And may I make just one final point, before we come to questions. When I go to Peking tomorrow I do not see my role as purely being to listen to what I hear from our Chinese colleagues, important though that will be. It will also be to communicate and to represent the views, the aspirations, the concerns, the worries, the problems, of the people of Hong Kong that have been communicated to me and to the Governor and to my Government in recent times. We recognise that much has been achieved over the last few years but I am also aware that there is still significant concerns, genuine problems of confidence, unquestionable uncertainties, some of which could be clarified in the short-term and we hope they will be, others which may require a little longer and I see our role as being doing what we can to ensure that we can influence those events in a way that is consistent with the well-being of the people of Hong Kong for very many years to come.
Thank you very much.
May we now turn to questions.
Dr Leong Che-hung: Thank you Foreign Secretary, your words are very encouraging indeed, I must say. Now we have a list of topics which I have sent to you. I would like to start off with a topic concerning British nationality and British citizenship. What I will do is to ask one of our members to lead a question and after that I will open it to the floor and as there will be a time limit, or in the interests of time, I will ask members to bear with me that I will put a stop at a certain number of questions so, as I mentioned, in the interests of time.
Now to kick the ball off, as I say, with the British nationality and the British citizenship, can I call upon Ms Emily Lau to start off with some questions please.
Ms Emily Lau: Chairman, I want to welcome the Foreign Secretary to this Council and to congratulate him for having the courage to have this open meeting with us which none of your predecessors have ever dared to do, although of course the Governor does it regularly. And as the Chairman said, Foreign Secretary, my question is on citizenship. During your very brief stay here, I am sure you have talked to a lot of people and I think there is one issue on which this community is united. If you talk- about democracy and others you may hear different views. And even on the representation on the Preparatory Committee of which the pro-democracy lobby has been completely excluded, you will hear different views. But on the question of British citizenship this whole council, the Hong Kong Government and the Governor, we are completely, solidly united. We want your Government to reconsider offering full British citizenship to the three-and-a-half million Hong Kong British subjects. Not all of them will take it. Some of them will want to be Chinese citizens. Good luck to them. But there are those who don't want to.
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