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The Unofficial Members could be confident that whoever was
appointed to succeed Sir M MacLehose would be very carefully
chosen in the light of the qualities called for by the job.
3. Sir Y K Kan then spoke at some length about the social and
other improvements made in Hong Kong in recent years, particularly
in such fields as schools and housing. This gave me the
opportunity to say that, while we recognised the substantial
progress that had been made in these and other fields, there was
still much concern in Britain about certain aspects of life in
Hong Kong. In particular, while we recognised the limitations
that Hong Kong's situation imposed on political advance, there
was a widespread feeling that more could be done in social
advance through such things as taxation reform and other measures
to help the poorer members of the community.
4. Sir Y K Kan said that he had been a pioneer in this field. He
repeated that a great deal had been done and the real difficulties
should not be underestimated. But he accepted that there was scope
for further progress, though probably not as much as was sometimes
believed in Britain.
5. Finally, I read him a polite lecture about what seemed to some
of us to be the rather too high level of critical sentiment about
Britain in Hong Kong. I said that I was doing this because he was
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