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Mr. Laird
Mr. Wilford Mr. E.G. White Mr. Gaminara
Hong Kong Defence Contribution.
In para. 2(b) of my minute of 17 December I said that there might be a precedent in recent years for the cost of a Colony's internal security forces being borne not on defence Votes but on that of the Colonial Office i.e. the Department then responsible for the administration of the territory.
2. I was then awaiting a telephone call from Mr. Kitcatt who is now in the Treasury (but who pledged himself not to report my enquiry to any of his colleagues there) but who in the early '60s was in the East African Department of the Colonial Office. He tells me that he has found in the U.K. Army estimates for 1962/63 an appropriation in aid from the Colonial Office for the East African Land Forces (King's African Rifles) with an explanatory note that these Forces were administered by the War Office but their cost was borne by the Colonial Office Vote. He could find no equivalent sum in the
Colonial Office Estimates but there was in the Colonial Services Vote a provision for "internal security" which was more than sufficient to cover the cost of the appropriation in aid appearing in the Army Estimates. There are imprecisions in this which would need further research but it seems fairly clear that this is the precedent on which the Ministry of Defence were relying when they drafted the paper enclosed in Mr. Gwynn's letter to me and this is the obstacle around which we shall have to consider how to find our way.
3. The background from my memory of events of the time was that Ministers of the day decided, when an African majority was introduced for the first time in the Kenya Legislature, to withdraw from the power of that Legislature and the other two East African Colonies?) The King's African Rifles on whom the duty of supporting the civil power lay in the first instance. These units were raised under
hand local law and be from local funds and had been so tailored as to deal with any likely threats to internal security other than a major breakdown, such as the Mau Man rebellion.
4. I suspect that the D.O.P. quoted in Mr. Gwynn's draft paper derives from a decision by Ministers, consequential on their main decision to withdraw this Force from the control of the local Legislature i.e. as to where when the U.K. took over the cost
of it fell.
Dan
Лизи (L. Monson)
17 December, 1970
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