The Key To The Rock

The United Kingdom already stretches to Shetland. Why not also to Gibraltar? The Spanish enclaves in North Africa, which predate and have never been part of the Kingdom of Morocco, are fully integrated into Spain, complete with MPs at Madrid.

But I am increasingly at a loss as to why an economically viable, and already almost entirely self-governing, distinctive community, the Genoese, Catalan, Sephardic, Maltese, Portuguese and Minorcan roots of which are all reflected in its remarkable local dialect, does not simply declare itself independent and stop caring about treachery from London. Even though that mix is entirely a product of British sovereignty. Including the only permanent Sephardic community still in existence on the Iberian Peninsula. Britain did that.

Let those be the two options at a referendum in Gibraltar: incorporation into the United Kingdom, which now allows for the continuation of considerable internal self-government; or independence. It is only a pity that that referendum could not have been held in this tercentenary year of British Gibraltar.

The Gibraltar Socialist Labour Party was founded out of the trade union movement, and specifically out of the T&G (now Unite), in order to secure for the British workers of Gibraltar the same pay and conditions enjoyed by other British workers. Under Joe Bossano, first elected for the Integration With Britain Party, it won the 1992 Election with 72 per cent of the vote under the slogan, “Give Spain No Hope”, which was not at all what the Major Government had wanted to hear. But the Major Government is back now.

To support a foreign interest against a British one would be to descend to the level of Margaret Thatcher, with her Single European Act, her Anglo-Irish Agreement, her refusal to recognise the Muzorewa Government while she held out for the Soviet-backed Nkomo as if  he would have been any better than Mugabe, and her open invitation to Argentina to move into the Falkland Islands that she could not at that point locate on a map.

Not that Labour has been blameless elsewhere. Someone called David Miliband lied to Parliament in order to create the world's largest “marine reserve” where the British Chagossians were properly entitled to live, thereby ensuring that they could never return. In June, that “marine reserve” was ruled legal.

Even taking it seriously in its own terms, it seems that turtles and sharks matter more than people. Including, on British territory, proud British Citizens who are far more loyal to this country than we have any right to expect. Every so often, I really do come over all Spiked Online.

The American lease has resulted in our territory’s being used to bomb Afghanistan, Iraq, and who knows where else in this Drone Age, as well as for extraordinary rendition flights, and it is being lined up to bomb Iran even if Britain does not formally participate in any such war. “Marine reserve”, indeed. Just not the marines or the reserves that that term would most immediately suggest.

But that lease runs out in 2016, with an option for renewal next year. Let that renewal be subject to a referendum of the very easily identifiable British Citizens of Chagossian origin or extraction.

British Overseas Territories, such the one from which I come originally and with which I remain in close contact in this electronic age (there is no sight quite like that of elderly Saint Helenians peering into Skype), do not have the right to conduct their own foreign policy. That is just not part of the deal.

Or, rather, it never used to be. The Falkland Islanders have had a referendum, and the result, with which I was as delighted as I was unsurprised, has been deemed to settle the matter. The terms of the deal have changed. Obviously. Or are the rules different depending on the skin colour of the British Citizens involved?

The American military-industrial imperium has also thoroughly mistreated British Citizens on the British territory that is Ascension Island, the recent granting of a Blue Ensign flag to which indicates that it has now become, as it is true that it never really used to be, a permanent and distinct community under the British Crown in Parliament.

We know what abuses have been and are being committed on and from our territory in the middle of the Indian Ocean. In view of unfolding events, what abuses have been and are being committed on and from our territory, a major international listening post, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean?

And how long before another remarkable lot of turtles, as depicted on the Coat of Arms and therefore also on the new flag, is made the excuse to declare the whole place a “marine reserve”? There are also sharks.