Tuesday, December 11, 2018 - 11:22

The analysis of Mr Azopardi and the GSD Opposition of the Gibraltar Memoranda of Understanding can only be seen as a cheap and transparent attempt to confuse public opinion. Moreover, their view is legally flawed, politically wrong and totally unsustainable, says the Government's respose.

A statement adds: "It would appear that Mr Azopardi has been remarkably lazy and has failed to read the whole of the Withdrawal Agreement in carrying out his analysis. If he had read the Withdrawal Agreement, he would not have made some of the strikingly ridiculous points he has raised. If he has read it, he has failed to understand it."

One of the main criticisms made by the Opposition, repeated ad nauseam in its statement, is that the Government has given away Gibraltar’s biggest bargaining chip by allowing frontier workers to be protected beyond the transition period and that the MoU on Citizens’ Rights that protects Spanish frontier workers will not lapse at the end of the transitional period.

This is quite a remarkable failure of understanding of the Withdrawal Agreement, the Government says. Indeed, it is the same failure of analysis that Mr Azopardi has displayed from his very first utterances on Brexit.

Anyone who has been following the Brexit debate with any seriousness will know that one of the most prominent and basic features of the Withdrawal Agreement is that Part Two of the Agreement on Citizens’ Rights protects, on a permanent basis, and therefore beyond the end of the transition period, the position of all frontier workers and of all EU nationals living in the UK and British nationals living in the EU at the end of the transition period. That is to say, their rights are protected forever under Part Two of the Withdrawal Agreement. UK or EU frontier workers would enjoy exactly the same rights Protocol or no Protocol, MoU or no MoU because they derive those rights from Part Two of the Agreement and not from the Protocol or the MoU.