TNAG-2450-FCO40-3567-Future-of-Hong-Kong-constitutional-development-1992 — Page 140

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institutions at its own pace

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that to force the pace

will put a strain on our unique constitutional

arrangements and make convergence difficult in 1997.

3.

I owe it to the community to make my own position clear. I have spent my entire career engaged in

a political system based on representative democracy. would be surprising if that had not marked me.

It has.

It

I have always been moved by Isaiah Berlin's description of democracy as "the view that the promotion of social justice and individual liberty does not necessarily mean the end of all efficient government;

that power and

order are not identical with a straitjacket of doctrine,

whether economic or political;

S

reconcile individual liberty

that it is possible to

- a loose texture of society

with the indispensable minimum of organising and

authority".

4.

I bring those opinions to the task of governing Hong Kong, where the ink of international agreements and the implacable realities of history, geography and economics shape and determine the way in which such views can be applied. That is a fact well understood by the people of Hong Kong, better understood by them perhaps than by many of those who would like you to be the heroic pawns of their own doubtless well-meaning preconceptions.

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