tim's experiment

The question how to elect the next Chief Executive is not an insoluble problem. Even if you accept that what is not in the Basic Law is not acceptable and there must be a nominating committee and the nominating committee must look rather like the existing election committee … the situation is not hopeless. People generally do not want or expect a completely free and fair election. The problem is that if the nomination process is totally fixed then the ensuing exercise of universal suffrage is meaningless. So we want to see a reasonable range of competing candidates offering meaningful alternatives. We do not want to see a process which produces a choice between two matched millionaires with unblemished records of grovelling to the Liaison Office, toxic personalities and no administrative ability, distinguishable only by the size of their illegal basements.

Now I do not believe that the constraints imposed by the Basic Law make a reasonable choice impossible. Some suitable reforms of the election committee and some sensible arrangements for its procedure could produce a system which, while a long way short of public nomination, ensures that candidates with substantial support are fairly considered. So far, though, apart from a few voices crying in the wilderness, nobody seems to be working on this. And the committee currently preparing its views on the matter could well make it impossible. Of course the committee is not helped by the fact that it is working on the basis of the SAR Government’s thoroughly misleading report on the matter. Still, let us be more specific. If there is a requirement that all candidates secure the support of half of the nomination committee then the situation will be beyond repair. The nomination committee will not be a nomination committee; it will be a vetting committee. No sensible democrat could vote for a proposal incorporating this feature.

The conservative (which means pro-Communist – it’s an upside down world) forces seem to be relying on the notion that the general public will be vigorously in favour of anything they come up with. This is unlikely. To take an extreme example, we can all see that if the universal suffrage election featured one single candidate personally selected by the incumbent, then it would be no improvement on the present system. This may seem an unlikely scenario but it used to be so common in Latin America that the technical term for it is Spanish: candidato unico.  Possible electoral arrangements can be arranged on a scale with candidato unico on one end and maybe the system which made Boris Johnson the Mayor of London on the other. The question which then arises is where on the scale does a system move from worse than nothing to better than nothing, and where in relation to that point are we heading. And I fear we are heading for the wrong place. A lot of people will feel that the present system, which allows a genuine debate between different views preceding a fixed election, would be better than a system in which the choice of candidates was fixed and no real discussion was likely at all – bearing in mind that we are not going to get a real choice either way.

After all we know where we are with Lufsig. He is a puppet but a public puppet. Allowing his successor puppet to masquerade as the people’s choice  is not an obvious improvement.