tim's experiment

It is a curious feature of current events in Hong Kong that the easiest way to understand what is going on is to read the works of George Orwell.

Accordingly we can venture a prediction that, now that the government has declared its intention to outlaw “fake news” we shall shortly be treated to the creation of a Ministry of Truth to decide what is true and what is false.

This is a political question, not a philosophical one, as the hero of 1984 discovers:

“You are a slow learner, Winston.”

“How can I help it? How can I help but see what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four.”

“Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder.”

The staffing of the new ministry will not be a problem. The question which interests me is who will head it. The duties of the Minister of Truth require a certain mental flexibility, embodied in slogans like: “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”

Basically the person appointed must be able to assert that two and two make five confidently, sincerely, without blushing or giggling. We can all think of local public figures who have the necessary ability, but punters looking to pick the winner will have to exclude those for whom the Ministry of Truth would be a demotion.

Eligible, perhaps, for a move sideways is Mainland and Constitutional Affairs Secretary Erick Tsang, who hit global front pages with his variation on patriotism: “You cannot say you are patriotic but you do not love the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party or you do not respect it – this does not make sense. Patriotism is holistic love.”

This will come as a surprise to many people in free countries, who suppose that patriotism is perfectly compatible with an awareness of the deficiencies of their leaders. Patriotic Ugandans did not generally love Idi Amin, patriotic Cambodians had a distinctly Platonic relationship with Pol Pot, and patriotic Americans – even those who voted for him – did not all feel that they had an obligation to love Donald Trump.

The notion of compulsory love is intrinsically problematic. We may feel we have an obligation to respect the government because it is the government, but that has very little to do with love of one’s country, which is a complex emotion not susceptible to persuasion.

Indeed there are often complaints that the notion of their country which people love is not very realistic. “La France profonde” is actually inhabited by very few modern Frenchmen and the idea of Britain which comes up in patriotic contexts – as here – is anachronistically pre-industrial.

Another strong candidate to head the Ministry of Truth is Mr Junius Ho, who has already demonstrated a formidable way with words by providing interesting explanations for such phrases as “kill them all” and “you are my heroes.”

Mr Ho has joined the chorus of abuse rising from pro-Beijing circles aimed at Mr Paul Harris. Mr Harris’s crime was to suggest that the powers that be might like to reconsider some parts of the National Security Law. Suggesting that anything done in Beijing is less than perfect demonstrates a lack of holistic love.

The part of Mr Ho’s piece – a joint effort with another lawyer – which suggested a promising future in the truth business, came when discussing the Court of Final Appeal’s decision in Jimmy Lai’s bail case.

Mr Ho correctly stated the legal position: “the legislative acts of the National People’s Congress and its Standing Committee  leading to the promulgation of the NSL as a law of the HKSAR… are not subject to review on the basis of any alleged incompatibility as between the NSL and the Basic Law, or the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.” In other words the CFA does not have the jurisdiction to decide on such incompatibility or to resolve it – if found –  by ruling parts of the NSL unconstitutional, as some people would wish.

Mr Ho’s interpretation of this is ”In essence, the judgment dismisses the allegation by Harris that some provisions of the NSL are incompatible with the Basic Law.” But that is not what the court said at all, in essence or in fact. If the court decides that an act is not subject to review then it does not review it. No review took place and Mr Harris’s theory remains a possibility. Indeed Mr Harris bowed to the official constitutional line by acknowledging that any such deficiency could only be remedied in Beijing.

Mr Ho is clearly well qualified to lead us towards the future foretold in 1984, in which “Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”

Another strong candidate is the nameless author of the Education Bureau’s recent defence of its guidelines for “national security education”. This starts with “The [bureau] disagrees categorically with the malicious labelling of national security education as ‘brainwashing or spoon-feeding young children’.” A news report continued “The bureau added it believed critical thinking skills would also be part of national security education, claiming media literacy should be strengthened among pupils as “fake news, hearsay, or unproven allegations could be hazardous to national security”.

So there will be critical thinking? Not exactly. National security “should not be taught as if it is a controversial topic. Instead, it should be clearly pointed out that safeguarding national security is the responsibility of all nationals and that there is no room for debate or compromise.”

Have you got that, children? The Education Bureau wants you to be critical, but only critical in the right places. You should, for example, switch on your critical faculties when dealing with things like this (also from Orwell): 

“The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power… We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognise their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”

Obviously that’s rubbish. When Mr Tsang tells you to love the Party, on the other hand, you’d better believe it.

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The Kennedy Town seafront is a nice place for a virus-free outdoor picnic lunch. There are  benches, and a harbour view full of floating and boating. It’s like the old Blake’s Pier. You can also contemplate a continuing controversy about the relationship between Man and Nature.

As soon as you unwrap your sandwich a small audience of pigeons will appear, watching attentively for any dropped crumbs and hoping that generous diners will be willing to share. The pigeons are a sleek and prosperous looking lot, which suggests that these hopes are often fulfilled.

This is officially not recommended. Some months ago I recorded with some puzzlement that signs had appeared in Central urging people not to feed birds, warning that this would lead to pigeon over-population, and possible obesity in lucky individual birds. The sign also said it “might” be a criminal offence. This is unlikely. Perhaps this is the sort of charge that you only have to worry about if your name is Jimmy Lai.

Anyway I imagine this is not a big problem in Central. Where I live, on the fringes of the Shing Mun Country Park, the matter of relations with wild biology is more pressing. As well as the usual birds in our neighbourhood we have frogs, monkeys, rats, snakes, feral dogs, wild pigs and  – a rare nocturnal treat – at least one large porcupine.

This has attracted the regulatory instincts of the relevant government departments, so we are also treated to a steady flow of advice, usually on large plastic banners. We are urged not to feed the monkeys, as “nature can meet their needs”, and how to keep safe if you meet a wild pig: “hide behind a tree”. Apparently wild pigs are fairly stupid.

Some surreptitious feeding does go on, though not by me. I understand the dilemma, though. The hungry animal before you wants food. Supplying it is clearly in the individual interest of that animal, though it may be problematic in the larger scheme of things. There is a story about a man who threw a stranded starfish back into the sea. His companion said this was a meaningless gesture, because there were hundreds of stranded starfish on the same beach. The rescuer pointed in the direction where the starfish was now, presumably, swimming away and said “it was meaningful to him.”

I understand that wild animals are not helped if feeding them encourages them to hang about areas populated by people. On the other hand natural food supplies are precarious and seasonal. Feeding the birds is a long tradition and is endorsed by Mary Poppins. The argument continues.

Indeed it is now reproducing itself on an epic scale in the New Territories, which for many years has been home to large numbers of semi-domesticated, or if you prefer semi-feral, cows and buffalos, now surplus to agricultural requirements.

A concerned citizen, seeing the cows looked emaciated, gathered some friends to organise food. The cows have been rounded up by the Ag and Fish people and are now found only in Sai Kung Country Park and Tap Mun (Grass Island). The volunteers crop grass in a distant village where it is a nuisance, and transport it to where the cows are evidently hungry. The grass gets a warm reception.

Occasionally the volunteer feeders have a whip-round and buy grass from the company which supplies the Jockey Club.

This is a controversial activity. Some cow fanciers disapprove. Feeders have been fined. An AFCD Spokesman said: “Feeding by the public will make them reliant on humans and lose their ability to find food sources in the wild. So when they are not fed, they will become habituated to seek food from tourists or from trash bins.”

He also said that the cattle could roam over 7,000 hectares of Sai Kung Country Park, which contained “sufficient natural resources to sustain the herd’s lives”. And though the flat top of Grass Island has, he conceded, been trampled flat by hordes of visitors there was still grass on other parts of the island.

This is a complicated scene and we must accept that everyone concerned is propelled by the highest motives, including concern for the health and happiness of the cows. However there seem to be a few landmarks worth noting.

Firstly, for whatever reason, the cows are clearly not getting enough to eat. Observers have seen them eating things like pebbles and plastic bags. One buffalo which died had two baskets full of plastic bags in its stomach.

Secondly there seems to be some official lack of information about the fact that grass is a seasonal crop. Round our way the grass stops growing about the end of October. Grassland then gradually turns brown, which is the way it stays until the summer rains start around the beginning of April. Last week’s unseasonal rain powdered our brown fields with green, but these are little shoots of no interest to a hungry cow.

This is so serious a matter for domestic cows that for centuries most cows were slaughtered in the autumn because they could not be fed over the winter. This practice continued until a gentleman called “Turnip” Townshend pointed out that his favourite vegetable would keep in a cool dry place and could be used to feed cows over the winter.  When I was a kid kale – now a trendy salad item – was grown only as a winter feed for cows and did not appear on human menus at all.

So the important question is not whether the cows have access to grass, but what they are supposed to eat when the grass dries up.

This brings us to the third point which seems to have got lost somewhere, which is that these are not wild cows. They are feral cows, which is a completely different thing. Your NT cow may have been turfed out to forage for itself by its owner, but it is still the product of centuries of breeding designed to produce a fat, immobile, unenterprising animal with no inclination to do anything but eat, breed and stand around looking picturesque.

No doubt millennia ago there was a primitive ancestral cow which roamed the Serengeti Plains and would instinctively set off for pastures new if food in its locality ran short. That was long ago. And the Sai Kung Country Park is mountainous. That is why is it a country park. These are cows, not mountain goats. Did they ever have “their ability to find food sources in the wild”?

I conclude that it is perhaps not entirely fair to expect surplus cows simply to fend for themselves. Nor is it conducive to happiness in the cow population. These are bred to be domesticated animals and would probably be happiest in a symbiotic relationship with humans.

So some help is needed. I cannot resist noting that the instinctive reaction of a Hong Kong civil servant to a group in need, whether animals or people, is to explain why help is not needed, and indeed will be bad for them.  Pensions discourage savings, unemployment pay encourages idleness, sickness pay fosters malingering and free health care encourages bad habits. We have no cake and cake is bad for you. Let them all eat plastic bags.

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Let me introduce you to Mr Richard O’Halloran. Mr O worked for a company called China Aviation Leasing Service (CALS). This company was based in Dublin but owned by a mainland businessman called Min Jiedong.

Mr Min got into trouble in his home country over suggestions that he had collected money from China investors and exported it through the usual murky channels to buy an aircraft in Dublin which, it appears, is the only asset of CALS. The plane has been rented out on a long lease to a Finnish airline.

Mr Min was eventually prosecuted and jailed. Some influential investors, it seems, wanted their money back. Mr O’Halloran, who was not working for the company when the dubious deals – if they were dubious – were done, was sent to Shanghai in February 2019 to try to resolve the situation.

After two weeks of negotiation he headed to the airport to return home to his wife and four children, and was there told that he was not allowed to leave. And so, for the ensuing two years, he has been an involuntary resident of Shanghai – at first in a hotel and later, for economic reasons, in a flat.

From time to time Mr O’Halloran has responded to hints that some action from him would result in his being freed. In response to one such suggestion he resigned from his job. Another was that a look at his personal bank details would be interesting. In January he was told he could leave, turned up at the airport and was refused again.

The current directors of CALS then tried sending $200,000 to the Chinese court which is now in charge of Mr Min’s case. This provoked a fierce police interrogation of Mr O’Halloran, apparently aimed at finding out how much his colleagues might be good for. He was then told that the price of freedom was $36 million.

The judge in the case, in which Mr O’Halloran is at least in theory a witness, told him at the last hearing that there was no exit ban (?) but he should expect to stay in China “for a long time”. It appears that someone in Shanghai is very determined to get the aeroplane, even if they have to wait for the lease to run out. Meanwhile Mr O’Halloran is a hostage.

Unsurprisingly his health has suffered and his family have become increasingly distressed by his absence. Last December they decided to ignore the official advice – diplomats usually argue that the smooth flow of international relations is too important for it to be disrupted by noisy complaints about abuse of individuals, however heinous the abuse may be – and raised a public stink in Ireland.

The case has now become a small noisy part of the argument over whether the EU’s recent trade deal with China should be ratified by the EU Parliament. Whether that will help remains to be seen.

I am told that Mr O’Halloran’s case is not unusual. Generally the official advice is not to make too much noise. Victims may well suppose – at least for the first year or two – that complaining publicly will only make matters worse. So ransoms of one kind or another are quietly paid, and the victims quietly return home.

This could not happen in Hong Kong. At least not yet. But this sort of story is why there are serious drawbacks to the government’s proposed new legislation, which will give the Director of Immigration power to prevent people from leaving Hong Kong.

We are still missing a lot of details. One of the details missing is a convincing reason for the new law. An earlier suggestion that it was intended to improve the handling of asylum claimants and refugees was obviously a work of the imagination. Our government’s dearest wish for refugees is that they should depart at the earliest opportunity to anywhere, or better still not come in the first place.

The freedom to travel where and when you wish is an important freedom, and it was entirely proper for the Bar Association to point out the impropriety of subjecting it to the whim of a civil servant. Unfortunately the Bar Association seems to have shot to the top of the DAB’s “reform” agenda lately, so advice from it may not be well received.

One does not, of course, attribute improper motives to the Director of Immigration. But he is a civil servant who has taken the oath of loyalty to the Liaison Office. If he or she is told that somebody should be prevented from leaving our shores it will take a brave – or suicidal – individual to say ’no’ … or even ‘why?’

So it appears the new law would place us in the same perilous legal category for visitors as Shanghai: you may transition at any time from visitor to hostage. This could be discouraging.

No doubt we will be told, as we were about the national security legislation, that only a tiny minority of people will be affected. I don’t think you can expect people to buy that pie twice. Our real rulers, these days, are seasoned mainland apparatchiks who have demonstrated their loyalty to Pooh by trampling on the few remaining civil liberties of their fellow citizens.

To their local sycophants and supporters who have ascended the social pyramid by facilitating the demise of Hong Kong’s autonomy I can only recommend a quotation from Bear Gryls in yesterday’s Guardian: “There’s no point getting to the summit if you’re an arsehole.”

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The Hong Kong Court of Final Appeal’s thoughts on Jimmy Lai’s bail application are now up on the Judiciary website. Their lordships will have gratified Mr Henry Litton by keeping their comments brief – at least by judicial standards – so readers with a taste for this sort of thing can be recommended to go here.

The newsworthy gist of the CFA’s thoughts was that Mr Lai can stay in jail. However further action is in prospect. The court held that the High Court judge who released Mr Lai approached the matter in the wrong way. But if he had approached it in the right way he might have arrived at the same conclusion. So Mr Lai is free to try again.

Mr Lai has now been jailed by a magistrate, freed by a High Court judge, rejailed by the Court of Appeal, and been told he can return to stage 2 by the Court of Final Appeal. This is a good illustration of the old joke that the law courts are open to all … like the Ritz Hotel. Mr Lai is a millionaire, which is lucky for him, in the circumstances. The rest of us can look forward to being bullied by publicly-funded prosecutors.

Lawyers will note the unsurprising observation that the Hong Kong courts cannot consider whether acts of the Central Government might be incompatible with the Basic Law. If they are, so much the worse for the Basic Law. The CFA also noted that the National Security Law (hereafter the NSL) stated that in the event of a conflict between the NSL and Hong Kong’s existing laws, the NSL would prevail. That is also unsurprising.

The effect of this is that Hong Kong now has two parallel legal systems. If you are an ordinary decent criminal who mugs old ladies or swindles banks, then your prosecution will be conducted under the old system and you will benefit from the rights which that system enshrines.

If you infringe the NSL, on the other hand, you fall down a regulatory rabbit hole into a legal system where some of those rights are no longer available. You do not have the right to bail, you do not have the right to a jury trial, you do not have the right to a judge not drawn from a list compiled, effectively, by the prosecution, and you may, if the prosecution thinks things are not going too well here, find the whole proceedings transferred to the mainland, where you will be deprived of further constitutional embellishments like the right to the lawyer of your choice and the right to a fair trial.

The least one could hope for, under these circumstances, is that the boundary between the two systems would be clear. But the Department of Justice — eyes firmly fixed on its major objective these days, which is to put as many of the government’s critics as possible behind bars — is not helping.

Last Wednesday Mr Edmund Wan Yiu-sing appeared in the West Kowloon Magistracy on a charge of sedition. This is not a charge under the NSL; the prosecution cited the relevant parts of the Crimes Ordinance. These are a venerable colonial-era offering which started life as a piece of model legislation circulated by the then Colonial Office of the British government in the 1930s.

Why this course was adopted is not clear. People have been pointing out the existence of a law against sedition for years without prosecutors using it. Maybe the idea is simply to keep the number of NSL cases in PR-friendly double digits.

However, Prosecutor Ivan Cheung said that although the charges were not covered by the NSL they did involve “behaviour endangering national security” and cited the CFA’s judgement as warranting a “more stringent” approach to the granting of bail in national security cases. The magistrate then remanded Mr Wan in custody. The full trial will not take place until May, so this means that Mr Wan, who is entitled to be presumed innocent, will have been inside for three months before he gets his day in court.

And the question which arises is, of course, is it acceptable – is it legal? – for the procedural parts of the NSL to be applied to cases in which the offence is an ordinary pre-existing one. The CFA did not consider this point because it was not at issue in Mr Lai’s case. So Prosecutor Cheung’s reliance on that decision could be considered a bit premature.

Musing over the documents which the CFA relied on when considering the legislative intent of the NSL one is not much helped. A great deal seems to depend on the rather slender question of whether “the law” is the same thing as “the Law”. Consider, for example the Address to the NPCSC (the legislature for practical purposes) which includes this passage: “… The Law expressly stipulates that human rights shall be respected and protected in safeguarding national security in the HKSAR. The rights and freedoms … which the residents of the HKSAR enjoy shall be protected in accordance with the law. The Law also fully reflects the internationally-practised rule-of-law principles such as conviction and punishment of crimes as prescribed by law, presumption of innocence, protection against double jeopardy, protection of parties’ rights in litigation and to fair trial.”

Clearly here “the law” is the law generally and “the Law” is the NSL. In this light we can perhaps interpret NSL clause 5 “A person is presumed innocent until convicted by a judicial body. The right to defend himself or herself and other rights in judicial proceedings that a criminal suspect, defendant, and other parties in judicial proceedings are entitled to under the law shall be protected.”

In other words what we must now call the old system prevails unless the NSL applies because the offence is an NSL offence. This seems to be the view of the CFA in paragraph 42, which says that the NSL’s restrictive bail rules apply in “NSL cases” – so, presumably, in other cases they do not.

Similarly in para 53 there is a distinction between “offences either under the NSL or under HKSAR law.” A footnote offers “Such as the offences of treason, incitement to disaffection or sedition under Parts I and II of the Crimes Ordinance (Cap 200).”

That “such as” is ominous, since it implies that even the CFA is not sure which existing laws could be regarded as “laws of the SAR safeguarding national security.” Is it to be left up to the prosecutor in each case?

I expect in the long run the practical importance of a clear dividing line will become apparent and judges will insist that if the prosecution wishes to benefit from the considerable help provided by the NSL then it must charge an NSL offence. After all under the existing Hong Kong legal system, if the prosecutor can establish that the defendant is likely to offend while on bail then bail will be refused. The NSL’s “more stringent” requirement is that bail should be refused unless the magistrate is satisfied that the defendant will not reoffend. This is a higher bar, but not an insuperable one. It does not mean the refusal of bail should be automatic.

The Department of Justice needs, perhaps, to look at itself in a mirror. Leaving aside the legal intricacies there is something indecent about taking months or years to charge a person, and then insisting that national security will be endangered if he or she is not immediately incarcerated pending trial. We all have the right to be free unless convicted. This should not be trampled on without good reason. 

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The new-look Legco, without opposition, without pan-Democrats and without the limited democratic legitimacy which surrounded its predecessor, is now with us, and will remain with us until next September at the earliest.

Further postponements of the elections cannot be ruled out. Our Imperial Big Brother does not love elections.

The Chief Executive. Carrie Lam, timed her expression of joy that the council had returned to “normal” nicely. It arrived just before the Economist Intelligence Unit decided that we should be moved from the Flawed Democracy category to the Hybrid one, which I think is the EIU’s euphemism for “the locals have no rights but foreigners can still do business”.

Actually the council has not returned to normal, because the normal arrangement in elected legislatures is that there is an Opposition. The usefulness of this is recognised in the British parliament by the fact that the Leader of the Opposition gets a publicly funded salary for doing the job.

The opposition provides two services. It exposes the government to criticism and scrutiny, and it provides the electors with an alternative to the party in power. Since our current leaders do not cherish criticism and regard the electors with a mixture of pity and contempt, they see no useful role for an opposition. And the Party is, of course, in power for ever and ever amen.

This is a pity. I have been reading a book about the relationship between Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee, who at various times were Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition facing each other, and could hardly have been more different in their political ideology. They managed to remain remarkably good friends. Neither was ever arrested.

They did have the advantage, it is true, of having been colleagues in the Coalition government during the Second World War, in which Churchill was PM and Attlee his deputy who filled in when he was away. I cannot resist quoting this description of their contrasting presiding styles:

“When the Prime Minister is away, Mr Attlee presides. We meet at the appointed time and go through the whole agenda and make all the necessary decisions. We go home at night knowing we have done a good day’s work. When Winston is in charge we have no agenda, make no decisions at all and go home at midnight conscious that we have been present at a historic occasion.”

Don’t suppose our own dear Exco resembles either much. But I digress.

What is Ms Lam going to do with her new-look Legco which, she noted, would no doubt be willing to approve things which the old one would have choked over. A law against doxing will please the Police Force, the nearest thing Ms Lam has to a base, in the political sense.

Less comment was attracted by the other half of her new legislative programme – a law against “false news”.

But this is ominous. We did in the days of the previous colonial landlord have a law against false news, as I recall. It had not been used for many years and was a clear violation of freedom of expression. As a result it was frequently criticised as a relic of an earlier, more primitive form of colonial government and, with some reluctance, it was eventually abolished.

One of the problems such laws present is the question what is false. I notice in the Education Bureau’s latest guidelines on national security education that students will be told that the new national security law did not diminish Hong Kong people’s rights and freedoms.

This is nonsense. A law which makes new criminal offences certainly diminishes people’s freedoms. It would be a complete waste of time if it did not.

Last year we were free to collude with foreign political organisations. This year we are not. This may be justified, trivial, a huge improvement on the old situation or all three. But it is clearly a reduced freedom. A government which is going to compel teachers to lie to their students is not an acceptable arbiter of what is false news.

Consider another bulletin from the education front: the slogan Liberate Hong Kong, Revolution of our Times, is to be banned because the government has “deemed” it to imply separatism, according to the relevant Secretary.

There are three objections to this. The first is that it is a clear usurpation of the powers and functions of the people who put the Oxford Dictionary together, and spend a great deal of time and effort on chasing an accurate definition of word meanings by looking at how they are actually used. I am proposing for next year’s update a new word – dictatwit – which I have just made up. It means an official who supposes it is his job to decide what words mean and believes anyone will take any notice.

The second objection is that the interpretation defies common sense. This can be easily demonstrated by inserting instead of Hong Kong a political entity to which separatism cannot possible be applied. Liberate China, Revolution of our Times. still makes sense (in the purely linguistic sense, of course), whereas – say – Home Rule for China, Revolution of our Times, would not.

The third objection to this sort of thing is that separatism is now an offence, and it appears that some people have been charged with it. Accordingly it should be up to the courts to decide whether in any particular circumstances a particular set of words bears the meaning complained of, and in the meantime the matter is, as the Secretary for Justice put it in a slightly different context, sub judice and not a proper subject for comment.

But would it, under Ms Lam’s new legislation, be false news to write that you did not believe the official “deeming” justified?

This is only one of the many problems attached to this sort of legislation, and there is no point in going through them all until some kind of draft appears. Let me just say that it is difficult to see our government coming up with something that will not result in a further slither down the EIU’s democracy rankings.

And I do not expect to be protected from ill-judged innovations by the surviving Legco. It seems the only media issue which arouses any passion in the remaining seat warmers is an intemperate desire to see RTHK gelded.

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You would think in the light of recent events that local politicians would realise that after you lose an election trying to reverse the results by legal manipulations later is a bad look. This point seems lost on the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment of Hong Kong, alas.

Last week the party unveiled their plan to get their snouts back into the district funding trough: wholesale disqualifications. You may think it’s a bit late for this. The district councillors elected last year, when the DAB as massacred in every district except Islands, have duly taken their seats.

Never mind. The suggestion launched by the surviving DAB members goes like this. Firstly all district board members will be required to take The Oath. This of course could have the disappointing effect that all the existing councillors do take the oath, and the DAB stays in the wilderness.

So this gets us to stage two, outlined in an open letter to the Constitutional and Mainland Affairs Secretary last week, which involves setting up some mechanism to disqualify councillors who “breach their oath”. This was justified, said the councillors, because so many councillors were “blatantly opposing the central and SAR governments… made the district councils a critical platform to advocate anti-Chinese ideas and cause chaos in Hong Kong.”

These Trumplets evidently have a vivid imagination. I believe many of us would have noticed if District Councils were causing anything worth calling “chaos”. I cannot speak for the prevalence of criticism or opposition of the central or local governments because the fact is that District Council meetings are rarely reported so opportunities to subversive oratory are rather thin on the ground.

I have noticed, though, that in my immediate vicinity – I realise this is just the well in which I am the seated frog – the standard of municipal services has shown a considerable improvement since the change of regime. This rather confirms the experience of other places, which indicates that where the same party is in control for long periods this leads to cronyism, complacency and corruption.

It would be nice to see the DAB engage into some soul-searching, with a view to discovering why the party is so unpopular. After all the prestige and perks attached to being a district councillor depend to some extent on the democratic legitimacy of the members. A display of bad losership is not going to endear.

Instead, though, the whole pro-Beijing camp seems to be besotted with disqualification. They want close-circuit TV in local classrooms, so that teachers who fail to push the pro-Pooh line can be expelled from the profession. They want a committee to consider complaints about judges, with no doubt the long-term objective of debenching those who display unseemly attachment to the rule of law.

The Op Ed page of the China Daily had an interesting piece last week suggesting that the Bar Association was unfit for purpose and should be replaced by a committee “appointed by the chief Executive” (!?) which would approve qualifications and, in due course, disqualifications.

We seem to be progressing surprisingly quickly towards what we might call the Stalinist model for controlling the population through a stranglehold on its ability to earn a living. In due course there will be a Wheel-tappers and Shunters Association of which all wheel-tappers and shunters must be members. Dissident shunters will be expelled from the association and will no longer be able to work in that capacity.

It seems that thousands of people are planning to take advantage of the opportunity to move to the wet, cold, COVID-raddled island where I was born. This regrettable hemorrhage is not caused by a fear of criticism or chaos. Freedom is like indoor plumbing. You can do without, but once you have had it you won’t want to.

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