A
CONFIDENTIAL
SAVING DESPATCH
FKK 6/548/1
From the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs
To the Officer Administering the Government of HỒNG KÔNG
Date 20 December 1968
No. 712
160) Prew
8
x1
28/01/1)
I have the honour to refer to your despatch (CR 12/5401/62–▼) of September 27 about exports of wide sheeting and sheets to the United Kingdom. As I have informed you in my telegram No. 1580, the revised quota levels set out in the enclosure to your despatch are in accordance with our understanding. I regret very moh that it should have taken so long to confirm this in a substantive reply, but I hope that my telegram was in time to allow quotas in accordance with the new arrangements to be allocated so as not to interfere with the normal processes of trade.
2. I shall be in touch with your London Office about the signature of a Memorandum of understanding, and I have noted your suggestion that this should follow the lines of Enclosure I to your despatch. I ought to say however, that it may not be possible to adopt precisely that formula of introduction to the Memorandum which you propose,
restrictions.......
3. I regret that you should have received so strong an impression that the Board of Trade, acting on behalf of Her Majesty's Government, initiated and conducted these negotiations in a demanding spirit of disregard for the existing Heads of Agreement. I must at once assure you that this was not the intention. Indeed there was reference in the first sentence of the Board of Trade's Aide Memoire of the 9th August to the possibility that "Her Majesty's Government might wish to ask the Government of Hong Kong to impose
Bikewise in the final sentence of the same Aide Memoire, in the context this time of compensation, there was reference to our willingness to consider some modification to "existing arrangements" for the sensitive categories. The existence of the Heads of Agreement has indeed been recognised all along and continues to be recognised. I should like to be able to say that this recent request for restrictions which you have accepted was exceptional and may in fact prove to be unique; but while I shall be surprised if it does not prove to be both, the furthest I can go is to say that only in such exceptional circumstances shall we again make a request of this nature.
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