tim's experiment

You know the rule of law is in a bad way when the Secretary for Justice starts making it up as he goes along. Newspaper readers this morning were regaled with the news that the police would be justified in helping bailiffs to clear occupiers because refusal to comply with a civil court injunction was a “collateral criminal act in contravention of the rule of law”. Which is, with the deepest respect, nonsense. It is a fine example of the BBB (Bullshit which Baffles Brains) intended to excavate the government from a hole of its own making. Contravention of the rule of law is not an offence. Failing to comply with a civil court injunction is not an offence until certain formalities which are still in progress have been completed. Outsourcing the clearance of the occupiers to a few loony lefties working on a private basis was a stupid idea in the first place. Reintroducing the police in this way will place everyone on the street in an impossible position, including the policemen.

But a lot of people have been making it up as they go along lately. We will pass quickly by the limp explanation provided by Superintendent Teargas (real name still an official secret) for his actions on the first night, though it is still being recycled. Kindness also requires us to linger only briefly on Mr Grenville Cross’s latest output, which ended an unblemished record of courtly legal discourse with a burst of venomous partisanship. Mr Cross asserts that the reason the NPC Standing Committee was so uncongenial in designing our future electoral system was the rejection of Article 12 legislation in 2003, which is unprovable, to say the least. The suggestion that some people wanted the police officers who were allegedly seen on television beating up a civilian to be hung, drawn and quartered was an exaggeration. And if Mr Cross looks up a standard textbook on media law he will find that if, as he concedes, the policemen had “not even been charged with an offence” then it was perfectly within the “legal niceties” for concerned citizens to urge that charges should be brought.

I shall also not discuss in detail Ms Regina Ip’s claim that the present arrangements for electing Legco conform to international standards. This was so obviously wrong that I thought it must have been a misprint. But no correction has appeared. Perhaps Harvard University should consider asking for its degree back.

For fiction dressed as fact, though, Felix Chung is in a class of his own. Mr Chung is a vice chairman of the Liberal Party and a Legislative Councillor. He is also extraordinarily gullible. In an article called “Internal damage” which called, as so many do, for an end to the occupation, Mr Chung cited figures which had apparently emerged from a meeting of the Commerce and Economic Development Bureau with sundry commerce and trade associations. Some of the items reported were difficult to check. Some of them should have aroused suspicion. A survey conducted by a business association, for example, found that the majority of SMEs had been either affected or severely affected by the occupations. More than 60 per cent said their turnover had dropped by 40 per cent or more. The Federation of Hong Kong, Kowloon and New Territories Hawkers’ Associations reported a drop in business for their members of 70 per cent!

Now let us compare these horror stories with a few numbers. The majority of Hong Kong’s population, including me, lives in the New Territories. They have not been in the slightest affected by the occupations, which have involved a large piece of Central and small pieces of Causeway Bay and Mong Kok. A further large slab of the population lives in the belt of North Kowloon running across from Tsuen Wan to Cheung Kwan O. They have probably visited the Mong Kok site to see what was going on but have not been prevented from buying what they want to buy in any way. Shops and hawkers of the SME kind are not selling Italian handbags or expensive perfumes whose sales might suffer from the erosion of the buying mood. They are selling food and clothes which people need on a regular basis. It appears that one of two things has happened here. Either the business associations lied fluently in an effort to tell the Commerce and Economic Development Bureau what it wanted to hear. Or some important details were missed out when their complaints were passed on. Either way if Mr Fung was not blinded by partisanship or stupidity he should have smelled a rat.