What will be the next ex military rifle must have?

[ovenpaa]

I meant the L98A1. The old Cadet GP rifle. A straight pull version of the L85A2. Are you talking about the L96? They are nice rifles but I meant the L98!

Yup, but it reminded me of the 'fake' L96's that are supposed to be doing the rounds.

[Gaz]

As for the next ex-military rifle... Perhaps the venerable L98A1, depending on what became of them. Although I imagine the sensible thing wasn't done (ie, selling them to the public) and they were probably all scrapped! Or were they upgraded to the A2 version?

I'm 90% sure they were scrapped. I might put an FoI request into the MoD and see if there's any info on their fate, but if they were ever going to reappear in the civilian world we'd have heard about them by now.
I know some CCFs were ordered to hang onto the rearsight/carry handles for their L98A1s when the A2 was introduced, because some pen pusher thought it was a good money-saving idea to order 30,000 new rifles without rearsights and just swap them over. That didn't work because the gas block on the L98A2 (which is an L85A2 with what amounts to the L98A1 trigger mech dropped in) is slightly higher than the L98A1, so the A1 rearsight was unique to that weapon alone.

I know the MoD scrapped shedloads of (almost) perfectly good DP No.4s a few years ago. The only thing wrong with the vast majority of them was that the barrels had had a hole drilled through them, the strikers clipped short and the bolt heads welded up. Replace those three components and you had a perfectly good rifle ... heck, I could cry to think how many functional, matched bolts and receivers ended up in the melting pot.