tim's experiment

Let us see, in the public-spirited atmosphere of the festive season, if we can sort out the problems of those people who are puzzled by the continuing unpopularity of our glorious Lufsig – I mean leader.

It seems that Mr CY Leung’s advertised appearances always attract a hostile crowd, so he is reduced to unadvertised or private ones. This did not happen to previous CEs or for that matter Governors. This is the kind of coincidence which has some people smelling a malignant conspiracy, and others calling for new public order legislation to protect the majesty which doth hedge about our Mayor. Why, wondered one of these suspicious people, did Mr Leung get no credit for his achievements?

Well there are some problems with Mr Leung’s “achievements”. One of them is that some of them do not look so much like achievements as quick fixes in which important principles were sacrificed for political expediency. Another is that Mr Leung did not come into office after a long spell in opposition. Any established policy which he now seeks to correct was preserved or initiated while he was a big wheel in the two previous administrations. It is particularly difficult to work out what Mr Leung – who as Convenor of Exco was the CE’s senior advisor at the time – thought when the administration killed the public housing construction programme which he is now painfully reviving. Did he argue vociferously against this piece of social vandalism, Exco deliberations having miraculously remained secret so nobody heard about it? Did he grit his teeth and long for the day when he could correct the error? Or is he, as a post-doctoral fellow in the Liaison Office University of Yesmanship, incapable of saying “no” to anyone further up the slippery pole to advancement in the service of Communist despotism?

Be this as it may, the problem is not in what Mr Leung does, but what he is. The fact is that he cheated shamelessly to get the job in the first place. Now on the Mainland it is axiomatic that we should let by-gones be by-gones on a truely epic scale. What are several tens of millions dead in the rosy light of the Party’s glorious history? Unfortunately this is not a habit in Hong Kong, where a certain level of integrity and honesty is still regarded as becoming in our leaders. Mr Leung is in the position of those Shakespearean bastards who seize the throne by murdering the rival claimants. Nothing he can do as a ruler will expunge the manner of his arrival. It does not matter whether he does a good job. The objection is to his having the job at all.

Of course as any careful reader of Shakespeare will know, the situation is not completely hopeless. The Royal usurper can salvage his reputation and support with a successful war against the French. Unfortunately Calais is far away and Hong Kong does not have an army, so Mr Leung is reduced to picking a diplomatic bunfight with the Philippines.  I cannot recall the last time a Hong Kong Government did anything so shameful. The latest “sanctions” are not in pursuit of compensation, reparations or accountability. All these substantive issues have been successfully sorted out. Hong Kong is now starting a fight because it still wants … an apology. Polite expressions of regret from the relevant government are not grovelling enough. A fulsome apology from the current Mayor of Manila (who is as it happens the responsible official) is dismissed as “insincere”.  So we are now acting on the rather unlikely theory that you can get a more “sincere” apology out of someone if you hold a gun to their head.

And will the Hong Kong government apologise to those domestic helpers who are abused, exploited and tortured by their employers?  This is not the result of an unexpected crisis mishandled. It is a result  of policies deliberately instituted and persisted in despite, or because of, their obvious consequences in making it difficult for helpers to assert even the most fundamental human rights, of which the right not to be tortured is one. I am not holding my breath.