3. Mr. Stuart stressed the political surrounding the whole question. Because of this the Governor had stressed how important it was to try and do something for liong Kong. Mr. Royle endorsed this point and said that his impression had been that the Governor was bitter that some of the things that had been said by ministers might not be carried out. Mr. Butler repeated his concern about the timing of such an operation. He also wondered how ministers would reply to Opposition questions in the House to the effect that the Government was prepared to reopen the negotiations för Hong "Kong, but not for Britain itself.
4. Mr. Youde said that on 1 January we would start discriminating against Hong Kong. He repeated Mr. Rippon's two undertakings, said how seriously Hong Kong took them and reiterated that the Prime Minister would be faced with very embarrassing questions on Hong Kong if we did not do something about them. Mr. Robinson said that it was not the wish on his side of the Office to sell liong Kong down the river. There were wider considerations. If we did something for Hong Kong, we would be under great pressure from certain Commonwealth countries and from anti-marketeers in this country. lle wondered whether we could do anything in the three weeks left to us to make a case on "technical adaptation". We had absolutely no obligation arising from Mr. Rippon's assurances to do anything in the context of the annual reviews until next year. He pointed out that there were many other important cases building up on which we were under pressure to approach the Community. Mr. Stuart thought there were two answers to critics of an approach on Hong Kong's behalf:
i)
ii)
we could use special pleading that Hong Kong's position vis-a-vis her competitors had got worse; and
we could answer domestic critics by saying that we had made a specific undertaking to Hong Kong at the time of the negotiations for membership.
Mr. Royle said that he was not sure that the domestic criticism of an approach on Hong Kong's behalf would be very damaging. We could at least use the argument that Hong Kong was a British Dependent Territory for whose external relations we were Y responsible which was not true of other Commonwealth countries.
We had only made undertakings to do what we could for them once we were in the Community.
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