tim's experiment

All readers who enjoy seeing their social betters publicly humiliated will have relished the recent spate of stories about illkegal adornments on top people’s houses. Hong Kong may not be the investigative reporting capital of the world but we know a sitting duck when we see one. Suddenly any reporter in search of a spicey story has only to follow some newsworthy individual home and take a picture of his illegal structure. Most of them seem to have one. A surprising number of people, including combative columnists and (Oh, my paws and whiskers) at least one judge seem to think that the law should not apply to them. Senior officials who would get the sort of advice service from the Buildings Office which the rest of us can only dream of, turn out to have been lamentably misinformed, or even uncertain, of the exact status of their balcony windows.

It all started, you will recall, in the New Territories, where the ombudsman discovered that the law was being enforced in a rather feeble way. There was a charming story about a gentleman who was building a swimming pool in his garden. He refused to admit officials who wished to look at it, so they took no action. Eventually they got in and found the pool was finished. There was, apparently, a policy that no action would be taken against structures which were finished. So the pool owner got away with it.

Actually this so-called policy did not apply in the New Territories as such. My house is in the New Territories. When the Buildings people took exception to a structure on its roof they did not get, and indeed did not seek, admission to the house so they could look at it. Nor were they in any way inhibited by the thought that the structure was clearly finished. I got the usual stream of threatening letters. So the explanation provided was nonsense. What seems to be going on here is two legacies from the old colonial days.

One concerns a matter of principle. Generally in the English legal system you are free to do something unless the government has a reason for making it illegal. In colonies, though, this principle was discarded. In many matters you were not free to do something at all unless the government had given permission. This can be seen most clearly in the police attitude to parking, which is that all parking is illegal unless in a place specifically dedicated by the government for that purpose. The result of this approach, of course, is that everyone breaks the law. Most people park in what seem sensible places, and hope for the best. Flat owners who wish to glaze their balconies go ahead. The merits of the resulting situation from the cokonial point of view were clear. Firstly the law did not in effect apply to the employees of the occupying power. Secondly those in charge of enforcing it were endeared to the regime by spectacular opportuinities for corruption. Where everyone is breaking the law it is easy to find people who will slip you a tip to pick on someone else.

I do not suggest that corruption is what is going on now. What happens, I suppose, is that the Buildings people respond to complaints. What else can they do?

More interesting in its way is the evident fact that in some places they do not even do that. Told that someone is bulding a swimming pool – a fairly conspicuous garden ornament by any standards – they do not look over the wall, borrow a helicopter or resort to Google Earth. Nor do they seek a court order which would allow them to force their way into the scene of the crime. They politely ask the home owner if they can inspect his illegal swimming pool and when he tells them to f*** off they go meekly away. The law is an ass. This is not the Buildings people’s fault.

The British technique for imposing foreign rule on conservative rural societies was to befriend and reinforce existing landowners and other bigwigs, who would support colonialism in return for social order and the preservation of their privileges. What this meant in the New Territories was that officials would, and were expected to, befriend local bigwigs, even if the local bigwig was a gangster, as with the influx of lucrative opportunities for skulduggery of various kinds he increasingly was. The implicit deal was that this person would be supported in his social eminence in return for his backing for “the admnistration”. The support he wanted in practice was the non-enforcement in his area of the law generally, so that villagers might continue with impunity to explode fireworks, eat dogs, discriminate against women, rob strangers under various pretexts, and pocket occasional dollops of government money on the pretext of “fung shui”. My house does not benefit from this policy because it is not in a traditional village. Clearly though some people think this deal is still in force. My favourite illegal buildings story was the one about a group of villagers who thought they should be paid compensation for removing illegal structures from their houses. And perhaps, as a bonus, be allowed to add another three storeys.

Where do we go from here? I am reminded of the tale of the man who asked an Irishman  in the street in Dublin the way to the Post Office. “If I were you,” the Irishman replied, “I wouldn’t start from here”.  An amnesty will infuriate people like me who have been forced to obey the law. Allowing people to pay to keep their extensions is clearly discriminatory against the poor. Getting rid of the lot is hardly practical. And as bits are still dropping off buldings unexpectedly it seems the Buildings Office is rushed off its feet already. All law and order depends on the idea that most people will follow the rules even if there is no policeman watching them, because they are the rules. If the rules are widely flouted they don’t work, and no amount of police action will fix the problem. I am tempted to put my illegal extension back and see what happens.