by the Liberal Party of Gibraltar
Gibraltar, 10 August 2002
Gibraltar has been in the news since the decision taken last year by the British and Spanish Governments to come to an agreement to solve their historical dispute on the basis of joint-sovereignty. There is practically no support in Gibraltar for this concept and every single political party and member of Parliament is totally opposed to the idea.
After Bermuda, Gibraltar is the second largest British colony left in terms of the size of its population. The people of Gibraltar argue that they should be the ones to decide their own destiny, freely and democratically, in exercise of their right to self-determination.
On the other side of the argument, the Governments in London and Madrid are determined to continue with the process, even if the people of Gibraltar are against it. Britain’s Europe Minister Peter Hain has threatened that Gibraltar will be left behind in Europe if the Gibraltarians do not support what is going on. The British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw has already told the British Parliament on 12 July that joint-sovereignty is already the agreed central pillar of the Declaration of Principles that London and Madrid are working on. The people of Gibraltar will have no say on this Declaration and the principles themselves will not be put to referendum by the United Kingdom. These principles will remain in place even if the Gibraltarians reject the more detailed comprehensive agreement that is expected to flow from it in a referendum.
In this context, the Government of Gibraltar has announced that it will organise its own referendum in Gibraltar in October of this year in order to allow the Gibraltarians to express their opinion on the question of joint-sovereignty. International observers will be contacted to supervise the proceedings. Both the Labour Government in Britain and the Conservative Government in Spain have said that they will not recognise the results of this referendum.
As Liberals, the position of the Liberal Party of Gibraltar is that it would be a serious democratic deficit if the freely expressed wishes of the Gibraltarians, through the medium of the secret ballot, were ignored. The people of Gibraltar are the first ones with an interest in this matter and their wishes must be at the heart of the way in which they choose to be decolonised. Most people quite simply do not want to replace one colonial master with two.
Gibraltar is an example of Liberal values and of much of what we stand for in more ways than one. Three hundred years of British traditions and the British way of life has made the Gibraltarians develop into a small multicultural society, where people of all races and religion live side by side and respect each others way of life in peace and harmony. It is a thriving democracy at the level of 30,000 persons, with its own Parliament and its own Government, where the Liberal concept of taking Government as closely as possible to the people has been given successful practical effect. There are now calls for greater self-government as well.
In short, it would be a shame to risk losing these values and these three hundred years of separate and distinct evolution in an artificially created solution imposed from above, as opposed to a way forward coming from the people themselves through the old Liberal principle of self-determination.
