Time for reason to prevail over Gibraltar

It was the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges who once likened his country and the UK staging war  over the Falklands islands to two bald men fighting over a comb.

One would hope and I expect  the current dispute between Spain and the UK over Gibraltar  will stop well short of war, but the current escalation shows the extent to which politics can play fast and loose with reason , particularly when it comes to the excuse of an unresolved sovereignty dispute.The future, as currently played out in  London and Madrid,remains unsettelingly unpredictable.

Let’s be clear.  Gibraltar has been allowed to flourish,  and the neighbouring Spanish towns to survive economically, thanks to diplomatic give-and-take over many years  which has involved men of reason in Madrid, London, and the Rock. Setting aside the sovereignty issue, they have identified areas of common interest- such as more open borders and the provision of Spanish labour, joint use of the airport, a thriving gambling industry in Gibraltar to which Spaniards contribute, and a laissez fare attitude to  fishing by Spaniards in disputed waters and engaging in contraband, on the one hand and Gibraltarians, living in Spain,  not paying Spanish tax.

And for those who have been recalling the bad old days of Franco when  Spain closed the frontier for thirteen year, it may be worth recalling that it was Franco who did us a few favours in WW2 by not allowing Nazi Germany as a stepping stone to Gibraltar, but on the contrary turned a convenient diplomatic blind eye to its use by the Allies, not least in the joint UK/US landings in North Africa – which spelt the beginning of the end for Hitler.

Of course it is even more absurd to equate the diplomatic posturing of Madrid’s centre-right Popular  Party government with Franco, as it is to argue that Argentina’s Cristina Fernandez is General Galtieri. Unlike Argentina, Spain is a  member of the EU and of Nato, just as the UK is,  and the economic, and social ties that bind Anglo-Spanish relations today are stronger than they have ever been in the past.

Anyone who doubts that should simply take a step back from the current claims and counter-claims focused on Gibraltar, and look at the investment of major companies in the UK, the continuing popularity of Spain as a tourist destination for the British (and the growing attraction of London to Spaniards) and the mutual British-Spanish cultural appreciation and exchanges from food and fashion to cinemas, theatre, and literature.

So what has put a spanner in the works, or where is the comb? At its simplest the dispute was sparked off by a blockade in disputed waters of handful of Spanish craft fishermen that for year not  sold their catch on the Spanish market but also supplied some of the better fishing restaurants and bars in  Gibraltar .

The blockade involved the Gibraltarian  government  dumping an artificial reef of concrete boulders. Similar boulders have been dumped by Spain around  some of its own ports, to control fishing on ecological grounds, but then then Gibraltar’s waters, like the Rock itself have been the subject of  unresolved sovereignty  claims which post-Franco successive Spanish and UK governments have wisely chosen not to fuel.

Now the blockade has played into the hands of a government in Madrid that mistakenly believes it has little to lose politically by stirring up a diplomatic row  over the summer months , that can distract the media and voters from the debilitating image of institutional  failure amidst ongoing allegations of financial scandal within the ruling PP. In an interview with a friendly newspaper, Spain’s foreign minister Jose Garcia-Margallo played his nationalist card declaring an end to the pragmatic  diplomacy of the  past- ‘games’ he called them-and justifying the  reimposition  of border controls on those going in and out of Gibraltar. He has warned that further measures being considered are the imposition of a €50 border fee, investigating the tax status of  estimated 6,000 Gibraltarians owning properties in Spain, closing Spanish airspace to flights headed to Gibraltar and bring in its huge gambling industry under Madrid’s tax jurisdiction.

Another thing is clear- any escalation  of this this-for-tat will damage the people of Gibraltar and the Spaniards who work there, while driving a deeper diplomatic wedge between London and Madrid which cannot possibly serve the better interests of either country.

Taking a cue from the new Iranian president, Spain’s prime-minister Mariano Rajoy  should put the interests of his country before those of his party, tone down  the rhetoric and resist further counter-productive  actions.  London should do everything it can to similarly defuse the situation, and to ensure that Gibraltarians  understand this is in their best interests for there to be an accomodation with Spain. A good beginning might be to have an interim period during which all blockades or restrictions are lifted, but further controversial fishing is halted.

Tripartite talks-brokered  by the EU or intermediaries in London and the UK who can be trusted as impartial-  should resume, with fishing rights and open borders points high on the agenda to agree on, as part of a consensus on what works  to the mutual political and economic benefits of Gibraltarians and their Spanish neighbours and of British-Spanish relations generally.

As a British-Spaniard-born in Madrid to a Spanish mother and a British father-educated as British citizen who holidays in Spain and has many Gibraltarians friends-this dispute makes no sense to me  whatsoever and is worth fighting over far less than the Falklands was in 1982 when a UK colony was occupied by a bloody military regime.

Of that war, Borges lamented afterwards, the death of  Juan Lopez and John Ward two fictitiously  named soldiers- enblemic of the many that died on both sides. “They could have been friends,” Borges wrote in a poem, “but they only saw each other’s faces once, on some islands that were far too famous, and each one was Cain and each one was Abel. They buried them together. Snow and ashes know them. What I have just recounted belongs to an event we cannot understand.”