The European commission's proposal, put forward on Tuesday, to scrap rules that force fishermen to throw millions of dead fish back into the sea provoked scepticism and applause.  Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, the television chef who started the campaign against the discarding of dead fish, was pleased with the result. "I would like to think it's hard to ignore more than half a million signatures," he said. "Now discards are at the heart of common fisheries policy reform."  This will not solve the difficulty, however, argued Daniel Hannan in The Daily Telegraph. "The problem is that it is a common fisheries policy. Fish stocks in EU waters are defined as a "common resource" to which all members have "equal access", he wrote. "The way to preserve fish stocks in the North Sea - what's left of them - is to give fishermen an incentive to treat them as a renewable resource."  Others were delighted to see a ban.  "These fish don't swim away to live another day," wrote annalisa Barbieri in The Guardian. "Mostly they are dead, so they are wasted. This would be immoral if we had more than enough fish, but we don't, so it's both immoral and uneconomic."