The British people have developed a great affection for the Brigade of Gurkhas. Also employed by the Indian Army, Singapore Police and the Sultan of Brunei, in other circumstances they would be regarded as mere mercenaries.
..rebel leader turned Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal has openly expressed his antipathy for the practice of young Nepalese men serving in foreign armies as mercenaries for hire. Once in office, he announced that he would discontinue Gurkha recruitment, an undignified and degrading legacy in his eyes.
It was an unpopular opinion. The job is a popular and lucrative post in a country where unemployment hovers around 42%, and his announcement spurred vehement street protests late last year from old, new and future Gurkha recruits. Dahal promptly reneged, announcing in a February meeting with a visiting delegation of British parliamentarians that the recruitment of Nepali men into their forces had bolstered ties between the two nations, and that he was not in favor of stopping recruitment. But behind closed doors, Nepalese officials still squirm at the thought of their countrymen being paid for fighting another nation’s war.
And it it also true that there has been a great deal of breath-taking hypocrisy from the Conservatives. as Domic Lawson in the Times said recently,
It was the Conservatives who took away the right of most residents of Hong Kong to settle in Britain: they refused to change that policy even after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989 caused many of us to argue this was potentially inhumane.
In 1994 Michael Howard, then home secretary, exempted only individuals who could demonstrate that they had assets of at least £1m – which obviously did not include any of the then Hong-Kong based Gurkhas.
Howard ... denied hypocrisy, arguing that when he made his dispositions about Hong Kong 15 years ago, the Gurkhas were not British subjects but citizens of Nepal. That is precisely the government’s point. The 1947 tripartite agreement between Nepal, Britain and India (many more Gurkhas serve in the Indian army than in our own) decreed: A Gurkha soldier must be recruited as a Nepali citizen, must serve as a Nepali citizen and must be resettled as a Nepali citizen. You couldn’t get much clearer than that.
These warriors would have understood the deal when they signed up. And a very good deal it was, which explains why year after year almost 20,000 young Nepalese would apply for the 230 new places available in the brigade.
But at the end of the day, the British love the Gurkhas (usual caveats about not wanting to live next door to one will probably apply if you scratch under the skin a little) and today's judgement of some test immigration cases is just bonkers. It may be due process. It may get overturned.
But surely joined up Government should be just that. Surely someone would have told Gordon when he met Joanna Lumley that these cases would be determined today. Surely someone could have said given the Commons vote, no announcement will be made on these cases until the procedures have been reviewed.
I'm no great fan of the Gurkha's right to residency campaign. But surely when in a hole, it is always best to stop digging.
