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IY CLASSIFICATION
DRAFT minute
Type 1 +
From
To:--
Mr Robinson
Top Secret.
Secret.
Confidential.
RESITIITUNU
Unclassified.
Y MARKING
........In Confidence
Telephone No. & Ext.
Department
1
Hong Kong
In reply to your minute of 22 December to Mr Statham, the line to take with the Dutch is the candid 'admission that while, we hope to introduce enabling
legislation on preferences shortly, there are so many imponderables in the legislative programme arrange- ments that we may not, in fact be in a position to
though
implement on 1 July, We would certainly hope to com- plete the process later in 1971, b It would cause no difficulties for us if the EEC or other donors
decided to go ahead themselves on 1 July.
2.
For your information, EEC domestic industry could well jib at the Community implementing its pre- ference scheme before other donors took up their part of the burden, so it is far from certain that the Dutch initiative will prosper.
3.
With regard to EEC inclusion of Taiwan and South Korea, we would view this with equanimity on the assumption that Hong Kong were also included in a manner satisfactory to that territory namely, that
she did not suffer substantially as a result of dis- crimination in favour of her close competitors. If the Dutch are interested to learn whether the UK pro- poses to include Taiwan and South Korea as beneficiar- ies in our preferences scheme, they might be told that we see no major difficulty in this provided that Hong Kong is granted satisfactory preferential access by the other major donors.
•
4 For your own information, our difficulty over Taiwan and South Korea is that Hong Kong would clearly like her rivals to be restricted in the EEC preference scheme in exactly the same terms as she is (ie, exclus ion on textiles and footwear) We are reluctant to