Conservative and Reform politicians have denounced this week’s post-Brexit Gibraltar deal as a betrayal. ‘Gibraltar is British, and given Labour’s record of surrendering our territory and paying for the privilege, we will be reviewing carefully all the details of any agreement that is reached,’ Dame Priti Patel, the shadow foreign secretary, said. Meanwhile, describing Labour as ‘the worst negotiators in history’, Nigel Farage called the agreement ‘yet another surrender’.
Vox declared that ‘Gibraltar is a territory illegally colonised by the UK’
But Spain’s right-wing parties have, if possible, been even more damning. José Manuel García-Margallo, a former Minister of Foreign Affairs, described the agreement as ‘total surrender’, the ‘absolute renunciation’ of Spain’s political and economic sovereignty over the Rock.
‘All the British companies that want to settle in the EU post-Brexit will now go to Gibraltar,’ he predicted, asking rhetorically who will now invest in Spain’s neighbouring territory. He dismissed the argument that the pact helps the approximately 15,000 people living in Spain who work in Gibraltar, insisting that Spain, ‘the fourth largest economy in the euro should be able to provide a solution for that number of people’.