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The law protecting fair trials: an obituary

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on September 4, 2025| Leave a Comment »

Readers may be fed up with me complaining about the erosion of the laws restricting the reporting of upcoming court cases. Well, some good news. The erosion has now reached the stage where there is nothing left. I shall not need to return to this topic again.

The law involved is rather unhelpfully labelled “strict liability contempt of court”. The “contempt of court” part means that your conduct is deemed to disturb the administration of justice. The “strict liability” bit indicates that the prosecution does not have to prove that you meant it, only that your publication could have affected the subsequent trial. Its purpose is to ensure that trials are fair.

Long ago the Law Reform Commission published a survey of the law in this area (along with some recommendations which, as usually happens, were ignored) which included this summary:

There are essentially four principal ways in which impartiality of the court may be impaired :

  • by commenting on the personal character of the accused;
  • by publishing an alleged confession by the accused;
  • by commenting on the merits of the particular case; and
  • by publishing a photograph of an accused person in such a way that he can be identified if the question of identity is likely to be in issue.

A website published by the UK government offering guidance to editors and writers gets right down to the basics:

For example, you should not:

  • say whether you think a person is guilty or innocent
  • refer to someone’s previous convictions

The case which offered an overwhelming temptation to some local media was the one involving a man who wooed a woman on the internet, invited her to dinner in a very expensive restaurant and fled after the meal, leaving her to face a bill for $80,000.

Clearly the idea of a meal worth the price of a small car was very interesting, and indeed the bill has been published on the internet. Most of the damage was incurred by the consumption of a very expensive bottle of champagne.

Still, that is no excuse for completely ignoring the law. A column in Dimsum Daily left little doubt about its intentions: “Man Wah $84,000 bill scandal lays bare inside perpetrator’s mind and Hong Kong’s loneliness trap.” Wait a minute. A man has been arrested and we’re going inside his mind?

We certainly are. In the first paragraph he is the “alleged culprit”, but you would not think so from the rest of the piece, which has his full name, a picture (!) details of his previous convictions and a discussion in the light of those details of whether the “alleged culprit” is a psychopath or not.

Would you, if you were facing a court appearance, like the reports of your arrest to include stuff like this?

According to court records *** (name) did not simply lie; he constructed entire worlds. He fabricated alter-egos with supposed triad ties and elite legal credentials, conjured the spectre of surveillance, and threatened women with exposure and harm if they did not comply … During his earlier trial, the court noted his dispassionate precision – threats delivered cooly, details supplied as if omniscient, a cruelty that felt engineered rather than eruptive.

And so on. Ironically at one point the writer asks ”Where does that leave justice?” Pretty knackered, if people are allowed to publish about freshly arrested suspects things like:

What, finally is in *** ***’s (full name) mind? Perhaps the answer is banal and chilling at once. He sees people as instruments, evenings as stages, truth as raw material. He is gratified by the gasp when the cork pops and the bill lands, by the moment his companion realises the script was never about her at all…

I do not see how a publication could put this out at all unless they were all so dangerously ignorant of the law that they should not be allowed near a keyboard, or they were completely confident that the law does not apply to them. Dimsum Daily is said to be a government-friendly publication.

As is the Hong Kong Standard, whose somewhat more circumspect approach – they only gave the defendant’s surname – was nicely encapsulated by the headline “Repeat dine-and-sash suspect may have planned scheme in advance” and a picture captioned “The suspect, surnamed ***, has a criminal record”.

So here we are. We do not have the rule of law. We have the rule only of laws the government likes directed at people it does not like. Integration with the mainland has reached the point where a trial is a mere formality: the formal endorsement of a conviction already announced by the police and reported in government-friendly publications.

I dare say Mr *** is a bad lot who has scammed women before. He is nevertheless entitled to a fair trial and he is not going to get it.

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Why are we so bashful about our names and addresses these days?

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on August 28, 2025| Leave a Comment »

Another week, another “data breach”. These stories follow a fairly predictable trajectory. An embarrassed company – or government department – announces that the “personal data” of thousands of people has been “hacked”.

The Privacy Commissioner is informed, and weighs in with some critical comments on the precautions taken, or not taken, by the data holder. The hacker, meanwhile, is at a safe distance from retribution or punishment, and we are all left to ponder the horrifying possibilities.

But are they horrifying? Last week’s example concerned two Japanese clothing vendors, both new to me, and the lost data comprised, according to rather sketchy media reports, names, addresses and phone numbers, as well as records of what the customers had bought.

Now wait a minute. Many years ago, when telephones were not mobile, and were tethered to the wall by a wire, subscribers to a telephone service were treated to a free book. This was called a telephone directory and included the name, address and number of everyone who owned a phone in your locality, apart from a few eccentrics who for various reasons opted to go “ex-directory”.

If the person you were curious about lived too far away to be in the book you could telephone a woman (it was always a woman) called Directory Inquiries, who had a whole collection of these books. If her range was not wide enough she could, at no extra charge, call her counterpart in the area where your target lived.

If you lived in America you could also (I am indebted to the incomparable Sue Grafton for this snippet) also consult a different directory which listed all the addresses in your area and would tell you who lived in them. You could then look at their tax records.

If a policeman in England stopped you (“just a routine inquiry”) and you gave him your name and address he would not consult the phone book, and computers had not been invented. But in the police station they had a copy of the electoral register.

This was compiled by asking every householder to record who actually spent a specified night in his house, thereby qualifying for the local vote. So your claimed name and address could be compared with the names recorded as residing in your claimed home. If none of them looked anything like yours you had some explaining to do. Anyone could inspect a copy of the electoral register.

In Hong Kong there was even more information available about you if you were a civil servant. Every six months (if I remember correctly) the government published an official phone book, copies of which were eagerly snapped up by journalists.

Large numbers of civil servants appeared in this, along with their official job titles, current jobs and workplaces. At considerably more expense you could buy something called the Blue Book, which listed every government employee, giving his rank, how long he has held that rank and which salary scale he was on. Women of course were also covered but I am too old-fashioned to use “their” as a singular pronoun.

Armed with the Blue Book and the latest government accounts, published as part of the paper avalanche unleashed by the annual Budget Speech, you could establish the exact salary of every civil servant.

When I worked in a local university we were required to provide detailed biographies to be included in course documents, which later moved to the library where anyone could read them. So you can find my early life in the Archives Department at HKBU. Departmental websites routinely include names, phone numbers and email addresses of staff, as in this randomly selected specimen.

Now I realise that there are some pieces of personal data which we would all really like to keep to ourselves. We are sensibly paranoid about credit cards, for example, and would not wish our personal relationships or erotic activities to be a matter of public discussion.

But when it comes to names, addresses, phone numbers and email addresses, one has to ask, where is the harm? I am a sitting duck for junk email because I still use my old work address. This comes with a reasonably good spam spotting service and I delete a lot of stuff unread. I have no objection to people knowing about my purchases from Japanese clothes shops although I imagine interest in my taste in Uniqlo tees is limited.

Your name and address can be used for “doxing” in which you are held up for general disapproval on the internet. This is a serious problem in times of violent disagreement and a source of genuine fear. But the evil here is not in the widespread knowledge of your home address; the evil is in the existence of people who think it justified and reasonable to come round to your house, harass your kids, throw things at your windows and write four-letter words on your front lawn with weedkiller.

I do not see the existence of these nutjobs as justifying a universal rule that people’s names and addresses should be regarded as a precious secret. Nor, in practice, do most people. When you sign up for a “privilege card” or a loyalty programme you are gratuitously trusting a commercial entity with information about yourself which they will happily exploit and, in many cases, trade. We do it anyway.

Buy one thing online and you will be bombarded for months, or even years, with suggestions for further purchases, not all of them from the original vendor.

Having your intray stuffed is particularly galling if participation is compulsory. Like many drivers l used to have an Autotoll pass. The company concerned topped up my balance occasionally from my bank account, and the transactions were routinely recorded in my bank statements. Then the government took over the tunnel tolls and we were all required to install a new gadget.

On the new system, when I go through a tunnel I am immediately sent an email recording my passage through the tube, and another email recording that my account has been charged the fee. Returning through the tunnel I get two more emails, followed by another one saying that my charges have been consolidated and deducted from the linked account at my bank. This is followed by another email, from the bank, recording that the money has departed.

This seems a very elaborate way of separating me from $16. Do I hear the word bureaucracy?

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A legislative scandal; must we call this toiletgate?

Posted in Uncategorized on August 23, 2025| 1 Comment »

Members of the Hong Kong Legislative Council had a moment of excitement last week, when an empty condom packet was found in one of the Legco building’s toilets.

Readers may share my bewilderment as to why this excited an outburst of political attention. Perhaps legislators, knowing that half the population already regard them as a load of lazy ****ers, were anxious to dispel any rumours that this is literally true.

Initial suspicions were that the toilet itself was the scene of some erotic activity. The toilet concerned is an “accessible” model, which I presume is the currently acceptable euphemism for what in everyday language is known as a “disabled toilet”, although of course the toilet itself is not disabled.

A feature of this kind of toilet is that it has a room to itself; there are none of the gaps at the bottom or top of the doors or partitions often found in regular cubicles. The occupant has genuine privacy. Also there has to be enough floor space for a wheelchair driver to do a three-point turn, so there is room for activities usually undertaken in a horizontal position.

Early reports had it that the Legco Secretariat did not think the find worthy of investigation, but legislators insisted on an examination of video footage. Inevitably there are cameras in the corridors of power, though not, I hope, in the toilets.

The Secretariat then reported that according to the all-seeing electronic eye there had at no point been two people in the toilet concerned. A political assistant, we were told, had been given some fatherly advice about disposal of litter. The Secretariat then considered the matter closed.

This is a little puzzling. Surely the objection – for those who do find it objectionable – is not just to sex in a toilet, but sex in the hallowed precincts of the Legco building. Are we to believe that the user slipped the offending item into his pocket during a moment of passion in a Kowloon Tong love hotel, only to find it later in the working day?

The thing that puzzles me, though, is how this trivial matter came to be reported in the first place. Most of us, after all, on seeing some piece of litter in the bowl, will just flush it away and get down to business.

Is the alert user of a legislative loo expected to isolate the setting as a crime scene and call security? The problem with this is that the finder presumably needs to answer a call of nature, so staying in the toilet without using it is a big ask. Or is the finder expected to fish the evidence out, and then proceed? Perish the thought.

It appears that the solution to this dilemma is clear to digital natives: you whip out your mobile phone and take a picture. And this, it seems, is what happened, because the picture eventually surfaced on the internet, as everything does sooner or later these days.

Let us pause here for a moment of nostalgia. Very few of the corporate giants of my youth have survived into the 2020s, but it seems that Durex is still going strong, serving the needs of those who want pleasure without pregnancy.

Connoisseurs of political scandal have not given up hope, according to media reports. If somebody is having sex with someone we can always look forward to the possibility that one or both of the participants is famous and/or married to someone else.

As a topic for public excitement, though, this rather depends on having a genuine democratic system in which the fate of an erring politician depends on whether the electorate is offended by his crime.

An interesting piece of political writing the other day explored the prospects ahead of Mr Tik Chi-yuen, the only legislator who did not run as a pro-Beijing or pro-establishment candidate. Mr Tik has voted for all the government’s major projects, including the new national security law. But that may not save him.

The revealing final thought was that the decision on the matter will not come from Mr Tik’s electorate. It will come from the Chief Executive. We voters know our place.

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Interesting ‘alliance’ seems to comprise a think tank worker with many hats

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on August 22, 2025| Leave a Comment »

An interesting creature has come lumbering across the local landscape. Readers, meet the Quadripartite Alliance for Harmonious Employment Practices. I shall follow the local newspapers reporting sightings of this creature and refer to it in future as the QAHEP.

I first spotted the QAHEP in the print version of the Standard. It was squeezed into the end of an article mainly devoted to increasing unemployment figures. The QAHEP, however, was not interested in unemployment, it was interested in the minimum wage for overseas domestic workers, and wanted it frozen, on the bizarre grounds that this would be fair to civil servants.

The online version of the paper offered a whole article on the QAHEP’s gripes, which included domestic workers taking out loans using their employer’s address – an odd complaint since the system requires them to live there and nowhere else – and “job-hopping”, or what people outside the domestic wage-slave system call moving to a better job.

The organisation had, it said, conducted a survey of 392 employers, 93 per cent of whom had experienced helper debt problems, and 72 per cent had been harassed by debt collection agencies. I am afraid I approach this sort of survey with a certain amount of suspicion: small sample, no information on how they were selected or how the questions were phrased. Was this, one wonders, the entire membership of the QAHEP?

Certainly not. The QEHAP’s full name is the Quadripartite Alliance for Harmonious Employment Practices Limited, and it is a company limited by shares, not a members’ club. I erroneously supposed that it might be an amalgamation of four clubs claiming to represent domestic employers. It is a sign of the times in which we live that we have no room for one independent trade union but four employers’ associations in the same space would be perfectly acceptable.

However there is no sign in the company records of anything like this. The QEHAP did have a previous existence as Organization of Enhance Harmonious International Employment Relationship Limited. Clearly harmony is a preoccupation, and so is long names.

This may be the fault of spokesperson Chrystie Lam. Foraging on the internet one finds Ms Lam engaging in a press conference last year (on helper debt problems already) and described as the founder both of the QEHAP and of the Coalition of Home Service Sustainable Development.

Ms Lam also appeared as spokesperson for the coalition in a press conference in June, in which Sustainable Development, like Harmonious Employment (though the QAHEP was not mentioned), apparently depended on further restrictions on domestic workers. They should not be allowed to borrow money at all in the last six months of their contract, Ms Lam suggested.

Readers may at this point perhaps be thinking that Ms Lam must have had a really bad experience with an overseas domestic helper to be so preoccupied with the (undisputably genuine) problems associated with the arrangement.

But it appears actually that her engagement with the matter is professional. In her journalistic output (of which there is quite a lot) Ms Lam is described as “director of labour and welfare affairs, Chinese Dream Think Tank”.

Chinese Dream is chaired by Kacee Ting Wong, who describes himself for press purposes as “a barrister, part-time researcher of Shenzhen University Hong Kong and Macao Basic Law Research Center, and chairman of the Chinese Dream Think Tank.”

The tank in turn describes itself as “ a non-profit Hong Kong-based organization working with skilled volunteers, experts and professionals who are passionate about telling the China story.”

The direction in which the tank rolls can perhaps be deduced from the fact that recent targets have included George Soros, and Amnesty International. A further clue, perhaps, is this vitriolic (and far too long) piece on the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China, published in 2023.

Well Ms Lam, like the rest of us, has the right to freedom of speech. May I respectfully suggest that this would be better exercised if she chose one hat when exercising it and wore the same one all the time? Employment harmony and sustainable development are desirable objectives, but if you are pursuing them on behalf of China Dream you should say so.

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Careless with those dog droppings? The DAB is on your case

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on August 13, 2025| Leave a Comment »

Let us rejoice. The Democratic Alliance for the Betterment of Hong Kong’s Central and Western branch has risen above the mundane pursuit of stability, prosperity and national security, diverged from the materialistic pursuit of livelihood issues, and found an issue of profound political and environmental importance: dog shit.

At a press conference (I am not making this up) a spokesman said the party had received more than 100 complaints about dog droppings in public places, mainly Caine Road, Conduit Road, Robinson Road, Ladder Street and Shing Wong Street.

District Councillor Rex Ip was reported as suggesting CCTV cameras at known black spots, as well as increased patrols. He also suggested overcoming urine odours by dowsing the streets in “lemon extract”.

Council colleague Noel Shih wanted better dog toilets, with a “drainable stainless steel surface, and adding water facets.” I suppose that was a misprint for faucets. Another councillor proposed more dog-friendly parks.

According to the reply to a Legco question in June, there were 24 cases of “fouling streeets or public places by dog faeces” last year, attracting $70,000 in fines. Note that only faeces are covered by law as officials think urine is a problem easily solved by routine street washing.

Well, what are we dog-owners to make of all this? Well if your favoured walking spot is in Caine Road, etc, then the DAB is on your case. Pick up your poop.

Dog walkers, including me, who carry a bottle of water to dilute any puddles left by our four-legged friends, are doing the public a favour. Our pavements can, officially, take it as it comes. That’s not to say that a nice scent of lemon wouldn’t be very welcome.

Now, a word for Councillor Shih (not a misprint) about dog toilets. They are a complete waste of money. I have walked an awful lot of dogwalks since I got my first whippet more than 50 years ago and none of the pooches concerned ever took the slightest interest in a dog toilet.

There are only two solutions to the solid waste problem. If you allow your dog to roam off leash you have to carry a roll of plastic bags so you can pick up after performances. If you keep your dog on the leash you can carry a sheet of newspaper, watch like a hawk, and slip the paper into a close catching position when your dog assumes the pose: legs apart, back bent.

The thing which designers of dog toilets seem to have a problem with is that dogs cannot read. Signs saying “dog toilet”, or “do it here” are wasted on them. Little pictograms of a dog in the position also do not cut the mustard.

Replacing the usual sand with a stainless steel surface is not going to help at all. Nor, of course, will “water facets”, whether that means a fetching fountain or just a tap. The only things which might help attract custom are some form of Astroturf which will feel like grass to a canine foot, or some chemical (I have seen this on sale for domestic use) which mysteriously tells your dog that “This is the place”.

The grass may work if there is no choice. I used to know a yachtsman who regularly took his dog to sea with him, and had a patch of artificial grass at the foot of the mast. His dog took the hint. I have not tried the chemical.

The DAB does, though, have one good dog idea. District Councillor Yeung Hok-ming turned up at the same press conference calling for more pet-friendly parks, which the public, according to a DAB survey, warmly supported.

As do I, with one proviso. Our nearest “pet-friendly” park has an enclosure with a double gate so you can let your dog roam free without worrying about it escaping when someone opens the gate. This enclosure is ludicrously small. If you have a very small dog, like a pocket poodle, or a rather unathletic one, like a French bulldog, then the enclosure may have some exercise possibilities.

A decent-sized dog will sniff round and look disgusted. Or jump the fence.

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Ad blockers are great, but are they also an ethical problem?

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on August 7, 2025| 1 Comment »

You may think you’re looking at Youtube, but Youtube is also looking at you. This should not come as a surprise. They say that if you can’t see what is being sold on a website, the thing being sold is you.

Youtube is selling your eyeballs, so of course they’re interested in what you get up to. They know when and where you looked, for how long, whether you finished an item, whether you watched an ad and if as a result you clicked on it. Behind all this surveillance is the chink of money being counted.

On the whole most of us are quite happy to let this go on in the background. We watch what we want to watch and try not to be manipulated into watching what we don’t want to watch … “You’ll never guess what happened next” and other clickbait avoided.

An important aide to an enjoyable Youtube session is an ad blocker. A good ad blocker will seamlessly remove those ads which interrupt longer pieces and insist on you watching for at least five seconds.

I understand this is a matter of much irritation to Youtube. A constant arms race continues between Youtube boffins trying to produce a blocker-proof ad, and the ad blocker people trying to keep ahead of them.

However using an ad blocker in this way does bring us to an ethical dilemma. People producing Youtube vids often depend on them for an income, in some cases most or all of their income. Part of that income comes from measured traffic on the ads inserted in their material by Youtube.

The possibility that I am blocking some small part of this by avoiding ads is not a problem if the content provider is someone like DAZN, a sportscasting company which throws billions of dollars around in public acquisitions. They do not need my pittance. But thank you for the football coverage.

Still, a lot of Youtube content still emerges from a cottage industry. Minority pursuit videos are often done by two people taking turns filming each other. Obscure hobbies attract dedicated individuals. Sometimes the possibility of being paid by Youtube for what they were doing for nothing comes as a pleasant surprise.

When you are looking at a site like this it is easy to feel guilty. Yes, I am enjoying the video without irritating interruptions, but the person producing it, who has become a famliar and admired figure, is missing out on the money to be earned by seducing my eyeballs.

Discussing this with computer-using friends I find I am not the only one bothered by this. A popular solution is to leave a “like”, whether you liked that particular offering or not. Subscribing is also a boost for a site.

Youtube also measures “engagement”, by which it means the response in messages to the site. So a costless word or two like “Bravo” or “Nice video” will help. This is not just a matter of pleasing Youtube. As a site operator in a small way I can assure you that all responses (other then the rabidly hostile ones) produce a grateful glow.

If you really want to be generous you can sign up for Patreon, which will funnel a donation on your behalf, or “Buy me a coffee” which does the same thing on a more small and casual scale. This may get you a mention and a thanks on your favourite site.

One of my more thoughtful friends has noticed that content providers these days often urge, or even beg, visitors to stay for the end of the video. Apparently Youtube pays more for this. So whenever he opens a video on a site he approves of he keeps it running to the end. If he doesn’t actually want to watch it to the end he opens a new window and leaves the old one running underneath it.

No doubt Youtube would regard this as a dishonest trick. But then Youtube is a bit of a dishonest trick itself. We all know the endless scroll is addictive.

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Fruit and vegetables now defy the seasons … with one exception

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on July 31, 2025| Leave a Comment »

When I was a kid my mother was still in the habit of shopping daily. We had a fridge but it hadn’t really changed our eating habits yet. Most shops featured a counter, behind which the “assistant” would stand and fetch what you wanted.

Fruit and vegetables were different. These came from a specialised shop called the greengrocer’s, which was set up rather more like a Hong Kong wet market. The fruit and veg were out on shelves or in baskets so you could inspect and fondle the goods.

There was a big open space in the middle of the shop where the greengrocer performed, juggling fruit, chaffering with the customers (most of whom he knew by name) and weighing purchases on a large weighing machine.

There was, I noticed, a lot of variation in what was available. We were at the mercy of the climate. You ate salad in the summer because that was when lettuce, cucumber and tomatoes were “in season”. You had Brussels sprouts with your Christmas turkey because sprouts were the only green vegetable immune to frost. Strawberries were a treat at Wimbledon because they had been unobtainable for nine months before

Apart from bananas, which came from – I suppose – banana republics by refrigerated boat, and citrus fruits, imported from Spain, to every thing there was a season, as the song had it.

Well we have changed all that. Wandering my local supermarket I find that most of the fruits and vegetables are reassuringly consistent. They may come from different places at different times of the year but they are always there.

This is partly because food now frequently flies. So what is out of season in the northern hemisphere will be just coming into fruition in the southern one. Also a lot of food production is now conducted in entirely artificial environments. Confused plants can be persuaded that it is fruit time regardless of the calendar.

This is all well and good, and no doubt makes it easier to follow a healthy diet. But there is one exception. We have just passed, you may not have noticed, the end of the lychee season.

I was a fan of the lychee long before coming to Hong Kong. This is because Chinese restaurants in the UK, at least outside the big cities, sold a rather specialised foreigner-friendly version of Chinese food, and this did not include desserts.

If you really wanted a dessert there were only two possibilities: ice cream or tinned lychees. This was thoroughly misleading. When I came to Hong Kong I found whole restaurants devoted to Chinese sweet dishes, offering an intriguing range of soups, dumplings, fruits and variations on rice. There were no tinned lychees or, for that matter, ice cream.

In due course I was introduced to the real fresh lychee. In those days the Xinhua news agency office in Hong Kong was routinely described as China’s de facto embassy in the colony, but they did perform some press relations stuff. And so I was invited on a day trip to see the lychee harvest in Shenzhen, which in those days still had trees and farms.

I am not sure how the industrial scale picking is done but we were all issued with bags and urged to help ourselves. The lychee tree is a conveniently low tree.

But it seems somehow to have eluded the trend towards fruit and vegetable globalisation. You can get lychees when they are in season in Guangdong. Outside that time you can’t. This is surprising.

When kiwis were a New Zealand speciality they were seasonal. But the fruit – also known as the Chinese gooseberry – was long ago transplanted and copied. So now they come from a variety of places and you can get them all year round. Why has this not happened to the lychee?

Let me offer a free suggestion to any New Zealand farmer who thinks the kiwi business is getting a bit crowded these days. Buy, borrow or steal a lychee tree. In the summer – that is your summer, not ours – you will have the world to yourself.

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Is writing on toilet walls still a thing?

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on July 24, 2025| Leave a Comment »

Without commenting in any way on the merits of the case, the news that a young man had been arrested and charged with writing a seditious message on a toilet wall was … pleasantly nostalgic.

Writing on the walls of public toilet cubicles used to be a widespread hobby and some walls in popular … establishments were virtually covered in writings and drawings. Well prepared graffiti artists had pencils or pens; the rest of us just scratched.

Of course many of the results lacked artistic quality and most of them were obscene. Among the more printable was the almost universal assurance that “Kilroy was here.” A variety of theories are offered about who Kilroy was and why he was commemorated in this way.

I also recall coming across “Clap your hands and jump with joy; I found this wall before Kilroy” to which someone had added “Kilroy built it.”

Public toilets in the more academic parts of Oxford sported graffiti of a more learned kind. Many of them were in Latin; a few in ancient Greek. Some users spent their toilet time composing alphabets: A is for Anabasis, B is for Binomianism, C is for Critical Theory and so on.

Inevitably, academics have swooped. Selection of findings here. Sample discovery: “Females discussed body image more than males did. There was also a difference in focus: females listed their height and weight, whereas males listed their penis size.”

A more civilised habit, in private homes, was to decorate your toilet walls with examples of entertaining newspaper errors of the “Headless body found in topless bar” kind. Many of these came from The Guardian, which was so notorious for the laxity of its proofreading that Private Eye called it The Grauniad

It must be said, however, that in the vast majority of English toilets the graffiti, if there were graffiti, were fairly crude and disgusting. However this was a result of the fact that the toilet cubicle was private. You could do what you liked in there and nobody would know. At my boarding school there were actually crowds in some cubicles at break times, of smokers.

So I am a little concerned at the news that someone has been arrested and charged for defacing a toilet wall. The question is how did they catch him?

I assume … I hope … there is no question of CCTV in the cubicles at Hong Kong China City, where the deplorable deed is alleged to have taken place. I realise we are on camera a lot these days. City Super actually has cheerful notices saying “Smile! You’re on CCTV”. Shoplifting is a serious matter and I yield without complaint the right to televise the avocados.

The toilet is another matter. No doubt writing on the walls is only one of the many ways in which the privacy of the cubicle can be abused, but privacy there should nevertheless be.

Other theories are also a bit worrying. Does Hong Kong China City expect its toilet attendants to inspect a cubicle after each visit to make sure the walls have not been defaced? Or do the national security cops keep an eye on suspected subversives by poking a periscope over the partition from the next cubicle?

No doubt the ensuing trial will be a big attraction to the media and all will be revealed in due course. Meanwhile the story also has a serious side. The suspected scribbler could face seven years in jail if his work is considered seditious.

As a police spokesman memorably put it: “doing with a seditious intention an act or acts that had a seditious intention is a serious offence”. Also it’s a national security offence, so even if your only audience was a toilet wall you don’t get bail.

Kilroy was here, and has moved to Canada.

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An economist on education: if it don’t make you rich it’s a waste of time

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on July 17, 2025| 1 Comment »

The newspapers are full, as is customary at this time of the year, of stories about local kids who have done well in the school-leaving exams. It seems that most of the stars of this show want to become doctors, which shows a touching faith in the inability of AI to take over the routine parts of medicine.

For a discordant note readers could turn to The Economist, which printed a long piece lamenting the fact that, as a subsidiary headline put it, “the bottom has fallen out of the graduate job market”.

The primary evidence for this comes from America, where graduates in their 20s have been found in one study to have higher unemployment rates than the general population. Things are apparently moving in a similar direction, but much more slowly, outside America.

Graduates – again from the evidence we are back in the USA – find jobs harder to come by and also less satisfying than they used to. Very good international example from the BBC on Thursday: mainlander with degree from Oxford and PhD from Singapore university is working … as a food delivery driver.

The Economist’s writer dismisses as an unsatisfactory explanation claims that many graduates of American universities are ill-educated and in some cases actually illiterate. These stories may be true, but the brightest and best are also finding employment elusive.

Some formerly entry-level jobs are certainly falling to AI. A more original suggestion is that people used to go to university to achieve digital literacy; now everyone gets it from their smart phone so for many button-pushing jobs a degree looks unnecessary.

The writer concludes that many American students are now deciding that university is not worth it: the time… the debt … the disappointment. This is not happening in Europe where, as our scribe puts it, “”Governments are subsidising useless degrees, encouraging kids to waste time studying.”

What do we mean by “useless degrees”? “Outside America, the share in arts, humanities and social sciences mostly grows. So, inexplicably, does enrolment in journalism courses. If these trends reveal young people’s ideas about the future of work, they truly are in trouble.”

Really? Underlying this lament appears to be the unspoken assumption that the main or only reason for any form of study is to increase your future income. Education of any other kind amounts to “encouraging kids to waste time.”

I am reminded of Oscar Wilde’s lament that people “know the price of everything and the value of nothing.” This might usefully be adapted. Economists – and The Economist – know the price of everything and erroneously suppose that the value is the same thing.

“Until recently,” says our author, “the obvious path for a British student hoping to make money was a graduate scheme at a bank.” But making money is only one of the things people hope to find in a job. Some British students would rather shovel sewage for a living than work in a bank and I was once one of them.

Only a Philistine society will limit its educational offerings to subjects with an immediate practical application, or indeed an ironclad promise of future wealth attached to them.

Indeed there are some areas of human activity where the attainment of the highest standards requires that many are tested, most of whom will fail. Training for air traffic controllers is a notorious example. Thousands apply, hundreds are accepted, tens actually complete the course and get into a control tower, some of whom drop out later when they find the work too stressful.

Many of the more demanding military specialities have similar attrition rates. In university programmes this is obscured by the fact that every student who makes a reasonable amount of effort will get the degree. But in general music grads do not become musicians, Eng Lit grads do not become novelists, philosophy grads do not become professional philosophers and the only graduate archaeologist I ever met was teaching in a primary school.

This brings us to the “inexplicable” attraction of journalism courses, which I flogged happily and successfully for nearly three decades. It was a platitude among teachers of journalism that most of our students were not going to be journalists, or if they became journalists would not stay that way.

At one time there was a spirited debate in the journalism education business about whether we should continue to design courses on the basis that the graduate would be able to meet the requirements of the trade (art, craft, science, con trick or disease, whichever you prefer) or we should accept that we were teaching non-journalists and adapt courses accordingly.

Generally we concluded that the practical aspects of a journalism programme were one of the things which students liked, even if they were not going to be practitioners themselves. Most of my students never became journalists. A surprising number (at least to me) became police people. Journalism may be (as Max Hastings puts it) a pursuit for “cads and bounders”, but it still has a whiff of adventure around it that you are not going to get in the Business School. But if you really want to be rich … your choice.

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So soft resistance is not a legal concept? Why this is a worrying thought

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on July 4, 2025| 1 Comment »

One does not wish to seem ungrateful, but the enduring mystery of the hour – exactly what do officials mean by “soft resistance” – has not been much clarified by the Secretary for Justice, who offered a definition last week.

Soft resistance, said Paul Lam, has three main elements: making false or misleading statements, expressing them irrationally with emotional bias, and having the intention to create misunderstandings about the Chinese or Hong Kong governments and their policies.

This looks like an extension of the law on subversion, already unmoored from its Common Law attachment to the provocation of violence. If this were the case it would still leave a variety of tricky questions: for example, would sincere belief in the truth of the statement complained of be a defence?

But Mr Lam scotched this notion by adding that “methods of soft resistance may not always be illegal, but that did not mean they did not harm society.” He also said that although the term was hard to define the government would not use it arbitrarily. ”You can say it is a political term,” he mused.

“Not all issues in society should be addressed by legal means. [Legal means] are also not always the most effective way of handling [matters],” Lam said. This brings us to a rather alarming question: what non-legal means is the government proposing to use?

A few reminders: we have repeatedly been assured that freedom of expression continues to be protected in Hong Kong. Both the Basic Law and the National Security Law reiterate the point, often also made by officials.

Anyone who complains about apparent infringements will be referred to the relevant part of the Civil Rights Ordinance, which permits exceptions to protect — put briefly — reputations, public order (including national security) and public decency.

But there is one condition attached to these exceptions: they must be “provided by law”. That means that if a person engages in soft resistance, deplorable though that may be, using methods which are not illegal, then he or she is exercising the right to self-expression and is entitled to Mr Lam’s protection while doing so.

The answer to soft resistance which does not break the law is of course soft repression. This could take the form of counter-arguments, pointing out untruths, denouncing irrational language and correcting misinterpretations of government policies.

This should not be too difficult. The government has a whole department devoted to putting its version of events before the public. RTHK is at its service and most of our surviving media take a pride in doing more than justice to the government line.

The answer to erroneous speech is, or should be, correct speech.

Yet somehow I do not think this was on the mind of the numerous senior officials who thought a 28th anniversary speech was a good opportunity to denounce the evils of soft resistance and promise to extirpate it.

The Secretary for Culture, Art and Tourism, for example, promised to step up scrutiny before allowing funding or the use of venues for shows. Other issuers of permits of various kinds are apparently putting their shoulders to the wheel. Of late we learn that restaurants can lose their licences, social workers and teachers can be drummed out of their professions. Some people cannot run a bookshop without entertaining a stream of visitors from government departments, citing anonymous complaints about hygiene, fire safety, business regulations or whatever.

We may have a government which, as Mr Lam said, welcomes criticism, but it is not very good at looking like that.

The problem with this sort of thing is that after a while it makes people suspicious. Maybe the venue you wanted to hire really does have an air conditioning problem. Who knows? The Lord moves in mysterious ways and routinely refused to discuss individual cases.

Recently the Inland Revenue Department resumed sending me annual tax returns. In normal times I would put this down to a lucrative one-off freelance gig in 2023 after which the employer very properly filed the usual form reporting how much it paid me. As it happened, though, this sudden renewal of interest in my finances coincided with several stories about news media and individual reporters being asked for large tax payments they did not owe. So an innocent bit of bureaucratic routine looks … fishy.

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