Oh for gods sake just give it back

First of all - this news sprung off the page at me.
Imagine my disappointment at the third reading when I realised that it read "PARITY" and not "PARTY".
A party would be a mighty fine concession to bargain with your employers over, maybe a party every Friday afternoon, with cakes and buns and fizzy pop and a bouncy castle in the garden and someone sick over the azalea bush at the end - I'd strike for that and I'm not even a teacher.


But then I saw this news story, its a head shaking "what the fook is going on" sort of news story.

For those not in the know (ie anyone outside of the UK or Spain), Gibraltar is a headland.
Its part of southern Spain.
Most of it is a big rock sticking out to sea.
Most of it is a British armed forces base.
It is British sovereign territory.
Which means that it belongs to the Queen.
Which means that we get to pay for it via taxation.

And its been that way for 300 years.
And Spain have asked "why" or "Que" for 300 years and they want it back.

It is theirs after all, we stole it from them when they weren't looking and when Britain had a navy made of wood that just blew up everything that didn't smile and wave at them from the shoreline. Picture the scene, some British admiral sailing past an island, or in the case of Gibraltar a headland, looking through his telescope at the natives lined up on the beach...

"Carruthers, carruthers, come here man, look younder, be those natives on that thar beach ?"
"Aye captain, that they be, aye, ooh arr"
"Be they waving at us Carruthers ?"
"Nay Captain, they be cursing"
"Right, give the bas'tads a broadside or two and we'll have their fekking island or headland off them by lunch, be quick about it man"

And in this manner the British navy captured the whole of the world in just a few short weeks and gave it all to King James or whoever was King/Queen of the day, maybe it was King George with a number, who knows, google it if you're really that bothered.

The point being that we own these daft bits of rock all over the world and on these daft bits of rock we place military garrisons to pretend that they are still important to us, we even fought a war back in the early eighties to pretend that we really cared ever so much about a group of rocks in the southern atlantic even though we had a buyer for them in the shape of Argentina, but did we do a deal with them, no did we buggary, we pretended that we still wanted to keep them, spent trillions of pounds defending them, not to mention hundreds of lives, and now we've forgotten all about them again - ask someone on the street to point to a map of the world and tell you where the Falklands are and they'll point to the tip of Scotland again like they did pre 1982.

And so for the last 300 years succesive Spanish Kings and governments have, every year, asked the British government "Hey you, how about you geeev us dat rock back huh ?" and every year the British government reply "Get stuffed Manuel, its British sovereign territory, it belongs to the Queen, how dare you". and every year the British population gaze heavenwards and whimper "why for fook sake, why don't we just give it back to them, its fekking obvious that its a part of Spain, its attached to the fekking country for gods sake, you can walk from Spain to Gibralter without getting your feet wet, its a headland in Spain - give the bugger back and stop wasting our money"

On the other hand, the British have already taken over every square inch of Spanish coastline territory from Gibralter to Salou in the North, another square mile of rock isn't going to make that much difference to the flow of British currency into the Spanish exchequer.