CONFIDENTIAL
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you will meet considerable criticism on this score when you come out here next month unless you can bring with you some indication of whether the UK would be prepared to accept some of the refugees who have applied to go there. What in fact is the Home Office doing about the applications which our Immigration Department sent to the FCO last month? As you realise, this is a subject on which anti-Whitehall feeling can be all too easily aroused and only with great difficulty dispelled. We are also having an increasing morale problem in the camps themselves and as you may have seen from the Hong Kong press, there have been a number of incidents in the camps, which are making them more and more difficult to administer. This is largely due to the uncertainty about American intentions, but any movement, even if only on a small scale, helps to keep the refugees happy and it would be very useful if arrangements could be made to send some of the refugees to the UK in the near future. Over the past four weeks the rate of resettlement abroad has slowed down considerably, although small groups are still going to France and Canada.
4.
There were also some sarcastic remarks in Executive Council about the actual payment of the £70,000 which HMG has promised to Hong Kong to help care for the refugees while they are in camps here. All we have received so far is a typically astringent Treasury letter to Haddon- Cave, informing him that he will have to produce detailed evidence that he has not embezzled the money and you can imagine what sort of reaction that has provoked! Perhaps the Department could look into this problem and find out when payment can actually be effected. We could then give it some useful publicity here which would silence or at least quieten some of the cynics.
In Less.
Yours sincerely,
спи
(C DS Drace-Francis)
CC DJ Moss Esq
Head of Chancery THE HAGUE
CONFIDENTIAL