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enclose the draft of a minute which the Foreign Secretary
would hd to the Prime Minister, formally circulating
the paper.
Sir Geoffrey is anxious to set the drafting
of the Bill in hand very soon: the Lord President of the
Council has written to him referring to the absolute
urgency of bringing this Bill forward as soon as
possible.
3. There are two main points. The first is how to deal
with termination of sovereignty. The consensus in
London, as you will see, is that this should be done in
the Bill itself, rather than by later Order-in-Council.
The reasons for this, which largely relate to
Parliamentary handling, are set out in the paper. We
have put this proposition to the Executive Council in
Hong Kong, since we had in April this year given them the
impression that we favoured the Order-in-Council
procedure.
Opinion in the Council was divided.
Sir S Y Chung and some of the Unofficials continued to
prefer the Order-in-Council procedure, while other
members accepted that this held unacceptable dangers.
The Governor, who accepts the arguments against the
Order-in-Council procedure, has advised that we should
now proceed as proposed. The Secretary of State thinks
that this is right: it is, as Lord Whitelaw has pointed
out, quite possible for Parliament to repeal the Bill at
a later stage in the unlikely event that we wished to
prevent the termination of sovereignty taking place in
1997.
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