[ad_1]
Gibraltar, a British colony in the extreme south of Spain, was not included in the Brexit trade deal announced on Christmas Eve by Britain and the EU.
For this 6.7 square kilometer patch of land, January 1 remains a fateful date, on which the transition period governing the small border between Gibraltar and Spain expires.
If no agreement is reached, there are serious fears that a “hard” border will seriously disrupt workers, tourists and the main commercial relationships on both sides.
Madrid leads the game
Spain has succeeded in persuading the EU to separate the Gibraltar issue from the big Brexit negotiations, meaning that Madrid is the one who directly manages all negotiations with its counterparts in Gibraltar and London, Breitbart writes.
Spanish Foreign Minister Arancha Gonzales Laya said last Thursday that if an agreement was not reached, the scenes would be repeated with the long lines of trucks waiting a week ago to cross the English Channel.
“We don’t have much time and the scenes of chaos in the UK should remind us that we must keep working to reach an agreement on Gibraltar,” Gonzales Laya told Spanish public television RTVE. “The Spanish want an agreement, the people of Gibraltar want an agreement, now the UK must also want it. Political will is needed. “
Throughout the Brexit negotiations, Spain has insisted that it wants to have a voice in Gibraltar’s future.
The stone was ceded to Great Britain in 1713, but Spain never stopped claiming sovereignty over it, Breitbart London recalls.
For three centuries the small land area gave British ships dominance over the narrow outlet from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic.
Just over 15,000 people live in Spain and work in Gibraltar, which is approximately 50% of Gibraltar’s workforce.
The population of the small territory, with 34,000 inhabitants, was strongly opposed to Britain’s exit from the EU.
The Franco precedent
In the Brexit referendum in June 2016, 96% of Gibraltar’s voters voted in favor of remaining on the continental bloc, which they believe gives them more weight in the negotiations with Madrid.
The territory still remembers the year 1969, when General Franco closed the border with Gibraltar, in an attempt to destroy the small economy here.
Gibraltar Prime Minister Fabián Picardo welcomed the post-Brexit deal, but added that his territory was still under threat.
“This agreement does not cover Gibraltar. For us and for the people of the Campo de Gibraltar that surrounds us, time continues to tighten,” Picardo said in a statement.
A little bit of Schengen
“We continue to work closely with Great Britain to finalize negotiations with Spain on an agreement on a draft EU-UK treaty on Gibraltar.”
Picardo recently told Spanish radio station Cadena SER that “a Schengen agreement would be the best result” to facilitate the 30 million border crossings between Gibraltar and Spain.
For his part, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said he was determined to find a solution that “would ensure the fluidity of the borders, which obviously benefits the communities living on both sides.”
