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Party calls on Govt to 'firmly tackle' frontier issue 'once and for all'
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Unless the questsion of the frontier is tackled firmly by our Government once and for all it is difficult to see how we can take any other promises seriously. That is the view of the PDP.
The party adds that the toll that La Linea Mayor Alejandro Sanchez is proposing to impose on motorists
travelling into Gibraltar is unacceptable, potentially unlawful (according to his own
Government) and undermines cross-border relations between Gibraltar and Spain.
It is also an inflammatory proposal as under it Spanish cross-border workers would be exempted. This can only worsen the state of relations between our two communities.
This proposed toll is regarded by them as completely unnecessary and has already been condemned by a major
Spanish frontier workers organisation.
“The proposals are completely unacceptable and the Gibraltar Government should make the strongest of representations to the Spanish Government to ensure that this proposal does not see the light of day. This may be an internal Spanish matter but it must be dealt with by the Spanish Government in a decisive way,” said PDP spokesman Kayron Pozo.
Equally the Spanish Government must do more to improve frontier flows, they add. We are now told that there may be traffic grid-lock because of works to dismantle the La Linea Fair.
Whilst Gibraltar has deployed significant police resources and new traffic arrangements at considerable cost to the tax payer the Spanish Government has done little to alleviate the conditions on her side of the border.
The party says that put simply it is inexplicable in times of apparent greater cooperation under the Tripartite Forum that the Spanish Government fail to
increase the number of entry points into their territory. This is a breach of the spirit of the Cordoba Agreement and the duty to monitor frontier flows. "It is clear that the border is a barometer of relations and unless the issue is tackled firmly by our Government once and for all it is difficult to see how we can take any other promises seriously," they said.
MAYOR'S MADNESS
*This is the full text also of a Unite press release:
"Unite the Union says it strongly condemns the Mayor of La Linea, Alejandro Sanchez for its totally out of order proposals for a toll fee to be applied at the Frontier. We consider this to be complete madness.
"The Union considers that if the municipality coffers are empty, he should seek a loan from the banks or seek financial assistance from the Central Government, which would be the logical avenue.
"The first step the Mayor of La Linea should do is to pay its employees their salaries on the agreed date and not 3 weeks later. Some employees do not know when they will be getting their salaries; this we think is disgraceful as it affects working people in that sense we fully support the continual industrial action taken by the Spanish trade unions UGT, CCOO and USO.
"We are aware of the problem, that what the Mayor is doing is deviating the attention of the problems faced by seeking demagogic solutions.
"The La Linea Mayor from the rightwing party, Partido Popular, should be extremely careful in ditching the stupid propositions, as there is a large contingent of Spanish workers who derive their income from the Gibraltar economy, who could be facing unnecessary problems by this irrational behaviour of a leading politician.
"We call upon the Mayor of La Linea to withdraw this insane proposal and apologize to all the citizens who would have been affected by this measure."
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