HOME OFFICE
Lunar House Wellesley Road Croydon CR9 2BY
PL O'Keefe Esq CVO
Hong Kong & Indian Ocean Department,
Foreign & Commonwealth Office,
King Charles St
London SW1A 2AH
Telephone 01-686 0333 ext
Et279
W Danneddy
Aift line:
Ines won't get
3) no quarantie that
1) maat UK not a country
c) not want for Says
58/1026/20 since Hame
office are now 29th August 1975 peady to proceed
Your reference
IMG Our reference 75
LASY
REF.
25
Date
NEAL
288)
Dear O'Keefe,
Since I wrote to you on 12 August about the Vietnamese refugees in Hong Kong we' have been able to give the matter more thought here, although we have still to hear from UNHCR and the U.S.A.
The Treasury will we understand raise no objection to a small band of these people coming here provided there are no proposals to make grants to assist their settle- ment. Although BCAR have expressed their willingness to help in a settlement operation I cannot be certain that they would not ask for a grant when they got down to practical details.
More directly from our point of view can you guarantee that, should the Home Secretary agree to relax his policy for your 71 cases, this will not lead to others in Hong Kong opting for the U.K? On the face of it if they did we could not distinguish them from the 71. Whereas the Home Secretary might be able to accept something of the order of 70-100 as corresponding with offers made by other EEC countries and therefore compatible with a policy of a uniform EEC approach, this could not be the case if the numbers were greater.
To my mind the tenor of the telegrams that I have seen does not give rise to much This hope that by taking 71 or 111 now we shall produce substantial new offers. means that at the end of the day half of these people may have nowhere to go. It must be clear that the U.K. is not the place of last resort for them.
As I said over the telephone this is a matter which must go to the Home Secretary who will not be back for about 10 days. You thought that the Foreign Secretary might wish to minute the Home Secretary about this matter, as he did last May will wait until he does.
Yours sincerely,
if so we
*ERVED IN REGISTRY No. 51
- 2 SEP 1975
NICK 18/25
P.L.