that they have free entry to Portugal; it also means that after 1991, when Portugal is a full member of the European Community Portuguese nationals from Macau will have free right of entry for work into Britain. Thus, at exactly the time when some people in Hong Kong may be apprehensive about the approach of 1997, they will be able to look across the bay to 80,000 people who have a right to enter Britain which is denied to Britain's own nationals in Hong Kong. The Hong Kong and British governments are acutely aware of this irony, yet it does not make either of them argue for a more secure status for British nationals in Hong Kong. Instead, the British government, at the insistence of the Hong Kong government, has been pressing the EEC to use a loophole in the Treaty of Rome to ensure that only Portuguese nationals of European origin have free movement rights in Europe. The Far Eastern Economic review reported the Portuguese author- ities' scathing condemnation of 'a hysteria worthy of Enoch Powell... Britain should stop criticising others who fail to follow their dismal example of devaluing their own passports'.21
The barrier to acceptance of a residual moral responsibility for people who have lived under British rule and whose future has been negotiated over their heads is the same barrier which has for over twenty years obstructed justice and morality in British nationality and immigration law: the fear of non-white immigration to Britain. It is not merely a question of numbers, but of colour. Millions of other people from overseas have an absolute right to enter Britain: between three and nine million Commonwealth citizens, from Australia, Canada and New Zealand; over 200 million nationals of EEC countries; about a million white South Africans. Almost all the people concerned are white; their right to enter Britain is unquestioned and does not lead to any public fears of being 'swamped' by immigrants. Yet the fact that there are three million British people of Chinese origin in Hong Kong is used to guillotine any debate about the nature of Britain's continuing responsibility for its nationals there.
The immigration fear accounts for much of the lack of leverage Hong Kong can exert in London. A Legislative Councillor ruefully remarked: 'If one white British man were being forced against his will to live under communism, it would be front-page news; if it were one man and his dog, there would be banner headlines and a public protest'. 22 The natural anti-communist, fiercely nationalist lobby is also profoundly racist and anti-immigrant (while the natural anti-racist, immigration-reform constituency, on the other hand, is profoundly unsympathetic to the ethos of Hong Kong and particularly of those
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