TNAG-0573-FCO40-706-Monitoring-of-progress-made-on-planning-paper-on-Hong-Kong-1976 — Page 145

PERSONAL

香港 督府

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GOVERNMENT HOUSE

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Mr Malton

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I was most grateful for the very sympathetic and understanding way in which you responded to the telegraphed extracts from my Legco speech. I realise how hair-raising it must be for you to have me deliver a major policy speech, which to some extent you must defend, without seeing it complete, even though it may be based on policies agreed between us. It is obviously very difficult to meet simultaneously the requirements of our completely different audiences.

I enclose a copy of the complete speech, which I only hope gives you most of what you want and at least none of what you do not want.

Copies of the speech in more elegant form will follow to the Department, and will also be sent to the Parliamentary Group and others by the Hong Kong Commissioner's Office.

I am frankly apprehensive about its reception here, not immediately but later on when its implications have sunk in. I then expect the odd spectacle of the Communist Press supporting the employers organisations in protesting against Government's callous burdening of industry with costs, the people with higher rents, and the economy with inflationary social expenditure! I am very much afraid that whether opposition develops in this way or not, there will be a whispering campaign of "pressure from the UK.

I keep on refuting this wherever I find it, but it has been fuelled either by things said by back benchers or officials in London, or by people sensing how they feel even if it has not been put into words. In the present situation this seems to me inevitable and is just something we have to live with.

Rt. Hon Lord Goronwy-Roberts.

PERSONAL