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"extremely tenuous".
In 1957 the Admiralty stated, following an enquiry from the Foreign Office, that it had little or no interest in the islands from a strategic point of view: and Far Eastern Department of the Foreign Office wrote to Peking that it had no intention of intervening in the present squabbles over the islands or contesting the various claims.
47. The whole question of the British position over the islands came up in 1971 after the Vietnamese note of August claiming them had been sent to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (see para 1). The British Government sent a note in reply on 2 November. The note said in part "The Government of the United Kingdom are not able to accept the viewpoint expressed by the Vietnamese Government concerning sovereignty over Spratly Island and Amboyna Cay and reserve their position in all respects as concerns all claims relating to sovereignty over those two islands". Later in the month the Vietnamese Embassy telephoned the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to ask for more detail. After consultation with the Legal Adviser a member of South East Asia Department spoke to the Embassy by telephone to the following effect:- "Two of the islets, Spratly and Amboyna Cay, were visited in 1864 by Her Majesty's Ship "Rifleman", a ship of the Royal Navy, and on October 25, 1877, a licence was granted by Her Majesty's Government to a British subject and a United States citizen to hoist the British flag on those two islands and to work them for guano. These rights were regranted in 1889 by the Crown to the Central Borneo Company. Her Majesty's Government have never acknowledged the various claims that have been made since this date by
other countries,"
48.
The British Government took up the position of not formally abandoning her weak claim for the following reasons. It might be useful to retain in view of the strategic consideration of ensuring that, at the least, the islands should be denied to powers unfriendly to Britain or her allies. Secondly there was a possibility of oil being discovered and the weakness of the British claim in itself was no reason for abandoning it at this stage. Other wider interests which might be affected adversely by abandoning the claim included matters concerning the Law of the Sea (territorial waters, continental shelf, sea bed etc). There also appeared to be no advantage "other than a certain post-imperial tidiness", in abandoning the claim, and even if it were done the separate question of whether Vietnamese sovereignty should be recognised would remain.
CONCLUSION
49.
Apart from the question of whether or not to abandon the British claim to Spratly Island and Amboyna Cay, one of the problems which has arisen most often concerning the islands is to what geographical area does the name the Spratly Islands refer. It has been used for the whole area, but more often has been used (as the United States Government uses it) to
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