British Right-Wing Upset With Hong Kong Immigration Policy

LONDON — Britain’s plan to give about 225,000 Hong Kong citizens the right to live in the United Kingdom by 1997 provoked an angry split in the ruling Conservative Party today.

Norman Tebbit, a former party chairman and one-time close adviser of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, led a right-wing attack on the plan, announced Wednesday by Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd.

Tebbit accused the government of reneging on election promises not to allow any further mass immigration into Britain, which has accepted hundreds of thousands of West Indian and Asian immigrants since the early 1960s.

Tebbit asserted in a radio interview that “It will not be 225,000 people, because just as the other immigrant communities, particularly the Asian community, they will quite naturally want to marry people of their own kith and kin. They will bring in wives and husbands. They will also all have certain rights to bring in sisters and cousins and aunts and grandmothers just like other immigrants. So it’s not just 225,000. It’s another huge gaping hole in our immigration policy.”

Tebbit has enough support to lead a major parliamentary revolt against legislation on Hong Kong, likely to be introduced in March.