The industry will moan

Trends suggest that we need smaller ships servicing more destinations - and that the era of mega containers was an outlier as a consequence of a global debt boom, fuelling a boost in consumer demand. Now we see that it is necessary to open up new new markets to maintain the same level of trade, for which super-size container ships are not appropriate.

If we can bring more destinations on stream, toughening up environmental regulations to take older, less compatible ships out of circulation we can stimulate shipbuilding for the new paradigm. Again that is more an IMO area than EU, where an independent Britain could initiate such moves.

The industry will moan, as indeed it always does, but it has been told all too often to get its own house in order. It hasn't. And in tackling the oversupply of ships, incentivising scrappage, we take a lot of the black market ships out of circulation - those feeding the counterfeit goods market and offshore weapons factories. Such will certainly not harm our efforts to clean up the Greek economy of its massive corruption problem.

Unusually, I'm not going to commit to any hard and fast conclusions, save to say there is much happening outside of the EU sphere, and major work to do in terms of global harmonisation and simply focussing on Europe is somewhat parochial. It matters not a jot if we have modern automated ports with the best compliance possible if the partner ports are still in the dark ages with uncooperative governments and obsolete equipment. We need a global initiative.

One could argue that EU "clout" is what we need to sort it out, but I would argue that it needs leadership - and who better to lead the world in maritime issues than the UK? That clout we supposedly enjoy as part of the EU evidently doesn't work and the input of landlocked states with no real ocean exports add no real value to the debate. In this, the WTO Trade Facilitation Agreement is far more relevant to enhancing global trade and creating jobs, along with solving the many issues in global shipping.

We have seen some progress with EU moves to sort out its own ports, not least with the Port Services Directive (PSD), which is more of a headache for European ports than our own. Unlike Daniel Hannan, I don't oppose it on principle in that EU ports are long overdue liberalisation. We just don't need it here.