30 November 1993
SECRET
Foreign & Commonwealth
Office
redis
(201
BY FAX
M J J Hanson
Information Coordinator
Government House
Hong Kong
Dear Mike,
POINTS TO MAKE BRIEF
1.
London SWIA 2AH
Telephone:
071-
HKB 301|
RECE
Z
ዘሌ. .
M
I am replying, with our collective departmental thoughts, to your letter of 29 November to Peter Ricketts with your compendium of points to make. We will be making good use of these in our briefing for News Dept, press releases etc.
2.
Our main comment concerns A2 (ii) on page 8 and A6 (iii) on page 10, both of which deal with the difficult question of how urgency/deadlines affect the LegCo elections. As the answers stand they sound self contradictory. We need, if possible, to find some form of words to include the LegCo voting method in A6(iii). If we cannot, we shoot ourselves in the foot. It might be better to find another way of dealing with the time-table question that does not make it quite so clear that the LegCo voting method is not, in its own right, an urgent issue.
3.
We have a few other suggestions:
Page 3, second tiret: Suggest leaving out second half of first sentence, "and why they object ...". Put like this it sounds a bit ingenuous since we (and others) know that their reason for objecting to such legislation would be that it had not been agreed with them first.
Page 5, last tiret: Suggest replacing second half of last sentence with "rather than arrangements which would be open to abuse and manipulation".
Page 7, A1, last sentence: Worth adding to, to read: "by taking action on all of the "simpler" and more urgent issues ..."?
4. We have just seen Nigel Cox's letter of today's date about this brief. We agree with the general thrust of his argument that we should be careful not to give an inaccurate account of the Chinese negotiating position (particularly since an accurate one still gives us plenty to go on) and we plan to publish a full account, warts and all, in the White Paper. We agree with Nigel's point on the voting age.
son.let.PR
SLM
SECRET