4
reduce our quotas mention that Hong Kong textiles had been under
restrictions for many years and that the "flood of imports" came
from elsewhere. Nor did Mr. Tran nor anyone else in the Community
mention that the redistribution of our quotas by the Community to
others was at no cost to the Community and at considerable cost to
Hong Kong. When we pointed these things out to him, he expressed
sympathy and understanding.
But the Community's proposals remained basically unchanged.
We naturally saw good reason to explain our fears about
and the possible consequences of these proposals privately to the
British Government and to the Community, in the Textiles Committee
in Geneva and publicly through the media. Indeed, so serious were
these developments that as you know the Governor went to London
himself in September to express our deep concern. The textile and
clothing industries themselves sent a delegation headed by Mr. Francis
Tien, a Legislative Councillor and leader of local garment manufacturers,
to see British Ministers.
Despite all our efforts, the EEC's negotiating mandate,
which was not finally agreed amongst the Member States until after
we had arrived in Brussels in October, was a highly restrictive set
of instructions to the Community's negotiators to secure "agreement"
(I must put that word in quotes) to secure agreement to, or to
impose, restrictions on the Community's textiles trade with developing
countries at levels which generally bore no discernible relation to
the provisions of the MFA and which were not justified by any
objective evidence that the imports of the products concerned were
actually causing market disruption. There was for instance a lot of
talk about how half-a-million jobs in textiles had been lost but that
the loss of these jobs was actually attributable to those imports
has never been proved.
/It
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