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The Minister for Industry
RESTRICTED
FROM: Sir John Eden Bt MP
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M ka
DEPARTMENT OF TRADE AND INDUSTRY
REGISTRY No. 1
SCDEC1771
HKK 6/548/3
Anthony Royle, Esq MP
Foreign and Commonwealth Office
Downing Street
LONDON SW1
Dear Tony,
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Cotton Textiles: Hong Kong
1 VICTORIA STREET
LONDON SWI
01-222 7877
23rd December 1971
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Many thanks for your letter of 26 December.
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We shall
DTI officials will be circulating soon after Christmas a draft steering brief for the resumed talks with Hong Kong. certainly do our best to give them a serious and meaningful content, and see that the reasons behind our replies to the Hong Kong requests are properly substantiated.
We are looking very carefully to see whether it might be possible to offer Hong Kong some flexibility in the present quotas.
I appreciate what you say about Hong Kong's situation and attach great importance to it; but I am also sure that we must consider very carefully what our position would be if other countries pressed for comparable terms to any concessions we gave Hong Kong. Unless we are prepared to defend special favours for Hong Kong and reject other pressures, you will appreciate that the total effect of concessions on our textile policy will have to be taken into account.
The Hong Kong Government know informally already about our thinking on broader textile trade policy it is generally in the terms you describe. I see no point in entering further into this topic in the talks on 10 January. We have at present very little idea about the Community's longer-term thinking and how far we can hope to influence it; it would be counter- productive if, by saying more at this stage, we left a misleading impression or aroused false hopes, especially in the presence of non-official industrial representatives from Hong Kong.
More generally, I do not think that we need enter into talks in too defensive a frame of mind.
Hong Kong, very reasonably from its point of view, is out to get the best possible bargain for itself within our quota system. But it was very apparent at
the first round of talks that, although the Hong Kong
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