The chief minister of Gibraltar has been fact-checking some of the reports following the new agreement between the UK and European Union regarding the territory.
On Wednesday, the British government and EU announced they had agreed a deal that means there will no longer be checks on people and goods at the land border between Gibraltar and Spain.
The border between Spain and the British territory had been one of many significant sticking points in Brexit negotiations between the UK and the EU.
But a deal has finally been agreed, with the British government saying the “last major unresolved issue from Brexit” has now been solved.
Under the deal, Gibraltar has effectively joined the EU’s Schengen free travel zone, with EU passport controls abolished. This means smoother border crossings for the 15,000 people who commute across the border daily.
However, it wasn’t long before certain parts of the media were painting the deal in a negative light.
But the territory’s chief minister Fabian Picardo has had no issue with publicly fact-checking them on social media.
Sharing a post from the Telegraph, which claimed Britain and Gibraltar had ‘handed control of the border to Europe, Picardo wrote: “This is untrue and misleading. It should be entirely disregarded. Disappointed in @Telegraph.”
In another post, he called out the Times for publishing a headline saying Gibraltar would “end VAT-free regime under UK deal with Spain.”
Picardo said was “not true,” adding: “Please be careful to report accurate details and not set false hares running on a deal as important and sensitive as this.”
In the comments, one person decided to consult X’s AI bot Grok to (for some reason), and even this agreed that the article was misleading.
It wasn’t just pro-Brexit media that Picardo called out. When a Brexiteer and former MEP David Bannerman said the deal would “mean British passport holders can only spend a maximum of 90 days in Gibraltar”, Picardo said this claim was “completely flawed.”
Reacting to Picardo’s fact-checking, Alastair Campbell said: “It is quite something that the chief minister of Gibraltar is having to spend much of the day rebutting distortions and fiction in our media.”
Brexiteers and pro-Brexit media sharing misleading claims? Whatever next…
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