Minister’s fury at EU betrayal of Gibraltar
A MINISTER stormed out of a top-level meeting after EU chiefs agreed with Spain to exclude Gibraltar from an important air safety deal.
Robert Goodwill quit the Brussels summit ‘in protest’ at the ‘astonishing’ decision to shut out the British territory from a plan to make flights safer and quicker by merging airspace.
Mr Goodwill refused to come back into the room even as the EU Transport Council gathering went on to discuss other topics. His extraordinary intervention means the air safety deal is on ice and new negotiations will now be required to revive it.
It marks yet another round in the bitter, centuries-old row over the sovereignty of ‘The Rock’. Gibraltar is a British overseas territory with a naval base and a military garrison, but despite losing control of it in 1713, Spain still wants to win it back.
The latest spat concerns an EU initiative called ‘Single European Sky’, which seeks to merge national air-traffic control systems, and reduce delays and near-misses endured by passengers.
‘I left in protest at a completely unacceptable situation’
For more than a decade Spain has been threatening to exclude Gibraltar’s airport from the wording of the agreement, even though the Rock is part of the EU. The move has been described by sources as an act of ‘political point-scoring’.
Tensions finally boiled over at a meeting of the EU Transport Council on December 3.
A draft version of the text included Gibraltar, in line with earlier agreements, and ‘that would have been favourable to the UK’, Transport Minister Mr Goodwill wrote to MPs.
But after Spain again sought to exclude Gibraltar from the deal, Italy agreed to the ploy as a way of getting the proposal wrapped up while it still held the rotating EU presidency.
The revised text did not specifically include the disputed territory, and added a footnote stating ‘the question on how to reflect the Gibraltar issue in the text is awaiting the outcome of discussions between Spain and UK’. Mr Goodwill said he ‘objected in the strongest possible terms’ but EU officials declared that a deal had been reached.
It was subsequently agreed that the document could not be driven through in its current form due to Mr Goodwill’s objection. ‘I left the Council in protest at what was a completely unacceptable situation,’ the Scarborough Tory MP
said of the incident.