Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Man throws subversive leaflets from high place: now where did we hear that before?

June 4, 2026 by timhamlett

History, it is said, does not repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes. This may explain the sense of déja vu that crept over me when I read about the case of Mr Raymond Wong – a 55-year-old construction worker, not the former newsman of the same name – who appeared in the Kowloon Magistrates Court a couple of weeks ago.

The charge against Mr Wong was that he had on two occasions thrown home-produced leaflets, or in legal language “paper sheets written with statements”, from the vicinity of his 12th floor public housing flat into the public area of the estate.

The first time many of them were picked up by an irate district councillor, on the second by a staff member of the estate’s management. Quite how this led to Mr Wong was not explained in court but police eventually discovered his fingerprints on two of the offending items.

Mr Wong was then charged with violating the local national security law, on the grounds that the words on the leaflets were seditious. The first batch called for action against corrupt police people, which I suppose is automatically seditious because it implies that there are corrupt police people, which of course is not true.

The second batch of leaflets included the phrase “liberate Hong Kong; do not vote”. Curiously Mr Wong was not charged with discouraging voters, though that is an offence. Worse, we may suppose, was the fatal phrase “liberate Hong Kong”, when as we all know the law presumes that Hong Kong is already as liberated as it wishes to be.

Mr Wong sensibly pleaded guilty and will be sentenced later this week.

Meanwhile I was haunted by the thought that scattering subversive leaflets into public places had come up somewhere before. And after some searching I found it in Geert Mak’s book, “In Europe”. Mr Mak was assigned by the Dutch newspaper he worked for to spend a year touring Europe while also touring the continent’s 20th century history. The resulting pieces were published as they were written in the newspaper, and assembled into the book, which is excellent though now a bit dated, afterwards.

So in due course Mr Mak reached Munich, a city with a complete set of capital city kit because it used to be the home of the Kings of Bavaria. One of them lent his name to the local university, the Ludwig-Maximilian Universitat. Apparently this is a rather bombastic piece of architecture.

Let me now hand the microphone to Mr Mak:

“Here at the university is where it all converges: the pompous stairways, the pseudo-Roman statues beside them (in reality, two Bavarian kings in costume) the stupendous dome covering the hall, but also the wispy innocent desperate little pamphlets that the students Hans and Sophie Scholl let flutter down from the galleries here on 18 February 1943 ‘In the name of Germany’s young people we demand restitution by Adolf Hitler’s state of our personal freedom …’. They had spread tracts and left behind graffiti on earlier occasions as well: ‘Freedom’, ‘Down with Hitler’. That was all the White Rose did. This time, though, they were caught by the caretaker and turned over to the Gestapo. Four days later they were beheaded.”

Now nothing like that could happen here. We do not conclude national security cases in four days. We take four years, which may or may not be an improvement but is certainly different. We do not do capital punishment.

We do not have to worry about our personal freedom, at least as long as we refrain from daring stuff like appearing in the vicinity of Victoria Park with a piece of red string or an inflated question mark.

Still, it should not be a matter of rejoicing that we have joined the club of countries where the channels of public communication have been so choked by fear and restrictions that citizens who wish to express their views are reduced to scattering anonymous leaflets.

Our government seems to have inherited the thin skin of our notoriously sensitive police force. Now even legislators – carefully vetted patriots to a man or woman – are complaining that any comment on government policy which falls short of a rousing endorsement is branded as dishonesty or worse by official spokesmen.

No doubt government policies are usually well chosen and efficiently implemented. Still, our leaders should perhaps take a word of advice from Oliver Cromwell, who famously wrote to one set of obstinate opponents: “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.”

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

My clock deceived me, but then nowadays machinery does that all the time…

May 30, 2026 by timhamlett

The other night I was deceived by my clock. I should perhaps explain that Chez Hamlett we still have a clock which hangs on the wall. This habit originated many years ago when our son was very small and insisted on a cuckoo clock.

The rather annoying mechanical bird expired quite quickly, thank goodness, and the empty hook was taken over by a silent station clock with a pendulum. The pendulum was purely ornamental and stopped working a long time ago without affecting the function of the clock.

The station clock finally grew tatty after decades of faithful service and was replaced by a simple, and cheap, version from Ikea; this is nothing fancy and just has the basic 12 numbers and two hands.

The clock is easily visible from my desk so I tend to use it despite the competition provided by my wristwatch, computer and telephone, all of which will happily tell the time if asked.

So it came about that I was watching a particularly riveting episode of Killing Eve on Netflix, and this was followed by another riveting episode, and another, during which time apparently stood still. Surely it could not still be 10.30? Indeed it was not. The clock had stopped and needed a new battery.

This was harmless enough. I no longer have to get up to go to work so a late night is nothing to lose sleep over, as it were. It was chastening to find how easily you could be deceived by a simple piece of machinery, even when it was easy enough to check.

Of course there was no malice here. The clock was not being mischievous. Phones, keyboards and mice all need attention to their electricity needs and will refuse to perform unless regularly fed. Battery-operated items of the traditional kind need changes, the car needs petrol, and so it goes.

Yet this is the age of deceptive machinery. This is not a completely new thing. Stalin used to have purge victims painted out of official photography. People wondered whether Robert Capa’s shot militiaman was really … well, shot. One news photographer of my acquaintance admitted that he always took a small stuffed toy on disaster assignments because pictures of ruins looked so much more poignant with an abandoned plaything in them.

The distinguished war photographer Tim Page mused in his memoirs whether it was acceptable to photograph a dead soldier under a poncho, and if so whether it was also acceptable to rearrange the poncho to improve the picture.

At a more homely level I once congratulated the chief photographer of the Morecambe Visitor, where I was a naive and newly recruited sports editor, on the frequency with which he and his colleagues managed to capture the goal-scoring moment, with the ball flying past the goalkeeper’s flailing fingers. He then explained that this was due to technical skill rather than timing; the diving goalkeeper was genuine but the ball was inserted in the darkroom while the picture was being printed.

On the whole though, with due allowance for the possibility that people posed when they knew they were being pictured, photographs were regarded as more or less reliable records of what people did and looked like.

I was always more suspicious of TV and film, because of early exposure to the amount of setting up and technical preparation involved in quite simple bits of moving picture. If the scene was supposed to be “real” you were to some extent dependent on the honesty of the enterprise, and needed to remember that out of the picture were “the crew”. Over the years the crew has shrunk. In my early RTHK days there was a producer/director, cameraman, sound man, lights man, man in charge of the props, just in case any were needed, and the driver of the van required by all these people and me. Nowadays you may be interviewed by a reporter with a phone.

Anyway we have changed all that. The moment when I realised that you could no longer rely at all on video came when I watched a Youtube video of cats doing Olympic dives off a springboard. This was not an attempt at deception – nobody was going to buy the idea of human-sized cats – it was just a display of what you could do with AI.

Which is, it seems, practically anything. Nothing can be relied on any more. Idiots who believe Hillary Clinton runs a pedophile ring out of a Washington pizzeria can now order up a video of Mrs C ushering dazed kids into the basement for unmentionable purposes.

Lying by machinery has now become so common that they seem to be genuinely frightened of each other. How else can we explain the constant insistence that the ordinary human netizen should prove he or she is “not a robot”.

This is infuriating. The usual test used to be a mosaic of nine tiny pictures, which you were supposed to tick if they had a bicycle or a traffic light in them. Sometimes they wanted you to look for a ”crosswalk”, something unknown to English English. But until you had passed the picture test you could not Google it.

We now seem to have moved on to a bit of cursive writing, which you are supposed to decipher and type in the space provided. I imagine this is difficult for any robot; it regularly defeats me. Alternatively you can listen to something and type that.

The resulting burst of sound is completely incomprehensible. I must in fairness acknowledge that this may be because my VPN places me in a carefully selected and very neutral Scandinavian city. I do not speak Swedish. What tangled webs we are all weaving these days.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Five-year plans, however important, are not a suitable topic for lampposts

May 2, 2026 by timhamlett

One of the changes I have noticed since our last – shall we say popular? – district board was replaced by a more salubrious patriots-only gathering is that we now get decorations on Shatin lampposts.

This adds to public gaiety, no doubt, but has limited effectiveness as a communication medium because the banners have to be quite small and the lampposts are quite tall. So you can’t really get any words in.

Early attempts in this area avoided the legibility problem because they were put up in celebration of anniversaries. All you could really see was a big number, but as you were seeing the same number in all sorts of other places it was quite obvious what we were supposed to be celebrating.

The latest effort did not involve a number. Looking up at it while waiting for the traffic lights to change I could not make out anything at all. My research assistant deployed her mobile phone, took a picture with the telephoto feature working flat out and announced that we were celebrating China’s 15th five-year plan.

Happily I was able to catch up with this important matter when I came across a much bigger offering on the same theme outside an MTR station. It seems we are urged to “Pro-actively align with the 15th five-year plan” and “Follow a holistic approach to development and security”.

I hesitate to criticise the work of other writers but I cannot resist the thought that the author of this offering needs to give some thought to finding the sort of language which means something concrete and sensible to the man in the street, who is rarely told to pro-actively align with anything, or indeed to follow a holistic approach to it.

Most English people of my generation are not bowled over by the idea of five-year plans. This is partly because rigid adherence to erroneous five-year plans caused two of the 20th century’s most catastrophic famines: in Ukraine 1932-3 and in China 1958-62.

It is also no doubt partly because UK governments have rarely attempted economic planning of this kind and the rare experiment (in the early years of the 1964 Wilson government) was not a success. The Treasury (which is what they call the Finance Ministry in the UK) has never developed a wish to run plans itself, but certainly does not want anyone else doing it.

Besides the history there is the philosophical objection, usually attributed to Friedrich Hayek, to government direction of the economy. This maintains that official intervention is an infringement of freedom and also obscures the useful information provided by prices set in the marketplace.

Whatever you think of five-year plans, though, one does have to wonder if they really call for the sort of mass public participation that the campaign on lamp-posts and MTR stations appears to be seeking. Even if we replaced proactive alignment and holistic approaches with something more democratic in tone it is far from clear what the average Hong Kong person can do to further the doubtless laudable aims of the national plan.

Apparently we are going to have our own five-year plan in due course, some time later this year. No doubt this will be a very valuable indication of what Hong Kong should be doing to further national objectives. Perhaps it would make more sense to wait for it.

A separate question is whether the compulsive adornment of lamp-posts with announcements of public interest is a welcome innovation. Perhaps it is a dulce et decorum thing that citizens should be reminded of historic landmarks and invited to join in democratic festivals.

But there is a cost to hanging things on lampposts and district board members need to consider whether the message they are trying to get across really suits this particular mass medium. If the only thing you can get in at a legible size is two digits then the merits of proactive alignment and holistic approaches should be advertised elsewhere. There is no point in hanging a message on a lamppost if people need a pair of binoculars to read it.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Leave a Comment »

An old joke with topical resonance

April 27, 2026 by timhamlett

Reading the latest news I find myself recalling an old Russian joke. It must be an old joke because it features an attempt to assassinate Leonid Brezhnev, who died in 1982. This joke is entirely fictitious and has no real people in it, living or dead.

It goes like this:

Yesterday a madman attempted to assassinate our leader Leonid Brezhnev. The attempt failed. As soon as he produced his weapon the assailant was overwhelmed by a crowd of bystanders shouting “Give me the gun! Give me the gun! Let me do it!”

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

Keeping ‘Five dumplings not one less’ off local menus

April 17, 2026 by timhamlett

The Hong Kong government’s attitude to the rule of law is interestingly ambiguous. It wishes to claim credit for being a law-abiding government, but it does not want to sacrifice for this purpose the achievement of other desires.

This implicit conflict is nicely wrapped up in the matter of restaurant licences. In any sensible jurisdiction there are some requirements for restaurant operators, intended to ensure hygiene and other worthy food-related objectives.

However these days all government departments are expected to show their enthusiasm for national security. So last year the Food and Environmental Hygiene Department, which licenses restaurants, treated licence-holders to a letter warning that licences would be revoked if holders or their “related persons” engaged in conduct against national security or the public interest.

Now the FEHD has form in the matter of using existing regulations to pester or persecute restaurants which the government, for some basically political reason, does not like. So there were complaints that what was effectively a new licence condition was too vague, and consequently open to abuse.

Not so, the Chief Executive told a news conference. “Offending conduct means any offence that endangers national security, or acts and events that are contrary to national security and public interest in Hong Kong. It is very clear,”

But it is not very clear, because two very different things are being mixed together. An offence that endangers national security is a criminal matter. Conviction takes place in a public court and is a matter of record. A restaurant owner convicted of such an offence may feel that losing his licence is the least of his problems, but he can read the law and look at the way it has been applied.

He will avoid traditional menu items like Five Dumplings, Not One Less, or Three Hamburgers; Revelation of our Thyme. “Related persons” will be urged to behave themselves. But what does the public interest require?

This mystery persists in the latest version of the licence, which has a clause we can consider in full:

“I shall ensure that no act or activity engaged or involved in by me or any of my related persons (include the directors, officers, employees, agents and sub-contractors) may constitute or cause the occurrence of an offence endangering national security under the National Security Law or other laws of the HKSAR, or conduct is otherwise contrary to the interests of national security or the interest of the public (including public morals, public order and/or public safety) of Hong Kong.”

As tends to happen in very long sentences the grammar wilts a bit in the closing stages and seems to require either the insertion of “that” after conduct or the deletion of “is” in the same place. But this does not affect the meaning, which still leaves the question over what might be in the public interest.

There are some legal glosses on the phrase, though unfortunately they are not particularly helpful. Some restrictions on media stories can be waived if publication is “in the public interest”. Judges tend to be quite conservative about this but the general rule seems to be that the public interest is served by stories which expose iniquity (in a broad sense) or stories which alert the public to hazards which they need to know about.

In contract law it is well established that contracts will not be enforced if their effect is not in the public interest. Once again this does not come up very often – judges are even more hostile to unenforced contracts than they are to muckraking journalists – but traditionally contracts have not been enforced if they concern gambling or commercial sex.

The morals/order/safety part seems to have been inspired by the part of the Bill of Rights Ordinance which specifies the purposes for which the government may restrict freedom of expression. This suggests – a worrying thought – that the government intends to use threats to restaurant licences to restrict freedom of expression, and proposes if anyone complains to rely on the permitted restrictions.

This may not fly in court because the Bill of Rights Ordinance also requires that restrictions should be specified by law and necessary in a democratic society. Clearly legal language is being used here, but perhaps as an adornment rather than a substantial signal.

Where does all this leave us? Well one theory is that the government wishes to increase its options in efforts to suppress businesses which supported the wrong people in 2019. Asked if this was the case Mr Ronnie Tong, a government adviser, replied last year that it was “hard to say”.

Another theory is that the unstated purpose is to reinforce the existing routine practice under which food outlets which have accepted bookings from organisations the government does not like tend to cancel them at the last minute.

Maybe it is just that the “public interest” is one of those elusive philosophical concepts like “soft resistance” which puzzle the public but are perfectly clear to recycled policemen and the people who write the front page of Ta Kung Pao.

The other remaining puzzle is why restaurant licences have been singled out. All government departments, we are told, have an obligation to support national security. But the numerous other licences issued for various purposes by different departments have not been amended in the same way.

Yet.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Leave a Comment »

OK, Donald, your boat is not a toy, but do the toilets work?

March 31, 2026 by timhamlett

Excuse an excursion into territory I do not usually cover here. In my youth I had some qualifications as a naval historian. I even once applied for a job teaching naval history.

Such posts are of course extremely rare and involve teaching future naval officers. The interview was quite pleasant and was conducted inside the actual Admiralty Arch, in case you were not sure what you were getting into.

I fear I blighted my hopes by being rather critical of Admiral Nelson, still a cherished icon in Royal Navy circles. I had encountered him in a detailed study of the years 1798-1801. This brings you the Battle of the Nile, but also an adulterous passion for Lady Hamilton, and a disreputable incident much neglected by biographers, involving the massacre of prisoners who had surrendered “on terms”, on the grounds that an agreement with rebels was void.

So I never became a part of the naval infrastructure, and remained a critical observer of a national institution. It has a wonderful history, but standards wilted a bit when ships were no longer built of wood, and the battle cruiser was a bad idea. The RN’s main claim to fame in the 20th century was the pioneering of naval aviation.

So I bristled when the Orange Tornado, the Liar-in-Chief, the draft dodger whose take on military life is that it’s for “suckers”, ventured the opinion that the Royal Navy’s two aircraft carriers were just “toys”.

This is an illiterate assessment. If there was one thing that all serious navies discovered in the 20th century it was that aircraft carriers are the new capital ships, and all navies need to deploy one or two if they hope to operate away from their home waters and the land-based aircraft which can support them there.

It could be argued that Britain is now a medium-sized nation ill-equipped financially for the burdens of a blue-water navy. But if there is to be one then it has to have some sort of aircraft carrier.

No doubt the British carriers are smaller than their American counterparts. But the American models have other problems. The USS Gerald R Ford, it was reported, was being withdrawn from combat in the Eastern Med after a fire in the laundry. Reports added that this would also allow work on a long-standing problem with the plumbing.

As the BBC politely put it, “In January, the vessel suffered a malfunction in its toilet system, with US media reporting clogged toilets and long lines for restrooms on the ship. The Navy acknowledged that there had been some issues, but ‘clog incidents are addressed promptly by trained damage control and engineering personnel.’”

Well, patriotic Americans may if they wish dismiss British carriers as toys. But at least they are not full of shit.

Can you say the same of your President?

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments »

Legal logic: there was no baby, but if there was it was only a small one

March 26, 2026 by timhamlett

It sometimes seems, when listening to lawyers in action, that they live on a different planet from the rest of us. Consider the performance this week at the on-going Wang Fuk fire inquiry from Senior Counsel Jenkin Suen.

For those who have just come in, the Wang Fuk fire was a blaze at a housing estate in Hong Kong last November which left 168 people dead. The inquiry is into causes and the other usual topics.

Inquiries of this kind are often a little gold mine for the legal profession and this one will be no exception. Mr Suen is an eminent practitioner not usually on the government payroll, though he is a part-time High Court judge and chairman of the Copyright Tribunal. However Mr Suen is appearing on behalf of the Hong Kong government, the official permanent legion of lawyers being presumably too busy.

Last week the counsel for the inquiry, another Senior Counsel, Victor Dawes, revealed that the inquiry would be told that the Housing Bureau’s Independent Checking Unit – which was supposed to conduct safety checks on building sites, had habitually warned the consultant firm overseeing the Wang Fuk renovation project when an inspection was imminent. The consultants, Will Power Architects, had passed this intelligence to the contractor, Prestige Construction.

Mr Dawes said the contractor had as a result been able to “tamper with” the work site before inspectors arrived.

All this was reported, as you might expect. Mr Suen, addressing the tribunal on the government’s behalf, was not happy with this. In some reports the checking unit was “was portrayed as tipping off or colluding with the firms,” said Mr Suen. “Such characterisations were completely groundless.”

Now we must note in fairness to Mr Suen that this was in Cantonese, so there may be some scope for misunderstandings here. But I think most of us would take that to mean that there was no tip-off, and consequently could not have been any collusion.

Bafflingly, though, Mr Suen went on to explain and defend … the tip-off. There was a practical need for government departments to arrange inspections in advance, he said, so that the inspected party would be available to provide samples and explanations. And, he added, the advance notice was given only a day ahead of the actual inspection.

I am reminded of the woman who was accused of giving birth to an illegitimate baby and said it was “just a small one”.

There is an old joke about a lawyer’s son who got into trouble at school because he hit a cricket ball through the headmaster’s window. Asked to explain himself he said that “the window is not broken; if it is broken it was not by a cricket ball, if it was broken by a cricket ball it was not hit by me, and if it was hit by me it was an accident.”

Lawyers are allowed to do this. Mr Suen’s line appears to be that there was no tip-off, but if there was a tip-off it was a legitimate bid to improve the inspection.

Of course there is a place for inspections with advanced warning. They are often used in military circles. The inspected unit has an incentive and an opportunity to spruce itself up, tick off all the little maintenance items which have been awaiting attention, and put its best foot forward.

Many years ago I found myself unexpectedly the head of the then Department of Communication in what was then the HK Baptist College. I discovered that as well as the teachers I was also responsible for a warren of studios, workshops and darkrooms in which the students could practice the communicative arts with the help of suitably qualified technicians.

I did not know – indeed I still do not know – what the standard academic management solution to this situation is. But I borrowed from the Royal Navy the idea of doing a ground floor-to-roof inspection about once a month, accompanied by the Chief Technician. There was no warning; I did not particularly want to surprise people but I did not want them wasting time preparing for my arrival either.

I suppose we should leave to the inquiry the question whether monitoring renovation projects was an appropriate task for an inspection with prior warning. But I fear the general public’s view will be that an Independent Checking Unit should be a bit more carnivorous.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

Our government is worried about our weight … or do they mean fatness?

March 6, 2026 by timhamlett

Many years ago I read a short story about a man who successfully summoned a genie, and on being offered the traditional wish said he wished to lose weight. “Certainly,” said the genie, and in a matter of seconds the lucky fellow was glued to the ceiling, having become lighter than air.

The point of this story is, of course, that what the man really wanted was not to lose weight, but to lose fat. Euphemism can be dangerous when making wishes.

But here we have our friendly local government, taking up the urgent task of persuading us that most of us are too fat. Or as they prefer to put it, launching a three-year action plan on Weight Management.

This involves an Inter-departmental Weight Management Working Group (I am not making this up) which will open proceedings with a year-long campaign to raise awareness. The group will monitor, encourage, “foster a social environment to support weight management” and “enhance collaboration between Chinese and Western medicine”. I feel thinner already.

This is a serious matter for some people. Being very fat – or as the medical types prefer to put it obese – is bad for your health. On the other hand there is nothing so amusing as a solemn government preparing to tread on a banana skin.

Having conspicuously failed to persuade most of the population to vote, our leaders are now going to persuade many of us to stop eating? We missed out on the Matterhorn; let’s try Everest.

Behind all this is a survey, part of a series regularly conducted by the local Department of Health. The ensuing report announced that some 32 per cent of the population were obese and another 20 per cent were overweight.

I have two quarrels with this survey. One is that it defies common sense. If half the population was seriously overweight you would see this on a daily basis. Wandering through shopping malls or MTR stations half the people you see would be fat. Clearly “overweight” is being used in a rather special sense. After all half of us are of above-average weight. That is what the average means.

The other quarrel is with the timing. The survey was conducted in the years 2020-2022. Does that ring a bell? The COVID epidemic was in full swing. Beaches and exercise halls were closed. Gatherings were banned. Hiking in groups was legally hazardous. Entertainment wilted. Eating was the only pleasure left and a lot of us put on weight. I know I did.

To extrapolate this result to a general assessment of the population and base a policy on it is perhaps a bit hazardous?

And is it really necessary to have a government effort to raise awareness? Awareness of weight management is one area where the private sector is extremely active, sometimes dangerously so. We are constantly bombarded with helpful slimming suggestions which involve spending money. Progress in the hunt for slimming aids of all kinds is eagerly reported in the media.

Indeed this constant harping on weight loss is sometimes blamed for serious mental health problems, particularly among young women. Social media sites like Tik Tok and Pinterest are lambasted for their willingness to host images of skeletal victims of the resulting eating disorders.

The problem, surely, is not lack of awareness. People who are seriously overweight are well aware of the medical implications of their condition, and are occasionally reminded of them by doctors and friends. Just as most smokers know the price of their addiction, so do most over-eaters.

We all know that we should avoid the double cheeseburger with fries, eat more veggies and get out for regular walks, if we can manage nothing more strenuous. The problem is in the implementation. And the solution, I suspect, is not for the government to take on the role found in many families of the nagging aunt whose major contribution to conversations is unwanted advice.

May I at least humbly suggest that the Health Department desist from what appeared in one recent publication to be an attempt to get us all to give up booze. True there are a lot of calories in alcoholic drinks. But people have been drinking alcohol for thousands of years and they are unlikely to stop now.

More constructively, in a crime film I watched recently the prime suspect was asked to account for his whereabouts on the night of the murder and produced a porch camera video of him taking the dog out for a walk. “You walk your dog in the rain?” says the detective incredulously. “Sure.” says the suspect. “When you’ve got to go you’ve got to go. He’s a 200 lb dog. You want to clean up after him?”

Keeping a dog gets you out, rain or shine, pounding the pavement or walking the park. It’s good for you. Yet half the population lives in housing owned or managed by the government, where dogs are not allowed. An easy win for the Working Group?

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment »

Are our universities too willing to sacrifice students to the gods of political correctness?

February 24, 2026 by timhamlett

What does a university owe its students? This question attracts a surprising range of answers. Idealists regard the institution as in loco parentis, and infer that it should treat students as it would wish its own children to be treated. The ultra-realists say that the sole obligation of a university to its undergraduates is to teach what is on the syllabus, test the results and certify them for potential employers.

There is much variation in this matter, between teachers and between institutions. Hong Kong universities generally now seem to be abandoning any notion of care for their students.

When I joined the then Baptist College in 1988 it was a post-secondary college. In the ensuing years it turned into a university. In many ways this was an improvement: more money, better pay, housing allowances, nicer titles, less pressure on potential students to go to a “real university”.

But there are no benefits without costs, and one cost in this case was a change in the sort of people who wanted to work at BU. When it was a college doing nothing much besides teaching, the staff were people who enjoyed working with youngsters. As time went by and the institution moved up the academic food chain they were gradually replaced by people who were willing to seek wealth and fame by conforming to the management’s desire to see us all devote most of our attention to research.

I recall a staff training session in which the youngest member present asked the oldest one how much time should be devoted to teaching and how much to research. The answer was that you should spend the least amount of time you could get away with on teaching and the most you could spare on research.

Where this was leading became clear much later, when a discussion of a student with a personal problem led one colleague to opine that such things were none of our business and should be referred to the Student Advice Service when first noticed.

These were extreme positions and in my time BU remained generally a humane and thoughtful environment where young people were not just taught but also cared for. This may have owed something to its religious origins.

Anyway this gradual change of focus pales into insignificance compared with the state of near-open warfare which local universities now wage against some of their students. No university now tolerates a student union. Many student publications have closed. And now we have the case of Chinese U student Miles Kwan.

After the Wang Fuk Court fire Mr Kwan organised an on-line petition calling for an investigation of the fire, accountability for those responsible, resettlement for the residents and a review of construction supervision.

You would think this was harmless enough. All the things Mr Kwan had suggested were promised by the Chief Executive a day or two later. Can it be an offence to agree with the CE too early?

Well apparently yes. Mr Kwan was arrested by the national security police on, we were told, “suspicion of subversive intent.” This does not make a lot of legal sense. “Intent” itself is not an offence; there must be an action with it. So it may be that the matter will not be continued. It may also be that the police proceed to a formal prosecution and Mr Kwan is acquitted.

This does not look much like the majestic machinery of the law rolling on its impervious and impersonal way; it looks more like a deliberate act of intimidation by a regime which cannot tolerate any spontaneous expression of opinion not controlled by itself.

You might also think that all this had nothing to so with the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where Mr Kwan was a student. What students get up to in their off-duty hours is generally nothing to do with their university authorities. While we can all think of scenarios when we might not wish to follow this rule, launching an on-line petition is hardly one of them.

In any case, if a student is arrested, prudent universities stand back to await the result of the proper prosecution. The police case should go first. This sensible policy is in fact enshrined in the CUHK’s published procedures for handling student discipline cases.

Nevertheless Mr Kwan was invited to meet a disciplinary panel on January 7. The panel meeting seems to have been a stormy occasion. Mr Kwan’s inquiry about the offences with which he was charged was rejected with “we ask the questions here”. He did not conceal his misgivings about the procedural fairness of the whole affair.

The panel’s conclusion was odd. It decided to take no action over the arrest, but to expel Mr Kwan from the university for his “impolite and disrespectful attitude” during the hearing and the conclusion that it was “more likely than not” that he had breached confidentiality rules, presumably by telling people about the up-coming hearing.

This is legally dubious and also cruel. Mr Kwan will now not be able to graduate, after six years of study at CUHK. Preventing people from graduating as a disciplinary move is the capital punishment of university discipline. It is and should be the last resort.

When I was a member of a university disciplinary committee we spent a lot of time explaining to people who had incurred fines – usually from the library – that in the last resort they would not be allowed to graduate without clearing up their debts. We were very anxious not to carry out this threat. In cases involving small sums and genuine poverty we sometimes had a quick whip-round and paid the debt ourselves.

We would not have conjured up two new offences during the hearing of another matter and I can see no satisfactory explanation for what happened to Mr Kwan. Another petition has now been raised (daring stuff) asking the university to over-rule the committee’s decision as being unjust and procedurally improper.

But in a sense the damage has already been done. I do not know if the committee went off-piste because it felt pressured to display a becoming level of zeal for national security. But who would willingly attend an institution where students are so eagerly sacrificed to the gods of political correctness?

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment »

Are our leaders too keen on locking people up?

February 11, 2026 by timhamlett

So the new regulation requiring us all to wear seat belts on buses was cancelled after five days, apparently because of public opposition to the measure. It is nice to know that the government cares what people think, at least about some things.

At one level this is an everyday story of careless constitutional design. The reformed system is set up to stuff the legislative and consultative machinery with people who will tell the government what it wishes to hear. You can’t expect it to provide an accurate report of public opinion on anything and it doesn’t.

At another level this is a typical performance from a department which seems to have strong opinions of its own. Observant residents in Sui Wo Road are baffled by the apparently random placement of a variety of street furniture, culminating in the curious insistence on providing bus shelters in places where nobody will use them, while adamantly refusing to put them where they are needed.

In the days when I occasionally visited government departments to interview their occupants the Transport people came across as intelligent and thoughtful. No doubt they still do. But the results of their collective efforts are, alas, sometimes difficult to understand.

I am personally an enthusiastic user of seat belts. They have saved many lives, including mine. Tour buses, on my last trip to Europe, all featured seatbelts and we were regularly reminded that using them was a legal requirement.

But in a Hong Kong public bus? Regardless of the numbers painted on the side they are, at busy times, packed. The driver has no control over the number of passengers admitted, and quite understandably imposes a limit only when the number of standing passengers threatens to block his view of the nearside wing mirror. Insisting that the seated passengers should wear a belt seems a bit of a token gesture.

Anyway many writers have chewed over the transport aspects of this matter. What I thought should have been given a bit more thought was the matter of penalties for not belting up. Of course there must be some penalty or the rule will not be taken seriously, but what on earth was going through the head of the person who thought it appropriate to threaten offenders with three months in prison?

Failing to fasten your seat belt is, as the late lamented Judge Caprio used to put it, “not an offence of gross moral terpitude”. It is a victimless crime, in the sense that the only person likely to be hurt as a result of failure to fasten is the perpetrator. Most offenders will have been guilty of nothing worse than absent-mindedness.

Willingness to jail people for this minor offence sits uneasily with the government’s total helplessness when faced with equally minor offences committed by people who can afford cars of their own, and the general immunity enjoyed by the perpetrators of potentially dangerous peccadillos like double parking in busy streets or obstructing roads reserved for emergency use.

Not wearing a belt is surely the sort of offence which can be easily and quickly dealt with by the issuing of a fixed penalty ticket, preferably for some modest sum within the means of bus travellers, who are not a wealthy bunch.

Sending people to prison for a few weeks used to be common in many jurisdictions but is now often considered an abuse to be avoided as far as possible. It inflicts the sort of disruption which makes a return to law-abiding citizenship difficult; the prisoner may lose job, home or spouse. At the same time it provides no opportunity for the sort of rehabilitative and educational activities which can form the constructive part of a prison sentence.

The inmate is more likely to emerge resentful than reformed.

Our government seems, sadly, rather over-enthusiastic these days for throwing people into prison, regardless of their age or condition. This may be a difficult point to put across to retired policemen turned politicians, but the government is in some ways different from a police force.

Success in police work may be measured by the number of criminals jailed. Success in government is measured by the happiness of the governed. Are we happier this week?

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | 1 Comment »

Older Posts »