A VC won’t get you into Britain

Rifleman Tulbahadur Pun then seized the Bren gun, and firing from the hip as he went, continued the charge on this heavily bunkered position alone, in the face of the most shattering concentration of automatic fire, directed straight at him....

Well, all that’s as maybe, but we still won’t allow Tulbahadur Pun into the country for his medical treatment. On the grounds that, in his application, he ‘failed to demonstrate strong enough ties to Britain’. It is sometimes said that satire is on its last legs, a redundant art form. This is why. We can no longer out-satirise what actually happens.

You may have read the story about rifleman Pun, the octogenarian from Nepal who won the Victoria Cross but has been denied entrance to Britain for the medical treatment he urgently needs. You may have considered the whole thing a simple mistake, a bureaucratic cock-up, the sort of stuff that happens from time to time but can easily be put right. Well, it isn’t. I contacted the British Consul in Kathmandu and he told me that the furore notwithstanding, he stood by the decision. ‘If Mr Pun applied tomorrow and a member of my staff denied him entry on the same grounds, I would support that decision,’ said Richard Beeson. Orders from the Home Office in London, you see. That’s the same Home Office which lets in upwards of 100,000 immigrants every year and has lost track of where all the illegal immigrants are.

Tulbahadur Pun, VC, was in the Third Battalion of the Gurkha Rifles operating in Burma in 1944 when the actions quoted above transpired. Now he is on his last legs, suffering from heart problems, diabetes and high blood pressure; a little bit of medical care from the country for whom he almost sacrificed his life is all he wants.

‘Personally, I might feel very differently,’ Beeson told me, ‘but we have to operate under regulations from London. Military decorations were not included in the crit-eria through which applicants can demonstrate strong ties to Britain. It is possible they were simply missed, or forgotten about.’

Forgotten about! Doesn’t that sort of tell you everything you need to know about this whole business? When the press got hold of the story Mr Beeson told me he fretted a bit and contacted his boss, Sue McKerron, the consul in New Delhi. ‘She said she’d have a word with London,’ Beeson said. Maybe she has and London doesn’t give a monkey’s. Or maybe she’s forgotten too.

The Tulbahadur Pun story has, rightly, provoked outrage. To judge from the numerous websites discussing the case and the multitude of letters I’ve received since first writing about it, people feel ashamed. The case of Mr Pun is thrown into bizarre relief when, every week, we read of people the immigration appeals court will allow into the country, despite their initially illegal presence here. Abu Ricin al-Jihad and his like — armed robbers, rapists, fraudsters, supporters of al-Qa’eda, people who loathe everything about our country and would give their lives to destroy it rather than save it, but who cannot be sent back to their countries of origin (Libya, Algeria, Somalia and so on) in case they get a bit of a beating from the agents of those despicable governments (which, nonetheless, our applicants wish to overthrow and replace with even more despicable governments).

Abu Ricin al-Jihad is, of course, a made-up name — a kind of politically incorrect composite. It would take too long to list the successful applicants to the appeals courts but, trust me, I am not overstating the case. One of the most recent, a Libyan named only as ‘AS’ (to protect his privacy), was, the court concluded, an Islamist fundamentalist terrorist who presented a very real danger to national security: i.e., he might well try to kill us all quite soon. But he should stay because Libya isn’t the most congenial place for a political dissident, is it? Better keep him here — and, indeed, pay to do so.

Comparing the case of Mr Pun, VC, with, say, Abu Ricin al-Jihad is what the human-rights lawyers would call a category error. We cannot send Mr Ricin back home because we are bound by international legislation which prevents us from so doing. Mr Pun has no such legal redress; because he has expressed no wish to exterminate his government, there is no reason to suspect his government will try to exterminate him. Instead he will simply die of heart disease quite soon because Nepal doesn’t have the facilities to give him adequate treatment — and that’s not covered in the legislation.

Well, sure. But there is a very fine soliloquy given by Paul Newman at the end of the courthouse drama The Verdict which springs to mind. The law — the court itself, the judges, the juries, the articles of legislation — are simply a solemn prayer by which we assure ourselves that we are doing the right thing. They are not immutable. When it turns out that we are doing the wrong thing, we can change the laws.

Richard Beeson expressed surprise that Mr Pun had not yet appealed against the decision to deny him entry, which he has the right to do. It’s not surprising to me. The 84-year-old had to walk for a whole day from his mountain village in order to apply for entry to the United Kingdom. And when he got there he was told, sorry mate, thanks all the same, but the VC doesn’t count — and so he walked for a whole day back again. So why kill yourself walking for another two days to appeal?

There’s a petition doing the rounds supporting Pun’s case — www.vchero.co.uk — and some big names weighing in, including the last boss of the CBI, Sir Digby Jones. ‘He fought for what this country stands for; it’s a simple matter of common sense,’ Sir Digby told me. Ah, common sense. That old thing.