Colleagues
House of Commons
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RECEIVED. EGISTRY
0 1 JUN 1990
DESK ICE
INDEX
3 April 1990
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1299
You will no doubt have seen a copy of a letter dated 28 March,
jointly signed by Bowen Wells, Norman Tebbit and John Butcher about
the Hong Kong Bill. It sets out concerns which I am sure a number of you may have about the Bill. I therefore thought it right to
write immediately in order to address these concerns.
The letter underlines
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rightly the importance of the
Sino-British Joint Declaration for the future of Hong Kong. Our
decision to provide passports for 50,000 key Hong Kong people and their dependants in no way undermines, or detracts from, the
importance of that Agreement. Indeed, it is precisely because of our obligation under the Joint Declaration to maintain Hong Kong's
stability and prosperity that we decided to introduce these
measures.
The writers of the letter are quite correct in asserting that our nationality package for Hong Kong is based on the proposition
that in order to persuade key people to stay there until 1997 and
beyond, we must give them the insurance policy of British citizenship. It is a fact that many of those professional and
skilled people who have emigrated from Hong Kong to Canada, the United States and Australia have done so precisely in order to obtain such an insurance policy. Our scheme is designed to ensure that the talent and enterprise which are ebbing away from the territory will have the confidence to stay.
In this way, we believe
we can make a real contribution to maintaining Hong Kong's
JONADF
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