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RECOVIE PAPERATY NO. 31
7 OCT 1981
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QUEEN ANME'S GATE
LONDON SWIH YAT
1981
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Thank you for your letter of 28 September to Tim Raison suggesting an amendment on British dependent territory passports to be offered at Report Stage for bringing forward at Third Reading. Since Tim is out of the country until Monday, I am replying on his behalf.
I can quite see that we could be in considerable difficulty here although there is, I would have thought, a certain awkwardness about specifying what should appear in a passport, the issue of which is by Royal Prerogative and not under statute. In any case the offer proposed amendment seems to me to have certain drawbacks. It would essentially enable the citizenship descriptions in passports to read "British (Hong Kong) Citizen", "British (Falkland Islands) Citizen" and so on. It may be that amendments to this effect will once more be tabled by the Opposition and, if so, it is doubtful whether the offer of our own amendment to the same effect on Third Reading will achieve much of substance.
See 1384 A
The carrying of an amendment to this effect can only give the impression-and this is what Hong Kong are presumably after - that the people concerned are British citizens, albeit British citizens whose connections are with Hong Kong or whatever the dependency is. One of the Bill's' main purposes, however, is to ensure that people are not called British citizens unless they have the right of abode here. We must try to avoid ending up with citizenship titles just as misleading as the present ones.
I may say that the indications at Committee Stage are that Hong Kong may be after rather more than what your amendment would give them. Lord Geddes remarked of an Opposition amendment which would have created titles of the British (Hong Kong) citizen kind that he favoured the approach but would rather see the bit in brackets left out.
I think therefore that we should resist all attempts to alter Part II and see how far we get. When Report Stage is over we can decide whether to do any necessary tidying up at Third Reading, or to ask the Commons to disagree the amendments or both. I can quite see that this may make the Parliamentary handling of the Bill more difficult but it really does seem to be the best way to proceed.