Miss Stoddart
CONFIDENTIAL
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Generalised references:
U.K.offer.
the
The genting at the Board of Trade on 21 July was diffuse and rather shapeless. Mr.Goldsmiths in the chair tried at the beginning to elicit statements of views from the departments present on the shape of the revised U.K. offer. Instead, he got a lot of questions, many of them on matter of detail.
2. The main points which arose were as follows :-
(a) the O.D.M. were not prepared to commit
themselves until they saw meaningful illustrative figures on the size of duty quotas for particular commodities;
(b) both the Ministry of Technology and the Ministry of Power (in respect of steel) serc particularly concerned about the possible inclusion of Spain amongst the bencfici^ries. This led to some incoherent discussion of the method of selecting beneficiaries and the self-election principle. Little if any sympathy was expressed for the need to adhere to the self-election principle in order to protect liong Kong, Mr.Goldeníth however athered fairly well to the position that we shoul: maintain our stand on the 3 lf- election principle, but he did say that if and when other countries buenched the principle, we would have to rende 38 our position, and it might well be that we would want to use the opportunity of other countries excluding potential beneficiaries to exclude countries (like Shin) to which we did not want to extend benefits;
(c) a representative from one of the Industries
Divisions of the Board of Crade wanted textiles to be excluded entirely, arguing that the offers of others were insignificant and in particular gave nothing attractive to Commonwealth developing countries. Mr. Goldsmith held to the position that we had to make some kind of offer on textiles;
(a) on the agricultural part of our offer,
Kr. Dixon of MAFF agreed that we needed substantially to reduce our offer and that there were no arguments for a duty quota aystem in the agricultural field. He would aim at reducing the scope of our offer by deletions and reductions in the depth of cut.
CONFIDENTIAL
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