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discrimination. The FCO are very aware of the political need to make the best presentation possible and we will be discussing this internally and with the Department of Trade, leading up to the 2 December Council meeting.
13.
If Mr Jordan has ideas on how we could best present the factual situation that seems likely to arise, we would like to
have them.
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EEC Textile Restraints
14. A brief for the talks with Mr Jordan by Chemicals and Textiles Division of the Department of Industry is attached. Although the GSP is presentationally important to Hong Kong, Mr Jordan has always accepted that a greater restraint on her textile exports is the various quantitative restrictions imposed or negotiated by the importing countries.
15.
CT Division have not discussed with Mr Jordan the details
of the mandate for negotiations with Hong Kong that is being prepared by the EEC. Their difficulty is that, in these negotiations Hong Kong and the UK will be on opposite sides of the negotiating fence. However, they have explained that in these preparations the UK's aim is, in accordance with the MFA (in the negotiations for which both the UK and Hong Kong played a leading part) to insist that restrictions are only tolerable where there is real evidence of disruption by Hong Kong textile imports into the EEC markets. Other members of the Community, notably France and Italy, take a more narrow view. They would like to restrict all Hong Kong's textile imports to a low figure.
16.
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One of the main UK aims has been to urge agreement with the Community on "burden sharing" This means that the 6+% overall growth rate enjoined by the MFA would be split among the Community members so that those which at present take large quantities (mainly Britain and Germany) would have a low growth rate, while the others would accept a very much higher percentage growth. This has now been agreed in detail by the Council of Ministers. The result is that Hong Kong will gain 6% overall growth on restricted items in the Community as a whole, but that their
/present very
Should
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