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It takes three to tango...
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By David Eade
Listeners to the BBC of a certain age will remember fondly ‘Listen With Mother’ which began with the question – “Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin.”
It strikes me this is the tact British and Gibraltarian politicians should follow with their Spanish counterparts and diplomats. There is a total disconnect in the Spanish mentality when it comes to Gibraltar. For Madrid the subject of sovereignty is solely to be discussed between Spain and the UK. Gibraltarians do not enter into the equation – it is a matter for the two sovereign nations. They need to be sat down gently and told the facts of life.
Madrid’s stance might be according to the rules in the Guide to International Diplomacy set out two centuries ago. I don’t doubt for a moment that the Foreign Office shares Madrid’s view on sovereignty – indeed if the British Mandarins had had their way they would have sold the Rock down the river long ago. Thankfully the real world has moved on and the sweet FO is no longer the power house it once was.
I have raised the subject of this Spanish disconnect with reality over Gibraltar before and will no doubt do so again. I do so today because the Partido Popular’s politicians have been busy counting their chickens before they hatch and talking of how they will deal with the Gibraltar issue when they come to power.
The Spanish National daily El País recently interviewed Jorge Moragas, who is the international political co-ordinator of the PP and Rajoy’s chief of staff. He is of the opinion that the Dialogue Forum has only served the chief minister and blames him for raising the sovereignty issue which Moragas and the PP insists is not allowed. It should only be for cross border co-operation and dialogue.
The PP then goes on to say that it will make profound changes to how the forum operates. Will it? It takes three to tango in this dance and if the chief minister of the day refuses to sign up to anybody else’s dance card then nobody trots. The forum is good to have but life in Gibraltar will go on with no ill effects if it is disbanded.
Madrid will also attempt to hold talks with London on Gibraltar’s sovereignty. However unless Gibraltar is fully involved, as the UK government will insist, there will be no talks at all. The Spanish foreign minister of the day can bend Hague’s ear all he or she likes but the simple fact is, no Gibraltar chief minister present, no deal.
I would like to say no deal at all on sovereignty from the Gibraltarian perspective but Peter Caruana has a lot of questions to answer about what happened in 2001/2002 to fool the British government into believing joint sovereignty was an option. He has since latched on to joint sovereignty with knobs on, or the Andorra model as he likes to call it, but again he only discusses that in Spain and not before the Gibraltarian people. Perhaps he is suffering from a disconnect of his own!
What Madrid fails to understand is that it is Gibraltar and not Spain that holds all the cards. If Gibraltar does sit at the card table there is no forum of dialogue. If Gibraltar isn’t invited to the poker table with its own voice (and veto) there are no discussions on sovereignty. If the PP believes otherwise – it is just ‘whist-ful’ thinking (pun intended)!
01-09-11
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