Gibraltar

Lord Patten Excerpts

Monday 10th March 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patten (Con)]

My Lords, I am deeply saddened that in Spain, just as in Argentina, prime ministers and presidents alike in deep economic and, therefore, political, trouble seek by diversionary tactics to raise with their electorates alleged threats by foreigners. Indeed, over this weekend, a very senior European foreign affairs figure, with no interest in either the United Kingdom or Spain, told me that it is possible to correlate exactly Spain’s recently renewed activities against Gibraltar with the emergence of the corruption scandals in the Spanish Government not long ago—the two correlate.

Therefore, just as the President of Argentina routinely issues daft and pathetic threats against the Falklands, so in recent years the Prime Minister of Spain has authorised deliberate incursions into Gibraltarian waters, as outlined by the noble and learned Baroness in her commanding speech and the figures that she gave, while political amnesia leads him to forget the ambiguity that Spain actually has two much contested exclaves of its own just across the Straits of Gibraltar on the north African coast at Ceuta and Melilla, surrounded by Morocco. Spain carries out these incursions—these interruptions into the lawful behaviour of people on Gibraltar—in a concerted campaign against the United Kingdom, one of its allies and a fellow NATO member. Indeed, in Spain people are today making bits of kit that go into the Eurofighter and are sent to Lancashire to be assembled there. That is an extraordinary reflection on Spain. I ask my noble friend the Minister: please, what kind of ally is Spain?

Only last week, on Wednesday 5 March, as the noble and learned Baroness has already referred to, in the Foreign Affairs Committee in another place I heard the First Minister of Gibraltar outline what he terms Spain’s “bullying tactics”, ranging from all those lengthy border delays to the breaking and entry into a British diplomatic bag at the frontier on one occasion—in the old days a gunboat would have been sent to deal with that kind of thing—to much more shocking incursions into territorial waters. The worst was on 18 February 2014 by a Spanish state vessel which sailed into British Gibraltar waters and disrupted an important Royal Navy exercise involving some of our special forces personnel from the Royal Navy Submarine Parachute Assistance Group—a disgraceful act. This must stop. I would like to ask my noble friend the Minister: on that occasion was the Spanish ambassador immediately summoned to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and, if not, why not?

By comparison, over the past 15 years, Royal Naval vessels have entered into, or passed through, the waters claimed by Spain around its two north African exclaves, to which I have already referred, on precisely two occasions. The first was by invitation back in 1999, when HMS “Herald” paid a port visit to the Spanish exclave of Melilla in north Africa just across the Straits of Gibraltar. The second was when, in August 2013, HMS “Montrose” exercised its lawful right of passage through the Straits of Gibraltar off Ceuta en route to the eastern Mediterranean. The score of incursions is several thousand to one, as far as I can see from the figures that the noble and learned Baroness gave. This is no beating about the diplomatic bush from me. It seems to me that in this respect we behave impeccably whereas the Spanish behave disgracefully.

Why does the United Kingdom not raise the Gibraltar issue at the next NATO council, for I think these Spanish claims and incursions are the only current examples of belligerence by one NATO member against another in the whole list of 28 member nations, setting aside the long-running saga that followed the Turkish invasion of Cyprus?

Gibraltar’s population wished by an overwhelming majority in the last referendum in 2002 to maintain the status quo. That population of 30,000 is approximately 10 times the size of the population of the Falklands, who feel exactly the same. Therefore, I welcome the apparent strong support of Her Majesty’s Government for the status quo. I just wish that Spain and the Argentine would—I borrow a phrase—grow up and get over it all soon and that their leaders would pay proper and effective attention to their own economies and the appalling unemployment, with the social unrest that follows, that both countries are experiencing, rather than trying to disrupt endlessly the life of a friendly neighbour. What a shocking accusation I am about to make: that is very un-European behaviour.