---

Mr. MacShane: Did the hon. Gentleman meet Sir Percy Craddock?

Sir Patrick Cormack: I am afraid that that honour was denied to us on that occasion--my vote is for Patten in all circumstances.

We met the deputy director of the New China News Agency and we were assured that all would be well. We must hope and pray that it is. Even among those who expressed the greatest buoyant confidence, as many did--it would do them a disservice not to make that plain tonight--one detected an underlying apprehension. One also discovered that many of those who were investing, quite rightly, so much of their time, talents and, yes, their money in Hong Kong, nevertheless had the security of another passport. They hope, and I hope, that they will never have to fall back upon that security. It will be a test of the new Chinese administration that they never have to.

I should like to mention one or two issues, some of which have been touched on before but which are tremendously important as Hong Kong moves inexorably towards the transition to a new sovereignty. I shall not

14 Nov 1996 : Column 553

labour the point about ethnic minorities as I hope that I have made my position plain on the general passport issue. I do not doubt for a minute the good faith of my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister, because I have great admiration for him, which is well known. I am afraid, however, that his statement, while full of good intent, was not enough. I beg my right hon. Friend to go that further mile--it is not even that, rather a few feet--and give that finite group of people proper protection. They are typified by the Indian whom we met at Whitehead detention centre, who has served Her Majesty the Queen with immense distinction over many years, but who does not know what the future holds. If anyone deserves the security of a proper passport, it is that man and others like him.

It is incumbent upon the House to do all that it can to impress upon our right hon. Friends in government the need to give those people passports. It will be seen as mean-spirited if we do not, and it will be seen as no more than proper recognition if we do--and we should.

In Hong Kong there is a real unease among the ethnic minorities and others about what will happen to their freedoms. Apart from the economic magnitude of the place, two things are most impressive to the first-time visitor. One is the true freedom of the press and the media to which my right hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Sussex (Mr. Renton) referred. The other is how one can wander around at almost any hour of the night and feel totally safe.

Mr. Henry Bellingham (North-West Norfolk): That is more than one can say about other places.

Sir Patrick Cormack: Yes, indeed.

People fear for those freedoms. The hon. Member for Inverness, Nairn and Lochaber has already referred to the young man, Wang Dan, and his example brings back the terrible memories of a few years ago.

Of course we want the concept of "one country--two systems" to work. Of course I am prepared to acknowledge that the 21st century will probably be China's century, and I recognise the importance of that country. Nevertheless, one has to say to the Chinese that they must demonstrate that those freedoms will survive. For our part, we must do everything we can to impress upon them just how important we reckon that survival to be. What has happened in China recently and what is happening with the provisional Legislative Council do not offer encouragement. One has to communicate that to the Chinese firmly and clearly.

Another remarkable thing about Hong Kong is the lack of corruption. That country has a legal system of which it has every right to be proud, and it is important that that remarkably buoyant society should retain those incorrupt values. One is worried not least because of the enormous disparity in payments between those who will be in one system and those operating under the other. When one considers what the garrison of the People's Liberation Army will be paid in comparison with what the Hong Kong police rightly receive, one can see the seeds of problems. We must be alive to those issues.

I am delighted to see that one of my companions on our trip, the hon. Member for Oxford, East (Mr. Smith), is in the Chamber because we should not let the debate pass without paying tribute to the way in which the forces

14 Nov 1996 : Column 554

of the Crown have defended Hong Kong for a century and a half. I speak for all of us when I say how impressed we were by the sheer professionalism, efficiency and dedication of the young men of the Navy and Army whom we visited on one of our days in Hong Kong. The new garrison has a lot to live up to.

Gesture politics are rightly often condemned, but there is a time for the gesture when it is truly symbolic. Much has been said about the handover ceremony, and it is extremely important that we should be represented at the highest possible level. I hope very much that the Prince of Wales will be there. I hope that the Prime Minister, whoever he is--and of course I hope that it will be the present Prime Minister--will also be there. Although the noble Baroness Thatcher will be very welcome, she should be only one of many in attendance. The Prime Minister of this country should be there, and I hope that by his attendance he will demonstrate yet again our continued commitment to Hong Kong.

I conclude where I began, with the joint liaison group. There is provision for it to sit until 2000. It must do so, and it must remain active. I believe that we should monitor continually the workings of the transition in every possible way, not just to 2000 but beyond. I repeat my suggestion that the House should devise some means of allowing a Select Committee to examine the affairs of Hong Kong and to monitor continuously what occurs. All hon. Members have a duty to that last great colony. If we are to honour our commitment in the way the hon. Member for Inverness, Nairn and Lochaber suggested, we must do something rather than merely make proclamations.

7.40 pm

Mr. Andrew Faulds (Warley, East): I am delighted to follow the hon. Member for South Staffordshire (Sir P. Cormack), whom I have to call an honourable and an old friend. He and I work closely together in cultural matters upon which he is very good and extremely knowledgeable. He also has considerable political courage on issues such as Bosnia, where only very few of us understood what was going on and pursued the right policy of intervention. Perhaps when he has lived with the Chinese and Hong Kong relationship for as long as I have, he will be nearly as good on that issue as he was on Bosnia. I am happy to help to educate him tonight in a brief speech which I hope will make some pungent and factual points.

The signing of the joint declaration in December 1984 by the Chinese and British Governments was a great and historic achievement. It was the outcome of the dedicated work primarily of our own Sir Geoffrey, now Lord Howe, who played a most significant role in bringing that agreement into being. The other contributor was Lord MacLehose who, if we are talking about Governors of Hong Kong, we must put at the apex of achievement while Mr. Patten would be playing in the puddles. Lord MacLehose was a great Governor and there have been others nearly as great as he. It was also the work of the Chinese Foreign Affairs Vice Premier, Zhou Nan, and very much involved in that work was the present Chinese ambassador to London, whom I have known for 24 or 25 years and for whom I have the greatest respect as an extremely able diplomat.

That declaration set the Basic Law of Hong Kong and was, to those who knew anything about the problems of bringing those two systems together, an immense

14 Nov 1996 : Column 555

achievement out of all expectations. Very importantly, in his statement in the House of Commons, the then Sir Geoffrey Howe stated:

"I should like to draw the attention of the House"--

to my speech at the moment, but on that occasion Sir Geoffrey continued--

"to the following important features of the draft agreement. It constitutes a formal international agreement, legally binding in all its parts. This is the highest form of commitment that can be given by one sovereign state to another".--[Official Report, 25 October 1984; Vol. 65, c. 819.]

That is why Patten failed us. Unfortunately for Hong Kong, Chris Patten lost his seat in the 1992 general election--would to God he had held it, by however small a majority--and the Prime Minister, in recompense and, I presume, in solace, appointed him Governor of Hong Kong. A man--I must be frank about this--who seems to know little of either Hong Kong or China and a man who, deplorably, was not prepared to listen to those who did know about those two countries.

There was excellent article in the South China Morning Post in September this year, which some of my colleagues may have read. It was by Sir Percy Craddock, another great figure in our relations with China. In that article, he said one or two moderately unkind things about the Governor, puncturing his pretensions and showing him up as an ambitious, scheming politician--and I don't think anybody who met Patten in his earlier manifestations would disagree with that analysis--in this instance with an eye on his own future regardless of the real interests of Hong Kongers. I feel not the slightest embarrassment in being as blunt as I can about what I think has been a disastrous term by Patten as Governor of Hong Kong at the worst possible moment in history.

The Basic Law provided that Members of the last Legislative Council under the British Administration--that is, before 30 June 1997--could become Members of the first Legislative Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. What an admirable arrangement. That was the so-called through-train agreement, which was in the original agreements. There had been also an exchange of seven letters--not two or three--between the two Foreign Ministers to agree on the composition and the method of election for that process. Those arrangements would have ensured a smooth transition.

However, the arrogant and ill-informed Governor Patten pursued his policy of constitutional reform. It had all been agreed and then Patten introduced constitutional reform. He reneged on the through-train arrangement, and on the seven letters, and pressed ahead with local legislation to change unilaterally the system for the 1995 Hong Kong election which introduced a different plan for the composition of the last Legislative Council. That clearly violated the agreements between the two countries--it is no good either Front Bench trying to dissimulate or pretend it is not so. It is disingenuous--I use a charitable expression--for the Foreign Secretary to claim otherwise.

Understandably, China could not accept this breach of the agreement and stated that the LegCo, thus introduced by Patten's reforms, would cease on 30 June 1997. And they announced the setting up of a provisional Legislative Council as a temporary body whose laws would not

14 Nov 1996 : Column 556

become operative until 1 July 1997? That body will be disbanded upon the establishment of the first Legislative Council of the Hong Kong SAR which will be elected--I do not believe talk about a later date--no later than 1 July 1998. If there is two or three months' slippage, so what?

It serves no useful purpose to argue about what was an inevitable outcome. The idea that China would accept the deal was arrogance beyond belief on the part of the Governor and his ill-informed advisers. Once that failed Bath politician had monkeyed about with the agreed arrangements, there would be no completion of his new project. I refer the House back to Sir Geoffrey Howe's statement that I quoted at the beginning of my speech. It was quite clear that was a cut-and-dried series of agreements and Patten's constitutional reform aborted it.

There are some politicians in Hong Kong who wish to see the outcome for Hong Kong in the dire terms that they describe. They ignore the most basic fact in the whole matter: it is in China's interests that, under the two systems one country policy set out in the joint declaration, Hong Kong's capitalist system and its success should continue. There is a guarantee that that will ensue for at least 50 years. China, for those of us who know something about its history, is historically a country that keeps its agreements.

We can all, however, guarantee our bottom Hong Kong dollar that the scaremongers and the wreckers such as Martin Lee already have their get-out passports tucked conveniently hidden in their back pockets.

---