All that is certain about this dispute, concerning a territory with but 34,000 residents, is that it needlessly amplifies aggravation between Britain and Spain.
Logic suggests that the U.K. should cede the territory, which no longer has any possible strategic value. I urged this on Douglas Hurd, foreign secretary in the 1990s, when he bemoaned to me the hair-raising secret service reports detailing criminal activity bankrolled through Gibraltar.But I am not a politician. The view of successive British governments about such things — including the refusal to surrender the Falkland Islands to Argentina — is that to quit Gibraltar would enrage jingoistic opinion at home for no political benefit.
Max Hastings: Brexit's Predictable Crises in Gibraltar, the Channel, Ireland - Bloomberg - 0 views
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The more neurotic a nation becomes about its place in the world, the more likely it is to cling to micro-symbols.
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Going back to the 2016 Brexit referendum, Johnson and his colleagues have dismissed the obvious impossibility of reconciling Brexit with the terms of the Irish Good Friday peace agreement, as a mere technicality.
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