I had no idea what a cockle is.... Now, are they gathering them for food, or for the shell?
Posted on 02/08/2004 4:29:17 PM PST by sarcasm
Five millionaire gangsters have been identified as key figures in the illegal cockling industry that led to the deaths last week of 19 migrant workers in the dangerous waters of Morecambe Bay in Lancashire.
The gangsters, all British and based on Merseyside, are said to make tens of thousands of pounds a week profit by hiring hundreds of illegal Chinese immigrants on slave wages and making them work in unsafe conditions.
Local people say the tragedy last Thursday night was an accident waiting to happen, and claim the gangmasters who took the workers on to the sands in the dark amid notoriously tricky tides had little concern for their safety.
'There were always white men there, wearing ripped jeans, well built and looking tough,' says one Morecambe resident who often sees the workers heading for the cockle beds.
'They had Liverpool accents and circled the workers all the time. There would be a pick-up truck collecting the cockles and bagging them. At the end of the day a smart man in a Land-Rover would drive up and hand the bags to others. It was like something out of a movie.'
Earning just £1 for nine hours of backbreaking labour, the workers would collect sufficient cockles to earn some of the gangmasters more than £20,000 a day. One of these bosses is said to pay neither tax nor national insurance yet lives in a multi-million pound house and drives an expensive sports car.
Everyone in the shellfish industry knows who the gangmasters are but few will speak openly about them for fear of reprisals. 'There are a lot of heavies out there,' says one insider who asked not to be named.
'A lot of the processing plants don't care where they get their cockles from. These gangmasters will turn up and offer you 10 tonnes of cockles a day. You have to pay cash - if you offer a cheque they laugh at you. If you ask if they're using licensed gatherers they just change the subject.'
Most of the illegal workers are 'bought' from so-called Snakehead gangs, an offshoot of the Chinese Triad criminal groups, which bring them to Britain from China for £20,000 a head. Most can afford to pay only a deposit, so the rest is docked from their tiny wages.
They live crammed into poor accommodation and survive on small amounts of staple food. Properties are often specially adapted, with bunks in every room and workers sleeping in eight-hour shifts. The houses rarely have hot water or electricity.
With no papers or legal status, the workers are kept in line by the constant threat of deportation. So great was their fear that several of the people trapped by the tide last week, scared of the consequences of being rescued, tried to hide from the lifeboats and helicopters.
Police expect to make arrests in days rather than months. The leader of the investigation, Detective Superintendent Mick Gradwell, said he is concentrating on Merseyside, where he believes the gangmasters are based.
As well as casting light on the appalling plight of Britain's black market workers, the deaths at Morecambe also highlighted bitter rivalries in the hugely lucrative cockle industry.
'It's all got completely out of control in the past few years,' says Rory Parsons of Parsons Pickles, one of the largest cockle processing plants in South Wales. 'It started when Spanish buyers stopped getting cockles from Holland and switched to Britain. Since then prices have rocketed. Four years ago cockles were £200 per ton. Now they're up to £1,300 per tonne.
'I know of a couple of collectors who earned more than £11,000 in a single week. When that kind of money is available it attracts poachers anda gold rush mentality.'
The sands of Morecambe Bay alone are said to contain up to £8 million worth of cockles at any one time. There are five other main British cockling areas: the Solway Firth and the Dee estuary in Scotland, the Thames estuary, the Wash, and Burry Inlet in South Wales. The latter three can only be fished with licences. The rest remain unregulated.
Cockling has always been risky but professionals pride themselves on a good safety record backed by a thorough knowledge of tides and the position of areas of quicksand. Few professionals venture out at night when such hazards cannot be identified.
The immigrant gangs' lack of experience, however, has led to similar difficulties before. In October, a group of Chinese had to be rescued when their overloaded tractor got bogged down.
A few days before Thursday's events rescue services were called when young workers were stranded in the sea. Their lives were saved although some of their vehicles were lost.
Professional, licensed cocklers use sieves called 'riddles' to save under-sized specimens, which are put back in the sand to protect future stocks. These collectors pay great attention to the tide tables and will not work on days of special danger, especially in the dark.
The gangs employing the Chinese workers provide no such information and obey none of the restrictions about cockle size, which brings extra profits.
One legal Merseyside gangmaster, Chris Mossman told The Observer: 'I only employ English guys. I have always avoided the Chinese. These people don't have the experience. It was only a matter of time before someone got killed.
'Everyone knows the people employing them. They are exploiting the workers and making a lot of money. When the Chinese come they are like Hoovers, they just wipe out the beds. It makes it harder for the people like me who are making a living, nothing more.'
The poachers are often highly sophisticated. They carry two-way radios and use a series of lookouts to watch out for inspectors. The four-wheel drive vehicles they use to reach the best cockle beds are often stolen to prevent the poachers being tracked down.
Hundreds of poachers are arrested each year, but while the maximum fine is £5,000 the average is just a few hundred pounds. Last December representatives from the South Wales Sea Fishing Committee met magistrates to seek greater fines to protect the legitimate trade.
With such vast sums of money to be made, the industry experiences waves of violence. The most notorious occurred in June 1993 when a gang of 15 masked men brandishing baseball bats and pickaxe handles attacked a group of cocklers who had travelled to Wales from the Dee estuary. Twenty people were injured, three so seriously that they required intensive hospital treatment.
Sporadic cockle wars have broken out ever since and the Chinese workers are often at the heart of it. At one of the houses that Chinese immigrants are thought to cram into in Morecambe the curtains are closed. Only one scared-looking face peeks out behind a twitching blind. A concrete block has been hurled through the window and twice the workers' vans have been set alight. On more than one occasion, huge bags of cockles left on the beach so the workers can go out to collect more have been torched by members of rival gangs.
Last week a group of Scottish cocklers confronted some of the Chinese workers and accused them of taking under-sized specimens. 'It all got a bit nasty and then someone shouted, "They've got a gun",' says one local. 'After that all the Scottish guys scattered.
'With prices this high a lot of cocklers will only go out if they have minders with them. You never know when it's going to flare up.'
I had no idea what a cockle is.... Now, are they gathering them for food, or for the shell?
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Preparation time |
less than 30 mins |
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Cooking time |
10 to 30 mins |
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Ingredients 290ml/½ pint vegetable stock 110ml/4fl oz white wine 2 tbsp soy sauce 30g/1oz honey 140g/5oz cockles, cleaned Method
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Willing workers.
Are we talking about Walmart, Nike, Reebok, Motorola, Stanley tool or the thousands of other "American" corporations who have invested in China in order to compete in this global economy. Whats the difference if the workers are in China or shipped to where ever, someone is getting rich off of the slave labor of the Chinese.
.. ;o). .Thanks..
I happy to say I do know what they are and how to eat them. Treat them like a clam in almost every way. They are much more popular in Europe than here, because they are plentiful throughout the region. They are delicious, but a bit more sandy and must be thoroughly rinsed before eating raw or cooking.
Eerily familiar. Seems I've seen that somewhere closer to home lately.
Who's eating all these cockles? Is the cockle the Irish national fish?
Yeah, they so po' in Ireland that a tiny clam is the national fish. How many cockles does it take to make a meal anyway? Or are they only hors d'oeuvres?
Anyone harvesting undersized shellfish wouldn't be above taking endangered species that they happen upon that can bring a premium price in the underground wild game market to East Asia.
These poachers could ruin whole fisheries. :(
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