Spain might try to force the issue of joint sovereignty with Britain over Gibraltar — a British Overseas Territory on the southern end of the Iberian Peninsula — in the event of a British exit from the EU, the territory’s chief minister said in an interview aired on Saturday.
Gibraltar Chief Minister Fabian Picardo told Sky News television that Spain might close the frontier gates with the territory if Britain votes to leave the EU in a membership referendum on June 23, choking the peninsula of workers and land access to the continent.
Gibraltar’s thriving services-based economy relies in large part on access to the EU’s single market.
Photo: Bloomberg
Picardo said “Brexit” supporters “would have a lot to answer for” if Madrid raised the possibility of joint sovereignty over the Rock — hitherto anathema to its 30,000 residents.
In case of a “Brexit,” the chief minister said: “The current Spanish minister of foreign affairs [Jose Manuel Garcia-Margallo] has been explicit as to what that might mean. They’ve said that they might consider closing the frontier if the United Kindom were to leave the European Union. And if Gibraltar wanted to continue to have access to the single market and the rights that we enjoy today of free movement, that we would have to once again consider the issue of joint sovereignty with Spain — which nobody in Gibraltar is prepared to consider.”
Spain ceded Gibraltar to Britain in perpetuity in 1713, but has long argued that it should be returned to Spanish sovereignty, and the territory remains a source of diplomatic tension.
In 2002, the Labour government of then-British prime minister Tony Blair said Britain was willing to share sovereignty with Spain over Gibraltar.
The territory, which is internally self-governing, swiftly held a referendum on the idea, in which 98.5 percent voted no.
Britain leaving the EU would “seriously impair” London’s ability to stand up for Gibraltar, British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond, a Conservative, said earlier this month on his first official visit to Rock.
Spain shut its gates on the solitary crossing with Gibraltar in 1969 before fully reopening them in 1985 ahead of it joining the EU’s predecessor, the European Economic Community, the following year.
Inhabitants had to rely on air and sea links, typically via Britain or Morocco, to reach the other side of the 1.2km border.
Gibraltarians have the right to vote in Britain’s referendum on EU membership.
With less than four weeks to go until the vote, the Remain campaign is on 53 percent support and the Leave camp on 47 percent, according to the What UK Thinks Web site’s average of the past six polls.
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