Cpen Letter to the Governor
(To be distributed in Hong Kong and In Britain)
Dear Sir Kurray;
It is not easy for me to write this letter, as I have been one of your supporters since you made your intentions for social progress know several years ago.
No Governor has spoken with more understanding, more sympathy, more concern for people, than you. ilo Governor has been so well-known for honesty than you. No Governor has walked more informally among the people than you. Yet, under no Governorship has there been more suffering, more injustice in law, or more unrest than under yours.
In this letter I will not enlarge on the important issues of rates, education, inflation, under-employment, labour unrest, legal injustices, persecution of hawkers, and other issues that have alienated vast numbers of people in recent years. These I will deal with in future letters. I will in this letter concentrate on the chaotic housing policies that have created unrest among more than half the population, actual and potential tenants of public housing.
Housing, before your great new programme began in 1973, was an asset to the community. It catered for the poor worker and gave him stability and security because he new that his poor vages could be used for food, cloth- ing and the education of his children. How the worker knows if he gets housing at all, he has to choose between reducing these three necessities to pay his rent in a new estate, and living in the old resettlement slums that have been condemned both here and abroad as being unfit for human. habitation.
Of this problem you must certainly be aware, since it has been brought to your attention by social workers, and in frequent public demonstrations and petitions, There is no visible sign that you anve taken the slightest notice of this serious opposition to your Covernment's profiteering from the rents of public housing.
Still on the subject of housing, your predecessor in 1964 was forced by general unrest to introduce a policy of offering hut spaces to all homo- less people. It took years of heavy pressure upon the Government to bring about this concession, and although the areas offered were not populer, they did at least ensure best every family had a roof over its head right that even most animals, let alone human beings, enjoy. (The average Englishmen will protest if a cat or dog is left homeless.)
Your Government has back-pedalled on this policy. Of course, it is
In fact, it is
It has pro-
· hypocritical enough not to admit any back-pedalling. hypocritical enough to boast vest improvements in hut areas, duced films and nows itens galore to paint fairy-tale pictures of the beautiful comiti.ns in hut preas. But all these films and press releases crit one important factor that they are not available to the hueless. Ever since you took office there has constantly been "an acute shortage of licensed (hut) areas". Feople have been herded like animals (nen, women and children together) in transit centres intended for emergency accomodation for a few days only, or even left homeless on the streets in cold or wet weather. Excuses such as shertage of contractors have been offered, but I an prepared . introduce contractors who will probably do a quicker, if not a better and c cayer, job on licensed (hut) croes. This excuse for the situation does not hold water. The result of your Goverment's policy is to prohibit poor people entering decent public housing, to reserve the new estates for the rather better off, end to leave the workers grovelling in plums, terements or in common doss-Louses (transit centres).
The tenants now being evicted from the rooftops of 271-201 Coi Keung Choi Street are an example of your Government's disgraceful treatment of homeless people. For nearly a year they have been asking for their right
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