GOVERNMENT LAXITY

Thirteen years ago, precisely on the 3rd March 1997, the Panorama newspaper carried the following headline.

DECOLONISATION, says CHIEF MINISTER

The Chief Minister Peter Caruana spoke of  "our desire to achieve decolonisation, to shed our colonial status through a process of constitutional modernisation which, while preserving a status of political dependency with the UK, will give us a modern, non-colonial status, something along the lines of the Isle of Man or the Channel Islands."

This is what he says he has achieved today, but to our regret the British sovereignty of Gibraltar is not secured like that of the Isle of Man or the Channel Islands. Instead, he has restored to life the reversionary clause of the Treaty of Utrecht by including it in our Constitution and we are still very much a colony as far as the United Nations and the rest of the world is concerned.

Malta was denied integration with Britain in a referendum with a much larger "Yes" vote than the 30% the Gibraltarian electorate choose to give in our referendum on the Constitution. Consequently our Constitution should, likewise, have been denied. Instead, it was undemocratically presented to Her Majesty for approval and rammed down our throats; a fact for which the Opposition is, also, to blame and must now regret ifor more than one reason.

As far as Mr. Caruana’s achievements in the European Union are concerned, our status as a separate jurisdiction has been allowed to deteriorate to insignificance, notwithstanding the costs and hassle entailed in adopting European legislation. From being virtually equal in European Law to that of any other of the original jurisdictions it has become an excluded Cinderella. Why? Because of his neglect and failure to defend our original favourable position as a separate Jurisdiction; mostly against the Spanish Government’s persistent objections to our inclusion in rightful measures with the excuse that Gibraltar is not a state. The Spanish Government’s European claim of control over British Territorial Waters is the recent most blatant example of the result of this neglect and failure. The European Commissioner advised of Spain’s claim almost two years ago! One should consider how much is incompetent failure and how much deliberate neglect. Consider the withdrawal of our official representative in Europe. This would never have occurred under any previous Government.

Emilio Peire