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According to 2015 figures, the UK fishing industry is made up of more than 6,000 vessels. Photograph: Murdo Macleod for the Guardian

The government has announced its withdrawal from an arrangement that allows other countries to fish in British waters. The environment secretary, Michael Gove, claimed the UK was taking back control.

On Monday ministers will trigger withdrawal from the London fisheries convention, signed in 1964 before the UK joined the European Union, to start the two-year process to leave the agreement. The convention allows vessels from the UK, France, Belgium, Germany, Ireland and the Netherlands to fish within six and 12 nautical miles of each others coastlines.

We will be saying were taking back control, Gove said on the BBCs Andrew Marr Show on Sunday. We will have control. We can decide the terms of access.

Gove said leaving the European Union would involve exiting the EU common fisheries policy, which allows all European countries access between 12 and 200 nautical miles off the UK and sets quotas for how much fish nations can catch.

When we leave the European Union we will become an independent political state and that means that we can then extend control of our waters up to 200 miles or the median line between Britain and France, and Britain and Ireland, he said.

One critical thing about the common fisheries policy is that it has been an environmental disaster. And one of the reasons we want to change it is that we want to ensure that we can have sustainable fish stocks for the future I think its important that we recognise that leaving the European Union is going to help the environment.

According to 2015 figures, the UK fishing industry is made up of more than 6,000 vessels, landing 708,000 tonnes of fish worth 775m. About 10,000 tonnes of fish were caught by other countries under the London convention, worth an estimated 17m.

Barrie Deas, chief executive of the National Federation of Fishermens Organisations, welcomed the governments decision, saying it was an important part of establishing the UK as an independent coastal state with sovereignty over its own exclusive economic zone.

Ben Stafford, head of campaigns at WWF, said achieving sustainable fishing was about much more than which country fishes where. He said: It is about ensuring that fishermen use the right fishing gear, that fishing takes place at levels that maintain sustainable stocks and that we pioneer ways to monitor what is happening at sea in order to understand the impacts of fishing.

Leaving the EU means we could get these things right, but we will still need to cooperate with our neighbours, as fish do not recognise lines on a map.

Will McCallum, Greenpeace UKs head of oceans, said: For years, successive UK governments have blamed Brussels for their own failure to support the small-scale, sustainable fishers who are the backbone of our fishing fleet.

If Brexit is to herald a better future for our fishers, the new environment secretary, Michael Gove, must keep the 2015 Conservative party manifesto commitment to rebalance fishing quotas in favour of small-scale, specific locally-based fishing communities.

Tom West, a consultant at the environmental law firm ClientEarth, described the move as a negotiating tactic. As a country outside the EU, we need to consider how we can best cooperate with our neighbours rather than unilaterally withdrawing from all agreements in the hope that standing alone will make us better, he said.

Many fish stocks in UK waters are shared with our neighbours and so need cooperation and shared management.

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UK to 'take back control' of waters after exiting fishing convention - The Guardian

In this momentous period of real change much more than Brexit is on the table, for how we conduct ourselves matters. Government ministers will listen and consult, doing our best to be open and responsive to Parliament. Equally, we hope parliamentarians can set aside partisan politics to work together wherever possible in the best interests of our country.

Such a co-operative approach is easiest when there is already a degree of consensus, yet it matters most on the many issues where there are real disagreements. We can of course rely on politicians of all colours to keep challenging the Government whenever they take a different view. The great clamour of discussion and debate is what makes our democracy so admired the world over. Yet by channelling our collective energies towards a single endpoint, and by coming together to improve our country, we can show British voters that there is more to our politics than just pessimistic bickering.

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As Britain leaves the European Union, let us do so in a way that brings this country together - Telegraph.co.uk

Negotiators from the European Union and Japan say they're close to striking a major free trade agreement that could jump-start talks for other potential deals.

"An ambitious EU-Japan deal would send a powerful signal to the rest of the world that two of the largest economies are resisting protectionism, in favor of openness, of trade and investment," Cecilia Malmstrom, the EU's top trade official, said this week.

Related: Trump could start a trade war this week

The EU and Japan, which together account for more than a quarter of the global economy, traded roughly $140 billion of goods last year, according to EU data. The deal they are negotiating now would help boost that number.

Japan wants to remove high EU tariffs on products such as cars and electronics, and is also seeking lower regulatory hurdles for Japanese companies doing business in Europe. The EU is pushing for improved market access for agricultural products and lower tariffs on food products such as cheese, pasta, pork and wine.

American business could lose out

An agreement could put some U.S. businesses at a disadvantage.

"If the Japan-EU agreement is reached, Europe will be able to export agricultural products like pork and cheese to Japan with lower tariffs," said Junya Tanase, head of Japan foreign exchange research at JP Morgan. "This means that the U.S. agricultural sector will face some disadvantages in the competitiveness of exports to Japan."

The U.S. had its own chance to gain better access to markets in Japan, the world's third largest economy, through the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the trade deal designed to reshape trade around the Pacific Rim. But Trump pulled the U.S. out of it at the start of his presidency, much to the dismay of Japan and other signatories.

Related: Japan and Canada want to resurrect Pacific trade deal Trump killed

Japanese and European negotiators are attempting to reach a deal ahead of next week's G20 summit of world leaders in Germany.

Japanese Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida told reporters on Thursday that negotiations would continue into this weekend with the aim of concluding a deal at the G20 meeting.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration may be about to antagonize key trading partners, including the EU and Japan, by announcing big tariffs on steel imports this week.

After quitting the TPP, the U.S. has shown interest in reaching a separate free trade deal with Japan. The two sides held economic talks in April, but those have since been overshadowed by Trump's push to renegotiate NAFTA with Mexico and Canada this summer.

However, an EU-Japan deal could prompt the U.S. to speed up the talks with Japan, JP Morgan's Tanase said.

And those aren't the only negotiations that could benefit, said Frederic Neumann, co-head of Asian economic research at HSBC. He pointed to the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, a China-led plan for a mega trade deal that has gained prominence since Trump torpedoed the TPP.

"The EU-Japan deal keeps trade liberalization rolling along and raises the prospects of more bilateral and even multilateral deals being signed in the coming two years by Japan," Neumann said.

-- Yoko Wakatsuki contributed to this report.

CNNMoney (Hong Kong) First published June 29, 2017: 6:31 AM ET

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Japan and Europe are racing to agree a big free trade deal - CNNMoney

STRASBOURG, France The European Union, whose parliament meets here on the French border with Germany, has not exactly been popular in recent years.

Complaints about unelected bureaucrats, lack of transparency, compromised sovereignty, unrestricted migration and costly member obligations have all fueled Euroskepticism.

But it seems the EU has finally gotten its groove back.

Two new surveys find that over the past year, citizens of member countries have decided that maybe this whole European idea the ambitious postwar project to promote continental peace and prosperity isnt so terrible after all.

The first survey, from Pew Research Center, polled people in 10 EU countries. In all but one, fond feelings for the union increased, most by a sudden huge amount. Here in France, favorability rose from 38 percent last year to 56 percent this spring. Across the border in Germany, it went from 50 percent to 68 percent. Even in Brexiting Britain, positive sentiment for the EU climbed from 44 percent to 54 percent.

The other survey, from the European Commissions Eurobarometer, also found an upswing in the share of European citizens who view the EU positively and have trust in it. Again, the upswing occurred in virtually every country.

Whats going on? How did the EU turn its reputation around?

To some extent, Europeans may simply be realizing that the grass isnt actually greener on the other side the other side being, in this case, life outside the European Union.

Britains upcoming exit has led to political chaos and economic uncertainty, not to mention sagging consumer confidence and departing jobs. Tens of thousands of jobs may leave Londons financial sector alone.

The same Pew survey found that majorities of nearly every country say Brexit will be bad for both the EU and Britain. Even a plurality of Brits believe Brexit will end badly for them. (Greece, which was threatening to Grexit the euro zone before departure portmanteaus were cool, is the only surveyed country in which a plurality believes Britain will be better off.)

Perhaps other EU members have watched Britains isolationist dysfunction and started to better appreciate the European project, even with its many flaws.

Not just coincidentally, in no country that Pew surveyed did a majority of respondents say they want to leave the European Union. This finding jibes with other recent polls.

Nonetheless, even though they dont want to leave, in nearly all of the countries at least half of respondents still want to hold a referendum to vote on whether to leave.

This may seem peculiar, given that Britain got such an unwelcome surprise when it held its own referendum. But this desire to hold a vote may reflect frustration with the lack of a say in what happens in Strasbourg (and Brussels, Luxembourg and Frankfurt, where other major EU business gets done). A referendum could be viewed as a way to gain more leverage over EU officials, even if the vote is really a bluff.

People think that voting will empower them, says Luigi Zingales, a University of Chicago professor who has studied economic and public opinion trends in the EU. Most Europeans are happy with the idea of some form of European integration and the common market. They just want more voice in the process.

Zingales also argues that a force bigger than Brexit may be more important in reviving the EUs reputation: the fact that finally, a decade after the global financial crisis struck, so many European economies are actually improving.

Zingales notes that in the Pew data, only his home country of Italy hasnt started feeling more warmly toward the EU. Italy also happens to be the only surveyed country whose citizens are more pessimistic about their economy today than they were a year ago.

Lending credence to this theory is that trust in the EU government and trust in national governments have been rising in virtual lockstep, according to the Eurobarometer data.

In other words, a healing economy may lead to less scapegoating, more political stability. As things get better, people realize they overreacted, and their far-right, anti-immigrant, anti-internationalist, burn-it-all-down feelings subside.

If economics are indeed whats driving the retreat from insularity in Europe, that bodes well for the United States, too. Our recovery, after all, is light-years ahead of most of Europes. Maybe our fever will break soon as well.

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Catherine Rampell: The newly popular European Union - Chippewa Herald

DEVELOPMENTS in the European Union are under the spotlight again as the formal negotiations have now started about the terms of Britains departure from the bloc. These come just a year after the nations referendum on its future EU relationship and the surprise decision, by a narrow margin, to leave.

Sustained opposition by the so-called Remainers in the period following the referendum delayed the governments invoking of article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty the procedure for ending EU membership but the Brexit negotiations are now expected to take up to two years.

Without providing a blow-by-blow account of the negotiating process, Prime Minister Theresa May has already announced proposals about reciprocal residency rights for some three million EU citizens already living in the United Kingdom (EU), and for one million Britons residing in EU countries. Although relatively straightforward, these have attracted controversy which is perhaps an indication of the likely difficulty of obtaining agreement on more complex issues like withdrawal from the single market.

Mrs Mays negotiating hand with the EU has surely been weakened by her failure to secure an overall majority in this months UK general election, but it remains to be seen what domestic parliamentary support she is able to attract, apart from the Democratic Unionist Party representing Northern Ireland, as the EU discussions develop, moreover, it is now clear that any deal will require parliamentary approval.

While the British people will continue to be divided over the terms of Brexit, it is clear that the government itself is determined to fulfill the referendum decision by withdrawing from the EU treaties and bureaucracies that no longer work for Britain. But at the same time it is insistent on maintaining a deep and special partnership with the remaining 27 EU member states. So while leaving the single market and customs union and reaching a separate trade agreement as well as the European Court of Justice thus allowing the nation to control its borders and restore its parliamentary sovereignty enabling it to make its own laws justiciable in its own courts this means cooperating fully on other major issues; from example, security and crime, the environment, education and scientific research together with cultural, technological, medical and sporting exchanges.

With the EU at a cross roads in the wake of Britains withdrawal, it is interesting to look from afar at the broader picture.

After the horrors of the second world war, the EUs founding principle was that nationalism should be suppressed by means of full European integration leading to creation of a federal superstate. The ambitions of the founding fathers have been met insofar as conflict between France and Germany, the traditional antagonists, has been avoided. But the insistence by current eurocrats on transforming the bloc, from a free trade area into a full economic and political union has served, ironically, to create tensions and divisions within the EU and precipitate a resurgence of the nationalism it was designed to prevent.

It now seems that Euroscepticism has grown to the extent that there is increasing resistance to ever-closer union on the part of nation states. With their varied history, culture, traditions, customs and languages, some EU members now seem reluctant to be subsumed into a federal superstate.

Nonetheless, two important steps towards this aim has been achieved the Euro single currency and the removal of EU internal borders through the Schengen Agreement. The Eurozone has been partially successful, but is seen by some as a flawed concept because of the huge disparities between its members economies Germany and France, for example, compared to Greece, with its residual debt problem, Portugal and even Spain and Italy which cannot operate effectively with the same interest and exchange rates. As for a borderless EU, the ongoing refugee crisis has resulted in alienation, xenophobia and distrust among EU member states which have been taking unilateral action to protect what they regard as their territorial integrity.

According to reports, the German Chancellor has stated explicitly that the EU should gradually turn economic and fiscal cooperation into political union. As far as Britain is concerned, it seems that, since it declined to join the Eurozone or participate in the Schengen arrangements, it would not have accepted any further steps towards such union leading to a federal state in the longer term. So, given the prevailing public mood, perhaps the victory for the Leavers, slim as it was, should never really have been in doubt.

In an increasingly inter-connected world, the future cohesion and prosperity of the EU, with its combined population of some 450 million, is of major concern. A Britain no longer constrained by what some see as the shackles of the EU is likely to be more outward-looking and will be free to reach trade agreements with the rest of the world. This could mean greater focus on the Commonwealth, including former colonial territories in the Caribbean, which is likely to benefit countries like our own.

Since European stability is important for global peace, it is encouraging that Britain has pledged full cooperation, post-Brexit, with its former EU partners. Thus, the rest of the world might reasonably hope that, even though the Brexit talks will be extensive and tough, the UK and the European Commission representing the other member states will not be permanently at loggerheads over the coming two years of negotiations. We can only trust that ultimately there will be a smooth divorce.

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Editorial: Uncertainty For Britain And European Union - Bahamas Tribune