TNAG-1566-FCO40-2131-Future-of-Hong-Kong-nationality-and-passports-Hong-Kong-(Br-1986 — Page 48

CONFIDENTIAL

714

HHH 340/

RECEIVED IN REGISTRY

12 MAY 1986

Foreign and Commonwealth Office

London SW1A 2AH

9 May 1986

S< OFFICER

REGISTRY

IND

PA

Action Taken

Doar Stephen

Hong Kong:

Nationality Order in Council

I understand that in Cabinet yesterday morning there was some discussion of the arguments to be used in Parliament to justify our decision not to grant British citizenship to the ethnic minority BDTCs in Hong Kong. We have since seen the draft brief from Conservative Research Department on this subject.

The Foreign Secretary has asked me to write to you to express his concern that the argument that a decision in the opposite sense would have involved a large potential immigration commitment should not be developed too far, especially in the Research Department document. He appreciates that it may be necessary to make some reference to the difficulty inherent in giving an uncertain commitment on immigration which stretches into the next century. But he sees considerable danger in any mention of a 60,000 (or 80,000, which I see is the figure selected for the Conservative Research Department's draft brief) figure for the potential ethnic minority by 1997. This would be seen as a worst-case figure being used to frighten MPs with an immigration "bogey". More seriously, the figure itself would be open to challenge and could rebound badly on the Government's case. The non-ethnic Chinese would probably deny categorically that they were seeking a commitment which went beyond the current 11,500 figure, and would accuse the Government of deception. We know that there are doubts in the Home Office about the feasibility of putting a ring fence round the 11,500, and that an argument could be developed that this would be unjust. Nevertheless we would, in our view, find it hard to argue that this is impossible. The argument which could be used against us is that it is unreasonable to discriminate in favour of those who have been put in this position through no fault of their own. Anyone who gets into it in future does so voluntarily and in full knowledge of the consequences. We think that it is all too likely that this would be seen, especially in the Lords, as a perfectly reasonable way of containing the commitment. Far from assisting our Government's case, raising what could be seen as a specious figure of 60,000 (or 80,000) would therefore expose us to counter-arguments which would make it harder to justify the decision to turn down the non-ethnics.

CONFIDENTIAL

/In short