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اعادية

No. 183

Colonial Office,

The Church House,

COLONIAL OFFICE

Great Smith Street,

London, S.W.1.

10th October, 1950.

Paskin is away ill and I am therefore writing for him to thank you for your letter to him of the 6th September telling us of the outcome of your discussions with the Executive Council on the draft despatch on Constitutional Reform.

2. Your letter arrived, I am glad to say, just in time to enable us to have a further discussion with Grantham shortly before he left, and we have now gone into very carefully with him the points you made. comments, with which Grantham is in general agreement, are set out in the following paragraphs.

Our

3. As regards the first paragraph of your letter, we appreciate that the Unofficial Members should not now be asked to accept any proposals which are obviously less liberal than those put forward in 1949. The present

proposals are, we feel, not really less liberal, in principle at any rate, as there will be an unofficial majority and, in fact, the method of indirect election suggested will widen the franchise even more.

4.

With reference to your 'second paragraph Grantham had, when we first discussed the new proposals with him at the beginning of his leave, mentioned to us that just before he left Hong Kong Morse had suggested to him that the Social Welfare Associations should also have an 'elected' member in the Legislature. The details of how this member was to be 'elected' would have to be worked out and might possibly present difficulties.

J.F.NICOLL, Esq., C.M.G.

At a

/later

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