CONFIDENTIAL
78/2
BRITISH TEXTILE POLICY
STATEMENTS MADE TO THE INDIAN GOVERNMENT
1.
2.
3.
Meeting Between Secretary of State and Indian Prime Minister on 1 November 1971
Sir Alec Douglas-Home said that we could not change our law on this the tariff policy_7 but that the position would change after we went into the European Community in 1973. At that stage we would be willing to look at it again. Quoting what Mr Noble had informed Mr Mishra in May, he added that our position was that we could not contemplate any postponement or modification of the tariff and that we would not expect its imposition to affect significantly the total of our imports from developing
countries.
Passage from Aide Memoire of 30 December 1970 to Indian Government
"HMG have recently endorsed the decision to liberalise cotton textile imports when the new tariff on CPA goods comes into effect on 1 January 1972: they believe that a policy of unrestricted entry over a moderate tariff is more liberal and therefore more in the interests of developing countries generally than a policy involving quantitive limitation."
Letter from Mr Noble to Mr Mishra, Indian Minister for Foreign Trade. 27 May 1971
"The need from our standpoint is that the UK market for cotton textiles should be put on an open competitive basis as from 1 January 1972 with only the modest tariff protection the UK producers have been promised.
This was the decision which our predecessors announced in July 1969 and which we had endorsed when we made our formal request last December for a waiver. The UK producers and our overseas suppliers have been working in this expectation and I am afraid that we cannot contemplate postponement or modification of the declared policy in any way."
CONFIDENTIAL