TNAG-0570-FCO40-703-Planning-paper-on-Hong-Kong-1976 — Page 173

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28.

Legislative Council is also desirable, to enable it to

deal with the increasing sophistication of Government and

with the extra-legislative duties of Unofficial members.

Clearly the appointment of representatives emerging

from the lower income groups will require the payment

of allowances to Unofficial members of the Legislative

and Executive Councils. The existing translation,

secretarial and research staff of the Office of the

Unofficial members of the Executive and Legislative

Councils will also need to be strengthened. In due

course it might be desirable to appoint Unofficial

"Members" drawn from the Executive Council, but answerable

in the Legislative Council for particular fields of

policy in the same way that Official members are at

present. In these ways the Legislative Council can be

made more representative and less alien and more responsive.

But even after substantial change along the

29.

lines proposed above the Executive and Legislative

Councils will be neither democratic nor directly answerable

to an electorate, and their composition will not satisfy

critics unable appreciate the "Chinese dimension" or

accept the absence of normal progress towards democratic

Moreover if these institutional changes

institutions.

were over-dramatised in an attempt to pacify UK critics

we would risk misleading the Chinese into reading too

much into them. If carefully handled these institutional

changes will be beneficial to social cohesion in Hong Kong