Mr. Laird
SECRET
Copies to:
Mr. Wilford
100
Mr. White (Finance
Dept.)
Mr. Gaminara
दिव
We spoke about the drafts attached to Mr. Gaminara's minute of 17 December and arranged to discuss the question of the Hong Kong defence contribution at 12 o'clock tomorrow (Friday). You said you would ask Mr. White to come.
2.
3.
In the meantime you were going to find out:
(a)
(b)
(c)
Just what precisely is "the system of allocating public expenditure between objective programmes" to which Mr. Gwynn referred in para. 5 of his paper. This is clearly the Aunt Sally which we shall have to knock over if we resist M.0.D's proposal that the uncovered portion of the cost of internal security
should be borne in our votes rather than theirs.
There are various ways which we might attempt this but until we know the precise nature of the Aunt Sally
it is difficult to decide which would be the most
effective.
This of course assumes that we do not accept the argument that this cost should go on our votes. As I told you, there may be one precedent in recent years for the cost of a Colony's internal security forces, which for reasons of policy (as in Hong Kong) H.M.G. was not ready to leave to be determined by the local legislature, being borne not on defence
votes but on the Colonial Office Vote.
You were going to check who was responsible for drawing the exact line between internal security expenditure and external defence expenditure in the case of Hong Kong; such a division was the basis of
Annex A to our paper.
We can also discuss the various detailed points made in Mr. Gaminara's draft but I would not myself take such exception as he does to the phrase "a self-governing Colony" in para. 4 of Mr. Gwynn's paper. In constitutional terms of course it is à nonsense but if the word "financially" were inserted in front of "self-governing" the sentence would be accurate.
17 December,1970.
SECRET
mart
(L. Monson)