TNAG-1263-FCO40-1606-Parliamentary-contacts-on-the-future-of-Hong-Kong-1983 — Page 10

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that the rights of the British people have to be protected but I think if they have to be protected in terms of not keeping Hong Kong in perpetuity, we also ought to look at that in the

same logic when you apply to the Falkland Islands and I think the political imperatives of both those problems

are going to have to come to rest with

the British government. Now how do we

get over this problem? I absolutely

agree with what Bernard Levin has said,

we have certain rights and duties towards those people who are British protected within the Hong Kong territories and we must I think do everything that we can within the international arena to

ensure that those rights are carried through and properly discharged.

Now the next question is then, how do we deal with the Hong Kong problem? Well the one thing that is absolutely certain is that we don't deal with it

in the way that the Prime Minister has currently dealt with it. This is not a situation in which megaphone diplomacy of the sort that we saw, what was it, a month ago, when she was making I think very dangerous statements on Hong Kong in a public arena, indeed making two different statements, one in China and one in Hong Kong as though they never spoke to each other. This is a matter

of great delicacy, it is a matter in which I think people standing up and waving the Union Jack is just a very inappropriate mechanism for solving that