tim's experiment

Dear me, I have had so much fun watching the government’s puppet legislators apologising for the reform cock-up that I fear Hong Kong politics will never offer so much amusement again. One must congratulate for their unaccustomed honesty those legislators whose main concern was that Beijing, or the Liaison Office, might be angry because they had failed to record a vote for the government. So now we know where they take their instructions from. Ms Regina Ip, who has often given the impression of having a mind of her own, explained her part in the walk-out as being simply a matter of following the DAB. So now we know what the New People’s Party is: it’s a political trick to get some more DAB supporters into the chamber under another name. Academic observers wondered what the voters would make of it, a question which did not seem to have come up much with the people concerned. And Mr C.Y. Leung, who can be depended on not to rise to any occasion, came out with the limp comment that it did not matter really because the pan-democrats had all said they would vote against the proposal anyway. But this will not do at all.

True the pan-democrats had said they would vote against the proposal, but as Mr Leung’s long record of terminological inexactitude reminds us, you can never rely on what a politician says. It may well be that some pan-democrats were hovering, tempted by the inducements offered, swayed by the last-minute pleas of Ms Carrie Lam, or bored with being virtuous. I do not suggest that anyone was doing anything as crass as offering large sums of money. But there is more joy in heaven over one sinner that repents than over 99 righteous persons who need no repentance, as Luke puts it. We need not doubt that if a few pan-dems had rescued the government from defeat at the last minute they would have been lavishly rewarded – lionised by the Liaison Office, nominated to sundry offices of prestige and profit, praised as the voices of moderation and possibly in one or two cases even allowed to be one of the ten candidates to be considered by the election committee before it names the three men approved by Beijing. Honours and opportunities would have come their way, but only, of course, if the government did manage to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. There would have been no mileage in changing your mind the way things turned out, which would merely have changed the voting figures from – say 28:9 to 24:13.

In other words, if anyone was going to change his mind at the last minute he would only do so if the full force of the people’s puppets was in the chamber and voting. Otherwise it would make no sense. After all the last-minute turncoats are going to pay a price. They will lose a lot of friends, be turfed out of their parties and will probably have no electoral prospects at all. This might be worth if if you were going to be the historic last-minute rescuers of the government’s historic initiative. If you are just going to spread the derision more widely then it is not worth it at all. So the fact is that we shall never know what would have happened without the walk-out. Possibly the pan-democrats would all have voted the same way. But the absence of the government payroll vote certainly made changing your mind pointless. So the cock-up may or may not have made a difference.

It has certainly made a difference to the way people look at the government’s supporters. Even the SCM Post, which is increasingly hard to distinguish from the China Daily, printed the observation that the establishment’s lawmakers did not seem on the whole to be very bright, and that election from a functional constituency neither required nor conferred any political nous. The call for democrats to “unbundle themselves” was recalled, after the establishment crew had exposed themselves as not only bundled but willing bundled puppets. People said nice things about the Liberal Party, a rare event. And James Tien achieved viral status in cyberspace with a cartoon pig and an assurance that it wasn’t a conspiracy, just stupidity.  On the whole I have to agree. It is tempting to suppose that this was all a devious plot to allow DAB candidates to present themselves to the electors without a vote for pseudo-democracy on their records. But this theory is not credible. The people concerned are too dumb for anything like that. We shall just have to accept that what you see is all there is. You don’t have to be stupid to be a pro-government legislator. But it helps.