Treaty talks and the silly season

The Spanish have a phrase for it: ‘serpiente de verano’. It means the easy, often irrelevant stories that all newspapers churn out to fill pages during what British journalists refer to as ‘the silly season’.

In Spain, when you read article after article about Gibraltar, few of them flattering, you can be relatively sure that it’s summer. Anything on Gibraltar offers an easy headline for a Spanish reporter.

Not that all the Gibraltar news in recent weeks has been newspaper padding.

UEFA’s decision to sanction two Spanish national football players for leading chants of ‘Gibraltar es español’ during celebrations in Madrid following a well-deserved win in the Euros 2024 was a meaty gift for newsrooms, for example.

But others, like the endless stories about the Eastside reclamation that ignore the fact it has been there for years and was previously scrutinised and cleared by the EU, were tiresome if not unexpected.

The backdrop to this summer’s ‘silly season’ is the unresolved negotiation for a UK-EU treaty on Gibraltar’s future relations with the bloc.

Negotiators had been poised to seal it in the run-up to summer, with two high-level summits in Brussels bringing together the then UK Foreign Secretary, Lord Cameron, his Spanish counterpart Jose Manuel Albares, the EU’s chief negotiator, Maros Sefcovic, and Chief Minister Fabian Picardo.

Set aside, if you wish, the presence of Mr Picardo at both those meetings, important as it was. But you don’t put two Foreign Secretaries and a Commission vice president in a room – not once but twice – if you didn’t think a deal was within grasp.

And yet agreement remains elusive, with talks disrupted by a UK general election that delivered a resounding Labour win and a change of government.

Days after becoming Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer met with Spain’s Pedro Sanchez on the sidelines of a summit in Blenheim Palace, in Oxfordshire, where the new UK Government set out plans to reset relations with the EU after years of confrontation following the Brexit vote.

In an unusual step, No.10 Downing Street flagged Gibraltar in a statement after that bilateral meeting. It’s worth quoting in its entirety.

“The Prime Minister set out his plan to reset the United Kingdom’s position on the international stage and said he hoped the change in approach would forge the way for an agreement on Gibraltar that worked for all parties,” the No.10 statement said.

“The leaders also discussed the generational challenges facing Europe, including Russian disinformation, the climate crisis and illegal migration.”

“The Prime Minister said he hoped the UK and Spain could work even closer together to tackle such issues in the coming months.”

“The leaders agreed to stay in close touch.”

Since then, negotiating teams have been engaged in continuous discussion as they seek solutions to the outstanding issues blocking a deal on Gibraltar.

It’s not an easy task, given inflexible red lines on all sides.

After the second Brussels summit, Mr Sefcovic concisely summed up the challenge and said agreement would require both “political leadership” and solutions that were “implementable and technically feasible”.

Little of substance has leaked throughout this process, another good sign given negotiating in public is likely a surefire route to failure.

But we know the main sticking points relate to thorny matters such as taxation on goods, how the airport will fit into the new arrangements and – perhaps the trickiest – who will conduct Schengen immigration checks on the ground inside Gibraltar.

The framework agreement that underpins the negotiation envisaged that Schengen role being carried out by officers from the EU’s border force, Frontex, at least for four years.

Spain would be the Schengen state responsible for ensuring the integrity of the controls, but Frontex would carry out the practical work inside Gibraltar.

Since then, however, Spain has made clear it expects Spanish police officers to be present on the ground, something that neither Gibraltar nor the UK will accept.

As we near the end of the summer break, expect the noise to ramp up as we likely head to another round of high-level talks in September.

From the outset, negotiators have avoided deadlines, allowing themselves room for manoeuvre in the knowledge that one set of solutions would present another set of problems. Throw in inevitable last-minute brinksmanship and you get an idea of the complexity.

The problem is there is now a deadline of sorts to focus the mind.

The EU’s new Entry/Exit System [EES] is finally scheduled to enter operation in November. When that happens, it will mean tighter checks at the border for non-EU nationals (that’s us), including biometric checks.

The e-gates and technical infrastructure are already in place on the Spanish side of the border, waiting to be switched on.

In the absence of a treaty agreement, the leeway we have enjoyed from Spain and the EU, allowing us to cross with little more than a passport and a red ID card, will likely come to an end.

That will bring all sorts of changes at the border, not least delays. Residents with blue ID cards already face those difficulties, routinely asked to demonstrate evidence of where they plan to stay, how they plan to return and what funds they have for their trip.

Come spring next year, when the EU’s ETIAS system comes into force, we’ll have to get pre-travel authorisation too, similar to the US ESTA system.

The Gibraltar Government has warned that border controls will be reciprocal, so non-residents coming into Gibraltar can expect much the same.

It won’t be the end of the world, but it will be the beginning of a new reality at the border, where fluidity is vital not just for those who cross for work, but also for Gibraltar’s economy with its reliance on frontier workers.

Spain’s El Pais newspaper opened its print edition on Tuesday with a banner headline that warned of harder border controls if treaty talks fail.

There was little that was new in the article, though there was some signalling that raised my eyebrows at least, a hiss from the summer snake.

The article, for example, cited anonymous sources at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs – including one described as “close to the minister” - who complained that, while Mr Albares had warned public opinion in Spain that any deal would have negative elements, Mr Picardo had “not prepared Gibraltarians for inevitable concessions”.

The same sources added: “The problem is that Picardo compares the current situation, where he enjoys all the benefits without any drawbacks, with the cost of reaching an agreement with Spain; when the correct comparison should be with a no-agreement scenario.”

I’m not sure what Spanish diplomats have been reading to stay up to date with developments in Gibraltar, but they’re wrong.

For years, the Gibraltar Government and the UK have been planning for a ‘no deal’ outcome, conscious of what it means.

Back in October, 2022, for example, the Deputy Chief Minister, Dr Joesph Garcia, was blunt during an interview on the contingency planning that he is responsible for.

“If there isn't [a treaty], there will be very serious consequences for everybody on both sides of the border,” he told me.

“Life as we know and as we have known it would simply cease to exist.”

It's a message that has been repeated ad infinitum, often to backlash from some people here who dismiss it as scaremongering, believing Brexit ‘wasn’t so bad’ after all, when for us it hasn’t even started yet.

Last June, in an interview with this newspaper, Mr Picardo was clear that Schengen states share a responsibility for immigration controls and that Spain is our neighbouring Schengen state.

But he was adamant too that the framework agreement set out the route to ensure Spain could meet its obligations without crossing Gibraltar and the UK’s red lines.

“We’ve been very clear that there is a joint facility which is equidistant into Spain and Gibraltar, which creates a common operating space – which I think is what enables us to square the circle on these issues – and which creates the opportunity for our respective law enforcement agencies to work in partnership in a common area where they can do all of the things that they need to do,” he added.

And he added: “We’ve talked constantly about doing this without crossing each other’s red lines. I have no intention of crossing a Spanish red line, but I can’t accept an attempt to cross ours.”

Mr Picardo reflected too on the history of Gibraltar’s relations with Spain and what he termed “the psychological reality” of Gibraltar’s cross-generational “monochromatic” politics when it comes to Spain.

He urged Spain “to be understanding of why the Gibraltarian rejected Spanish presence in Gibraltar in today’s day and age.”

Which takes us back to the summer silly season.

When the Spanish players spurred the crowd in Madrid to sing ‘Gibraltar es español’, many in Spain – though by no means all - dismissed it as harmless fun, a joke.

Except we didn’t find it funny, and neither did UEFA’s disciplinary body.

In the wider context of the treaty negotiation, perhaps the nameless diplomats in Madrid who brief Spanish journalists might reflect on why that is.