UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 147-iii

House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE THE

FOREIGN AFFAIRS COMMITTEE

OVERSEAS TERRITORIES

Wednesday 6 February 2008

HON JOE BOSSANO MP

Evidence heard in Public Questions 176 - 207

USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT

Oral Evidence

Taken before the Foreign Affairs Committee

on Wednesday 6 February 2008

Members present:

Mike Gapes (Chairman)

Mr. Paul Keetch

Andrew Mackinlay

Mr. Greg Pope

Sandra Osborne

Rt hon. Sir John Stanley

________________

Examination of Witness

Witness: Hon. Joe Bossano MP, Leader of the Gibraltar Opposition, gave evidence.

Q176 Chairman: Joe Bossano, welcome. You are familiar to many of us here and I suspect that, over the years, you have appeared before various Committees in this place on many different occasions.

As you know, we are currently conducting an inquiry into the Overseas Territories. Although we are not visiting Gibraltar this year, several members of our Committee visited Gibraltar last year, and we therefore thought it was useful to get evidence from Gibraltar as part of the inquiry.

May I begin by asking you how you assess the Cordoba agreement and where we are today, given that you are on the record as saying when it was agreed that it was in some respects contrary to Gibraltar's interests and unreasonable. Is that the view you still hold? How do you assess the progress that has been made?

Joe Bossano: Perhaps one needs to define what progress means. Progress means different things to different people. The Spaniards have a very clear idea what progress means from their perspective and therefore progress is anything that advances the prospects of a Spanish Gibraltar. We do not measure progress by the same yardstick.

One needs to distinguish between the tripartite forum, which was created. We took the view then that we would reserve our judgment and evaluate the results. The only result that it has produced has been the Cordoba agreement. The Cordoba agreement had a number of elements with which we disagreed and which we would have altered if we had won the election, which was a very close thing.

One of the elements was that, on a number of occasions in the text, there was a specific reference saying that the references in that document to the sovereignty of Gibraltar was exclusively a matter for the United Kingdom and the Kingdom of Spain and that this was understood and accepted by the Government of Gibraltar. We made it very clear that, if there were a different Government of Gibraltar, that different Government would inform the other two parties-meaning us-that we would not accept or understand that the reference was bilateral to the other two signatories.

There is, of course, a very clear piece of progress from the Spanish perspective: the Spanish pensioners got paid revalued pensions from 1 April last year, and provided that they accepted that that revaluation should be paid directly to them in a Spanish bank account, instead of their coming to collect it in Gibraltar, they got as an inducement an amount of money equivalent to all the increases that they would have had since 1989 in the Gibraltar social security pensions, which no other contributor has received.

Therefore, we have been very critical of that arrangement, where people who paid the same number of stamps receive different levels of benefit, because one gets retrospective payments and the other one does not. Furthermore, whether they get it or not depends on a number of things. One is that you have to be Spanish: if you are another nationality, you do not get it. That seems to us to be clearly contrary to the entire spirit of Community law on non-discrimination. The second element is that you have to have stopped contributing in 1969, when the frontier closed. So we are rewarding the workers that abandoned Gibraltar in 1969 and penalising those who came to work afterwards. There are other aspects, and therefore, rather than saying whether this is progress or not, we say there are things we have no objections to and things that we object to.

Q177 Chairman: Can I ask you about some specific matters? What about telecommunications?

Joe Bossano: Telecommunications is a clear win for Gibraltar in terms of its fundamental position, as Spain had to accept the 350 international code, which had been resisted until that time. For the benefit of analysing this element of the Spanish restrictions, we need to realise that this was not something introduced by the Franco regime; it was introduced by democratic Spain, because at the time the telecommunications were removed, the international dialling code did not exist. When telecommunications were restored by the Felipe Gonzalez Government, they refused to restore normality. Instead, they gave us 30,000 Spanish numbers, which were treated for calling purposes as though they were in Spain. In fact, what has now happened is that calls from Spain to Gibraltar are now more expensive, and we pay more for our phone calls, but we have the benefit of being accepted as a different jurisdiction and a different country with its own country code and the calls are international, so we are happy to pay more for them.

Q178 Chairman: What about the land border crossing?

Joe Bossano: The movement across the border has improved as a result of the actual implementation of the red and green channel, which Spain promised to do when the frontier opened in 1986, as part of the Brussels agreement of 1984. When they signed up to the 1984 agreement, they agreed that when the frontier was reopened, there would be a red and green channel. It is progress that it has been implemented, but it certainly is significant to recall that it has taken them over 20 years to deliver what they promised. At that rate, maybe we can project future progress.

Q179 Chairman: You referred earlier to the forum. There have been several ministerial meetings since 2004, and the most recent one was in November 2007. The former Foreign Office Minister, Geoff Hoon, informed us last year that, in the view of the Government, the arrangements were on track and working well. What is your assessment of that?

Joe Bossano: I do know where the track is leading to and, therefore, little comes out of these things. For example, in the case of the actual arrangements in the Cordoba declaration, nobody knew what was in it until after it was agreed and made public. So in Gibraltar, we tend to rely predominantly on leaks in the Spanish press. Although the three parties are sworn to silence and confidentiality, the system leaks at the Spanish end much more efficiently than at the Gibraltar or UK end. Although reports in the Spanish press are not 100% accurate, the deal on Spanish pensions, for example, was explained in the Spanish media, with something of the order of 90% accuracy, 15 months before it happened. If anything new is in the pipeline and we are on track to achieve it, we will know it after the event and will then have to judge it post hoc. We cannot evaluate it beforehand, because no information is available.

Q180 Chairman: May I ask you, then, about the airport issue? Are you still opposed to the airport customs and immigration arrangements that were part of the Cordoba agreement?

Joe Bossano: Yes. The new agreement provides for a change in the regime once the air terminal is extended. The Cordoba agreement provided simply for a corridor to be built from the existing terminal to the Spanish frontier, to avoid the arrangements whereby people now get a bus in La Linea to come to Gibraltar and take an aircraft to Spain. The Government subsequently announced their intention of going beyond what was required by the Cordoba understanding and investing something of the order of £30 million in the building of a new terminal. From a point of view not having anything to do with Spain, but rather with public expenditure, we do not support that.

Although there were initially 14 flights a week to Madrid-one run by GB Airways and the other by Iberia-GB Airways pulled out altogether and Iberia cut its flights from seven a week to two a week. We have a terminal in which, until something new happens, we are investing 30 million quid to provide for a weekend flight to Madrid and a daily flight to Gatwick. We do not think that is a good way to spend public money, but that has nothing to do with the foreign affairs dimension of the issue.

As regards the arrangements, what we are seeing now is that, even though something like 60% of the traffic that goes from Gibraltar to Madrid is of Spanish origin-that is to say, not of Spanish nationality, but originating on the Spanish side of the international border-people from Spain prefer to come into Gibraltar, do some shopping, because we have much lower prices than in many commodities, and catch the Gibraltar-Madrid flight from the Gibraltar end, rather than take the La Linea bus. The bus is operating at very low occupancy levels. That is going to be replaced by a system whereby, technically, nobody will be able to board the aircraft in Gibraltar and exit the aircraft in Spain on landing. Once the extension is there, they will be deemed to have entered Spain before boarding the aircraft and to have remained in Spain after landing, because the exiting from Spain arrangements take place after landing and the entering Spain arrangements take place before boarding.

To us, that is totally unnecessary, and we therefore support the existing arrangements, which give people the flexibility to choose to fly Gibraltar-Madrid or La Linea-Madrid. There are lots of unknown elements in the new arrangements, which will only be tested once they are put in place. Suppose somebody has shown his passport at La Linea, and something happens between him showing his passport and getting on the aircraft. Where is he? In no-man's land; still in Gibraltar; or has he now left Gibraltar and is in Spain? Those things indicate the peculiarity of the arrangements, which are intended exclusively to allow Spain to argue that, in fact, they do not concede that it is an international flight between Spain and Gibraltar, but a domestic flight between one part of Spain and another.

Q181 Chairman: May I clarify one thing? The new terminal is not yet under construction.

Joe Bossano: No, it was announced in May last year, before the general election, and it was due to go to tender. The last time that I asked in Parliament about this, I was told that three companies had tendered to do the work and that all three were Spanish. As far as we know, to date, the tender has not been allocated.

Q182 Mr. Keetch: May I ask about the Odyssey, Mr. Bossano? It seemed to us to be an extraordinary incident, but its ramifications are deeply constitutional and potentially important. Give us your understanding and your picture of it.

Joe Bossano: The view on our side of the political fence is that, if an American company or a Panamanian ship does something that is against the law, the answer is for the people who think that it is against the law to take the necessary legal steps to enforce the law. Of course, the Spaniards argued that, because they did not concede any territorial waters under the treaty of Utrecht, we do not have any territorial waters. You have already had the views of the Foreign Office on that, in which it says that the Odyssey was intercepted by Spanish vessels three and a half miles away from Gibraltar. The United Kingdom chose, in our case only, to claim the three-mile limit, even though in all the other Overseas Territories, they claim the 12-mile limit, and in the Falkland Islands they have a 200-mile economic exclusion zone.

Q183 Mr. Keetch: That would take in most of the Mediterranean. It would be difficult to enforce a 200-mile limit there.

Joe Bossano: Remember that the median line that the Foreign Office put in the paper to you-I imagine, to confuse you, because that is its strategy normally-applies only in the Bay of Gibraltar. There is no median line on the eastern side; the next bit of land is when you hit Morocco. You may not have 200 miles, but you can certainly extend the 12-mile limit, as in La Linea. If you go in a straight line from La Linea into Gibraltar in the sea, you are in Spanish waters after three miles, and then you are in international waters, because the United Kingdom has chosen not to extend our territorial waters to the same 12-mile limit. Obviously, for one reason, and one reason only, if Spain does not recognise three miles, it will not be chuffed at having to recognise nine more.

The constitutionally important dimension is that the United Kingdom has the responsibility for protecting and defending the territorial waters of its Overseas Territories. Therefore, what they should have done a long time ago, and what they should do with no further delay, is to increase the three miles to 12 miles and ensure that people are made to respect our territorial waters, as is the case in every other colony.

Q184 Mr. Keetch: Just remind me, when a British nuclear submarine got into difficulties and was in port in Gibraltar a few years ago, were you part of the calls from people in Gibraltar that it should be removed, on the basis that you did not want it there?

Joe Bossano: No. We objected to it being repaired there, because when I was a branch officer of the Transport and General Workers Union and the Ministry of Defence wanted to cut back on the work load of the dockyard and make people redundant, we tried to persuade the Ministry of Defence that we should be permitted to do repairs on nuclear submarines. The Ministry told us that it could not allow us to do that, as the facilities could not be upgraded in Gibraltar, because we were too small, the population was too close and it was too dangerous. As the population is still the same and the size of the Rock is still the same, it cannot cease to be dangerous just when it suits them. That is the only thing I objected to.

Mr. Keetch: We will not pursue that.

Chairman: It is one of the great advantages of being an experienced person who has been around a long time.

Joe Bossano: Thirty-six years.

Chairman: Andrew, you wanted to ask about pensions.

Q185 Andrew Mackinlay: Briefly, in the previous Parliament when the right hon. Member for Neath (Mr. Hain) was here, he referred to the pensions thing repeatedly as a scam, and he blamed the Gibraltar Government, as distinct from the United Kingdom Government. I never really got my head round that, but I notice that the British Government now seem to have resolved the scam. Can you just take me through that?

Joe Bossano: Yes, I think that they have done worse than that. They have actually perpetrated a scam against every non-Spanish contributor. That is what the British Government have done. I feel particularly strongly about this because I was in government when pensions were frozen, and I had the difficult job of freezing pensions for all the contributors; it was done for one reason and one reason only, which was to save British taxpayers money.

The United Kingdom said to me, "Look Joe, okay, you have convinced us that we have the responsibility for paying the pensions because Geoffrey Howe promised to do this in 1986, but what we are not prepared to do is give Spanish pensioners annual increases, because you decide to give them to pensioners of all other nationalities. Therefore, either you pay for the pension increases or you freeze everybody, so that we don't have to pay." It was Hobson's choice, so we froze them.

What they have just done as a result of Cordoba is to recognise that the freeze was wrong; they have unfrozen the increases retrospectively to 1989 at a cost of £30 million or £40 million, bringing the total cost to the British taxpayer to £250 million, in exchange for a contribution that the Spanish workers made in the 15 years that they were there, of one shilling and five pence before decimalisation. The total contribution in the 15 years was £250,000. The payback for those contributions has been £250 million, £1,000 for every pound contributed-the best social insurance scheme in the history of mankind. That is a scam.

Q186 Chairman: Can I take you up on the figures? You quoted two different figures, £30 million and £250 million. As I understand it, the estimated cost to the UK taxpayer, according to the National Audit Office, is about £100 million.

Joe Bossano: They are probably not calculating the costs from 1 January 1986, which is when it started. They are probably calculating the costs from the most recent backtracking that has taken place. The original bill would have been even more. The fact is that it is less than it would have been if they had paid at the beginning, simply because when the United Kingdom made this last agreement, it agreed to pay the surviving pensioners and the heirs of pensioners who died after October 2007. Since then, the latest additional cost is likely to bring the total bill-the total cost past and future-from 1 January 1986 up to when the final Spanish pensioner dies, and his final descendent disappears, to somewhere in the order of £250 million. The £30 to £40 million is the cost of the element agreed in Cordoba.

Chairman: Thank you. That is helpful. Paul, you wanted to come in on another issue?

Q187 Mr. Keetch: Yes, I wanted to probe you on something. We did not have a general election in September-although many of us wanted one-but you had a general election in October. Tell us what the results were.

Joe Bossano: The result was that the Government won with 500 votes more than the Opposition, which means that, if 250 or 300 people had had the wisdom to change sides, I would now be addressing you as the Chief Minister.

Q188 Mr. Keetch: But compared to them, did you do better?

Joe Bossano: The number of extra voters who cast a vote in this election was 1,411, and my share of that extra vote was 1,341. But it was not enough.

Q189 Chairman: Can I ask you about the Cervantes institute, which is dedicated to teaching Spanish as a second language and promoting Spanish culture? That has been one of the issues in the Cordoba agreement, and it is supposed to start its activities in 2008. What is your view of it, and do you believe that there could be any benefits to Gibraltar from it?

Joe Bossano: We are bilingual, and I think that you need to appreciate that in all linguistic communities, in the United Kingdom, in Spain or in any other nation state, the standard variant of the language happens to be the variant spoken by the part of the territory that conquered the neighbours.

The only reason why standard English is the English of the south is that the English conquered the Scots and not the other way round; otherwise the standard language would be the one with the Scottish accent. In Spain, the Castilians conquered the rest, and that is why Castellano is the standard variant of Spanish. The variant that we speak in Gibraltar, which has imported long words from English, Genoese and a number of other elements in our population, is closer to standard Spanish than, say, Catalan or Galician. I do not think that our language will improve, and I do not think that our insight and understanding of the Spanish character needs improving. I think that we have got them sussed out completely.

Independently of that, we have no objection, in principle, to all member states opening cultural institutes in Gibraltar, renting buildings, employing cleaners-preferably TGWU members-and paying rates. We simply object to taxpayers' money being used to provide a public building to a foreign Government to open a cultural institute, when the declared objective of that foreign Government is to increase to possibility of Hispanicisation of the Gibraltarians, of which there is no prospect, and reducing British influence in Gibraltar, of which, again, there is no prospect. From a public finance point of view, I know that part of what you look into is contingent liability and the proper use of public funds. Therefore, we are doing our bit, in our corner of the world, to make sure of that.

Q190 Chairman: To be clear, this is a facility whereby the building is being made available by the Government of Gibraltar?

Joe Bossano: Voluntarily. It is not part of a deal. It is not that the Spanish said, "We want £40 million for our pensioners and a building for the Cervantes institute." They did not put it that way. The Gibraltar Government, out of the kindness of their heart, wanted to offer it. We have youth clubs and senior citizens clubs-I happen to be the president of the senior citizens' club in Gibraltar-that could do with this kind of public building, if the Government have nothing better to do with the money.

Mike Gapes: Could we now move on to the constitution?

Q191 Sandra Osborne: I come from the south of Scotland, and Gaelic was never my first language, but the British Government are putting substantial resources into teaching people Gaelic.

May I ask you about the new constitution? I know you have concerns about the preamble, but one of my colleagues will ask you about that. Concerns have been raised that the Executive, under the new constitution, have too much power over the police and the judiciary. Would you agree with that, and do you have any other concerns?

Joe Bossano: I was in the Select Committee that was set up in 1997. You have read my paper. This is something to which we attach great importance. I have been in the Gibraltar Parliament for 36 years. My involvement in politics started 44 years ago, when the United Nations first decided that Gibraltar's decolonisation had to be by agreement with Spain. That was what made me go into politics at the age of 25, and I have been campaigning for decolonisation for two thirds of my life. Obviously, before I pass to the other side, I would like to see the job finished, so this is a very important issue for me. The dynamics of the internal mechanism of the constitution is a problem in a small community.

In the United Kingdom, one can say that there are politicians who are in charge of the police, the administration of justice, and so on. With Gibraltar, however, we are talking about a community of 10,000 families. That is what Gibraltar is. We see ourselves as a micro-state, a mini-nation and a people with its own identity, but we are really little more than a small tribe on a speck of limestone at the beginning of the Mediterranean. In a small community, people are interlinked by family, marriages and neighbourhoods, so, in some respects, it may sound as if it is talking in favour of colonialism. Believe me, it is not. As a socialist, I have been ideologically committed all my life to the concept of decolonisation.

In some respects, however, the figure of the Governor-the figure of somebody external to the system-rightly or wrongly, tends to inspire more confidence in its impartiality. In small places, if people apply for jobs and one guy gets promoted and others do not, even if there is no basis for it, they will look for the family links that explain the promotion, rather than saying it means that the person is better. Therefore, it is a sensitive area.

There is now a Police Board and a Minister for Justice. There was a Justice Bill that we voted against in the House because we had reservations as to whether we wanted a politician in charge of that. It is one thing to say we do not want the Attorney-General to be in Parliament with a vote because he is not elected, and another thing to say we want someone who has a vote and who is elected to be more involved in the administration of justice than has been the case in the past. It is a new thing in our society. I have concerns about it, and perhaps it is too early to say whether those concerns are justified or not. I can assure you that whatever things the Governor was doing in Gibraltar, there was never any worry about him using the police on orders from the Foreign Office. The concern we had about the Governor was whether he was pushing a particular line, for example when we had the Hain-Straw initiative to sell us down the river. The Governor had a job to do in trying to persuade us that we should paddle in the direction they wanted us to go, which we did not do, obviously.

Q192 Mr. Pope: I am amazed by your view that the English beat the Scots. It certainly does not feel like that.

In your submission to the Committee, you mentioned concerns about the wording of the second preamble to the constitution. Could you say a few words about what effect you think that has had on the prospect of delisting at the UN?

Joe Bossano: It is important to be conscious of the views of the chairman, Sir Julian Hunt, who was the ambassador for St. Lucia. He is very pro-Gibraltar and very sensitive to our views on self-determination. He said delisting is not the objective; delisting is the result. It is not that there are criteria for delisting. There are criteria for having achieved full self-government. In my view, the United Kingdom Foreign Office is still playing a double game. It moved with the second preamble, quite frankly, because I made clear to Geoff Hoon, when he came to Gibraltar, that we would campaign for rejection of the new constitution unless they gave a public commitment in the House of Commons-which they did in answer to a question from Lindsay Hoyle-and in the United Nations, and put in the text that the United Kingdom recognised that we were exercising self-determination. In the first chapter, on human rights, we mention the provisions in the Human Rights Convention of the United Nations that talk about the inalienable right to self-determination. The second preamble is where we ask the British Government to say specifically that the act of voting in the referendum was making use of this right. They did not want to put it in the preamble. Instead, they put it in an answer to a planted question in the House and they said it in the UN.

The Spanish Government were in the loop even during the negotiating period. The proof of that was that, before we finished on the last day, the Spanish Government came out welcoming the result that was not yet public, which was the removal of that second preamble.

The United Kingdom claims that we have exercised self-determination. We passed a motion in our Parliament asking people to vote in a referendum that was to be the use of that right. In international law, in chapter 11 of the charter of the UN, it is absolutely crystal clear that you only exercise self-determination to come out of a colonial relationship and enter into a new one. The moment that that happens, the obligation of the United Kingdom as an administering power under article 73 e of the charter ceases automatically. The United Kingdom makes no attempt to go to the UN and say: "In the case of Gibraltar, they have now exercised their right to self-determination, and therefore, we are no longer sending you progress reports." Ask yourselves how the UK can have decolonised us in January of last year and still be reporting on the progress we are making towards being decolonised. We are supposed to have gone past that by now.

So, the answer is that they said to us what we wanted to hear to keep us happy, and they said to Spain what Spain wanted to hear to keep them happy, and they have been playing this game for the 36 years that I have been involved. Therefore, I am here today to try to enlist your help in getting them to come clean and get off the fence. If the decolonisation process is not finished, we will campaign until it is.

The UK Foreign Office has got to be tasked about one thing: for years it was castigating the UN C24 by saying that it was being too doctrinaire in saying you are either a colony or you are independent and that, in fact, self-determination and decolonisation did not necessarily equate to independence. I remember, for years, the British Government arguing in the UN, quite legitimately-and they succeeded in persuading the C24-the question of how you can say that the Pitcairn Islands, with 47 people, can only be decolonised by becoming independent. What do they do: open 47 embassies and that is it? Then they run out of population!

Logically, one has to say that the remaining colonial territories are also entitled to the inalienable human right of self-determination. They also are entitled to aspire to emerge from a colonial relationship with a power like the UK, France or Holland. But in each case, it is no longer "one size fits all." What is possible for Bermuda or Gibraltar is not necessarily possible for Montserrat or Pitcairn. Therefore, I feel this Committee has a role to play in closing the colonial chapter and helping to bring about solutions that meet the criteria. Then the UK, as the administering power, is perfectly entitled to go to the UN and say, "The fact is that we have given this amount of self-government to Gibraltar because, in their circumstances, that is what they are capable of handling. But we are not going to give the same to Montserrat, St. Helena or the Falklands-with 2,000 people in the south pole-not because we do not want to, but because they might not be able to do so much for themselves."

That was what we were promoting in this new constitution for Gibraltar. We think the content of the constitution is capable of meeting that yardstick and our approach at the UN is to say that if it is the UN that has rejected this, let the UN tell us where it falls short. But, unfortunately, at the General Assembly in December, the UK supported a resolution that was identical to the one with the old constitution: still requiring our decolonisation to be on the basis of a negotiated settlement with Spain. There is a caveat at this stage that that will not happen without the consent and support of the Government of Gibraltar.

Let me tell you that when I started in 1964, the UK's position was stronger. It was held that the treaty of Utrecht did not curtail our right to self-determination, even to the extent of independence. The UK was defending in 1964 the position that the Gibraltarians and the Falkland Islanders were not barred from independence and that they did not go because they did not want to. That position has not been restored.

Mr. Pope: I think that the UN has difficulties with the concept of people exercising their right to self-determination, but not wanting independence. That has caused real confusion with the C24.

Q193 Sir John Stanley: One of the key relationships between this country and the Overseas Territories lies in the limited number of appointments that are made out of this country to senior posts in the various territories. Would you like to make any comments on how satisfactorily you feel the present system for UK-made appointments is carried out and on the level of consultation that takes place? Do you have any comments on the length of the terms for which people are appointed and on procedures that apply if it becomes necessary, for any reason, to terminate an appointment before the end of the due term?

Joe Bossano: The appointments that are made by the UK in Gibraltar-now and under the old constitution-are the Governor and the Chief Justice. When I was in government, we wanted to continue to have a military Governor, because in our view they tend to have a closer affinity with Gibraltar because of its military history. People who are of a sufficiently high rank are sufficiently used to giving orders that they can resist taking them from the Foreign Office. Also, they have already retired and are therefore not on a promotion ladder to go anywhere else, so they can not be leaned on.

We had a very clear-cut set of criteria, whether they were an air commodore, a brigadier, a field marshal like John Chapple or a naval officer. In our experience, our military Governors have been tougher defenders of the Gibraltarian interest than civilian Governors. We have had few civilian Governors, and I am happy to say that we now have a Royal Marine as Governor. As you all know, the Royal Marines were involved in the battle to capture Gibraltar in 1704, so presumably he will want to keep what was captured then.

Again, when the present chief justice was appointed, it was not the choice of the Government of Gibraltar. The Gibraltar Government appointee, the head of the civil service who sat on the Public Service Commission, came to me for input. I told him that the only guy who we could say we would like, of the people who were there, was the only person that we knew. That man happened to be somebody who had been Attorney-General in Gibraltar. I thought that he had put up a very tough fight against the Foreign Office to get us a land memorandum, under which land would be transferred to us from the Ministry of Defence without us having to pay. He therefore seemed like a good guy to have in Gibraltar. However, it is not possible to see these people's limitations.

I do not think that we are equipped in some areas to assess the qualities of the appointees. We have to assume that people are being sincere when finding somebody to do a job in Gibraltar and that they are doing it for the right reasons. We have to assume that they are picking people who have the right skills, knowledge and experience to do what is required of them.

The staff who serve the Governor's office and the Deputy Governor are UK civil servants who are seconded to Gibraltar. They are therefore not appointed for a specified time in Gibraltar. They may spend a three-year tour of duty there, but effectively they have a career that includes time in Gibraltar, but which will finish up in another Government Department. I do not think that we have any problems in that area.

We have never had the kind of problems that other Overseas Territories seem to have with their Governors. I came into government from being a trade union leader. Trade union leaders have the reputation of not taking no for an answer. I never had any problems with the Governors who served in my time in government. We had a sufficiently close relationship and friendship. They would always say to me, "I have been instructed to tell you-" and then tell me what they had been instructed to say. We would then have lunch together and they would tell me what they really thought. That worked very well.

Q194 Sir John Stanley: So you have no proposals that you want to put to us for any changes to the present system. Although we will not go into any details on the Schofield affair, are there any lessons that you feel need to be drawn from it?

Joe Bossano: I can tell you that we voted against the Judicial Services Bill because we were not happy with it. When Chief Justice Schofield talked about making representations about the changes, our position was, "I believe that the people in the system are better equipped than I am as a politician." If somebody wants to argue with me about wage bargaining or trade unionism I feel that I am qualified; I have done that for many years of my life. If you ask me what the best way to ensure the independence of the judiciary is, all I can tell you is that I am 100% committed. I said that even if there were no real difference but he felt more comfortable, I was quite happy to support whatever the Chief Justice wanted, because I could not see any downside to it. The legal profession in Gibraltar is very big in relation to the size of its population; I think that we have more lawyers than almost any other corner of Europe. [Interruption.] Are you a lawyer by any chance?

Mr. Pope: No. There are way too many lawyers in this place.

Joe Bossano: All I can tell you is that I have never had a very high regard for the legal profession, because I am used to living in a world where we call a spade a spade. The lawyers then diverge into the colour of the spade, the weight of the spade and the length of the spade, depending on the client. That world, which I do not understand and which I do not particularly like, now seems to be running the show. If the Chief Justice was arguing that there would be a greater level of independence if there was less political involvement in the appointment system, I would have had no difficulty. We were committed in the election campaign to coming back to the United Kingdom and saying, "From the position of the newly-elected Government of Gibraltar we have no problems in accommodating anything that the Chief Justice is asking for; we see nothing wrong in doing it."

Q195 Mr. Keetch: When we were in Gibraltar in July the Chief Minister told us that there had been a huge change in relations since the appointment of Sir Robert Fulton. How do you get on with the Governor and have you noticed this huge change in relations?

Joe Bossano: I do not know where that huge change is supposed to be. There is greater fluidity at the frontier because after 24 years they have done what they promised to do 24 years ago. All I can tell you is that the latest thing that the Spanish Government have done has been to put a protest because-

Q196 Mr. Keetch: This was about the appointment of the Governor.

Joe Bossano: I am sorry. I thought you were talking about the Spanish.

Q197 Mr. Keetch: No, I was talking about the relations that you have with the Governor, or the relations that the Chief Minister has with the Governor.

Joe Bossano: I have had no problems with any Governor as leader of the Opposition and no problem with any Governor as Chief Minister. The problems might be either with the Chief Minister we have or with the Governors we have had. If there are problems between two human beings, which of the human beings is at fault depends on a value judgment. I have tended to like most Governors more than I like the Chief Minister.

Chairman: I think we are aware of that, Mr. Bossano. That is a healthy relationship between the Leader of the Opposition and the ruling party. We have just seen it today as well.

Q198 Andrew Mackinlay: I am trying to get to the bottom of the constitutional position of the office of Chief Justice. It is not clear to me whether he is a creature of the United Kingdom or a creature of Gibraltar. In the United Kingdom, the removal of a judge requires, I think, votes in the Houses of Parliament-long-enshrined in the Bill of Rights. I would have thought that the Chief Justice of Gibraltar or any other Overseas Territory was a creature of the United Kingdom appointments process. I do not know if you can help me on that. If I am wrong and he is a creature of Gibraltar or other overseas territory, it seems that we do not have comparable constitutional safeguards regarding the removal, discipline or suspension of any Chief Justice. It seems to me a hallmark of democratic processes and the independence of judiciary that there has to be some impeachment process, which we have in the United Kingdom. I am asking whether these Chief Justices in Overseas Territories should be subject to UK safeguards and/or impeachment processes. If not, ought there to be an enshrined comparable safeguard, in micro-terms, in the Overseas Territories?

Joe Bossano: The only thing I hesitate about, Andrew, is in trying to explain something which I am not really equipped to give you definitive answers on. All I can tell you is that the provisions in the new constitution are not very different from the provisions in the 1969 constitution. In terms of disciplining a Chief Justice, I would tend to look at these things from my own personal background. If this guy were being disciplined in any other job, I would look at it as a branch officer, saying, "What would I argue in the disciplinary proceedings?" I am not very clear on what it is that the Chief Justice is supposed to have done wrong that has led to him being suspended with full pay and brought into a disciplinary proceeding.

I can tell you that the idea-it is not a requirement of the constitution, but a requirement of the legislation introduced by the present administration before the election, and one which we were committed to change-that you should have, as head of the judiciary, a head of the Court of Appeal, which is permanently in the United Kingdom, seems to me to be wrong and unacceptable. No legitimate reason has been given, and the only one I can think of is the protocol list. Some people care more about status than others. I am not the kind of guy who notices the red carpet. I usually make the mistake of going in the tradesman's entrance. For some people, however, a red carpet is important. Of course, in the protocol list, the Chief Justice is in the queue ahead of the Chief Minister. I do not believe in queues, anyway, so it never mattered to me where they put me.

Since the head of the judiciary is no longer in Gibraltar, when we have, for example, the Armistice day or Trafalgar day ceremony, they are not around to have a car with a flag in front of the Chief Minister's car. I speculated, thinking aloud in Parliament, whether this had had any influence on the decision to change the system, because I could see no other reason for wanting to change it. Therefore, I think there is a negative side to it. I believe that the man running the judiciary in Gibraltar should be permanently in Gibraltar, all the year round, and not 2,000 miles north. However, the constitution does not require it, and does not prohibit it. The Government of the day has chosen to do it, they are elected, and it is their democratic right. I would not want to appeal to the Foreign Affairs Committee or the House of Commons to overrule the elected Government of Gibraltar, because that would be a retrograde step from the point of view of decolonisation.

Q199 Chairman: Thank you. Can we move on to a topical point? We are debating the Lisbon treaty today. Do you have any comments about the way in which Gibraltar's interests were represented during the intergovernmental conference and the negotiation process that led up to the agreement on the Lisbon treaty?

Joe Bossano: There is a long saga of mismanagement on the part of the United Kingdom in terms of protecting Gibraltar's position. This is one of the things that has worried me almost since the day I was elected to the Gibraltar Parliament, in July 1972. The first legislation on which I was asked to vote in the House of Assembly was the accession treaty to the European Economic Community in 1972, so that we would join with the United Kingdom: the equivalent of the Act that you passed here. As a newly elected parliamentarian and legislator, believing that I actually represented the people and had the right to express views and change things, I asked if I could move some amendments. The Attorney General said, "No, no, you are not allowed to move amendments, it has already been signed." That was my introduction to the European Economic Community as a newly elected Member of Parliament in October 1972. Since then, we have had a whole cycle of occasions when things have been done-I remember that an agreement was made in Amsterdam at three in the morning and the Foreign Secretary fell asleep. When he woke up, something had been done about Gibraltar which he had missed and was not able to recuperate. I believe that that continues.

One of the fundamental things that I have never got clarification for from the Foreign Office in all the time that I have dealt with this, has been the concept that we are in the European Union as a European territory for whose external relations a member state is responsible. Linguistically, I look at that definition and I say, "If I am part of a territory for whom a member state is responsible, I cannot also be a part of the member state that is responsible for that territory." The UK argues that for community purposes we are part of the UK, but for UK purposes we are not. That is the system that was introduced, and is one of our bugbears. In the system that was introduced consequentially on this interpretation, none of the EU laws operate between Gibraltar and the UK. All the new laws operate between Gibraltar and the European Union, as if Gibraltar did not exist and we were in the UK. That is now being enshrined and carried forward in the Lisbon treaty.

I am not sure that it is possible to unravel that after so much time, but the way that it has been handled from the beginning has been transposed with every stage of the consolidation process that has taken place since the original European Community, through to the European Union, and now to the Lisbon treaty.

Q200 Chairman: There was a problem until recently of a backlog of implementation of European Union directives in Gibraltar. I understand that that has now largely been resolved.

Joe Bossano: We still have some directives that we implement now and again and that are overdue, but the bulk of them have disappeared. At one stage, there was a huge backlog that was in dispute. We are not part of the single market in goods-at one stage the European Union decided that, for example, even though there was no free movement of goods between Gibraltar and the European Union, we still had to introduce all the legislation on labelling, even though the goods were not in free movement.

Literally hundreds of provisions were related to the free movement of goods, which we had never had implemented. The Foreign Office originally advised that they were not implementable in Gibraltar. You cannot say that something must be labelled in a particular way-in all the languages of the European Union, for example-if at the end of the day we bring in something from Morocco. It cannot enter Spain because it is a non-EU product, so why should we have to label it in 12 or 24 languages or whatever?

A big chunk has been removed from the backlog because the European Union has accepted what we are required to do under our terms of membership. We have to implement things to do with the movement of people, the movement of services, health, employment because of the movement of labour, and social security legislation. Anything to do with the import or export of products, agricultural products, or fishery products-those are ours. That has meant that the amount that we have been liable to implement is less than originally appeared.

The other thing is that, increasingly, we are using the Italian model, which is that we just put a piece of paper and we virtually repeat the text of the legislation, and quite a lot of it is meaningless, I always remember the time I was in government when we were required to implement a piece of legislation that had to do with ensuring that we prevented the pollution of rivers where we grew oysters, especially pollution from effluent from chemical plants. We do not have oysters, we do not have rivers, and we do not have chemical plants, but the Foreign Office told the European Union, "They don't have chemical plants." It did not say anything about the oysters or the rivers, and the EU said, "Ah, yes, but they might have in the future." We might have chemical plants, but we will never have rivers, believe me. At the end of the day, I, as a Minister, introduced the Bill in the House. Although it makes nonsense of the concept of Parliament and legislation, we have got a law to make sure that our non-existent chemical plants do not pollute the non-existent oyster beds in the non-existent rivers. That was the easiest way to deal with the issue.

Q201 Mr. Pope: I realise that we are short of time. I wanted to ask about your view of Gibraltar's relationship with the British Parliament. Obviously, Gibraltar has some powerful advocates in the House of Commons.

Joe Bossano: Yes.

Mr. Pope: Including a member of this Committee, the hon. Member for Thurrock and Gibraltar, Central (Andrew Mackinlay).

My point is about the formal relationship between Gibraltar and this place, and whether you think that we would be better moving to a system similar to what happens in France, where Overseas Territories are represented in the National Assembly in France. Now that Gibraltar is in with England, South West in the European Parliament, do you think that there is a case for having representation in the House of Commons, or, as this Committee has recommended in the past, do you think that in a reformed House of Lords, Gibraltar and the Overseas Territories might be represented? Do you think that that would be a helpful step forward in the relationship?

Joe Bossano: I said earlier how the UK had shifted position, from first of all accusing the UN of equating decolonisation and self-determination with independence, and that that was not necessarily the correct view. The UN has now accepted and said so categorically that independence is only one option and that there are other options. One of the clear options is the concept of integration. It has been there from the beginning; it has not been used on many occasions, but certainly, both the Dutch and the French integrated their colonies a long time ago and, in many respects, on very generous terms.

I noticed that in some of the questions that you put to representatives of the other Overseas Territories you asked them, "What does it take for somebody from the UK to belong here and to have the right to vote?" Well, anybody from the UK who comes to live in Gibraltar is entitled to be entered in the list of electors after six months, and has the right to vote and to stand for election, provided that his intention is to stay in Gibraltar and make it his home. We do it because we are the colony that is geographically closest to the UK. The influence of this House and the influence of the culture of the UK reached Gibraltar before it reached anywhere else, including our special relationship with the Navy. We were the first and the last port of call of every naval ship leaving Devonport or Plymouth.

Those links make us feel very much at home here, and I believe that it would be entirely consistent with the UK's history in creating, out of the Empire and the Commonwealth, for a solution for the remaining territories to be found that gives them the maximum level of self-government that they can achieve, given their particular geographical and human resources. A way should be found whereby they are involved in representation in Parliament. There is an argument that the level of self-government is not full self-government to the extent that there may be a residual power in the Parliament of the UK to overrule the Parliament and the Government of the former colony so that it has not ceased 100% to be a colony. However, for as long as that residual power exists ,that argument is answered clearly by us participating in voting in that Parliament.

By definition, the argument that our Government started, which was subsequently completed, won us the vote in the European Parliament on the Matthews case, which was about a complaint of a breach of human rights This argument was that a Parliament that is able to legislate for Gibraltar does not represent Gibraltar because the residents of Gibraltar are not able to vote for that Parliament. Clearly, it was felt that giving an electorate of 20,000 an MP in a place where most MPs represent 750,000, would create problems for everybody, so the compromise was found that we form part of the South-West region. Therefore when Glyn Ford, for example, stood for the South-West region, he got elected as a British Labour Party/Gibraltar Socialist Party candidate, because we endorsed him as our candidate as well as a candidate of the British Labour Party.

It does not require enormous imagination to find a way of reconciling the maximum levels of Government within the territory and the recognition that, for practical reasons rather than for archaic treaty reasons, independence is not a solution for any of us-with the possible exception of Bermuda. One should not look closer at the Dutch model; I would certainly be supportive of that idea.

Q202 Chairman: Can we just look briefly at two other areas? First, in the financial sector, there have been significant improvements in the regulation of financial institutions and the offshore financial activities over the recent years-not just in Gibraltar, but also elsewhere in the Overseas Territories. Do you think that there are any lessons that can be learned by the smaller financial centres, such as Anguilla, Montserrat, Turks and Caicos Islands, from the improvements that have taken place in Gibraltar?

Joe Bossano: This issue is closely linked to the concept of contingent liabilities in the UK, which is one that the UK Foreign Office always raises with the National Audit Commission. Let me tell you how I think one ought to approach this question conceptually. The concept has to be "polluter pays". By that, I mean that if the United Kingdom says to the territory, "This is what you should do," and the territory says, "I don't agree with you, I want to do something else," then collateral to that, there must be an undertaking that if the territories disregard the advice, they have to underwrite the cost.

The opposite side of that same coin is that, where the UK insists that we do what it thinks best, it has to pick up the bill. The cases that have cost the United Kingdom money was first, Barlow Clowes, which was sent to Gibraltar with a licence from the Department of Trade and Industry when we did not have our own licensing authority. The second was BCCI, which was a case of a UK bank buying a small, Jewish-owned Gibraltar bank which had come to Gibraltar from Morocco and which, with £10 million, was totally solvent. I used to have the union bank account there because it was 100% unionised. When BCCI came in, it took the bank over, and increased its activity from £10 million to £100 million. BCCI then took the £100 million from Gibraltar, and put it in London; from London it took it to the Cayman Islands; and from there it disappeared. The third saga was the mismanagement of the pension issue by the United Kingdom.

In all three cases, local advice was overruled because they knew better in London; they all turned belly-up and cost a lot of money. My experience was that the UK gave bad advice, things turned out wrong and they subsequently blamed us. In my time, in 1988, we pushed out the regulatory mechanism from the Treasury. I felt that since we were going to go out on a marketing exercise to attract people to Gibraltar, it was inconsistent to invite people to apply for a licence and then, when they applied, to tell them that they did not meet the standards. So, we would market it but at the same time said to people that there was an independent entity over which we had no control and which laid down the criteria that they had to satisfy.

There must be no possibility of political influence. We are all politicians and we know that if you have an industry and there is something that will cause a lot of unemployment, you are tempted as a politician to try to bend the rules if for no other reason than the good intention of saving jobs and people's livelihoods. There has to be a machinery that is completely independent of the Government. In Gibraltar it is. I should like to see that machinery become so independent that it receives no money at all from the public purse and is financed by the industry. The criteria should be that if it is a small industry, it may need to be partly financed from public funds to get it on its feet but it should have a clear guideline that it is expected to pay its way and raise its own money and then not have to report or explain things to the Government, or to the UK Government either. Independence should be independence of any external influence.

Chairman: That is very helpful.

Q203 Sir John Stanley: As I am sure you will agree, the 1996 Hague convention on the protection of children is one of the most important international conventions on the protection of children that has ever been concluded. I am sure you would also agree that it is a total human rights disgrace that the ratification of this convention has been held up for some five years by the entire EU-because the EU has to proceed by unanimity-as a result of the inability of the Spanish and British Governments to agree how the convention should be operated in Gibraltar.

The question I want to put to you, because I find it genuinely mystifying, is why, when a simple and almost self-evident solution was available, it took so long to agree it. The simple self-evident solution, which I have advocated in this House, and any number of other people must have advocated in any number of other Parliaments and international forums, was that agreement be made between the British and Spanish Governments on how the convention should be operated in Gibraltar, with both Governments agreeing that that did not in any way prejudice either side's position on the sovereignty issue.

Our Foreign Secretary made his ministerial statement on 8 January, finally announcing a solution and putting copies of the relevant exchange of letters in the Library. The last sentence of David Miliband's letter to the Spanish Foreign Minister, Mr. Moratinos, reads: "These arrangements or any activity or measure taken for their implementation or as a result of them do not imply on the side of the Kingdom of Spain or on the side of the United Kingdom any change in their respective positions on the question of Gibraltar or on the limits of that territory." So there is the self-evident solution. It is in the Foreign Secretary's exchange of letters. I wonder whether you can provide us with any explanation of why on earth it took five years to agree this simple self-evident solution, at the same time depriving children around the world of the protection of the 1996 Hague convention.

Joe Bossano: I have the debate of 21 June here in front of me, and I have read carefully everything that you said in that debate, Sir John. Let me say that one thing on which I disagree with you is that you seem to apportion blame equally. You have to first ask yourself how a civilised democracy in Europe can put all those children at risk for the sake of defending a principle enshrined in the treaty of Utrecht in 1713, which allowed, inter alia, the exportation of slaves from west Africa to the Spanish colonies in 1714. I think it is a disgrace that the Spanish Government should behave in that way. What is wrong is to say, "Look, why do you not find a simple solution?" The answer is that Spain accepted from Miliband something they had been rejecting for the previous five years. That is the answer.

What is even worse is that here we have a nation which is apparently wooing us now, when only two weeks ago they entered a reservation about the extension to Gibraltar of legislation to stop international organised crime. The extension of the UN convention on combating international organised crime was signed by the United Kingdom some years ago and extended to Gibraltar last year. The first thing Spain did was to object to its extension to Gibraltar. You would have thought the last thing they want is for us to become a nest of people who organise international crime, unless they want to be able to point the finger at us because the criminals are there, because we have not got the convention extended.

I know you are a good friend to Gibraltar and I agree with you entirely that it is indefensible that children should have suffered because people are playing games in Madrid or London. The answer is that the stick cannot always break at the weakest link. Because we are 20,000, you are 50 million and they are 45 million and the whole of the EU is 400 million, people say, well, here we are, 400 million and we cannot sign because of 20,000. No, you cannot sign because someone says, "Either you screw Gibraltar"-pardon me for saying so-"or I will not sign."

One of the things the British lads on the Rock used to call us for many years when there were lots of them there was Rock scorpions. It is an apt description of us. We are small, very tough and very proud of our links with the United Kingdom. It is in your culture and in your history that you do not like small guys being stepped on, and we are the small guys in this outfit.

Q204 Chairman: Do you have any concerns about human rights in Gibraltar, apart from this issue that has just been mentioned?

Joe Bossano: There are problems in Gibraltar in a number of areas. For example, I am dealing with one particular case in an unfair dismissal tribunal which has now been dragging on for two years where the Government, which is supposed to be ensuring that the law on unfair dismissal is observed, is the litigant. Because they are the litigant they have gone all the way to the appeal court in England to argue that somebody that has worked for one year and two days has not worked for 52 weeks because the week starts on a Monday and not on a Sunday. That would make a year 53 weeks long. If I was not there giving a free service, that person would have lost out.

Q205 Chairman: Excuse me, if this is subject to legal action at the moment we cannot discuss it here.

Joe Bossano: No, we won. It cost the taxpayer a lot of money, but we won.

One of the advantages of a place like Gibraltar is that you have a single system. One of the problems is also that there is no deus ex machina-there is no external body to appeal to. If you are fighting the Government in any area, there is nobody above the Government other than the judiciary. In the case I mentioned, we won at the tribunal, we won at the supreme court and then it went to the appeal court. There are people, for example, who have been making representations to you in respect of the gay rights movement. They say it is against human rights not to equalise ages for sex between consenting adults. We decriminalised it in 1988 when we came into government. Therefore there are areas where I can tell you that we are all on paper committed to 100% observance of international human rights. Our new constitution says so.

We actually asked the United Kingdom Government-this was something we felt very strongly about-to have the right to change our constitution in Gibraltar in order to extend the human rights chapter without having to wait for constitutional change. It requires a two-thirds majority of the House and then a referendum to do so. Therefore, the answer is that the political and ideological commitment to human rights is as high as would be found in this country or anywhere else. The reality in practice might not be as high as the theory that we all subscribe to and defend, and I believe that one of the problems is who to go to. We want full self-government and to run our own affairs, but if someone is in a position of too much power, who do you turn to other than international organisations and so on? If there is a deficiency there, it needs to be addressed and put right, but I am not sure that I have the answer.

Q206 Mr. Keetch: You have covered the point about gay issues, but surely there is more that the Government of Gibraltar should be doing, for example, to equalise the age of consent for same-sex couples, legalise the protection against discrimination on the grounds of sexuality, and give legal recognition of same-sex partners. That exists in the UK, but not in Gibraltar. It exists even in this House of Commons, which is one of the most conservative institutions in the land, but it does not exist in Gibraltar.

Joe Bossano: No, I agree with you. Sometimes there is a lot of hypocrisy in small societies, where people all throw up their arms in horror at something, but that does not equate to what they actually do in their own lives. For example, I can tell you that one area of fundamental difference that I pointed out in our new year message this year was when the Government of Gibraltar came out talking and implying that some of those areas of complaint from these groups were an attempt to bring in extraneous standards from other places in Europe that are causing the breakdown of the family and society.

I categorically rejected such an analysis and such a view. I believe that the fundamental human rights of people start from one premise and one premise alone: that you must respect people the way they are. No one can be accused of doing anything to destroy the family or society or anything if they are not interfering with anyone else. We live in a mature and civilised world of which the fundamental basis is that it is wrong to treat people differently because of their religion, colour, political views or sexuality. If Gibraltar has a hang-up about sexuality, then it is time that it overcame it. It is as simple as that.

Chairman: Thank you. Finally, Andrew.

Q207 Andrew Mackinlay: My question is slightly different from what Mr. Pope talked about, because he talked about the representation of Overseas Territories and of Gibraltar. What about the representation of Gibraltar's Government here in the United Kingdom? We all know the distinguished Mr. Albert Poggio, who ably represented Gibraltar here under both your Administration and that of Mr. Caruana, but it seems that there is one area of discrimination against Overseas Territories, particularly the big Overseas Territories of which Gibraltar is one, and that relates to Remembrance Sunday and to access to the House of Commons. I think that diplomats have access to Parliament, but representatives of Overseas Territories do not. If you want to give us evidence on that, I wonder whether those issues should be repaired or remedied, both in relation to Gibraltar, and speaking for the wider constituency of the Overseas Territories.

Joe Bossano: That comes back to the whole point that has prompted my wanting to come to speak with you and my original submissions last year. In relation to this business of modernisation, we have a long political battle in Gibraltar between us and the other side as to whether modernisation equated to colonisation. In the Foreign Office paper before you, all the territories are treated as going through a process prompted by the 1999 White Paper to modernise the relationship. However, modernising it and making it more modern does not fundamentally alter the nexus or essence of it. It is the essence of it that has to come to an end once and for all and be replaced by something else. The 1968 constitution of Bermuda is often regarded as being the most modern arrangement, but it is in fact the most ancient, and it is a wonder that it has not been changed. Yet that is the one that is the most advanced in terms of devolved power to the people of Bermuda.

I think that the new element that ought to replace what exists today between the overseas territories and the United Kingdom is a partnership that is real in every sense of the word. That includes that the position of the representatives of those territories in the United Kingdom and the access to Parliament of those territories should be based on what partnership means, and partnership means equality. It does not mean having to ask for favours and it does not mean having to bend the rules. It is that philosophical approach that I think ought to produce what I think is required, so that the Foreign Affairs Committee may no longer be responsible for the territories, although I would like to see some Committee of the House of Commons still being responsible. We do not want to be your "foreign affairs" anymore; we are part of the family, not foreigners.

Chairman: The reason that we are conducting the inquiry, just for the record, is that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office is the Department responsible.

Joe Bossano: I accept that.

Chairman: We scrutinise the Department. If the Government chose to have a separate Overseas Territories Department or if some other Government Department had responsibility, no doubt that Select Committee would be conducting the inquiry.

Thank you very much for coming, Mr. Bossano. It has been extremely valuable and we wish you all the best. It has been good to see you.

Joe Bossano: It has been a pleasure to be here.