CONFIDENTIAL
2
Mintech were to demand restrictions on our m.m.f. exports and claim that they should be rolled back from 28 August.
5.
When other people in London don't challenge Stewart we don't know whether this is because they know that his ideas on policy will not be agreed or because they see the weakness of his arguments. But if they imagine that there is some force in his arguments they may be susceptible to persuasion that the policy should be changed.
6.
And Basically our point (which I think Derek Jones' letters have brought out pretty clearly) is that it is not British policy that has prevented restraint on our m.m.f. exports but the British tariff, which has prevented them gowing sufficiently to pose any threat to the British industry. We want to try and prevent any new policy being based on misleading information. A typical piece of this was included in the PC(O) paper on International Trade in Textiles where in a section dealing with the alleged threat from non-cotton textile imports, it was claimed that there was a problem now. There was a particular mention of imported trousers having half the UK market, without any mention that most of them were cotton, under quota restrictions already. Imports of m.m.f. trousers were negligible.
7.
Nevertheless at Bob Goldsmith's meeting in the BOT on 25 November Stewart said 'If the US and EEC during the next eighteen months restrained imports of both cotton and non-cotton textiles, then the UK would certainly do so also'. (He has already confirmed the accuracy of this record of what he said.)
8.
When on adds to all this the constant and I fear wilful misinterpretation of Hong Kong's policies and actions that Stewart seems to spread whenever he can, we have a situation that naturally gives Hong Kong some cause for concern.
9.
People tell us not to take Stewart seriously, they have spoken of him being shifted from his present job, but he stays there, no one shuts him up, and he gets away with the most outrageous state- ments. Presumably this is because his superiors are well satisfied with him. Therein lies the danger for us. David Sellers has told us that at the meeting to discuss the Norwegian statistics Stewart said that he was under instructions to prepare the UK case against Hong Kong,
10.
Part of our difficulty lies in the fact that we often don't know exactly how the discussion is going in London until I drop in again to ask. We set out our views on the textile issue pretty fully in my letter CR EIC 111/2/4 IV of 30 August 1969 to Hughes. We had no answer to it so the Hong Kong Government had to give me my instructions for the Cotton Textiles Committee meeting in October without knowing HMG's views on the suggestions we had put forward in that letter and its enclosure and in my Preliminary Comments on the PC(0) paper.
When I was in London on 1 and 2 December I mentioned again to Denzil Dunnett our suggestion that Article 2 of the CTA should be deleted (a suggestion I had made in September).
It did not
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