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Secretary of State for Defence
SECRETARY
GURKHA LEGISLATION
HKD
Ps
Ps | Mr Maude Mr Mclaren Defence Legal Advisers 8/2 And
Your minute of 22 January suggested that this Session's
Hong Kong Bill rather than the Armed Forces Bill 1991 should
be used to make the necessary legislative amendments to reduce settlement and citizenship opportunities for Gurkhas and their
families.
ce Mr Paul lamdading
Submissive.
J8/2
I do appreciate your difficulties and the understandable
wish to safeguard the quinquennial Armed Forces Bill from
controversy. However, for the reasons I explain below, I
cannot agree to allow the Hong Kong Bill to run any greater risks than the very considerable ones it already faces. I have no doubt that proceeding as you propose could in practice prejudice the successful passage of the Hong Kong Bill.
Your minute itself identifies the cardinal difficulty:
combining measures which will, on the one hand, give citizenship to selected people in Hong Kong to whom we owe little while, on the other, withholding it from a group of people who have directly served HMG and who command widespread
respect and affection in this country. This would very likely alienate numbers of our backbenchers who might otherwise be sympathetic to the Hong Kong proposals.
But that is not all. The proposal would also make an already contentious Bill considerably more difficult to
handle, especially by widening its scope to permit amendment
of the British Nationality Act 1981. That is an eventuality I
am keen to avoid. It is by no means a necessary consequence
/of legislating
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