Dear Mr Kinnock,
Thank you for your letter of today's date about the Community Charge. You refer to reports in this morning's press. These are speculation. Chris PattenThe Secretary of State for the Environment made the Government's position quite clear during the debate on Wednesday. I enclose the relevant extract from Hansard. [not in file] In the light of that I see no need for a statement of the kind you envisage.
You refer to an ‘omission’ in the debate on the Community Charge. The most striking omission in that debate was surely of any Opposition policy on the matter; an omission which your own senior colleagues have described elsewhere as cynical, vacuous and despicable.
Yours sincerely,
Margaret Thatcher