This Gurkha thing is clearly not the work of one government or of one
party - the disgusting treatment has been going on for decades, I
discovered tonight:
Gurkha resettlement: only the tip of a very ugly mountain of
discrimination
tagged with:
* government incompetence
* gurkhas
* military
* Nick Clegg
Let us move on a bit from the euphoria of what must have been the
first Liberal party led parliamentary motion to have defeated the
government since, oh, probably 1922 or something. Yes, it was a sweet
moment, but I've been on duty in halls tonight and went, so I thought,
to "celebrate" with my ex-Gurkha security guards. There really is very
little to celebrate as it turns out. This resettlement stuff is the
tip of a very large, a truly Sagarmathan sized, saga of discrimination
and outright deception wielded against the Gurkhas for decades -
generations indeed - which, now that they have the ear and following
of the British "decent folk", needs to be pressed home - preferably
before any banker or civil servant gets another penny of taxpayer money.
One of my guards tonight is at least third generation British Army
Gurkha. He retired in 1994 as a WO2. His pension in 1994 from the
British Army? Whether he lived here or back home...£22 per month. The
same, in monetary terms, as his father got when he retired in the
early seventies and when his grandfather retired in 1938.
I don't know if my readers will know all this - but for most of their
time the Gurkha soldiers that have served Britain were not in the
British Army, in the strictest sense. Until 1947 they were in the
British Indian Army (or even, previously, in the British East India
Company Army). At Indian independence, three (at least) separate
streams were created - for those who wanted to serve in India, they
continued in the newly independent Indian Army; for those who wanted
to serve Britain, there was the brigade created in the British Army;
and they also provide members for the police service in Singapore (and
more recently to the Sultan of Brunei's independent force too - though
most of these will have been in the British Army section previously).
So, when my guard from tonight retired from the British Army on £22
per month in 1994, which was 1000 Nepalese Rupee, his friends, family
and so on who had at the same recruitment and selection events as him
all those years previously decided they wanted to go to Singapore,
were retiring on a pension of 22,000 Nepalese Rupee. They had all been
led to believe when they joined up that there had been a binding
tripartite agreement involving India, Britain and Singapore to keep
all the Gurkha wages the same so that there would be no disadvantage
for men choosing one or the other.
When my chap retired, a group of them took the Nepalese government to
court to get them to show them this agreement and it appears it may
never have existed. So whilst the British section were observing it,
benefitting from what was little better than (albeit extremely good)
cheap labour, the others were paying equivalent wages to their locally
recruited colleagues. The British Army ones had few family rights
either throughout their service. If they were based in Hong Kong as
many were, or Brunei, they didn't get to take their families there;
whilst in Singapore, a crowded wee place if ever there was, their
Gurkhas' families got full rights as families of government employees
- their kids could go to Singapore schools and so on - and have the
right to remain when their fathers have retired and so on - even if
their fathers decide to retire to Nepal.
Now you also know, no doubt, because we hear about it all the time in
respect of British recruited armed forces, of this concept of "tours
of duty" between which you come back home to your home garrison and
have months or years with your family before being shipped off
somewhere else. Of course those "Robson and Jerome" British soldiers
in the garrison at Hong Kong also got this, as well as some rights to
have their families in Hong Kong. The Gurkhas? Not a chance. The
British Gurkhas in Hong Kong were there more or less permanently with
just vacation type visits to family back in Nepal. My chap did
thirteen years on one "tour" with nothing other than holidays home.
So, whatever the outcome of the resettlement rights campaign, this
goes far deeper. By how much, and with what justification, have these
guys been paid a fraction of not just the rest of the British Army but
even their colleagues in Singapore, and for how long? What is their
pension entitlement now, compared with someone of similar rank in a
domestic British regiment of a similar age and why is it different if
it is?
It's too depressing, it really is. Presumably someone has done the
maths and worked out, instead of just batting away government claims
that it would be "too expensive", precisely how much it would cost to
treat these guys on something like a par with their ranking
equivalents in other regiments, as, presumably, their British Gurkha
officers are with their equivalents.
As I have said before, I personally don't much care for the very
notion of a state military force, but if we are going to have them,
and generally agree that we need them, we ought at least treat people,
of whatever race and nationality and for whatever reason they opted to
serve our country, decently - from the tales of British veterans being
told they cannot have specially adapted housing on planning grounds or
whatever, to the near slave labour that appears to have been the case
with the Gurkhas. We have, or have had, what has often been described
as the best military in the world, size for size. It is some wonder
given how we treat them.
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