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American businessmen for undisclosed and probably illegal purposes. There is nothing in the 1975 despatch which can be read as justifying a policy of indirect pressure. If it is indeed to be our policy that we should use such tactics, then this ought to be spelt out clearly and
explicitly in the new despatch.
(b) At what point do we stop further constitutional progress in
territories which have no intention of proceeding to
independence? WIAD have argued that we should allow no further development in any territory except as part of an agreed timetable leading to independence; and this is what the draft at present proposes. But the difficulty is that there is considerable variation in the stages reached at present in different territories, and we might not find it easy to resist pressure from the less advanced territories
to be allowed to move at least to the level reached by the
most advanced. It might be worth discussing whether we should draw the line at the point reached by the most advanced territory, and allow other territories to progress up to that point if they want to..
(c),Do we want to retain the possibility of associated statehood?
Paragraph 4 of the draft lists the various alternatives to independence or continuing dependency that were considered in the 1975 despatch. One of these was associated statehood. Mr Duff has argued that it is now "tribal lore" to reject
associated statehood as an alternative to internal self-
government in constitutional development towards independence, since it represents an indefinite commitment to responsibility without power.
He therefore suggested that the despatch should specifically reject associated statehood as an option open to dependencies. However it is not the purpose of the despatch to rule out any particular solution: everything must depend on the individual circumstances in each specific territory. I suggest therefore that it is enough simply to make it plain that we should have very serious doubts about creating any new associated states, as proposed in the draft
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