tim's experiment

In 1593 Henry IV of France effectively ended the French Wars of Religion by becoming a Catholic. Historians are not sure that he actually said “Paris is well worth a Mass”.  But the quote embodies the general assumption that Henry, who had the best claim to the throne but was opposed by many aristocrats on religious grounds because he was a Protestant, did not change his official faith for theological reasons. However the conversion was not examined too closely and Henry had a successful reign until assassinated by a Catholic terrorist (Muslims are not the only people who take their religion too seriously) in 1610. His contemporary Elizabeth I of England, who also inherited a country divided by religion, soothed anxieties on this score by saying that she had “no desire to make windows into men’s souls”. Returning Officers in Hong Kong, it seems, are expected to be more ambitious.

The defining feature of the Leung administration is not its policies, which in some ways are better than those pursued by previous teams, but the casual way in which it demolishes and discredits pieces of what you might call the civic infrastructure. Institutions like the police and the ICAC are politicised and subverted, councils and consultative bodies are politicised and perverted, ordinary democratic habits are abandoned without notice or regret. Now we are losing the idea that an election is a public event conducted under clearly understood rules in which anyone who follows those rules can play. This started with the announcement, two days before the nomination period, that candidates would be required to sign a declaration indicating their support for three specific clauses of the Basic Law. This was announced in an unusual and interesting government press release. This went through the existing legal requirements for candidates: “has to declare in the nomination form that he/she will uphold the Basic law and pledge allegiance to the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region“, and successfully elected members of Legco: “members of the Legislative Council to swear to uphold the Basic Law when they assume office“. It goes on to say that “We take the view” that candidates who advocate independence may not be eligible for election and this could cause “uncertainties to the solemn Legislative Council election and confusion to electors“. It goes on to say that Returning Officers will ask candidates to sign a “confirmation form” expressing their support for the Basic Law in general and three clauses in particular.

The oddest thing about this effusion is the use of “we”. The HKSAR government does not usually refer to itself a “we”, an affectation generally reserved for newspaper editorial writers and the Queen. Usually we get “a spokesman” and for matters of this importance the spokesman usually has a name. Another oddity is that although “lawful” occurs a couple of times and the new wheeze is supposed to be “in strict accordance with the law” we are supplied with no details about this. Nor in the ensuing week have we heard from the Department of Justice, or indeed from much of anyone else. So who is the father of this bastard? We can, I think, exclude the Electoral Affairs Commissioner, Mr Barnabas Fung. Mr Fung has been floundering entertainingly when explaining the significance of the new measure. It is “administrative”. Candidates who refuse to sign may or may not be disqualified. The Returning Officer may if they do sign it seek “further information”. So it seems that you may be disqualified if you don’t sign and you may still be disqualified if you do. Or you may not. A fine mess for a retired judge to preside over. But this innovation is not Mr Fung’s style. We know this because even as the nomination matter was bubbling along he was asked about possible regulation of internet comments on candidates. His reply: “The EAC is open-minded on this but it is not up to the EAC to change the law.  Fung added that society should reach some broad consensus on the issue before the government may consider how to take it forward.”

Having aquitted Mr Fung, do we look further up the bureaucratic pyramid? One luckless official poked his head over the parapet last week to deny that the new measure was intended to exclude independence-seeking politicians from the election. Why he expected anyone to believe that he did not say. But later, in a rather under-reported speech,  Zhang Xiaoming, the head of the mainland’s Liaison Office in Hong Kong, let the cat out of the bag. Of course no disreputable candidates should be allowed to run in the election, he said, in case they won and used Legco to “demand independence”. And indeed this argument has been rather popular in the columns of the China Daily, our local English-language counterpart of the Global Times. Readers have been assured that politicians who are not happy with the government do not understand the Basic Law. The requirement that they should express allegiance to specific parts of it is desirable, and completely lawful according to mainland legal experts. Well a mainland legal expert is like a Swiss admiral. It’s rather easy to be an expert in mainland law because there isn’t any. I also note an outbreak of that hallmark of China apologia, ill-informed allegations that what is being proposed is in fact perfectly normal. We are told that no country allows people to advocate independence for particular parts of it. This is hogwash. People have been trying for years to separate Quebec from Canada, Catalonia from Spain, Wales from England, Brittany from France and so on. Where people enjoy freedom of speech they enjoy freedom to entertain the idea of independence. And vice versa.

There is no such thing in Common Law systems as a thought crime. In what passes for a legal system in China it is punishable to hold the wrong opinion. This is not the case in Hong Kong. Threatening people with prosecution for making false election statements if they fail to subscribe to the official interpretation of the Basic Law is clearly an attempt to intimidate. We all respect the Basic Law because it is the law. We are still free to see some parts of it as better than others. And since the law itself contains provisions for it to be changed we are implicitly allowed to discuss and advocate changes which we regard as an improvement. Independence would be a drastic change and is certainly not a practical objective in present circumstances. But people are allowed to think about it, talk about it and even campaign about it. Because that is what freedom of speech entails. One of two things will now happen. Someone will challenge the new election requirement. This need not involve any great matters of principle because it appears to be ultra vires. I do not believe the law authorises the government to order Returning Officers to inquire into the personal opinions of candidates. If the challenge succeeds, well and good. Some resignations would then be appropriate. If the challenge fails I can only hope you are reading these words in Canada.

Watching the Leung administration feels increasingly, if I may borrow a metaphor from Michael Lewis, like sitting in a small boat watching the Titanic steam inexorably towards an iceberg. Is there no principle they will defend from mainland interference? If we are going to vet candidates why stop at questionnaires and ferrets through the press cuttings? There is a rich history of witch-finding which may help. Matthew Hopkins, the Witchfinder General and subject of a gloriously bad horror movie, used a pin. Will we see anyone who utters the word “independence” in Legco grabbed by security and hustled out of the chamber, never to be seen again? 1984 was 30 years ago. Animal Farm is now.

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When I was aged six it was decided, in accordance with the medical consensus at the time, that my tonsils served no useful purpose and should be removed. This is now regarded as a sort of scientific variation on Female Genital Mutilation, doing nothing for the patient’s health because the tonsils are in fact useful. Never mind. The gentleman who amputated my tonsils in accordance with the prevailing medical wisdom was called an “Ear, Nose and Throat specialist” and the place where he worked was called the Ear Nose and Throat Clinic. But you will not find such a specialist, or such a clinic, in Hong Kong, where the specialists in this area announce their field as “Otorinolaryngology”. Readers who suffered Latin at school will recognise this as being constructed from the Latin words for ear, nose and throat, capped with the word for an area of study. It seems the ear, nose and throat people feel naked unless their professional title is cloaked, like the naughty  bits of Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”, in the “decent obscurity of a learned language”.

No doubt the medical profession is aware of the placebo effect of a bit of mumbo-jumbo, the reassuring rustle of a white coat, the appearance of relaxed omniscience. What is the difference between God and a doctor, goes the old joke. God knows he isn’t a doctor, is the answer. This is all very well, and may even be therapeutic, but it causes problems when doctors as a group emerge in the political arena. Suddenly we have the Legislative Council’s medical representative engaged in a one-man obstruction campaign — no doubt known in the profession as a “filibusterus medicus” — to head off a government proposal to reform, or at least to change, the Medical Council. The council  regulates the profession by vetting qualifications and adjudicating on complaints. Suddenly it seems this profession, largely composed of Mercedes drivers judging by the contents of their reserved spaces in hospital carparks, is having sand kicked in its face by the government. In retaliation Legco is paralyzed. Two other bills (whose importance has no doubt been exaggerated, but still…) will die if legislators do not finish work on them before the summer break.

The government wishes, we are told, to add four lay members to the Medical Council. The council currently has 28 members, 24 of whom are doctors. The idea, or so we are told, is to deal with the public suspicion that the council takes a rather indulgent view of professional misconduct, and that when it does undertake disciplinary proceedings they proceed very slowly. The first point is propelled by a widespread belief that a doctor has very little to fear form the council unless he rapes a patient or sells her kidney to a mainland hospital. The second point was highlighted by a recent case which was decided nine years after the events complained of. This is a long time, even by the standards of the regular courts. The legendary Yacoub Kahn’s unlawful dismissal case took seven years, leading many people to suspect that the government’s lawyers were under instructions not to lose it before he reached retirement age, and consequently could not be reinstated. The quote invariably wheeled out at this point is “justice delayed is justice denied”, which is usually attributed to William Gladstone (19th century prime minister and inventor of the bag) but can be traced back to the 17th century. Well quite. Part of the Council’s disciplinary musings involves a Preliminary Investigation Committee which (I quote its website) “always includes a lay member”. All four of the existing lay members are available for this purpose but no doubt they are busy people. It may be that a larger pool of lay members would enable the committee to meet more often and get a move on. It is difficult to believe, though, that this is the only, or even a major, cause of the leisurely pace which characterises the council’s investigations.

Anyway there we have the case for the prosecution. The Council is dilatory, slow and biassed in favour of doctors. Reading the pamphlet it produces for the information of potential complainants I did detect a certain wistful hope that the number of complaints would be quite small. There is a section on “the nature of medicine”, which starts with the admission that “medicine is not an exact science” and goes on to say that errors of diagnosis or bad outcomes are not necessarily a sign of misconduct. There is a lengthy list of “categories of complaint we are unlikely to take forward” and a daunting section on what may be required of you if your complaint survives: evidence on oath, appearance at public hearing, cross-examination by counsel for the accused… Clearly doctors, like policemen, believe that their work involves special challenges which the lay person does not understand. I sympathise, though it is difficult to accept the council’s claim that it is regarded as anti-doctor by doctors.

The case for the defence is that after all medicine is difficult. With the best intentions and greatest care there will still be cases where the outcome is unfortunate, for which read tragic. A doctor doing his best and following the accepted tenets of the profession may still, say, excise a perfectly healthy set of tonsils. It would be unfair to jeopardise his ability to work in the profession because of a bit of bad luck. Only doctors understand what other doctors go through so it is appropriate and necessary for them to be the overwhelming majority of judges of professional conduct. Cases take a long time because they are complicated and adding lay members will not help.

All this hardly explains the passion which the government’s rather modest proposal has aroused. The problem seems to lie in a harmless-looking phrase, “appointed by the Chief Executive”. This phrase, and its predecessor “appointed by the Governor” used to denote a constitutional ritual. A specialised unit in the Home Affairs Branch kept a register of potential officeholders.  For many years I was regularly asked to update my entry in it, though the only invitation it ever produced was to the committee which vets personal number plates: fun but badly paid. Posts on councils, consultative bodies and such like were filled by the branch after nomination by an outside body, some consultation with the relevant department and maybe the chairman of the body concerned. They were not vetted for political propriety. However it is now widely believed that such appointments are used to reward the government’s supporters, which would be bad enough, and worse to pack the bodies concerned with people who can be depended on to support some government project or objective.

Nor is there an absence of evidence for this view. Come with me to the official list of members of the Legislative Council. This is confusingly presented in “order of precedence”, thereby making it very difficult to find any particular councillor. On the other hand it does mean the councillors are more or less in order of arrival, so that you can see how much legislative toil it takes before honour descends in the form of a Bauhinia Star (BS) of one colour or another or a Justiceship of the Peace. Justices of the Peace in the English system are lay judges who sit in court with a lawyer (the Clerk) to advise them. All they do in Hong Kong is polite inspections of prisons, so this is basically an adornment for your business card.  Looking down the precedence list you have Tsang Yok-sing, who is first becausse he is chairman; he has the BS  and JP. You then come to three very senior and undecorated democrats. Then you meet your first DAB man, who has everything, and next comes another democrat, again undecorated. Then there are two Laus: Wong-fat is lavishly decorated, while Emily is only a JP from pre-Handover times. Next comes a block of government supporters, all of whom have the full BJ except for the FTU’s Wong Kwok-hing, who for some reason is not a JP. Then we come to the undecorated Ronny Tong, and so it goes on. Of course this may not all be CY Leung’s fault. But if you look only at the members who joined the council in 2012 the message is the same. A total of 11 BS have been awarded. Not one to a democrat. The story with JPs is similar. The DAB has 18 per cent of councillors and gets a third of honours. Your work in Legco will only be recognised if it is work on the same side of the fence as the DAB. What used to be a civic honour has become a political reward. Appointments to other bodies may have more obviously toxic results. You have to wonder, for example, why the MTR was in such a tearing hurry to order fleets of trains from a Chinese manufacturer who is the rolling stock equivalent of the people who sold melamine-laced milk powder.  Then there are the university rows…

So what is bothering the doctors is the thought that the four lay people to be appointed by the Chief Executive will be chosen for their willingness to pursue some particular policy beloved of the CE. Recognising the qualifications of mainland doctors would be a hair-raising example. The Chief Secretary, Carrie Lam, will not have soothed these fears by suggesting the other day that the change to the council would help to solve the shortage of doctors in public hospitals. How does that work, one wonders?

Whatever you think of the doctors’ case, this controversy is a symptom of a wider problem. Appointments by the government used to be almost universal. And it was almost universally accepted that the major consideration in such appointments was the interests of the body or activity involved. No doubt some people were black-listed for a variety of reasons but the system was not used as a form of social welfare for grassroots supporters, or as a way of packing councils and consultative bodies with proponents of a particular point or policy. Times have changed. It is now widely accepted that appointments and honours are used to reward, to bribe, and to provide a well-grassed retirement pasture for the Boxers of our local Animal Farm. Whether things changed gradually or CY Leung is entirely to blame is not relevant. Trust, once dispelled, is not easily restored. On the whole we still rely on doctors to do the right thing by us. We cannot, alas, say the same of Mr Leung. His successor will have a lot to live down

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The Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong, more conveniently known as the DAB, has a women’s wing. This is known as the Womens Affairs Committee. For most of the year it labours unseen and those of us who are not DAB members, or not women, are undisturbed by its activities, whatever they may be. Do the DAB ladies do the usual Women’s Institute stuff – knitting patterns, recipes, flower arranging?  Do they have guest speakers, film shows, study tours? Do they laboriously pen earnest analyses of policy issues affecting women, to be passed to – and ignored by – their male party comrades? Alas we do not know. The WAC emerges once a year to give a press conference, presided over by its chairwoman, Elizabeth Quat. To the best of my recollection this has been going on for at least five years. The press conference is always about the same topic. The WAC objects to various architectural quirks, usually involving the use of glass as a barrier, which allow observant males to look up the skirts of ladies and, if so minded, to photograph what they see there.

This annual festival is open to a number of objections, and indeed they have been made over the years. Mr Alex Lo is not the first person to point out, as he did in a recent column, that if you are opposed to upskirt peeping and picturing then it is not terribly logical to publish an annual list of the best places to do it. The publication of the annual list continues; Hysan Place’s food court is apparently the current hot spot. It also appears to some women of my acquaintance that there are perhaps more pressing issues to which the DAB ladies could devote their annual 15 minutes of fame, like the virtual slavery of some domestic helpers, the plight of sex workers, the shortage of help and facilities for working mothers, or the glass ceiling which results in Hong Kong’s business leadership being overwhelmingly male. This point has also been made before, in vain. This year there was a small innovation. Miss Quat announced the discovery that as well as places where careless architects had provided opportunities for upskirt photography, there were also places where similar carelessness allowed vertical views more or less downwards. As ladies leaned forward to eat this meant that lubricious male eyes – or presumably, though Ms Quat did not make this point, lubricious Lesbian ones – could behold … well they could behold as much of a scantily dressed bosom as you can see on any public beach.

Clearly it is not what is seen or photographed that is the problem, but the possibility that someone is getting illicit pleasure out of it. Ms Quat conceded that the number of cases recorded by the police was dropping. There were 274 last year. But she said this was only the tip of an iceberg, because most victims did not realise they had been snapped. But if the victim of the fell deed is not aware that it has taken place, where is the harm, one wonders? There are of course good public order reasons for discouraging men from hovering round glass escalators in the hope of taking pictures of underwear, but the possible harm to the victim is not one of them. A personal note here: I am an enthusiastic and regular dancer in the Scottish Country tradition. Mostly we dance in private but occasionally we do public demonstrations. After one of these I discovered an interesting snippet in the video recorded by a member of the audience. I dance, of course, in a kilt, which if you are not Scottish is difficult to distinguish from a skirt. There is a move called a “polite turn” which is basically a twirl on the spot. I noticed that when done quickly this twirl results in the kilt flying up in the air and providing an instant answer to that perennial question: what do you wear under the kilt? The answer in my case is underwear. So I can testify from personal experience that having your knickers snapped has no deleterious effects at all. There is no trauma, no danger of pregnancy or sexually transmitted disease. In fact it appears from the few cases which are actually reported in the newspapers that in the vast majority of indecent photography cases the offence is spotted by a by-stander, not by the star of the picture.

Ms Quat’s annual smutfest does not bring out the best in Hong Kong newspapers. The Standard’s story, written with admirable straight face by a female reporter, was headlined “Perv alert: upskirt black spots”. The SCMP went for “Peeping Tom alert”, which is not much of an improvement. Unconventional sexual tastes are known as paraphilias, and an urge to look at or picture the underwear of unaware ladies is one of them. It used to be thought that there was a list, which would eventually succumb to the usual scientific approach: they all got Latin names, then symptoms would be enumerated, causes discovered and eventually, perhaps, a cure. The arrival of the internet has enormously expanded the list, to the point where this enterprise has more or less been abandoned. The relevant Wikipedia entry quotes an authority as saying that “Like allergies, sexual arousal may occur from anything under the sun, including the sun.” It is at least agreed, though, that these things are not chosen by the person concerned, and also that they cannot be changed by any currently known medical intervention. The help which is offered is concerned with helping the patient to lead a normal life and avoid manifestations of his taste which will lead to trouble with the law. Clearly there is a lot of luck, good and bad, involved here. For some people their kink is merely another float in life’s rich pageant; they enjoy conventional sex as well, they can take or leave a bit of extra interest on the side. Others may have desires which are difficult to fulfill, despite the large industry now catering for what the relevant producers calls “fetishes”. And some would be highly objectionable and illegal if acted out, notably pedophilia but also rape, cannibalism and so on.

A society which has managed to achieve a level of tolerance for homosexuals should be able to manage a similar level of sympathy for other people who did not get the conventional kit when sexual preferences were being handed out. Indeed to be fair, the media (at least in English) were admirably restrained in their reporting of a recent case involving a man who was caught in an advanced state of public sexual excitement over a pair of ladies’ shoes. A person who feels drawn to photographing ladies underwear is a problem. He is also a person with a problem. Jovial headlines about peepers and pervs are not helpful. An annual tirade against glass escalators is also not constructive. Do these people get the help they need?

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I do not generally write about British matters here. I have spent the last half of my life in Hong Kong so I don’t really feel qualified. However for the last week anyone who even looks like a Brit has been subjected to a barrage of questions. So here, in case you are wondering, are my answers.

Do you feel British or English? English. British is a passport. On the whole I agree with the old Flanders and Swann song (which can be found in full here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdY1Y5XNJBY) that “The English are moral, the English are good, and clever and modest and misunderstood.”

What do you think of Brexit? It’s a catastrophe. People seem to have forgotten what the first half of the 20th century was like. The primary purpose of the EU is not to make people richer, it is to provide Europe with an international system which does not include regular punch-ups. The alternative is World War Three.

Whose fault is it? My generation, I fear. I notice that support for exit was overwhelmingly concentrated among older voters. Most young people are appalled by the result. So my lot provided most of the Brexit votes. Nor does it stop there. The people who had the pleasure of licking Hitler are now known as the Great Generation. We who came next were the Lucky Generation. We caught the first full flowering of the Welfare State, before it was diluted by the rich people’s backlash and before our elders had forgotten what things were like before. We flourished on National Health orange juice and free milk at school. Cheap school dinners (which would now I suppose be called school lunches) were designed by nutritionists and there was no nonsense about choosing chips with everything. We all grew up much bigger than our parents. Education was free as long as you kept passing the exams and people who had no previous family connection with university could and did reach the third year of a PhD without paying a cent in fees. We came of age in the 60s, which was a fun time to be young. The 70s and 80s were a rough time if you were a miner or factory worker, but the bright and well-organised could continue to fulfill Harold Macmillan’s tactless observation that “many of our people have never had it so good.”

And the result of this was that most of us took very little interest in politics. This left the field clear for ambitious creeps who had never done anything else. I suspect Nigel Farage was taking a wild guess when he accused members of the European parliament of never having had a real job, but he could have said the same thing with complete confidence of the UK parliament. A political career now starts in your 20s with work in a party research department, think tank or NGO. As a result for many politicians the idea of actually doing something useful with the power that comes their way comes second to winning. Standards of conduct have declined, though not perhaps as much as they have declined here. The Brexit campaign was the apotheosis of this approach. Not 24 hours after the result was announced the leaders of the campaign were withdrawing the promises which they had dangled before a gullible electorate. I recommend a stunning piece of writing in the Guardian which you can find here: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/25/boris-johnson-michael-gove-eu-liars.

If you can’t be bothered to read the whole thing, consider at least this wonderful quote from Kipling:

I could not dig; I dared not rob:
Therefore I lied to please the mob.
Now all my lies are proved untrue
And I must face the men I slew.
What tale shall serve me here among
Mine angry and defrauded young?

So my old home is a mess. Looking at the list of places which voted strongly for Brexit I see many familiar names from my time as a journalist reporting industrial decline: places where old ways no longer worked and an indifferent central government had made no serious effort to put anything in their place. Communities have been wrecked. Bitterness is understandable.

Still, some perspective, please. This may be a demonstration of the things that can go wrong in a democracy, but my old home still avoids the things which can go wrong under other systems. The UK does not have a mysterious secret police force that can keep you in solitary confinement for eight months. It does not jail refugees for two years for collecting and selling empty tin cans. No lawyer or politician of any stripe has called for Scottish nationalists to be prosecuted for treason. There are real elections with dramatic consequences, as I suspect we shall shortly see. But not in Hong Kong.

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I would normally be disposed to deal gently with Mr Tung Chee-hwa, who has reached a venerable age and long since left the centre of the local political stage. But Mr Tung wants to continue to be a player, and in that case he must expect to be tackled occasionally. This brings us to a recent speech in which Mr Tung opined that the job of the Chief Executive was impossible because he did not have a dependable majority in Legco. The implication of this, eagerly picked up by the regime’s local running dogs, is that there should be a ruling party, of which the CE is a member. Or, in a less dramatic version of the same prescription, the Liberal Party should be persuaded to join the ranks of dependable lobby fodder currently filled by the DAB and its trade union alter ego.

The unkind thought which springs to mind at this point is that Mr Tung’s view of the matter may be explained by his personal history. If you have made a frog’s breakfast of a job it is a comforting thought that the job was impossible in the first place so nobody could have done any better. The kinder thought is that Mr Tung has misunderstood the whole purpose and tenor of the Basic Law. Clearly having a leader with a following in the legislature works, more or less, in countries where the ruling party is periodically dumped on the pavement and replaced with the former opposition. But it was never intended that Hong Kong should have a system of this kind. A permanent ruling party, on the other hand, is a recipe for corruption, stagnation and autocracy.  We do not need a local version of Robert Mugabe. The Basic Law involves an attempt at an intermediate model, in which there is no ruling party, but the government is subjected to checks and balances. That is to say it is subordinate to the law and courts, and it depends for its finances on a legislature whose composition it does not control.

The closest analogy, perhaps, is with the US system, where the president depends for money and legislation on a Congress in which his party may not, and often does not, enjoy control. The government has to build coalitions to support its requirements. A majority for one proposal may not be the same people as the majority assembled for another proposal. This is hard work but it meets the requirement dear to the framers of the US constitution, which was to ensure that power was divided and diffused, so that tyranny would be prevented.

Returning to Hong Kong, perhaps it was a pity that Mr Tung was put on Exco for the term of the last governor. This suggested to observant citizens that the first election of a Chief Executive for the SAR was fixed, and known to be fixed by both governments years before it took place. Also it exposed Mr Tung to the way colonial Hong Kong worked, and gave the misleading impression that this was the way it would continue to work after the handover. In the colonial arrangement most legislators – indeed for many years all legislators – owed their positions to appointment and felt a corresponding duty to support the Governor who had appointed them. This did not entirely stifle dissent. There was an Office of Unofficial Members of the Executive and Legislative Councils (Umelco for short) in which the appointees mixed and mingled, so that a lot of issues were discussed informally. The actual Legco proceedings were a public ritual. Serious discussions took place in private.

The framers of the Basic Law tried very hard to ensure that the government would have a tame majority but clearly in a system in which all members were produced by some sort of election this could not be guaranteed. This, however, has not stopped SAR governments from taking Legco for granted, and supposing that whatever they wanted to do would sail through eventually.

The problem which Mr Tung has overlooked is that the governments produced by this system made bad choices. The visceral impression that the system was not working for most people was eventually substantiated by two thoughtful books: one which showed that the Hong Kong SAR government was colluding with a small group of rich families, and one which showed that the government had at the same time surreptitiously dismantled the rudimentary welfare state reluctantly erected by colonial-era civil servants. The routine rebuttals were not convincing.  Often the government added insult to injury by announcing a bad policy, holding a grossly fixed “consultation” about its merits, and then claiming that it was doing what we all wanted.

There is also a problem with political pollution wafted down over our northern boundary. China’s representatives in Hong Kong are often correct in supposing that things are not going well. They erroneously suppose that the solution to this problem is more input from them. Mr Tung might usefully use his position in the corridors of power to point out to Beijing’s local representatives that the problem for Chief Executives of the Hong Kong SAR is not that they have little control over Legco, but that they have little control over themselves. It would be surprising if Mr C.Y. Leung was a popular success: he has no talent for politics and is hampered by a propensity for weasel words and sleazy friends. But his fatal flaw in the eyes of most Hong Kong people is the perception that he is a ventriloquist’s dummy sitting in the lap of the Liaison Office.

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The environment has become a sort of reverse epidemic. Helping it is a handy prop for any proposal, from windfarming to bans on shark fin soup. And there is a serious point here. The globe is in fact warming; large parts of it could become uninhabitable as a result. Species are disappearing, concrete is covering landscape, air and water are polluted. That does not mean that every exercise which claims the environmental label is actually praiseworthy, or worthwhile, or successful. This is a good point to bear in mind when contemplating the activities of our government, whose relationship with the environment is often opportunistic or bumbling. Actually our government was a quite late convert to the existence of the problem. People in the department of that name often complain privately that their colleagues know little and care less of the environment. Moreover the existence of an Environmental Protection Department evokes a well-established bureaucratic reflex: all the other departments try to keep it off their patches.

So initiatives in this area should be examined carefully. Consider, for example, the compulsory charge for plastic bags. The official defence of this scheme is now that it has “changed shopping culture”, and this is true. Even fossils like me now carry a bag, just in case, or stagger out of Page One with an unruly armful of books rather than pay for a new sack. On the other hand this was not the reason originally given for the plastic bag charge at all. Indeed I do not doubt that if the relevant official had stood up in Legco and invited honorary members to support an elaborate and expensive scheme to “change shopping culture” he would have been laughed out of the building. The original justification was that the ban on free bags would help the environment by reducing the amount of plastic used to produce bags, and the amount of space taken up in local landfills when said bags were discarded. In these respects the scheme has been a total failure. If you look at the amount of plastic in the new, durable, non-throw-away plastic bags, and the average number of shopping trips you can get out of one, it is easy to calculate that the amount of plastic used, and eventually landfilled, has increased by a factor of ten. This does not, it is true, take account of the fact that the new bags are a bit bigger. But then it doesn’t consider either that the old flimsy bags were biodegradable, while the new ones will be here until Stephen Hawkings pulls the plug on the universe. Readers who take an interest in these things will also have noticed that a whole new market has opened up for the vendors of plastic bags for lining bins, carrying garbage, hiding dog droppings and other purposes, which in the old days were usually met by reusing supermarket bags. The conclusion I draw from this is that attempts to modify behaviour to help the environment can have unintended and unforeseen consequences. Officials should be careful what they wish for.

Which brings me to the latest looming catastrophe, the proposal to charge for solid waste disposal. In other words, what you put in your dustbin. A charge for what goes down the sewer (a turd tax?) is being left for later. I must admit to having some misgivings about the solid waste charge since it was first announced. People who pay taxes (and we all pay taxes one way or another – you cannot eat or sleep without encountering the consequences of the high land prices to which our government is addicted) are entitled to get something in return. Collecting rubbish is an important public service. Not all public services are charged for. There also seems to be an important difference between this wheeze and the plastic bag one. The plastic bag charge faces you, as the individual shopper, at the point of delivery, as it were. When tempted to ask for a bag you are also deterred by the compulsory charge, which will be added to your bill immediately. This is not going to work with the waste thing, though. There will be nobody in your dustbin to point out that the particular item you are about to deposit in it will cost you 50 cents. An occasional bill will come in. No doubt you will be as mystified by it as we commonly are by the others. Why, when oil prices are at record lows, does my electricity bill feature an upward “fuel cost adjustment”? Anyway, the point is that the deterrent effect will be delayed and diffused, for which read ineffective.

Actually it may even be perverse. On my estate, as on many others, all the rubbish goes into communal dustbins which are emptied every morning. The charge will presumably be levied on the whole collection and shared out between all of us. This means the more rubbish you put in the more your neighbours will subsidise your profligacy. Conversely if you reduce your rubbish output most of the savings will go to them also.

Well these are the obvious problems, with which some well-intentioned official is now no doubt wrestling.  A new side-effect surfaced last week. Officials have, it seems, spotted a danger that unscrupulous producers of solid waste may deposit it in the nearest litter bin, and so avoid paying the charge. The solution to this problem has two aspects. A lot of litter bins will simply be removed from the street. Apparently more than 1,000 have gone already. The government has also unveiled a new model litter bin with a smaller hole through which the litter must be put, the idea being that a full garbage bag will no longer fit. They have ordered 800 of the new small-orifice model. No doubt more will follow.

I am reminded of the old saying that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. Those of us who have been here for a few decades remember that public littering used to be a major problem. People who had no further use for a bit of “solid waste” would simply drop it on the pavement, or if at home throw it out of the window. A great deal of money and effort – not to mention a flood of awful APIs – was devoted to persuading people to change their behaviour. And to a considerable extent, this has succeeded. People do look round for a litter bin rather than just dropping things. But what will they do if, having looked, they cannot find one? I find it difficult to believe that the average Hongkonger – or, for that matter, me – will simply shrug his shoulders and pocket the unwanted item so that he can take it home and pay the charge to have it disposed of in the officially approved manner. The new tight-lipped litter bins have already evoked one well-established habit: people who find they cannot get their item inside a litter bin leave it leaning against the bottom of the bin, in the hope that the collector will take the hint. And the charge hasn’t been introduced yet.

I think environmental enthusiasts under-estimate the fragility of the progress made towards a cleaner Hong Kong. Round the corner from my house is a car park popular with nocturnal couples. It has two regular litter bins and a set of three “separate your garbage” ones. Even so it is quite obvious from the little heaps of litter a car’s width apart that some of the courting couples cannot be bothered to interrupt their canoodling for a quick visit to the nearest receptacle. No doubt the fact that all this activity is taking place in the dark helps to sanction unsocial behaviour. But this is the point. Keeping clean streets depends on the voluntary cooperation of citizens, encouraged by their wish to appear socially responsible to their peers. At the moment there is a fragile consensus that the thing to do with litter is to put it in the nearest bin. In the new regime of missing, or tight-lipped, bins, that consensus may well be replaced by a widespread view that only suckers pay more garbage tax than they have to. No doubt this will draw bitter condemnations from the plutocrats who have run their businesses on a similar basis for years, but there it is.

So we have an interesting paradox here: a scheme to “protect the environment” which will result in us all walking pavements ankle-deep in rubbish. We will have a cleaner environment and filthy streets. But culture will have changed…

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Following last week’s visit to the alarming gap between what I need to live on and what our government thinks sufficient for the aged or disabled, I have been browsing in the works of Joseph Stiglitz. The interesting thing about Mr Stiglitz is that he is a Nobel prize-winner (albeit in Economics, a variation about which some of us are a bit dubious) so he can say things which would be instantly dismissed as extreme ideology if they came from, say, Noam Chomski, Long Hair, or me. Like if the government consists of rich people it will govern in the interests of rich people.

Mr Stiglitz’s speciality is inequality and its economic consequences. Those consequences, as equality increases, are dire. A flourishing economy depends on purchasing power and the rich, though big spenders on a per capita basis, are not numerous enough to supply it. There are also social consequences. If society is very unequal then it is not working for the large number of people at the bottom of the distribution. They are likely to withdraw their support for the existing way of doing things. Is this beginning to sound familiar?

Mr Stiglitz’s third point, which is particularly relevant here, is that inequality is not necessary or inevitable. There are policies which are conducive and there are policies which are not. And contrary to the bleating about “competitiveness” which greets any suggestion that the status of workers or poor people should be improved, there is no evidence that societies which go out of their way to reduce inequality suffer in consequence. If anything the contrary is true.

In this context there was an interesting piece a few weeks ago in (I think) the New Yorker. This was written by a Finnish person living in New York, who complained that he (or possibly she) was fed up with Americans saying that Scandinavian social security systems depended on a high level of social solidarity found only in highly homogeneous communities and would consequently never work in America. This was based on the idea that Nordic social welfare arrangements involved a lot of people paying to rescue a few from poverty, unemployment, sickness and other social ills. This was not the case, said our Finn. Actually middle class people in Scandinavian countries supported social welfare systems because they benefited most people. Middle class families liked knowing that an illness would not bankrupt them, they liked knowing that they did not have to save for ten years to send their kids to university, they liked knowing that if they resigned, or were fired, from their current job their income would not immediately plummet to zero. People, in short, were willing to pay for a social welfare system because it was good value for them, as well as other people.

The conclusion from all this is that Hong Kong’s nearly unique combination of extreme wealth and poverty is not inevitable. It is not something like the weather which we just have to put up with. It is a choice. We, or our government, could pursue options which reduce inequality, or at least stop pursuing options which increase it. This is a livelihood issue, and we have a government which claims to concentrate on livelihood issues. Yet we see no progress.

One reason is that our leaders seem to have achieved a state of learned helplessness. No doubt some of them would blame this on the near-deadlock in Legco, and some of us would blame it on too much waiting to be told what to do by the Liaison Office. But there it is. In a recent speech Carrie Lam announced that the government’s current ambition was to tackle “three peaks”: MTR fares, the misbehaviour of the Link REIT, and reform of the MPF. She claimed that all of these presented great difficulties and success could not be guaranteed. This is pathetic. The government is after all the government. It can change the law if necessary. The problem with the MPF is that the needed reforms will annoy some of the government’s friends. The problem with the MTR is that it is neither fish nor fowl, public or private. Either would be more acceptable. The problem with the Link REIT is that it was a stupid idea in the first place, but unwinding it would be embarrassing. These are all problems which resulted from previous government actions: the part privatisation of the MTR, the setting up of the MPF with bad rules, the sale of items previously owned by the Housing Authority to the international greed industry. What governments do they can undo.

Unfortunately this requires first that they should learn to accept responsibility for their own mistakes. Ms Lam seems to have problems in this area, as evidenced by her performance on the topic of lead in water supplies. Nobody will be held responsible were were told, because the problem was in the system and not in the actions of individuals. That may be true, but it does not settle the matter at all. The “system” is not something for which nobody is responsible. Some part of the government is responsible for ensuring that public housing tenants have a supply of drinkable water. The higher reaches of that department or branch are populated by people who are not plumbers, and do not personally carry water. Their job is to ensure that there is a working system for delivering clean water and if the water has lead in it then they have failed. It appears that the Water Supplies Department has a successful system for delivering water to buildings and estates. The lead appeared in the local piping. The local piping was built at the behest of the government and it was the government’s duty to ensure that “the system” produced non-poisonous water in the resulting taps. I suppose that this duty rested with someone under the Development Bureau.

This suggests that under the “accountability” theory the buck would have stopped at the door of the Secretary for Development, Mr Paul Chan Mo-po.  So we can now credit Mr Chan with surviving his fourth resignation-worthy scandal, which is probably a record. Has the man no shame?

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Having passed another of life’s lugubrious milestones, my 70th birthday, I spent a good deal of time wondering whether I should collect that controversial little gift to us dinosaurs, the Fruit Money. This is a small monthly sum, officially the Old Age Allowance, which you can collect from the Social Welfare Department. The only requirement is that you live in Hong Kong and are aged over 70. The points against: I don’t really need it, in the sense of being in any danger of deprivation from want of savings or property. I am one of the people Carrie Lam does not wish to give a pension to. I have also lost the habit of being comfortable living on public money since my student days, when the provision in the UK was rather generous. The points in favour: my more pragmatic friends say that if you have been paying income tax for the last 30-odd years you have earned a few bucks from the public coffers, especially as said coffers are overflowing with money which our government is mysteriously reluctant to spend. Also a dependable income stream is a great thing in retirement, because the problem with living off your savings is that you don’t know how long they will have to last. The Fruit Money is a trivial amount, but it will go on as long as I do.

Thinking about this kept me off the welfare rolls for a few months, until I decided that I should stop teaching before my lesson content consisted entirely of things that happened before my students were born. So although I have quite a lot of winnings of one kind or another stashed away I no longer have an earned income, however trivial. Finally I fired up Google, and found that one is expected to present oneself at a convenient Social Welfare Field Office. The “field office” terminology threw me for a bit. Where are there fields in urban Hong Kong? I suppose the designation indicates those outposts where the SWD actually communicates with lay people, as opposed to the “real” offices where civil servants exchange paper with each other. Anyway there is a field office near the end of our minibus line so off I went.

The field office (Shatin South) turned out to be rather intimidating. It was very quiet. There were none of those helpful uniformed types you find in the Transport Department downstairs, making sure you have found the right form and the right queue.  In fact there was no queue. And although I went round the whole room twice looking at a great many leaflets and forms, very little in English, there was no application form either. Eventually I worked out that a mysterious piece of digital equipment was one of those gadgets you find in the Crown Motors service department which spits out a little piece of paper with a number on it. On the wall was a lower number. So it seemed I was at least in a digital queue. It was still very quiet. One SWD person, or so I supposed, was having a murmured conversation in a corner with two clients. There was a row of interviewing booths, partly screened so you could not tell if anything was actually happening inside them. A bit of background music would have lightened the atmosphere. I was haunted by the memory of the scene in one of the “Doctor in the House” books where the hero goes to Moss Brothers to rent a dinner jacket and is reminded of the atmosphere in the VD clinic of his hospital.

Then my number was called and things looked up. The SWD person who screens initial inquiries turned out to be both pretty and helpful. She could, she said, give me the relevant form but because I live in Fotan I would have to take it to the Shatin North field office. The form is large. This is because the government uses one form for two different old age benefits and two different disabled ones. I suppose nobody actually has to fill in the whole thing. In fact if you just want Fruit Money you only have to do four bits of the form. My helpful lady indicated these, put an “x” where I should sign, and gave me a booklet with the address of the Shatin North field office in it.

So to the Shatin North field office, which is unlike its southern counterpart in several respects. The South office is in a building full of government departments and consequently is easy to find. The North one is on a sort of mezzanine of its own in a shopping mall near the Prince of Wales Hospital and it is not easy to find at all. Despite this, however, it seemed to be much busier. This may be partly because it also caters, for the time being, for Ma On Shan. Still it was not so busy that you had to wait for long. The initial receiver of inquiries passed me to an SWD form receiver, who accepted the form, photocopied the business end of my passport, accepted the copy of my ID card which I knew they wanted, and asked me to wait. I presume that the SWD is like the Bank — if your request involves the bank giving you, or anyone else, money then the paperwork has to be approved by some senior person you do not actually meet. It seems the senior person was happy, because I was told to expect some good news, which would be backdated to the day of my application.

On the whole I must say that as visits to government departments go a trip to the SWD is quite pleasant. The staff are helpful and if anyone thought it a bit odd that a foreigner was applying for Hong Kong welfare they did not show it. Clearly there are limits to how generous you can be in dishing out public money but the arrangements seem to be as painless as possible. Maybe the unified form could be reconsidered, as it looks a bit intimidating until you realise that most of it is not for you.

On the other hand if the giving is easy the amounts could be considered scandalously low. I reproduce this table from the relevant government web page:

The first one of these is the Fruit Money. The second one is the government’s Big New Thing, which starts at age 65 but is means tested. I know nothing of the distinction between normal disability and higher disability. But I find it extremely disturbing that people are apparently expected to be able to live on these paltry sums if they have no other means of support. Hong Kong is a developed affluent society. The government has money coming out of its ears. Surely to God we can do better than this?

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Lovers of linguistic confusion have had a pleasing little side show to Mr Zhang Dejiang’s visit: a controversy over whether the trip has been or should be described as an “inspection”.  Readers had to be careful in their choice of newspapers to enjoy this. Some newspapers refused to describe it as an inspection as a matter of principle. Some, on the other hand, notably the English version of the China Daily, insisted on describing at as an inspection as a matter of editorial policy.

Clearly this is to some extent a translation problem. There is a Chinese phrase which is conventionally translated as “inspection”. But this does not settle the matter because in translation there is always the possibility that the conventional does not fit particular circumstances.

One of the dumber local columnists, for example, pointed out that the last time the Queen of England visited Hong Kong, then a colony, this was also described as an “inspection”. Well it may have been in the Chinese press, but no English publication would refer to a Royal visit as an “inspection”. The Queen is a constitutional monarch. It is not her job to inspect anything but the occasional guard of honour.

And this, of course, is the root of the problem. In English, at least, the idea of “inspection” covers a wide range of possibilities.

During the brief pause in the Napoleonic wars following the Peace of Amiens tourists flocked to Paris, and one of the attractions was the chance to see Napoleon himself reviewing his personal horse guards, which he did every Sunday. The historian of horse matters notes that this “was no mere ceremony, but a serious inspection in which questions were asked and answered, and noted by the accompanying Chief of Staff in a green pocketbook.” This may be regarded as one extreme – a visit by well-informed superior with questions and follow-up action. Military inspections are frequent, detailed, and directed at the important question whether the inspected troops are looking after their equipment properly.

At the other extreme? Well in my musical capacity I can occasionally be found warbling encouragingly at the back of passing out parades staged by various uniformed groups. As part of the proceedings the presiding “officer” is invited to inspect the troops, and tours the parade ground for this purpose. He or she occasionally stops to chat, to the dismay of the perspiring musicians who are expected to keep up a continuous background barrage of slow music. The presiding person then usually finishes by inspecting us. He or she floats towards the band. Our leader advances, salutes, and says “Thank you for your inspection, Sir”. Or madam as the case may be. The sir or madam then walks slowly past our front row. No comments are offered, and as we do not share the uniform of the people on parade we could get away with anything – Dutch bicycle troops, Italian bersaglieri – as long as we all look the same.

This is inspection as a polite gesture, and it is a common feature of state visits. The visitor is greeted by the commander of the guard of honour, traditionally carrying a drawn sword in a vertical position, and said visitor is conducted along the front row, followed by the civilian and military subordinates of both parties. The guard of honour have been preparing for weeks. They have been carefully inspected in advance by the local equivalent of a terrifying Regimental Sergeant Major. Compliments are traditional and usually justified. In the unlikely event that you spotted an unpolished button it would be churlish to say so.

I think in the context of official visits the important difference is between inspections without warning, however friendly, and those in which the victims are told in advance that the visitor is coming. Clearly in the latter case the “inspector” is rarely going to see anything but what the inspectees wish him to see. What should be white has been freshly painted, what should be clean is freshly cleaned, what should not be seen has been freshly hidden. That does not mean that the inspection is valueless. The preparations probably involve a lot of useful painting, cleaning, etc. Also the perceptive inspector will be able to derive some information from whether the preparations have been done well or badly. He will not discover what the inspected unit looks like on an ordinary working day. But the question whether they can put up a good show is worth an answer.

The downside to this, we must note, is that the effort to impress a visitor may lead to a great deal of trouble and expense, some of which may have no useful purpose. I notice for example that Mr Zhang was shown a three-dimensional model at least as big as a King-sized double bed of Lantau Island after further planned vandalism in the name of “development”. This had apparently not featured in the recent public consultation exercise on when and where such development should take place, the conclusions of which have at least in theory not yet been decided. The relevant policy secretary denied that any guns were being jumped. The version in the model was “not final”, he told the media. Readers may be tempted to take this with a pinch of salt. Supposing it is true, though, this means that the model, cost so far unspecified, had absolutely no useful role in life except – hopefully – to impress one visitor who, one must suspect, is as capable of reading a map as the next man.

So where does this leave us with Mr Zhang’s inspection or visit? It does not appear that Mr Zhang wanted, or needed, to look at Hong Kong. Nor did his programme include any events which suggested that a staff officer with a green pocketbook would have been useful. Banquets, cocktails, visits to science park, ordinary people, CE. Actually it looked rather like a Royal visit used to. Only the opening of a Zhang Dejiang Hospital was missing. I do not think Royal visits have ever been described as inspections in English and I do not think Mr Zhang’s visit should be either. But the Chinese word may be more versatile.

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Wow, visitor numbers are down. For some of us, this might come as a relief. There is a limit to how much tourism you can get in a crowded city without making it intolerable for residents. The thing that puzzles me about the people responsible for this is that they go to so much trouble to arrange things which do not appeal to me at all. Cable car to giant Buddha? Disney? Shopping? No thanks. This suggests that the problem with tourism in Hong Kong is that it does not consist in providing things which locals can also enjoy. If you live in London or New York many of the things which attract tourists are attractions for you too. You may indeed be grateful for the international patronage which keeps some of the more rarefied cultural attractions afloat. In Hong Kong, on the other hand, the government only encourages industries in ways which help the 11 or so families who own most of the place to get even richer. So local interests do not get a look in. Can the real estate barons make megabucks by attracting mainlanders to expensive handbag shops? Bring it on.

Under these circumstances the tourism industry seems not so much a part of society as a burden on it. A few people get rich and the rest of us have to run the gauntlet of all those wheeled suitcases full of baby powder. So I have been trying to think of tourist attractions which would be unique, more or less, costless, also more or less, and welcome to people who live here as well as the potential visiting hordes across the boundary. So let me see…

Monkeys. If you go to Gibraltar the standard tour (which pretty much everyone does because Gibraltar is a small place) includes a visit to the apes. The apes live wild on the top of the rock. Your guide will take some snacks (raw pasta is acceptable) to ensure that a few apes will turn up. I have never heard of a tourist being molested in any way by an ape but no doubt it happens occasionally. There is a legend (probably copied from the one about the Tower of London’s ravens) that something terrible will happen if the apes disappear. Well the visitors will be disappointed, at least. In Hong Kong we have a substantial population of wild monkeys and they are treated as an embarrassment. Go to the places where they hang out and you will see only notices begging you not to feed them. One gentleman who had had a bad time with the monkeys actually wrote to a local paper the other week suggesting that they were vermin and should be officially exterminated. Now I realize that some population control is probably required. People in my part of the New Territories occasionally have to shoo monkeys out of their kitchens, which is closer to nature than most of us want to get. But can we not have some sort of monkey/human interaction experience which can be flogged as a humane alternative to those mainland zoos where you can throw a live chicken into the tiger pen?

Water sports. If you walk along the edge of Tolo Harbour — and our town planners have been generous in providing places where you can do this — you may notice one thing is missing. There are mountains, there is water in large quantities. But even on public holidays there are no boats. This is extraordinary. Go to European cities with lakes or rivers and these are regarded as important recreational resources. In England, where many people are perhaps a bit nutty about boating, I have rowed on industrial canals. Swiss lakes have beautiful antiquated paddle steamers. Even the ornamental lakes at the Palace of Versailles have rowing boats. Sussex villages where the sea is only navigable for a few hours round high tide have public slipways for boat launches. And we have Tolo Harbour, a huge sheltered enclosure with nice scenery and no commercial traffic. And we do practically nothing with it. Hong Kong could be the must visit for small boat enthusiasts all over Asia. Of course we don’t want lots of amateurs floating around Victoria Harbour, which is a busy commercial port. But the only serious boats in Tolo Harbour are resting at anchor between engagements. When I complained about this before a reader wrote in to say that, while he agreed with the complaint, there was actually a Taipo Boat Club. I hope there still is. But it is not in Taipo. It is miles away in Taimeituk. And all that shoreline is being wasted.

History. Now that it’s 15 years since the handover can we perhaps acknowledge that one of the cool and interesting things about Hong Kong for visitors is that it used to be a colony? I am not suggesting a wholesale wallowing in nostalgia, or indeed that the past was better than the future. But we have nothing to be ashamed of, and we would be more interesting if we had more mementoes. To start with, now that the idiot who perpetrated this idea has retired, can we go back to having red postboxes? The colour has nothing to do with politics — it was widely adopted in the 19th century for things which needed to stand out. That is why it is used for fire engines and stop signs. Then there is the matter of rickshaws. I realize that some people are a bit twitchy about being towed by another person, but they have them in Tokyo and they don’t seem to be regarded as a human rights violation. They used to have a bad name in Hong Kong because all the rickshaw men looked as if they were the sort of people the DAB digs out of old folks’ homes on polling day. But this was a result of the government’s refusal to issue new licences.

Could we perhaps also have formal dinners for visitors? I have in mind a regimental atmosphere, with the presiding “colonel” piped in and the junior officer present giving the loyal toast. Quite who the toast should be loyal to can be decided later. There should be no political objection to this kind of dinner as an entertainment, because our local police force is still doing it. The toast is “to the Hong Kong Police Force”. While we are with the Force, perhaps we could do something with that ceremonial flag-raising at Gold Bauhinia Square. This is like the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace: a military charade to amuse the tourists. Unlike the changing of the guard, though, it suffers from serious deficiencies in the wardrobe department. We can not, of course, change to bearskins. But pith helmets would look better than those boring peaked caps. Dare we suggest that they would look even better with red coats? It would also be nice to have the Scottish part of the police orchestra in kilts. I know those tartan trousers are acceptable in some Scottish circles but they always remind me of Rupert Bear.

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