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Gurkha Settlement Rights

Before I give way to the Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee, from whom I very much want to hear on the issue, let me say that the key point is the attempt to take a narrow number of Gurkha pensioners and gross it up into the largest conceivable number that the Home Office can think of. Frankly, that number is nonsense on stilts. It is based on nothing at all—no polling, no questionnaires, no surveys, and certainly no knowledge of the Gurkhas' beautiful and mountainous country, of the advanced years of some of the pensioners, who find it hard to contemplate walking to the next village, let alone taking a plane to London, and of the social status and prosperity of discharged servicemen in their own community. It is a fantasy to suppose that more than a fraction will want to settle in the UK.