TNAG-2203-FCO40-3158-Hong-Kong-nationality-package-legislation-to-restrict-the-ri-1990 — Page 20

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