Gurkha resettlement: only the tip of a very ugly mountain of discrimination

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.