TNAG-0292-FCO40-328-Disturbances-in-Hong-Kong-bomb-attacks-and-threats-1971 — Page 57

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Paragraphs 3 to 7

5.

These paragraphs are of particular interest and the views which they contain might have been put in another way. The highly sophisticated,able, hard working and extremely affluent Colony of Hong Kong, with its extremes of wealth and poverty and with all the complexities of a modern, grossly over-populated and competitive community, has to be administid under the classical Crown Colony type of Government. As we have suspected for a long time, this system of Government with its oldfashioned over-centralised "Mandarina" administrative machinery, is creaking under the strains imposed upon it. Moreover in the absence of any elected element in the Central Councils of Government there has inevitably developed an innatous between the Government and the people:various devices for overcoming this weakness have been considered the City District Officer Scheme; the expansion of the UMELCO office) but they have had a very limited effect.

6. It was because of the difficulties, in the particular circumstances of Hong Kong of introducing any elected element into the Executive and Legislative Councils that the Governor and we have been thinking in terms of using the medium of local Government to give the people of Hong Kong a greater opportunity of participating in the conduct of the Colony's affairs. However, although this matter has been under consideration in the Colony since 1965 we are still awaiting the Governor's recommendations. The years 1967/9, to which the Governor refers in his paragraph 7, cannot be blamed for all the delays which have taken place in the consideration of various problems since that time. Much of the blame must attach (and the last sentence of this paragraph is as near as the Governor has ever come to admitting the fact) to the cumbersome structure of the Government administrative machine, particularly the Colonial structure. I am quite convinced that many of the delays are due to the bottleneck imposed by the fact that any matter of any substance has to be considered by one or more of the Friumvirate triangulate constituted by the Governor, the Colonial

Secretary and the Financial Secretary.

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Paragraphs 8 to 11

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7. Although the Governor does not arrive at any pin-point conclusion as to the cause of the outbreak of "bomb" incidents, it seems as likely as any other conclusion that the water charges issue triggered off the situation. It appears most unlikely that the coincidental release of confrontation prisoners had anything to do with the matter although I think that the Governor is quite right when he suggests (paragraph 16) that it may well now be more difficult to effect further reviews of the sentences of such prisoners.

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/Paragraphs 13 to 15