Conservative and Reform politicians have denounced this week’s post-Brexit Gibraltar deal as a betrayal. ‘Gibraltar is British, and given Labour’s record of surrendering our territory and paying for the privilege, we will be reviewing carefully all the details of any agreement that is reached,’ Dame Priti Patel, the shadow foreign secretary, said. Meanwhile, describing Labour as ‘the worst negotiators in history’, Nigel Farage called the agreement ‘yet another surrender’.
Vox declared that ‘Gibraltar is a territory illegally colonised by the UK’
But Spain’s right-wing parties have, if possible, been even more damning. José Manuel García-Margallo, a former Minister of Foreign Affairs, described the agreement as ‘total surrender’, the ‘absolute renunciation’ of Spain’s political and economic sovereignty over the Rock.
‘All the British companies that want to settle in the EU post-Brexit will now go to Gibraltar,’ he predicted, asking rhetorically who will now invest in Spain’s neighbouring territory. He dismissed the argument that the pact helps the approximately 15,000 people living in Spain who work in Gibraltar, insisting that Spain, ‘the fourth largest economy in the euro should be able to provide a solution for that number of people’. He proposes instead ‘to clean up that area, which is a mess, and make it a special economic zone’. Another Partido Popular politician suggested that the socialist government might follow this agreement with Britain by giving Morocco co-sovereignty over Ceuta and Melilla, Spain’s African enclaves.
Meanwhile Vox, to the right of the Partido Popular, has been even more direct, declaring that ‘Gibraltar is a territory illegally colonised by the United Kingdom.’ A spokesman stressed that: ‘Any agreement that does not contemplate the total reintegration of that territory under Spanish sovereignty is illegal, illegitimate and unjust.’
Referring to Gibraltar’s reputation as a centre for tax evasion, money laundering and smuggling, he said, ‘The Gibraltar region and its inhabitants have become victims of illegal activities of all kinds originating in or destined for Gibraltar, and this agreement, with the necessary cooperation of Sánchez’s [allegedly] corrupt socialist government, will not improve their security or prosperity.’
Since Labour enjoys a huge parliamentary majority and elections aren’t due until 2029, there’s little prospect of Britain’s right-wing politicians being able to overturn the Gibraltar deal any time soon. But in Spain, although elections aren’t due until 2027, the right-wing parties could be in power much sooner; Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s socialist government is engulfed in a series of scandals allegedly implicating his wife, his brother, a former transport minister, the attorney general and, since Thursday, Santos Cerdán, the number three in the party hierarchy. All deny wrongdoing.
Following this latest scandal, Sánchez apologised to the Spanish people, vowed to do better in future and suggested that he is the victim of a campaign of vilification orchestrated by the far right, judges and media outlets. He also vowed to see out the legislature. But this new story, allegedly involving kickbacks worth hundreds of thousands of euros, is a devastating, perhaps terminal blow, since it suggests that Sánchez’s left-wing party may be systemically corrupt. Sánchez’s suggestion that it never occurred to him that such things were going on under his nose is not helping him.
Alberto Núñez Feijóo, the leader of the right-wing Partido Popular, the main opposition party, said: ‘He has got to go; it’s simply not credible that Sánchez who controls everything didn’t know what was going on.’
Since entering office in 2023, Sánchez’s minority left-wing coalition government has only managed to pass one substantial piece of legislation: the hugely controversial amnesty bill benefitting the Catalan separatists whose support Sánchez needed in order to form a government. Last week the EU Commission criticised that law since it was passed with the votes of parties which directly benefit from its provisions. Previously the Venice Commission, a legal advisory body to the Council of Europe, noted that it had ‘deepened a profound and virulent division…in the society of Spain’.
Whenever elections are called, the deeply unpopular amnesty law combined with the socialists’ scandals may well propel a right-wing coalition of the Partido Popular and Vox into power. Knowing that Gibraltar’s 34,000 residents depend on imports of food, medicines and other supplies from Spain, those parties have always seen Brexit as a golden opportunity to exert pressure and finally make Gibraltar part of Spain.
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