Oct 24 Government Distorts Facts
The GSD has today said that the Government cannot continue to equate the comments it may make of their handling of the current crisis with Spain, with criticisms of Gibraltar. They are not the same.
The GSD warns our community against the clearly manipulative way in which the Government has attempted to distort what the Leader of the Opposition has said in his statements and sees this as another example of a Government more interested in distortion and manipulation than substance.
The fact is that the GSD and its Leader, Daniel Feetham, have criticised the Spanish Government for their recent campaign against Gibraltar on numerous occasions describing that campaign as immoral, unjustified and illegal. It repeats the same point today especially in the light of the recent actions at the frontier.
The Spanish campaign cannot, however, be used a mantra to stifle the Opposition. The Leader of the Opposition has expressed a view of Mr. Picardo’s handling of the situation at a time when he claims to be trying to agree ad-hoc talks with Spain to resolve a situation that is affecting not only businesses but the lives of ordinary people.
The GSD and the Leader of the Opposition will not be silenced from advocating a calm, mature and intelligent approach to this crisis. If Mr. Picardo thought more carefully about his actions and statements before he made them, he would not now be doing a u-turn on allowing Spanish Fishermen to fish over a year and a half after he allowed the 1999 Agreement to be torn up on Facebook without any plan B whatsoever.
The GSD has a proven track record of standing up to Spanish harassment and bullying whilst at the same time advocating dialogue that is safe and reasonable. That track record produced results and the party notes, for example, how a number of years ago its former leader, Sir Peter Caruana, was lambasted by the GSLP-Liberal party machinery for entering into the Cordoba Agreement, which Mr. Picardo described in Washington barely two weeks ago as “very positive”. Indeed, to suggest, as Dr Garcia does, that the GSD is giving up on the trilateral process is absurd, and shows how unreliable GSLP-Liberal political spin really is.
In any event, judging by recent events, in our view this Government would have been incapable of creating the right circumstances to pave the way for the Trilateral Forum of Dialogue which they now so hanker for.
