tim's experiment

You know, to paraphrase Dirty Harry, with all that excitement I have plumb forgotten the number of Lufsig’s illegal structures. What was the number of unauthorized adornments Chez Leung? Was it, as the old song has it, 12 for the 12 apostles, 11 for the 11 who went to heaven, or 10 for the 10 commandments? Whatever the number was, it was too many for a man to subsequently stand up and pontificate publicly about the importance of obeying the law. Mr C.Y. Leung knows perfectly well that there is a compromise between obeying the law and not obeying the law: the one he used himself. You disobey the law until it becomes publicly known and an electoral liability, then you obey and perpetrate a cock and bull story about your “mistake”. Michael Chugani’s hyper-sensitive hypocrisy detector must be ringing all its bells at this point. Whether that produces any published results remains to be seen.

Another man with numbers problems is my old friend Robert Chow Yung. The point which he seems to have overlooked is that comparing one number with another number only works if both the numbers were collected the same way. Farmer Giles says he has 200 animals on his farm: 50 cows, 50 sheep and 100 chickens. Farmer Jones responds that he has 2000 animals on his farm: 50 cows, 50 sheep and 1,900 cockroaches. Clearly it would be foolish to conclude from this exchange that Farmer Jones is in some way in the lead. But Mr Chow just cannot resist counting the cockroaches. I do not know whether more people support Occupy Central or the Campaign for Peace, Silent Majority … whatever it calls itself this week. I do know that no useful conclusions can be drawn by comparing the number of people who participated in the “plebiscite” and the number of people who participated in the “petition”, because the conditions under which names were collected were quite different. Mr Chow’s lot were willing to accommodate tourists, children, and people who wanted to “vote early and vote often”, as they used to say.  This produces a higher number at the cost of making comparisons impossible.

The same goes for today’s march. Numbers of marchers on these occasions are notoriously difficult to establish and even more difficult to interpret. But whatever number we eventually accept it cannot be usefully compared with the turn-out on June 4 or any other date, because on those earlier occasions the number was not affected by shameless offerings of bus rides, museum visits, lunch boxes or free post-protest dinners.  We do not need to explore the possibility of undue pressure being exerted by employers, or offers of actual cash: what is readily admitted is enough to prevent this event from being compared usefully with others in which bribery was not on display.

Still on numbers of people at protests we come to the curious aftermath of the pro-p0lice demonstration the other week. All these years we have supposed that the police were politically neutral, and the reason why their estimates of numbers were always much lower than those provided by organizers of the event concerned was something entirely innocent: maybe the police counting method was more conservative. But after the pro-police demonstration the normal order of events was reversed. The police number was about twice as big as the one offered by the organizers. This was a small demonstration – the organizers’ figure was 2,000 and something – so there is a desperate shortage of innocent explanations for this. It seems that the police figures are just wild guesses like everyone else’s, and like everyone else the police tend to see what they want to see.

Finally we come to the week’s most surprising number, the majority for a vote of no confidence in the chairman of the Law Society. This was followed in all channels by the information that the rules of the Law Society do not require a chairman to resign if a vote of no confidence is passed. This brings to mind the story, for which I am indebted to Bernard Levin, of the domestic helper who came home one day to find an alligator in the bath. She resigned, explaining that “I cannot work in a house with alligators. I did not mention it because I did not think it would come up.” I am sure the drafters of the rules of the Law Society never considered the question of what would happen if a motion of no confidence in the chairman was passed. They assumed that the chairman, as any gentleman would, would resign. Off you go, Ambrose.