Michael Gove’s father has contradicted claims made by his son that the family’s fish processing firm in Aberdeen was destroyed by the European Union’s fisheries policies.

Ernest Gove told the Guardian that he sold the business voluntarily because the fishing industry in Aberdeen was being hit by a range of different factors. These included competition for space in the port from North Sea oil vessels, the Icelandic cod wars, dockworkers’ strikes and new 200-mile limits to control over-fishing.

Michael Gove has said in speeches and television interviews that his father’s firm “went to the wall” because of the EU’s fisheries policies, and that the common fisheries policy “destroyed” it.

Ernest Gove told the Guardian that he did believe the industry in Scotland “more or less collapsed down” after the EU became involved in fisheries policy, but he said he sold his firm voluntarily, as a going concern. “It wasn’t any hardship or things like that. I just decided to call it a day and sold up my business and went on to work with someone else,” he said.

“[I] couldn’t see any future in it, that type of thing, the business that I had, so I wasn’t going to go into all the trouble of having hardship. I just decided to sell up and get a job with someone else. That was all.”

The cabinet minister’s attacks on the common fisheries policy (CFP) have intensified as the battle to win the EU referendum has approached a climax. Nigel Farage led a protest by fishermen on the Thames that dominated referendum coverage on Wednesday. A second anti-EU flotilla is due to sail down the Clyde into Glasgow on Friday.

Salt in their veins and fire in their bellies: fishermen battling for Brexit Read more

Michael Gove directly linked his father’s business problems with the EU in a primetime Sky News interview on 3 June, when he said the EU had damaged the economy. “I know myself, from my own background,” he said. “I know the European Union depresses employment and destroys jobs. My father had a fishing business in Aberdeen destroyed by the European Union and the common fisheries policy.”

That theme was also central to a BBC News profile of Michael Gove at home with his parents in Aberdeen by the BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg, broadcast last Sunday. The package stated that he had seen “his dad’s fish merchant business go to the wall”, an event his family blamed solely on the EU.

Ernest Gove told the BBC the CFP “ruined the Scottish fishing industry because it just went downhill”. However, the report offered no evidence or information to link that statement to the family firm’s fate.

When the Guardian approached Michael Gove for comment about his father’s remarks, a clarification was released. Ernest Gove said he would be voting leave on 23 June and was proud of his son “for standing up for all the folk who lost their jobs because of Europe”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ukip leader Nigel Farage and Labour MP Kate Hoey join an anti-EU flotilla on the Thames. Photograph: Jeff Spicer/Getty Images

“I don’t know what this reporter is going on about,” Ernest Gove added in a statement. “Everybody in the north-east knows it was Europe that did such damage to the fish trade. The common fisheries policy was a disaster, not just for Aberdeen, but all of Scotland. There wasn’t any future for my business. It closed as a direct result of Europe.”

A spokesman for Michael Gove added: “It is well documented how the EU and the CFP destroyed the fishing industry, particularly in the north-east of Scotland. EE Gove and Sons was one of the companies directly affected. It closed as a result of the damage inflicted on the fishing industry by the EU.”



Gove brought up his father’s fisheries business during a BBC Question Time debate, saying again it had had to close because of the common fisheries policy. He reacted angrily to a question about his father’s comments to the Guardian, claiming words were put in his mouth and accusing the media of trying to belittle the closure.

Gove said: “He was clear to the BBC on Sunday night and to me when I was a boy that the business had to close because of the common fisheries policy. That business closed as a result of what happened.”

Ernest Gove said he was now nearly 80 and could not remember when he had sold the family firm. Michael Gove told reporters on Monday that it had happened while he was sitting his school exams. That timescale puts its closure in the early to mid-1980s – before strict fishing quotas were introduced under the CFP.

Struan Stevenson, a Tory MEP for Scotland from 1999 to 2014 and a former chair of the European parliament’s fisheries committee, said Michael Gove was guilty of “traducing” the EU and of “trotting out an emotional story as propaganda” to back the leave campaign.



Stevenson said the largest factor by far in the demise of Aberdeen’s fishing industry was “Olympic” overfishing by UK trawlers, which had to be controlled in order to prevent the total collapse of fish stocks.

“I’m dismayed, frankly, because, with all the hard work that we put into trying to reform the fisheries industry and trying to get sustainable fishing back on the agenda, and trying to save fish stocks from their inevitable collapse they were heading towards, all that work is being traduced.”

Richard Lochhead, the former Scottish fisheries minister who represents Moray, north-east Scotland, said: “Our fishermen will be gobsmacked by the irony of [Michael] Gove’s belated concerns for the fishing industry, given it was the Tories that negotiated such a poor deal for our fishermen in the first place while other nations got better deals.

“The other irony is that our fishing communities in the north-east turfed out the Tories because of their fishing sellouts that meant Gove had to go south to secure a Tory seat.”