SPECTATOR

The Spectator, 56 Doughty Street, London WC1N 2LL Telephone 01-405 1706; Telex 27124; Fax 242 0603

OUR TITANIC BETRAYAL

In a letter in the Independent on 20 May, Dr Michael Zell, of the Humanities School of Thames Polytechnic, wrote,

As a child during the days of the cold war, I can remember being told that the Chinese had little respect for human life. That was of course nonsense then, and the apparent unwillingness of the Chinese government to use brutality to put an end to this week's demonstrations suggests the same today.

By contrast, the readiness of a British government to use overwhelming force to break up a student demonstration even before it reached the London equivalent of Tiananmen Square leads one to wonder which government most respects human life and the political liberties of its citizens.

Well, Dr Zell can safely be confined to what his co-religionists like to call the dustbin of history, but is he very much more of a self-deluding fool than the more important figures of the world? Are Messrs Heath and Kissinger, Kaufman and Gor- bachev wiser or more admirable in their reaction to the slaughter that has ensued since Dr Zell wrote his letter? Is the British Government which Dr Zell so dislikes showing respect for the human life and political liberties of the people of Hong Kong? On Tuesday, the British ambassa- dor in Peking advised British nationals to leave. How does Britain feel that it can force the people of Hong Kong to stay?

The Hong Kong Agreement of 1984 is, in the words of the Foreign Secretary's joint biographers, 'very much Sir Geof- frey's personal responsibility'. Sir Geoffrey Howe likes to speak of Hong Kong as 'a delicate precious Ming vase which has to be kept intact and unharmed in the great relay race as the British pass the responsi- bility over to their Chinese team-mates'. Those words always sounded absurd. Now they sound obscene.

When he signed the Agreement, Sir Geoffrey brushed aside anxieties about right of abode saying, 'Far better to con- centrate on building the liner rather than concentrate on the lifeboats.' Now he should consider the story of the Titanic. It sank on its first voyage and there were enough life-boats only for the first-class passengers.

For what can the Agreement now be said

to mean? Our 'Chinese team-mates' have shown what they do to their own people when they have the temerity to ask for democracy. How can a single citizen of Hong Kong be expected to trust their good faith when in 1997 they occupy the colony on which they have long cast covetous eyes? What use Basic Law when adminis- tered by a government that will not even respect basic life? We have pointed out repeatedly in these pages the chief example of China's treatment of a country under its control: we have reported how it has raped and ruined Tibet (to which, by the way, it guaranteed freedom and autonomy under an agreement in 1971). Now at last the threat is plain to see, and the world is shocked, and still Sir Geoffrey clings to his

Agreement. As he smiles and waves it in the air he looks like no one so much as Neville Chamberlain at Heston aero- drome.

The Foreign Office's vestige of an argu- ment at this crisis is that we do not know what will happen in China. This is true, but it does not follow, as the Foreign Office says, that we should simply wait and see. Hong Kong is a colony, which means that Britain has an absolute responsibility to its people, particularly as, unlike in our other colonies, the people have not asked for independence. We are not discharging that responsibility. We are giving them nothing in which they can have confidence. If we continue in this course we shall be betray- ing millions.

If the British Government would only get off its knees and look around it would see that there is a great deal it can do to restore confidence. It should immediately — say that the Agreement does not bind us because one party to it has broken its trust. The Chinese, by the way, insisted that it be only an Agreement, and not a solemn and binding treaty. We can now use this against them.

— work out, without discussion with the Chinese, a new, stronger Basic Law, which we can present to any future government in Peking which proves itself to be run by members of the human race.

— establish fully representative democratic institutions at once in Hong Kong.

— recall the pusillanimous Governor and replace him with a political appointee of the highest rank, a Lord Soames of our day.

— give right of abode in Britain to all United Kingdom passport holders in Hong Kong (about 3.25 million people).

— go to the EEC and ask for a joint declaration of a readiness by the member countries to welcome the people of Hong Kong if they decide to flee. As British citizens they would, of course, be free to live anywhere in the EEC, but it would be a proper gesture to have their rights collectively reiterated.

— table a resolution at the United Nations

THE SPECTATOR

condemning the killings in Peking and calling for international support for the establishing and protecting of democratic rights in Hong Kong.

— work for a United Nations commitment to defend the status of Hong Kong after 1997 if an Agreement with China cannot be pursued.

If these actions are taken, the restora- tion of confidence in Hong Kong will be immediate. The colony's brain drain will cease, and the paradoxical effect of having the right to leave will be that people will want to stay. Until these actions are taken, the citizens of Hong Kong should not waste their breath shouting outside the Xinhua 6 A loss of face is far better than the loss of liberty and the loss of life news agency. They should march in their millions on Government House and tell the Governor what they think.

All this will involve a loss of face, something which the Foreign Office finds as hard to bear as do the Chinese. Until now, the Government has managed simul- taneously to argue that it cannot grant right of abode because of the terrible effect on Britain of a mass immigration and that there is no need to do so because the Agreement guarantees the safety of the people of Hong Kong anyway — a two- faced argument, so now there are two faces to be lost. But a loss of face is far better than the loss of liberty and the loss of life. What of the Prime Minister? It was over Hong Kong that she performed the most spectacular and untypical U-turn of her time in office. In 1982, she went to China to discuss the question. She offended the Chinese because, fresh from victory in the Falklands, she spoke of obligations to British dependents rather than opportuni- ties for the men of power. 'In conducting these talks,' Mrs Thatcher said, 'I shall speak not only for Britain but for Britain's moral responsibility and duty to the people of Hong Kong.' The Foreign Office put it about that she was ignorant and incompe- tent, and soon the realpolitik men were in charge. No more nonsense about freedom for British people. With that extraordinary worship of power which the self-styled 'pragmatist' always exhibits, the nego- tiators set out to kowtow to their commun- ist counterparts. 'With Hong Kong,' say Sir Geoffrey's biographers, 'the most formid- able hurdle was to convince the Chinese leadership of British sincerity and trust.' In 1984, the right year for such an event, the Chinese were convinced, though, not so much of sincerity and trust as of credulity and weakness. Mrs Thatcher had made the mistake of allowing her instincts to be overridden.

But the situation in which she now finds herself is not simply the one with which we are all familiar of a feeble Foreign Office undermining the robustness of the Prime Minister. The crisis challenges her right- wing instincts too, because of the question of immigration. Although we do not be- lieve that there will be a big flight to Britain as a result of granting the right of abode, the British voter, especially the Tory voter, will be hard to convince. Mrs Thatcher will have to call up enormous reserves of courage and statesmanship to face down her natural supporters. She will have to trust, as she did so successfully during the Falklands, in the decency of our people. She will have to say that, more important even than their natural anxieties about being swamped, are the duties which Britain owes to all the people for whom it is responsible. In this strange case, it is British to welcome foreigners, unBritish the work of a low people — to refuse them.

If Mrs Thatcher were to say this, she would be supported by the Liberals. At present, Labour is playing a slippery game on this subject, but could the party of multi-racialism really be the only one in the House of Commons to try to keep the people of Hong Kong out? It is usually a feature of true statesmanship that it can compel bi-partisan support. In any case, Mrs Thatcher must take the risk. If she does not, if three and a quarter million people are to be abandoned, she will have presided over something worse than the betrayal of Czechoslovakia in 1938, worse than the repatriation of the Cossacks after the war — worse because our responsibility is more absolute. She will have presided over the most discreditable British policy of the 20th century. Judging by her re- marks in the House of Commons on Tuesday, she seems bent on doing so.

Besides, even more is at issue over the question of Hong Kong than the obliga- 6 She will have presided over the most discreditable British policy of the 20th century tions of a colonial power to its subject people. For what is being tested is the sincerity of the West. There has been much excitement in the West at the reforms of Mr Gorbachev, but he is a symptom, not a cause, not changing the world, but noticing more intelligently than his predecessors how it has changed. The change is that Communism's moral and intellectual and political failure is complete and so all that remains is for its systems to be removed. The change is the greatest vindication of the Western way of life since the Allies landed on the Normandy beaches in 1944 (we do not say since 1945, for in that year, Soviet totalitarianism began to grip half of Europe). All over the world, people in their hundreds of millions look to the West. They want to hear the truth from the BBC and the Voice of America. They want to be richer. They want to be self- governing. They want to vote. They want to worship. They want to be free. We say that we welcome this, but are we not also timorously selfish, worried by instability, secretly believing that what we treasure is not so important for people with slit eyes or black faces, fearing for the loss of our comforts? Hong Kong is the test case.

In China, more than a thousand million people are not free, and now thousands of them brave enough to say so are dead. In Hong Kong, the Union flag flies, as it does in Britain, over a free people. Are we to run it down in eight years' time and let the red one fly in its place without allowing that free people a means of escape? If we are to do so, we cannot claim to love liberty and we shall have to confess that, for the first time in our history, we have forced Britons to be slaves.