The Gibraltar Broadcasting Corporation is reporting that the European Scrutiny Select Committee (chair: Sir Bill Cash) is calling for a halt to the talks between the UK, Spain, and Gibraltar aimed at settling the Rock's status after the upheaval of Brexit. The overseas protectorate was left out of the TCA deal negotiated in 2020. The call follows oral evidence taken earlier this month from David Rutley, a junior foreign office minister, and Robbie Bulloch who heads up the UK's negotiating team. The committee is getting nervous about where the border should be located and how it should be policed.
The report says: "Sir William Cash warns the proposed deal as outlined by Government ministers in an evidence session amounts to a 'serious diminution of UK sovereignty'."
And it continues:
"He says one of the major concerns for the Committee is how UK nationals and Gibraltarians will be handled if Schengen controls are introduced at Gibraltar’s airport rather than the border – a move the Committee says would render ‘Gibraltar’s frontier British in all but name.' It labelled the practical implications of people being checked to enter their own territory as 'seismic'."
This comes from the Committee's own website which raises fears of the whole thing resulting in a "Northern Ireland Protocol 2.0" Cash has written formally to Rutley about the border becoming "British in all but name."
He writes in his letter: "From your evidence, we suspect that the UK Government is prepared to concede an arrangement that will leave Gibraltar’s frontier British in all but name."
I think he means the border is about to become SPANISH in all but name, otherwise, it doesn't make any sense. The border will, apparently, become an entry point into the Schengen free movement area with checks administered by Frontex Border Guards - the EU's border control agency. It will be British in name only.
Cash certainly describes the practical implications as "seismic" and says to Rutley: "You were unable to reassure us that UK nationals and Gibraltarians, wishing only to enter Gibraltar, would not have to undergo Schengen checks."
But the plan is no more seismic than the UK having an internal trade border imposed on it as it has in the Irish Sea between GB and Northern Ireland. The talks over Gibraltar are simply an extension of Britain's new status outside the EU where once we had significant influence but now have none at all.
The proposals may be wholly unpalatable to Cash but they're entirely logical and reflect the new realities and the power imbalance. There has to be a border. Cash wanted this as he spent most of his adult life campaigning for Brexit even before it had a name.
The EU and the 29 members of the Schengen area are hardly going to sub-contract part of the border control to a third country, and if there must be a border somewhere, putting it at the entry into Gibraltar rather than between Gibraltar and Spain is a rational choice and probably reflects what most Gibraltarians want.
Cash wants Rutley and his officials to "stop and take stock" and return to the committee with "clear red lines on the UK Government’s Gibraltar negotiations."
He says "serious consideration should be given to pausing negotiations so that the opinions of all interlocutors can be canvassed, including Members of this Committee and the House."
One almost feels sorry for Cash, he is living in the Lord Palmerston gunboat diplomacy era of the nineteenth century where we could make demands that would be taken seriously. Now, Brussels will just laugh at him.
The idea that his committee, MPs or ministers for that matter, have any chance of imposing their will on Spain and the EU is simply a joke. If ever the principle of smaller countries banding together in order to gain sovereignty and influence needed to be demonstrated, this is it.
