Gibraltar’s representation at the Labour Party Conference continued yesterday evening with the Gibraltar Reception hosted by the Chief Minister Fabian Picardo and featuring a keynote speech by the UK Minister for Europe and the Overseas Territories Stephen Doughty MP.
Commenting on the Opposition’s recent statement regarding the Fishing Agreement, the Government has said that it is obvious that the new Leader of the Opposition, Daniel Feetham enjoys arguments, which go round in circles.
A statement released yesterday adds, ‘the problem with circular arguments of this kind is that the blame usually ends up squarely at the start of the chain of events with those who made the accusations in the first place.
In this case the origin lies with the fishing agreement of 1999 which was entered into by his party in Government and which is the root cause of the issue that Gibraltar faces today. The issue is now to excert Gibraltar’s jurisdiction over a group of people who have been used to flouting the law for more than ten years.
In a recently published article in the journal of Geomorphology, Dr. Clive Finlayson of the Gibraltar Museum explores the possibility that a ‘lost world’ formed part of Gibraltar, as caves such as Vanguard and Gorham’s once faced a coastal shelf with a shoreline as 5 km away, at times.
Dr. Finlayson notes that, the caves hold a unique archive of fauna and flora, in the form of fossils, charcoal and pollen, helping environmental reconstruction of now- submerged shelf landscapes. In addition, a 300-metre dune complex on the East side of the Rock and other geological features complement the biological picture.
The Government has rejected the philosophical ruminations of Shadow Environment Minister Jaime Netto that were present in the Party’s recent statement on Ape Management.
The Government insists that the Opposition have to understand that they cannot pretend that the world started on 9 December 2011 and that they were not in Government before.
The Government has amended the Births & Deaths Registration Act to enable the registration of any stillbirth which may occur in Gibraltar, to be registered after the twenty fourth week of pregnancy.
Additionally, the Government has made provisions for the registration of any stillborn child that occurred from 1st January 1996 to date. This, should however, not be construed as imposing a duty on any person to apply for registration.