That’s absolutely correct. Nothing to do with being anti immigrant. Something which this government has never been. In fact their pro immigration policies have led to support for the BNP that Nick Griffin could only have dreamed of.

I hope the free toy’s a kukri! Top sentence btw.

I think even the BNP are not stupid enough to come between the public and the Gurkhas and I would be surprised if Labour were doing over the Gurkhas to score points over the BNP.

This, to me, is about the basic Lefty/Socialist/Marxist/Trot hatred of all things to do with our nation’s history, achievement, honour, military. Anything to bring dishonour to the Nation is good in their eyes and in balance, anything that can bring pride to the people that was not created directly by the Left is hated and torn down.

The Gurkhas for them are a Happy Meal of delightful, entropic, Fabian political goals, with free toy.

The Gurkhas are not a group that need an exceptional amount of protection when you look at the people we have deported to Nigeria, Pakistan etc. Our Government was doing what it has been trained to do, beat down on immigrants, not because it’s popular with the BNP but be

For what it’s worth, though, I’d assumed almost the opposite of what you did! Rightly or wrongly, settlement rights for Gurkha ex-servicemen and their dependents had struck me as being, insofar as such distinctions are ever in any sense useful, a conservative [with a very small 'c'] cause, with the Gurkhas seen less as ‘foreigners’ than as hard-working, loyal, patriotic legacies of Empire, a traditional adjunct to our armed forces and hence all-around good eggs. So I’d simply assumed that Brown, having very little patience with Empire, tradition or the armed forces at the best of times, didn’t want to lavish funds on what he viewed as a vaguely reactionary hobby-project for e.g. the delightful Ms Lumley, daughter of a retired major in the BIA, with a soft spot for organic farming and on good terms, bless her, with HRH the Duke of Edinburgh.

And by the same token, I’d assumed – almost certainly unfairly – that Nick Clegg saw in this project not only ‘decency’ (and incidentally I do truly believe that Clegg WAS trying to do the decent thing here – he’s certainly invested plenty of energy in the issue over past months) but a way to build bridges with the sort of traditional Tory voter, or even soft Blairite voter, who might be looking for an alternative this time around, c.f. his earlier statements regarding tax cuts.

Either way round, though – hurrah! What happened was, clearly, a victory for decency – although, now that we have more than 7,000 foreign citizens serving in the British armed forces (not including nearly 4,000 Gurkhas) it’s clearly time to consider regularising and even extending settlement rights for those who offer up many years of exemplary service in defending Britain’s interests.

This government has been getting away with duplicitous programs ever since it was elected. ie an announcement that seems incredibly warm hearted and community spirited, but with the devil in the detail.

This was actually a typical ruse, but with totally the wrong sort of constituent. It shows how much the Brown cabal is out of touch. I even think I can detect members of his own front bench wincing and trying to hide behind lowered gazes.

Kudos to Nick Clegg.