E.R.
CONFIDENTIAL
Draft: Minute from Home Secretary to Defence Secretary
GURKHA LEGISLATION
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.
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. have no doubt that proceeding as you propose could in practice prejudice the successful passage of the Hong Kong Bill.
I
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 on Hong Kong: indeed, we now believe that we may be able to achieve all our objectives through the Hong Kong Bill itself, deliberately leaving the 1981 Act intact.
turn, proceeding in that way would of course remove the
grounds upon which you have sought to justify this
intervention.
In
A final point. You mention that circumstances have changed
CONFIDENTIAL