GFTU BGCM Minutes 2017

childhood you think, “It is true, how has this affected me?” We live in a bit of a

siege mentality. Over the 300 years that we have been British, there have

been 14 recorded sieges of Gibraltar. I still remember in 1984 when the

pedestrian crossing was opened and finally we could walk through into Spain.

If you think that it was only 1975 that the border opened and finally we were

able to go through into Spain, but previously it was very difficult to leave

Gibraltar. You had to get a ferry to Morocco and then move back into Spain by

another ferry. We were very landlocked and we were very insular. It is very

hard for us to think or to even imagine that situation recurring.

One of the big things that has emerged in terms of trade unionism as a result of

this difficult relationship has been the creation of the Cross-Frontier Group. In

the summer of 2013 we had a really, really, really bad patch, a really bad time

when we were having really, really long frontier queues, up to about eight

hours. It was really awful. You have got people who commute, you have got

children who are going to school, you have got mothers having to finish work

and pick up children in Spain. It was a really, really awful time. There was a

study carried out by the Gibraltar Federation of Small Businesses that mapped

out the economic consequences of all these actions and they were nothing

short of devastating, devastating for La Line and the Campo area and

devastating for Gibraltar. What did that do? What happened there was that

the trade unions in Gibraltar, the trade unions in Spain, the business

associations in Gibraltar and the business associations in Spain, just the ones

local across the border, we all got together and we formed the Cross-Frontier

Group. God knows, there is enough conflict between GGCA and Unite to write

a book. You are thinking of unions and business associations, both from

Gibraltar and the other side of the border all coming together. We usually

would be at each other’s throats. As a collective coming together and trying to

work together, you think how has this come about and the reason it has come

about is because it is just that important, that frontier fluidity for us is essential

for our economic survival.

We have actually done a lot of work in these last four years. We have lobbied

in Brussels, we have spoken to the European Commission, we have spoken to

208