tim's experiment

I am all for justice being tempered with mercy. The only statement in the Bokhary row that I agreed with was the magistrate’s observation that sending her to prison would ruin the rest of her life. This was probably true of many of the hundreds of people he has sent to prison during his judicial career, but it is nice to see enlightenment dawn, however late. Anyway, I am not by instinct a hanger and flogger, all right?

Still, I am moved to protest by the campaign Jake Van der Kamp has been running in the Sunday Post, to the effect that financial crime should be regarded as trivial, or better still as not really crime at all. I realise that it is common for people in dodgy professions – like salesmen of used cars, double glazing, Oriental carpets or uncompleted Hong Kong flats – to feel that the little tricks they play on the public should be regarded as a bit of harmless fun. But I did not think people in the financial business wished to be considered in that category. Although looking at some of the people they elect to Legco, perhaps they do.

Look, if the events of the last two or three years have taught us anything, it is surely that financial shenanigins have serious consequences. They lead to stagnant economies, bankrupt businesses, lost jobs, wrecked families, ruined lives. The consequences may be out of sight. That does not mean tbey should be out of mind.  Me Van der Kamp argues that financial crimes do not leave “blood on the pavement” so nobody is hurt, and the victims volunteered by swimming in a pool which they knew contained sharks. These attempts at mitigation tell us nothing about whether a crime should be treated seriously or not. “She was not hurt” and “she asked for it” are the two excuses most often offered by rapists and paedophiles.  The people who rob you with a fountain pen are gentlemanly types with nice cars, Jockey Club memberships and friends in the business media. But they’re still robbers.

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Watching the Global Football TV programme twirl past my nose (you have to watch something while you’re exercising and I have conscientious objections to 24) I suddenly realised that I had passed an unexpected statistical landmark. The entire 2010 World Cup had passed, and I had seen none of it.   Not one kick of the ball – no goals, no noteworthy incidents, no opening or closing ceremonies – nothing. I realise that for some people this might be unexceptional, and even welcome. I remember one of my colleagues on the Derby Evening Telegraph going out to get some public reaction to the latest development at the local footy club. “Son,” said the first person he asked, “if they played in my front garden I would close the curtains.” Not everyone is a fan. Well I am not really a fan, but I take an interest.

I remember sitting at home to watch the World Cup in considerable detail when it was held in England, and we won. I remember hiring a second hand television on behalf of a floor full of students so we could watch it in Mexico, although England had I think not qualified. When I had done five years as a sports reporter the urge to watch the whole thing had disappeared. Watching football was work. But I still tuned in for the odd game. If you work in the education business and have modern teaching technology you can now put your employer’s equipment to work and watch on a very large screen, which is fun. But as far as South Africa is concerned I missed the whole thing.

This is partly, of course, because they no longer have it on the old free-to-air television network. You can’t see anything unless you have cable. I fell out with the cable people a couple of years ago – a long story – so we just have the basic stuff. And the World Cup was not on it. No doubt I should have expected this. More surprisingly it was not on the news either. News coverage of every football league in the world includes a bit of footage. Usually a few seconds of action with a goal at the end of it. But this time the World Cup was an exception. No clips, however short, on the news. So the television news people were reduced to still pictures and occasional computer reconstructions, followed by live interviews with fans outside the stadium.  The excitement in South Africa, if there was excitement, was not conveyed. Even after the Cup was over the mysterious shortage continued. The Global Football programme has no clips either.

Now I don’t know if the World Cup people adopted this as an explicit policy, but the result of their efforts, at least in Hong Kong, was that you could not so much as see a ball being kicked unless you payed someone. It might be the cable people, or a cinema, or a bar owner, but the idea that this was something which a moderately interested person could watch for free has disappeared. So I suppose I was not the only moderately interested person who missed it completely this time around.  And I wonder how long the thing will last as the great show it used to be if this level of greed is deployed every time. Of course the game needs its avid fans. But it also needs the vast legion of occcasionally interested onlookers whose attention fosters the delusion that what happens on the pitch is important. The game needs to be talked about. If all the water-cooler conversations die after a few sentences because only the fanatics saw any of the games then interest will eventually be combined to a few rabid enthusiasts, as it is for rowing or chess.

Having said which being bombarded with the Olympics for two weeks was no fun either. Is there a happy medium in these matters?

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I am puzzled by the spectacle of the government fighting a flat-out legal battle over whether the mysterious Ms W (who was Mr W several operations ago) can marry her Mr Right. I mean we taxpayers have been pushing the boat out here. I have no idea what fees were paid to the QC flown out specially from London to argue on the government’s behalf, but I’ll wager she did not fly tourist and she did not stay in Chung King Mansions either.

I can see how we got to this stage. Faced with an applicant for marriage with a birth certificate in the wrong gender the bureacrat behind the desk would pass the matter to higher authority. This higher authority, still pretty junior, would take the safe course and say “no”. This would then work its way up the pyramid, with successive layers concluding that they must support the front-line staff and those people know what they are doing anyway. So the underlings say “no” becasue they think the matter should be decided higher up and the higher-ups say “no” because they think it should be decided by the underlings. This is how public administration works, or doesn’t work, as the case may be.

With the arrival of the court case the matter has to go to the Department of Justice, but to the part of the department where justice takes second place to finding legal pretexts for whatever the government has decided it wants to do. Since government policy is to say “no” the department says “no” and everyone is happy except Ms W. And so we go to court. Probably the best thing, actually. The gender situation is a good deal more complicated that it was when the law was drafted. And in all the paper-shuffling so far, nobody has really had a chance to sit back and consider the matter from scratch. Let a judge have a look by all means. But why the enormous trouble and expense? What has the government got to lose?

After all the fact is that this particular question is not going to come up very often. People in W’s situation have a hard row to hoe. Years of psychological confusion lead to prolonged and painful medical encounters. Finally making the longed-for transformation tends to lead to loss of friends and job. And having arrived, the new you is not going to be a prime property in the marriage market. Not only do you have an exotic personal history. Medical science has not actually reached the stage where pregnancy is possible. So the number of eager couples who are going to turn up at the registry with confusing birth certificates is minute. This is a decision which has virtually no practical consequences, except for those personally involved, for whom it is all-important. Saying “yes” would have done them a great kindness and done nobody any harm.

So why is the government resisting with such enthusiasm? I do not believe that this is a slippery slope situation. Are we really to believe that a homosexual man, wishing to contract a same-sex marriage, might undergo prolonged psychological therapy, have his hormones sabotaged, endure extensive and painful surgery to rearrange his private parts and turn himself into a woman to marry someone who prefers men…? This is nonsense. Some of our leaders lead a sheltered existence but surely there are experts who can put them straight on this sort of thing. The worrying rumour is that they are consulting the wrong sort of experts. It seems that a surprising number of our political appointees are members of fundamentalist sects of one kind or another. They spend their Sunday mornings being told that God intended sex to be conducted on rare occasions between married couples of opposing sexes in the missionary position. This is a poor basis for policy-making, but then these unelected people don’t have to tell us what they really think about anything.

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If oyu don’t remember who Mr Zinger was that is probably because you are not a serious Bob Dylan fan. Mr Zinger, a rich young man, killed a waitress in a Baltimore hotel and was jailed for a mere six months. Dylan’s song about the case is a small masterpiece, though not one of his much-covered ones. Perhaps it is a bit too long.

Anyway Mr Zinger came to mind because there has been much discussion lately about the way in which the law treats, or doesn’t treat, defendants with rich daddies and other attributes like, as the song has it, “friends in high office in the politics of Maryland”, or the local equivalent. This has always been a delicate topic. Teachers of law will tell you at an early stage that one of the characteristics of the Common Law is that all people who appear in the courts are treated equally. As in principle they are. We all recognise that the practice does not quite come out like that. One of the important functions of the law is to protect property, and this is of little interest to those who have little of it. Judges tend to come from a sheltered and educated background; defendants do not.  Anatole France wrote of “the majestic equality of the laws, which forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets and to steal bread.” An Englishman observed more succinctly that “the Courts of Law are open to all – like the Ritz Hotel”.  To put it bluntly, we all know that if you are a rich bitch with good connections and an expensive lawyer you can get away with almost anything short of murder (sorry, Nancy) whereas the outlook for Tin Shui Wai housewives fresh off the China train is less rosy. Such is life.

Still it is usual for magistrates and judges to go to some lengths to conceal this. And this is a useful convention, because they then have to think seriously about the issues of principle involved. So while unstirred by the affaire Bokhari I am quite disturbed that the magistrate shamelessly explained his benevolent approach to sentencing by referring to the defendant’s “well-off background”. Still this was a minor peccadillo compared with another case later in the week, in which the magistrate, jailing a man for indecent assault, said he would not risk the abuse he would get from the newspapers if he succumbed to a request for a non-custodial sentence for such a serious offence.  Leaving aside the question whether indecent assault is such a serious offence, this violates an important principle of judgeship. Magistrates and judges should not read newspapers if they can’t handle comments on their work. You boys and girls better all write out 200 times this quote from Lord Justice Salmon: “I am quite convinced that no judge … would be influenced in any way by anything he read in the newspapers. If he were he would not be fit to be a judge.”

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Interesting story in Sunday’s Post about the Real Estate Developers’ Association, which has apparently commissioned a very expensive PR firm (nothing but the best for our plutocrats) to find out what the public thinks of them and why. The first interesting thing about this piece of news is that it was not new. It was published the previous Tuesday here: http://biglychee.com/ We blogistas have to stick together.

The second funny thing about it is that the real estate moguls are going to pay a lot of money for something which many people would be happy to tell them for free. Many of us would be happy to have the chance to tell a selection of real estate developers what we think of them, which would go roughly like this:

The real estate business is populated entirely by lying scum whose attitude to ordinary people is much like that of shearers to ordinary sheep. They deploy shoals of legal landsharks to find loopholes in the laws designed to ensure that new buildings are reasonable in size, inoffensive in appearance and consistent with the government’s view of what would be in the public interest in the area concerned. Aided by subtle corruptionof the relevant parts of the civil service this enables them to inflict on our urban landscape buildings which are gross, ugly and frequently deployed in a way which not only spoils the view for everyone else but effectively prevents them from even seeing it. The industry’s ethics are non-existent, its aesthetics abysmal, and faced with a real estate developer as a potential son-in-law most of us would feel a strong preference for an ordinary decent murderer.  Added to these offences is their malign influence on public policy, which includes preventing the government from running a decent public housing programme, and slagging off the Chief Executive in Beijing if he does not share REDA’s bloated opinion of its importance to the local economy. We blame real estate developers largely for the fact that accomodation in Hong Kong is hideously expensive, and considerably for the shortcomings of our political system. Also we don’t like them. Too many come across in public as arrogant fatcats with antediluvian politics and obnoxious personalities.

As to what the expensive PR people will think up to remedy this situation, the mind — as they say — boggles. I am not going to try to help this bunch of bandits but some of the more objectionable individuals might improve the overall average perception if they contrived to drop dead in the street.

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