A few hours after the British government announced that it was giving up control of the Chagos Islands and handing sovereignty to Mauritius, Fabian Picardo appeared on the BBC. Gibraltar’s chief minister was “confident”, he said, that the case of the Indian Ocean archipelago set “absolutely no precedent whatsoever” for the UK’s sovereignty over Gibraltar.

Reaffirming the identity of this non-self-governing territory (as the UN defines it), under British rule since the 1713 treaty of Utrecht, is routine. Sometimes it occurs after seemingly trivial incidents. After Spain’s victory over England in the Euro championship in July, Álvaro Morata, the captain of the Spanish football team, briefly encouraged the crowd at a late-night party in Madrid to chant “Gibraltar is Spanish”. It was a joke, but Gibraltar formally complained to Uefa, which sanctioned Morata and his team-mate Rodrigo Hernández, or Rodri, who plays for Manchester City and had joined the chants on stage.

Conservatives and their allies in the UK are already appealing to imperial sentiment and raising concerns about the future status of Gibraltar after Keir Starmer’s Chagos “giveaway”. However, Gibraltar’s residents, workers and visitors face a more pressing issue than debates over colonialism or football chants: the fallout from Brexit.

It........

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