The astonishing history of a 200-year-old British-Gurkha friendship | UK news | The Guardian

This is an article from yesterday’s Guardian about the issue of whether all of the older ex-Gurkhas should be allowed to settle in the UK; the author, who served in a Gurkha unit as a conscript in the 1950s during the Malaya “emergency”, supports it, with some reservation:

On the government side, the Home Office fears a massive influx of ex-Gurkhas and their extended families, while the Ministry of Defence worries about the effects on future recruiting of Gurkhas should there be a large exodus of ex-Gurkhas from Nepal and the Nepalese government cease to benefit from pensions now being paid in Nepal - effects that may become critical with a Maoist-dominated government already hostile to the idea of Nepali nationals serving in an overseas army.

On the other side, there is the question of just how representative of Gurkha opinion the activist Gurkha Army Ex-Servicemen’s Organisation (GAESO) is. Field Marshal Lord Bramall, in a recent letter to the press, refers to GAESO without naming it, when he writes that he is confident “a great many serving Gurkhas regard this recent activism as ‘trade unionism’ that discredits their soldiers and is in any event counterproductive”. Perhaps so, but then serving Gurkhas already have the privileges that those who retired before the 1997 watershed - when the Brigade of Gurkhas left their Hong Kong base and were relocated in the UK en masse (thus acquiring the right of UK residence along with parity of pensions with British troops) - are still fighting for, and may not wish to see the applecart overturned.

There is also the matter of costs. Should there be a large influx of pre-1997 ex-Gurkhas and their families, their pensions, which were designed to provide a comfortable enough retirement in Nepal, would be quite inadequate to live on in this country. This would mean either that these pensions would have to be increased or that the government would be having to deal with large numbers of welfare claims - both expensive options.

(The Gurkhas, by the way, are a unit of the British army recruited from Nepal, a relic of the days of British colonial rule in India; the officers are British. They were based in Hong Kong until 1997.)

There has been a campaign recently to get rights for all the old Gurkhas to settle in the UK, with Joanna Lumley as a figurehead (Lumley is a British TV presenter and actress whose father was an officer in a Gurkha regiment in the 1940s). Amazingly, this has had support of the popular press of both left (what’s left of it) and right, and MPs of all the main parties, to the extent that the government was defeated in the Commons, by one vote, on a motion last Wednesday to allow all Gurkha veterans to settle (the Government had proposed to allow those with 20 years of service, excluding all but the most senior ranks, or had received certain medals or been injured in battle). I have heard it suggested, privately, that the Government’s determination to keep the old Gurkhas out was proof that they do not always cave in to media pressure.

The problem is that the Gurkhas knew from the day they signed up that joining the Gurkhas did not lead to a right to settle in the UK; they receive a pension, which is substantial by Nepalese standards, but in the case of them moving to the UK, is likely to have to be increased. While I am sure that not all of them will move, those who do are likely to bring dependents, unless they are excluded, which would make any change allowing their resettlement look symbolic or even cruel. Has anyone considered the size of the resultant influx? A letter in last Friday’s Guardian also considered the loss to Nepal of the old Gurkhas leaving, in terms of the money sent home and skilled men leaving.

Don’t get me wrong; I support the right of anyone, ex-serviceman or otherwise, with family ties in this country to spend time here and for those with British spouses to settle, but I do believe that those who are supporting this campaign are voting with their hearts, not their heads. Significantly, last Wednesday’s motion comes from the Liberal Democrats, a party which has never been in government and which has been opposed to Britain’s post-2001 war efforts, so perhaps this is an attempt to prove that they “support our troops” more than Labour or the Tories do (and the Tories’ policy on this, while they were in government, was the same as the present government’s). I suspect that the government knew that those who call for free settlement for Gurkhas now are likely to be much less gracious when the inflow starts in earnest.

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