Eventually, however, England grew and spoiled Spain went into decline. In , a combined Dutch-English force took Gibraltar — a barren rock of limited material value, but one that provided a key strategic port at the mouth of the Mediterranean Sea.
Wellington achieved handsome victories in what became known as the war of independence in Spain and the peninsula war in Britain. But Spain was glad to win the war and, with the exception of Gibraltar, largely remained a friend.
Wellington walked away with a lot of great paintings — especially by Velazquez — but cultured Spain had lots more, and greater painters than England, so it did not really miss them.
Things were mostly rosy from then on. British mining companies showed the Spaniards how to play soccer — and they learned well. The only real black spot was that a cowardly Britain stood by in the s and allowed Hitler and Mussolini to help General Franco win the Spanish civil war , pushing it into dictatorship and encouraging Nazi Germany to launch the second world war.
Many Britons died as a result, while Spanish republicans the same people Britain had refused to help volunteered to fight the Nazis and were the first to enter Paris. There was, however, one major problem.
General Franco wanted Gibraltar. He closed the frontier for many years, bringing suffering to the poor people of Gibraltar and preventing the Royal Navy from sneaking over the border for tapas. The rest of the world generally agreed that this was an absurd spat. What sort of people would get belligerent over Gibraltar?
Of all the big countries in Europe, Spain is now the one most enamoured of Britain. It wants a soft Brexit. Gibraltar is therefore already outside of the customs union, and there are customs controls between Gibraltar and Spain. With regard to the circulation of goods, there is already a hard border, and there are physical infrastructural arrangements in place to segregate either of our customs territories—precisely what the Irish and Northern Irish hope to avoid.
What is anathema on the island of Ireland already exists between Gibraltar and Spain. While there is no doubt scope to improve trade across the border by improving infrastructural facilities, Gibraltar has no issue with these controls as long as they are proportionate and do not hinder legitimate trade. With regard to people, the immigration authorities of both Spain and Gibraltar already carry out controls, because Spain is part of the Schengen Area and Gibraltar is not.
Conversely, there are no immigration controls between Ireland and Northern Ireland because both the U. Gibraltar is not a part of the Common Travel Area because it is not a part of the U. Instead, under British constitutional law, Gibraltar is a British overseas territory—and under our constitution, our executive, legislature, and judiciary are wholly distinct from those of the U.
The Irish backstop is therefore there to prevent the emergence of controls between Northern Ireland and Ireland or Northern Ireland and the U.
The already initialed political declaration between the EU and U. I also need to clarify that the Gibraltar protocol, agreed with the EU as part of the U. The protocol addresses local and practical issues of importance to citizens and businesses in Spain and Gibraltar providing for cooperation in support of the shared prosperity and security of the area. Mechanisms have been put in place to foster this cooperation, but those arrangements do not make any concessions to Spain on sovereignty, jurisdiction, or control.
It is only when sovereignty is parked to one side that we can work on initiatives to improve cross-border relations, something that is undoubtedly in the mutual interest. All must act in good faith and remain open to dialogue if we genuinely wish to enter a new era in relations between London, Madrid, and Gibraltar.
This should be the spirit in which the parties should approach all questions on the future relationship. As part of the package, Gibraltar agreed to build a new airport terminal right up against the frontier, with the idea being that there would be another building on the Spanish side allowing for easy access without having to go through normal immigration controls at the land border.
The arrangements had massive potential to boost economies on either side of the border. Unfortunately, the government in Spain changed as the terminal opened at the end of They insisted on joint ownership of the airport terminal and the presence of Spanish authorities in the terminal building in order to claw back jurisdiction and control over the isthmus, a strip of land that forms an integral part of the territory of Gibraltar.
The latest statistics indicate that Gibraltar employs 14, frontier workers—people who live in Spain and rely on a fluid border in order to access work in Gibraltar. Of the 14, workers, 9, are Spanish and 2, are other Europeans who are neither Spanish nor British.
In the region, 32 percent are unemployed. It would be irresponsible in the extreme for Brussels and for Madrid, in pursuit of ulterior motives, to put the livelihoods of thousands of families in the region in jeopardy for failing to consider ambitious proposals for the border. The Spanish government should know that if fluidity at the border suffers as a consequence of Brexit, thousands of their own nationals would have great difficulty accessing places of work in Gibraltar, and so too would Spanish businesses in the region suffer if Gibraltarians cannot trade with them as a result of new barriers.
We trust that sensible, orderly, and reasonable alternative arrangements will be put in place to mitigate against that. For that to happen, Spain must recognize and respect the rights and wishes of the Gibraltarians to freely determine their own destiny. For us, the time has come for Spain to finally relinquish its sovereignty claim and recognize the democratically expressed wishes of the Gibraltarians.
In Gibraltar, a British territory, 96 percent of the population voted against Brexit, but they are also adamantly opposed to joint rule by Spain. It might be time to reconsider. The crisis in Catalonia tore the country apart. The new Spanish prime minister will need to fend off rivals and manage alliances to stay in power long enough to heal the wounds.
Spain has long resisted the rise of the far-right, because Basque and Catalan separatism animated nationalist passions—but the rise of Vox in Andalusia shows that the country is not immune from xenophobic politics.
Shusha was the key to the recent war between Azerbaijan and Armenia. Not all Gibraltarians, however, are comfortable with this sense of Britishness. There are few Gibraltarians today who imagine a future independent from the UK — although Brexit has certainly focused the minds of some on this matter. The overwhelming majority of people we have interviewed see themselves as British Gibraltarians — with a varying emphasis on each of those terms.
Although the journey from colonial subject to citizen took time, since there has been no legal difference between UK British citizens and Gibraltarian ones. Today, many Gibraltarians imagine themselves as having the same status as people in Wales vis-a-vis the UK: certainly not English but British nevertheless. Yet, there is a collective amnesia at play about what this identity meant in the past. When prompted, many Gibraltarians can recall what it was like to be second class citizens in Gibraltar.
There was not much difference between working class Gibraltarians and their neighbours immediately across the border: no difference in language, the music they listened to or the religion they practised. When this generation was asked who were the Spanish people when they were young, they talked about the fishmonger, the hawker, the grocer, the barber and so on. But no one mentioned mothers, aunts, grandmothers who were born in Spain — almost a third of marriages before the war were between Gibraltarian men and Spanish women.
It saw the closure of the border between and
0コメント