Brexit poses an “existential threat” to Gibraltar’s economy, the chief minister of the British territory Fabian Picardo told the BBC Saturday.
While Britain’s full departure from the EU, including from the union’s single market, could be a “disastrous exit for the United Kingdom, [it] would be an existential threat” for the service-based economy of Gibraltar”, Picardo said.
A deal needs to be struck to keep the territory in the single market despite U.K. divorce from the EU, he added.
The chief minister of the Mediterranean outpost of 32,000 inhabitants said on the BBC’s Today program that the Britain’s so-called hard exit would “mean a complete exit from the single market, no arrangements for freedom of movement.”
Gibraltar’s residents voted overwhelmingly to stay in the EU at the June 23 U.K. referendum. A total of 96 percent of voters on ‘the Rock’ opted for Remain.
But since the U.K. as a whole voted 52 percent for ‘Leave,’ Picardo said the search has been on to find a model that would keep Gibraltar inside the EU.
“We’ve been talking to many people in the United Kingdom … in particular to the Scots, who have been talking about this possibility of what has been described as a reverse Greenland,” Picardo said.
That scenario would theoretically allow one part of an EU member to leave but the rest to remain, based on the case of Greenland’s exit from the union in 1985 despite its government at the time in Denmark staying put.
Picardo called for a legal and political analysis of what could be possible, warning that “the important thing now is not to pretend that we’ve found the right model.”
In June, Spain’s Foreign Minister José García-Margallo suggested it could share sovereignty of Gibraltar with the UK.
Over 12,000 people cross the land border with Spain each day.
Spain has long contested U.K. ownership of Gibraltar, which it shares a land border with. Locals voted to stay with London in a referendum on the issue in 2002 by a margin of 98 percent.
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