[Sir Russell Johnston]
Hong Kong
20 JANUARY 1988
attention, such as, the status of passports and the boat people. I must say to the Foreign Secretary, in all earnestness, that when he said, almost casually in his off- beat fashion, that we could repatriate the boat people with adequate guarantees, a little shiver ran down my spine. It was not nice to hear such an idea in the middle of a debate.
The election is the immediate issue and it is the touchstone of future confidence in the arrangements for Hong Kong. I hope that the Foreign Secretary will be rather more positive before the debate is over than he was in opening it.
5.10 pm
Sir Peter Blaker (Blackpool, South): Like others who have spoken, I favour direct elections. The question is what part of the Legislative Council should be directly elected, and when that should happen.
Like my hon. Friend the Member for Weston-super- Mare (Mr. Wiggin), I do not take it as axiomatic that 100 per cent. of directly elected Members of the Legislative Council, based on the Westminster model, is necessarily right for Hong Kong. A start should be made with 25 per cent. of the Legislative Council being directly elected, to see how that works. It should then move on, the success of that percentage having been demonstrated, to a larger one. Direct elections should start between 1988 and 1991, not at a later date. For part of the Legislative Council, it should be not later than 1991.
I have three points to make in that regard. First, we are still in the lifetime of the first Legislative Council containing indirectly elected Members. Therefore, we have not had a chance to see how the experiment is working. It has certainly transformed debate in Hong Kong. The debate there is more vocal and, on the whole, is well- informed. It is interesting that there is no sign of the people of Hong Kong saying, "The people in the Legislative Council, whether nominated or indirectly elected, lack authority because they are not directly elected by the people." At present it is not losing authority for that
reason.
We hear remarks, such as those made by the right hon. and learned Member for Aberavon (Mr. Morris), that time is running out. That makes the basic assumption that the clock stops in 1997. Why are we assuming that? I know of no reason why we should assume it. We have not seen the draft Basic Law. We do not know whether there will be provision for further evolution in the Special Administrative Region- SAR of Hong Kong after
1997.
The most important question is, what do the people of Hong Kong want? I attach importance to the report of the Survey Office. It has done a very thorough job, and it was congratulated by the independent monitors on having properly, accurately and impartially conducted its operations. It is wrong to describe its work as a concoction, as has been alleged, implying that it was some sort of rigged arrangement by the Government of Hong Kong. That is a disgraceful allegation to make.
It is also said that it was wrong for the Survey Office to attribute different weights to different types of submissions, depending on whether they were letters from individuals, petitions or stereotyped letters. As I read it, the Survey Office report does not do that. It reports what happened and leaves the reader to make his own judgment.
Hong Kong
994
With regard to the different opinion polls, A. G. B. McNair is a well-known polling company of international repute. It was selected on the basis of an open tender. The target population that it took was the adult population of Hong Kong. It operated by random sample, chose a group of 3,000 people to test, and conducted a pilot test in advance. Its methods seem to have been thoroughly professional, and it certainly was not doing what it was told by the Hong Kong Government.
Mr. Foulkes: When I was in Hong Kong last week I spoke to the managing director of A. G. B. McNair, who confirmed that the formulation of the questions that were asked in the survey were based on the wording of the Green Paper and that, given a free hand to ask more direct and simple questions, the questions in the survey were not the ones that would have been asked. She felt constrained by the complicated wording of the Green Paper.
Sir Peter Blaker: That is a very interesting remark. It is news to me that the company was instructed to adopt that wording. If it is correct I accept that, but it does not invalidate my argument. A. G. B. McNair used experienced and trained interviewers and it had perhaps this is the most important point-3,000 face-to- face interviews.
If one looks at some of the other opinion polls that are referred to in the document that has been circulated by the Delegation for Democracy, the organisation led by Mr. Martin Lee, one finds a lesser degree of professionalism. The colony-wide polls were largely conducted by telephone. If one conducts a survey by telephone, one automatically limits the people whom one can reach to telephone owners. Therefore, one is excluding more than half the population of Hong Kong. I can see no reason why non-telephone owners would be more likely than others to want direct elections in 1998. It is wrong to imagine that people who are opposed to direct elections in 1988 are representative only of big business.
Other polls were confined to specific population groups; for example, a group of university students. I can imagine what sort of reply I would receive if I polled a group of university students.
If one looks at appendix 7 to the voluminous report by the Survey Office, one gets a better idea of the nature of the other surveys that have been cited by those who are calling for direct elections in 1988. My reading of the Survey Office report is that there is clearly a majority in favour of direct elections, but not in 1988. I believe that the majority are against direct elections in 1988, but in favour of them at a later date.
What is beyond dispute is that there is a serious and large divide in the population. I should like to repeat the question that my right hon. Friend the Member for Guildford (Mr. Howell) asked: why should we imagine that people would be less inclined to obtain passports for Canada, Australia or the United States if they had been promised direct elections in 1988? It is possible that there would be more concern if it were announced that there were to be direct elections in 1988 than there is now. It would not be right to move towards direct elections at the present time, given the clear division among the population of Hong Kong, and given also that we are still in the first legislature that has been elected, even partially, by indirect elections.
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- Secondly, I want to deal with the accusations that have been made against Her Majesty's Government by the
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