TNAG-1085-FCO40-1335-Implications-for-Hong-Kong-of-changes-in-the-British-nationa-1981 — Page 118

The passage

offer changes on Report, we shall suffer damaging defeats. of the Bill through the Lords could even be put seriously at risk.

The main difficulty is that few people accept that employment is really a satisfactory criterion for the passing on of citizenship. Even the C.B.I. take this line, although it was because of the just claims of our overseas exporters and businessmen that the Bill included such provisions in the first place. But many of our critics have argued that can have strong connections with this country even where working for a foreign firm. Others have pointed out even when working for a British company the employment may not neccessarily involve any close connection with the United Kingdom. The Bill demands that such a close connection shall exist, but the whole question of what constitutes a close connection (a term which we have not been able to define satisfactorily) has caused great difficulty. It has been pointed out that a person thinking of taking up an overseas appointment would probably not be able to obtain in advance any guarantee that by the time of the birth of any children abroad he or she would be accepted as meeting the close connection requirement. This has been seen as a damaging point.

Other problems have arisen over the position of partners and the self-employed. The latter in particular cannot readily be fitted into the scheme in the Bill because there is no United Kingdom linked criterion (such as a company or firm established here) on which to base their entitlement. But this very fact has been used by our critics as an indication that our whole approach is wrong.

The European dimension has been peculiarly troublesome.

There is

a very effective Cross Party community lobby in the Lords and they are quite determined that the EC should receive some kind of special recogni- tion; what they want is for the children of people employed by Community institutions to be treated in the same way as the children of Crown I servants. This would make them British citizens otherwise than by descent

instead of British citizens by descent only. The same lobby has made good use of the undeniable fact that a child born in some European countries (notably Belguim) to a British citizen by descent only would be stateless unless it had a Belgian father. It has not been possible for the Government to give any wholly satisfactory reply on this point, which also applies outside Europe and worries a good many people.

In the face of all this, it seemed to me essential to change our approach. If the employment provisions of the Bill as introduced were tinkered with still further, clause 3 of the Bill would become so complex as to be virtually unintelligible, and we have already been much criticised for its complexity. This complexity would also add further to the

/difficulties