It doesn’t seem particularly sensible to have bits of your country stuck in another country miles away, especially if they’re by the seaside. It’s asking for trouble. Just look at the Falkland Islands and now Gibraltar. Blockades, queues, wars, deaths, misery. Why not give them up? What’s wrong with being Argentinian or Spanish? Surely some agreement could be reached that would mean the Gibraltarians could keep their pubs, pillar boxes, flags, second world war tunnels and fish-and-chips. We’ve got enough tax and spook havens and smuggling opportunities. Couldn’t we just lose this one? I thought we were keen on Spain, for sunny holidays and retirement. The Spanish are charming. You don’t have to go to bullfights.
My friend Karen has just buzzed off to southern Spain for the summer. Lucky her, but she tells me that Spain has its own little enclaves in Africa, Ceuta and Mellila. What trouble, expense and horror they’ve had, particularly with Mellila, a potential bridge into Europe: dismantling refugee camps, building vicious razor-wire fences along a floodlit no-man’s land, tear-gassing, killing, incarcerating and expelling desperate migrants.
Besides I’m a bit worried about the way we acquired Gibraltar, over 300 years ago, together with a monopoly on the slave trade to the Spanish colonies in America. It was part of a treaty agreed with the representatives of King Phillip of Spain, a deranged, sexually insatiable fellow who conducted orgies lasting for weeks, in which “dresses were torn, wigs knocked off, hair pulled out … dishes hurled … and ambassadors kept waiting,” according to Robert Walpole biographer JH Plumb. A sort of early Bullingdon Club. But, oddly, we feel obliged to stick to this arrangement.
How about a fresh start? No more Sykes-Picot-type colonial carve-ups, less nationalism, more generosity towards refugees, who will keep coming, from countries that have been bombed, flooded, desertifed and otherwise wrecked. They want a share of the safer places. What else are they meant to do? Stay at home and die? I thought we were meant to be living in a global village now, where we knew what state everyone else was in and were bothered about it. I had hoped we might learn from the past. Don’t laugh.
