158
葉錫恩
(MRS.) E. ELLIOTT.
TEL. 3-422414
OUR
REF:
YOUR REF:
Parliamentary
Under-Secretary of State
Recd.
817
TO HKIOD
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ARECEMERSING har 6. quease
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Jo a HEMERSING
Rt. Hon. Goronwy-Roberts, Foreign & Commonwealth Office,
London S.W.1.
Dear Sir,
REGISTRY No. 51
- 9 JUL 1974
HKK 14/3.
lathe.com
55. Kung Lok Road, Kwun Tong,
KOWLOON.
3rd. July, 1974.
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175
Thank you for your letter of 27th. June, 1974, concerning your judgment of Mr. Lui Sung that he was lying in saying that he has been wrongly treated by the Hong Kong Government. If the Government was telling the truth, then obviously this man travelled many times for long distances to see me, and almost became demented, merely to tell me a lie.
Mr. Johnson did not have time to see Mr. Lui. He was indeed very busy when he was here the Hong Kong Government makes sure that M.P.s are always so busy that they cannot see all there is to
However, Mr. Johnson is an exception in that he does try to go out of his way to meet people at the grass roots, and my criticism is certainly not of him. I am only sorry that with his first-hand knowledge of Hong Kong (and other colonies) he is not in the Cabinet.
see.
I must say that I like the way in which successive ministers in your office all pontificate for the people of Hong Kong, basing all they say on what the Hong Kong Government deigns to tell them on the very subject about which the ordinary people are making a complaint.
To put you more in the picture than the Government here will ever do, recently in a meeting in which it was stated that we were to introduce "General Duties Teams" to demolish illegal hawker stalls and confiscate their property, I requested that if this were to be accepted, I hoped that they would choose better men than those used by the Squatter Control, since the latter, I said, with cases like Mr. Lui's in mind, were only thugs. The Government head concerned agreed that sometimes the only people they could recruit for this task were thugs, but he would try to improve the standard. This was a clear admission that the circumstances for Mr. Lui's case do exist.
You say Mr. Lui has a hut and kitchen. Quite true, but thanks only to himself. His hut was unlawfully demolished, but he lived in the debris until he was able to put it back in shape - and the fact that he has been allowed to stay there proves that it was not illegal in the first place. Action on illegal huts is supposed to be continuous.
But the real complaints of Mr. Lui have been utterly
ignored by you and the Government here: he says that $800 was stolen from the hut at demolition. His four-year old child told him he saw the "thugs" (my term for the demolition squads) take the money from a drawer. You did not deal with his claim that the demolition was illegal as the hut was built with permission and was only demolished a day or two after his wife refused to give a bribe to the officers concerned. Surely you are not going to tell me that you still do not believe there