tim's experiment

Oh, the irony! On one page of this morning’s newspapers, another irritating lecture from a Beijing bigwig about the importance of the rule of law, and the need for Hong Kong people diligently to observe the restrictions designed to ensure that the arrival of universal suffrage does not disturb our imperial rulers. And on another page, the law flouted, and flouted by the current example of the sort of leader Beijing officials thing we ought to choose.

Let us be more specific. The Beijing bore is vice president Li Yuanchao, of whom we can confidently assert that he would not recognise the rule of law if he found it floating in his bath. This was a “don’t do as I do; do as I say” moment. Business as usual. Meanwhile in Hong Kong our lovely Lufsig was appearing at the opening of a publishers’ conference. Mr C.Y. Leung paid fulsome tributes to the importance of free media, a piece of infrastructure which he believes we still possess. He then ill-advisedly moved on to consider the attack on former Ming Pao editor Kevin Lau. Nothing to worry about there because, as the Standard quoted, “the assailants and others were quickly apprehended on the mainland and turned over to the Hong Kong police.” The version of Mr Leung’s words in the Post is slightly different but just as illegal.

Illegal? Yes indeed. Every beginning reporter learns, and over the years many of them have heard it from me, that once someone has been arrested judicial proceedings have begun, and it is a serious offence to imply in speech or writing that the persons arrested are guilty … or for that matter innocent. I do not know whether the two persons arrested on the mainland are the assailants or not but in either case they are entitled to be treated as innocent until proven guilty. It is scandalous that the Chief Executive of the Hong Kong SAR should express an opinion on this important point while the trial or trials are still pending. Normally one would expect to see the newspapers prosecuted for reporting it, but I fancy under the circumstances everyone is going to pretend it never happened, or pretend that there is nothing wrong because we know the pair are guilty anyway, or pretend that this is an irrelevant little legal point and it is not in the public interest to pursue the matter.

As we move on towards Occupy Central, though, this is going to bring a little problem. Can a Chief Executive lecture us all on the importance of the rule of law while carelessly breaking it on other occasions? This is not just a matter of an illegal vine trellis or two, after all. The offence this time is called contempt of court and people are occasionally jailed for it. I suspect if the Secretary for Justice had said what Mr Leung said then half the legal profession would be baying for his resignation. But as it is Mr Leung himself who has dropped the legal brick I wonder whether anyone will bother. It is already clear that he doesn’t care what we think.

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Well I hope none of you were surprised to hear that the great new White Elephant High Speed Railway to Shenzhen is running two years late already. Large projects of this kind often succumb to what is called the Planning Fallacy: over-optimistic assessments of the prospects for early and below-budget completion. Academic controversy continues over whether this is due to an innate bias in the human brain towards optimistic projections of the future, or it should more properly be blamed on unscrupulous contractors who make unrealistic promises, knowing that once the project has started it is unlikely to be cancelled however bad the news gets.

I must congratulate the MTR on contributing to the great tradition of offering limp excuses for rail delays, pioneered by the UK’s former Southern Region, which was often paralyzed by autumnal avalanches of fallen leaves. The MTR’s problem, it seems, is that it rained. What a shock that must have been. Also the tunnelers ran into some rocks under Lai Chi Kok. You can imagine the two great men in their Baker Street flat musing over this item. “See, Holmes, according to the newssheets people who were digging a hole under Lai Chi Kok found rocks there.” The great man took his pipe from his mouth. His lip curled. “Indeed, Watson, and what were they expecting to find, marshmallows?”

The great international example of this sort of catastrophe is the Sydney Opera House. Work on this started in 1958, at which time the budget was A$7million. When the building opened in 1973 it had cost A$102million. A more recent example is the building which houses the Scottish Parliament. Work started in 1997, with the projected cost at GBP40 million. When it was completed in 2004 the estimated final cost was GBP431million.  Rail projects are the specific hobby of a Danish prof called Bent Flybjerg. He been trying to foster more pessimistic planning by beating people over the head with the past statistics, like these: between 1969 and 1998 the average over-estimate of passenger numbers for major new rail projects was 105 per cent. The average (not the maximum, the average) cost over-run was 45 per cent. Interestingly the early casualties did not produce any more caution in the later estimates. the error rate remained the same. This suggests that it is probably the same now.

More recent international examples are equally ominous. Barcelona’s ninth underground line was supposed to cost 1.9 billion Euros. It came in at 8.7 million Euros. The modernisation programme for the UK’s West Coast line was originally supposed to cost between 2 and 3 billion GBP. Revised estimates effortlessly zoomed to 14.5 billion GBP, at which point the track company became insolvent. A new rescue strategy was brought in in 2003 which would, it was hoped,. keep costs down to GBP 8.3 million. These hopes have not been entirely realised; work is still in progress and the final bill is expected to surpass GBP 9 million.  In this company the Edinburgh tram system, which should be opening next month, looks a bargain. When work started in 2006 the budget was GBP 498 million. Final bill with financing costs is expected to be only GBP 1 billion. But this is deceptive. Nearly half of the originally planned network was cancelled to save money.

What can we hope for, then, from the MTR’s Great White Elephant? Well there was no competitive bidding for the contract (our two railway companies having been merged with each other) so the original number offered – $80 billion – can be considered an honest guess. Unfortunately this was considered politically unacceptable so it was massaged down to $68 billion. This is now the figure used in hand-outs and press reports, although the project was not trimmed in any way; all that happened was that some parts which could plausibly be inserted elsewhere in the public works budget – like roads – were excluded from the headline figure on the grounds that they “would have to be built anyway…”  The MTR has now produced a $4billion contingency fund, which is going to cover the latest glitches. So this is now presumably a $72 billion project. It is difficult to believe protestations that the two-year delay now expected will have no further impact on costs.

I infer two things. Firstly about suggestions from Shenzhen that the Hong Kong Government should accept some financial responsibility for disappointing ridership on the already existing line between Shenzhen and Guangzhou: these should be resisted strenuously. Two years may not be the end of it. Secondly there is the position of the responsible minister, who despite  being on the MTR professed himself totally surprised by last week’s news. If I were you, mate, I would resign now. It’s all downhill from here.

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It is nice to see that somebody still has a kind word to say for the old colonial government of Hong Kong, which comes in for a lot of gratuitous stick these days. Still I must say that Regina Ip’s piece in the Sunday Post was laying it on a bit thick. I do not doubt that Ms Ip in her career encountered some expatriate civil servants who were humane and intelligent men, genuinely dedicated to doing the best possible job for the people of Hong Kong. There were such people. I met some of them and Ms Ip must have encountered a lot more civil servants than I did.  But are we then to go on and say that “Hong Kong … afforded those elite administrators a chance to build an economic miracle and a successful society by blending the finest of British and Chinese administrative traditions, unencumbered by the divisive, debilitating effects of parliamentary politics”? Let us leave aside the inconvenient fact that most of the economic miracles and successful societies in the world have managed to combine those happy attributes with parliamentary politics. Was the colonial government really the apex of British and Chinese administrative tradition?

This is not how it seemed at the time. No doubt that line about blending the best of the two traditions was a good morale-booster for local recruits, who could hardly be told that they were contributing to the last dying flicker of the glory that was the British Empire. But even Ms Ip’s mentors would, I suspect, be surprised to see this line taken so seriously. After all anyone who has a background in colonial history will recognise in the old Hong Kong system the standard colonial arrangement, in which conservative traditional leaders are recruited to support alien rule by the promise that the wealth and privileges to which they are accustomed will be preserved. No doubt many people thought that Hong Kong was better run than the obvious alternative. But colonial administrators were not all disinterested Platonic philosopher kings. Many of them were a by-word for greed, racism, snobbery, homophobia and above all corruption.

Then we have an interesting passage about the effect of electoral politics on those who practise it. “No geographical constituency legislator could have got elected without honing their (sic) skills in sloganeering, staging public protests, mobilising the masses, attacking their (sic again) opponents and generally all the chicanery of political campaigning,” says Ms Ip. But just a moment, one of the directly elected members for the Hong Kong Island constituency is one Ip Lau Suk-yee, GBS JP, alias Regina herself. So is this a confession that Ms Ip has mastered all the chicanery? Or is she just talking about other people?

I fear Ms Ip is not the only colonial bequest who finds it difficult to understand how a government can manage if it is under public pressure to provide education, health, pensions and such like. Well this is how it works in most of the world: to govern is to choose, and the choices are made by the people who will suffer the consequences, ill or otherwise. Ms Ip has a notoriously tin ear for public sentiment. So does the government of which she is a part. That is its problem. Not the fact that some legislators entertain the sacrilegious notion that the people should get what they want.

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Readers may have been wondering, as I have, for many months how the election by universal suffrage of the next Chief Executive was going to be fixed. That it was going to be fixed was never in doubt. We are dealing with democracy with Chinese characteristics here. Elections are only allowed if they can be fixed.

The broad outlines of how this will be done are now clear. The Nomination Committee will be pretty much the same shower who were the electors last time round. Any candidate who wishes to run will need more than half of the votes of the committee. Of course this would leave us with a maximum of one candidate, and we can’t have that. So each committee member will be given three votes, thereby ensuring that there will be three candidates. This will produce three trusted candidates, every one of whom will no doubt be a notorious creep owning at least two illegally-adornment-infested houses in the best parts of town. And we will be graciously allowed to choose between any of them who survives the election period without coming up with some no-no like a noisy mistress or an illegal basement.

This is a preposterous arrangement. Even if the nominating committee were genuine  it would be a recipe for three identical candidates offering a minimum of genuine choice. The nominating committee is in effect a vetting committee. And we can all guess what sorts of candidates will be vetted out. No doubt we will be told that candidates who wear the label of a major political party or have massive visible public support can still be nominated. But they can also still be not nominated, and that is what will happen to any of them who threatens to divert the election from its intended course, which will probably be the re-election of C.Y. Leung.

Any derogation or dilution of this catastrophic arrangement will be presented as a major concession by the comrades to the people of Hong Kong, the implication of this being that we should gratefully shut up and accept the result as a legitimate representative of us all, even if the winner turns out to be Lufsig again.

Next year: how to fiddle Legco.

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