Open the door or the fish gets it

Our friends in the North, those loveable Icelanders, are back in the headlines again. A couple of years ago their hilariously mismanaged "banks" played a small but pivotal role in bringing the financial system to its knees. A few months back their unpronounceable volcano closed down European airspace. Now they've turned their balefeul glance on the North Atlantic mackerel fishery.

Having mismanaged and fished-out their own whitefish stocks, Iceland's trawlermen are going after the mackerel in a big way. The country's approved quota for mackerel this year is 2,000 tonnes, but so far it's taken.....100,000 tonnes! And it plans to take a total of 130,000 tonnes before the year is out. (That amounts to half a tonne of mackerel per Icelander!) Along with the Faroe Islands, who are going along with this astounding bout of overfishing, Iceland could catch about one-third of all the North Atlantic's mackerel in just this one year, a depredation from which the stock may never recover.

Iceland is always a bit surreal (They don't have surnames! They have Bjork!!), but even by the country's own lights, the rationale for all this is truly bizarre. Iceland wants in to the EU, and seems to have come to the conclusion that the way to make its case is to massacre other people's mackerel stocks, promising to cease and desist once EU entry is approved. It's not exactly what you'd call a charm offensive. In fact, some curmudgeons at the EU, as well as some national governments, think that sanctions or even a 70s-style fishing war might be a more appropriate response.

Even if we can't quite blame the country for the volcano, just think of what Iceland has done to burnish its credentials for EU membership in recent years. Greed and astonishingly incompetent regulation meant that Iceland's banks punched far above their weight in triggering the financial meltdown, at huge cost to other governments, notably in the UK and Netherlands. The country's voters voted down an already-agreed deal to compensate those countries for their losses. And now they're trying to force their way into the EU by raping the already damaged North Atlantic fishery.

It seems clear that EU membership talks for Iceland should begin with appropriate despatch. As soon as talks on the accession of Iran, Myanmar and Somalia are concluded, Brussels should get right to it.