tim's experiment

Much anguish in railway watching circles this week over the fact that the new express rail station does not yet feature any arrangement for passengers to go through mainland customs and immigration before they get on the train. Clearly if extended this lack will be inconvenient. On the other hand it’s not rocket science, and the officials concerned have at least another two years to get their heads round the problem. Meanwhile the light at the end of the tunnel is beginning to look very much like the headlamp of an on-coming train. In this morning’s paper Gary Cheung warned that the new railway might be a white elephant” if the checkpoint problem was not solved. But this is an optimistic estimate. It is becoming increasingly clear that the rail link will not be a white elephant but a black hole, inexorably sucking in money from all directions.

Note that careless reporters, including Mr Cheung, often report that the original budgeted cost of the project was $65 billion. This is not the case. The original budgeted cost was $85 billion. Realising that this held out dim prospects of the line ever covering its costs, officials then massaged the figure down to $65 million. This was not done by cutting any expensive features from the design. It was done by shunting parts of the expenses into other sidings in the government budget on the specious grounds that they “would have to be done anyway.” For some time after that, interestingly, the price of the cultural district (which shares part of its site with the railway terminus) went up like a rocket while the publicised price of the railway remained the same.

Meanwhile I predicted that if the sums were done honestly the taxpayers would in the end see no change from $100 billion. This was not a particularly daring or cynical guess. The average budget over-run on big rail projects (not the maximum, the average) is 50 per cent. Projects involving long tunnels are particularly prone to bad financial news because although you can drill test holes, in the end you cannot really know what is down there until you build the tunnel itself. And your contractor will charge you extra for any nasty surprises. The express rail link, owing to an extravagant early inspiration, consists of one long tunnel.

It now appears that the $100 billion guess will need to be revised upwards. The official price is now $71.5 billion but Michael Tien, who has some experience in these matters, is now predicting a figure of $90 billion. And the corporation has not yet made the widely-expected announcement that the line will not open by “the end of 2017”. Many people now do not expect to see it open before 2018. Delays are themselves a cause of extra expense, as officials remind us every time one of their pet projects fails to get through the Finance Committee at the first time of asking.

So let us suppose for a moment that the MTR Corp ends up paying $100 billion in round numbers for the construction of the line. Assume also that the cost of borrowing has by then returned to the historic average of about 4 per cent. This means that the corporation will have to find $4 billion a year just to pay the interest on its debts. This compares with its profit from all other railway activities in Hong Kong last year of $7 billion. This is a big ask. How much can you charge people for taking them 27 kms?

Mr Cheung quotes Frederick Ma, chairman of the independent committee which looked at the project, as saying that without a joint checkpoint at West Kowloon the trip will only be marginally faster than the existing through train. On the through train passengers do their Hong Kong formalities in Hung Hom, and the China stuff in Guangzhou. I am not sure that I follow this. Even if there is a joint checkpoint this does not mean that one joint immigration person is going to do the passport part for both Hong Kong and the mainland. You will queue for the Hong Kong formalities and then you will queue for the mainland formalities. They will not be quicker; you will just get all your frustrations in one place. Mr Ma apparently supposes that in the absence of a joint checkpoint the train will have to stop in Shenzhen for the purpose. But by all accounts it is going to stop in Shenzhen anyway. The trains between Shenzhen and Guangzhou are losing money hand over fist, and amalgamation with the Hong Kong service is eagerly awaited. There will also be a stop in Dongguan. And then the “high speed” train will drop you in the outskirts of Guangzhou, instead of the middle. Some people might consider the existing through train better value even if there is no extra charge for the new-fangled express at all.

I conclude that the new link is never going to make money. This is not uncommon with new rail services and lines. They often only make a profit after the original builder has gone bankrupt and sold them off at a huge loss. But this is not an option for the HKSAR Government. It has placed the MTR in a tricky dilemma. If it charges too much for the new express trains then nobody will ride them. But in view of the mammoth costs of construction, if the trains are priced a level which fills them with customers they will lose money anyway. This is beginning to look like a financial catastrophe on the scale of the Sydney Opera House (original budget $7 million, final cost $102 million). Can we name it after Donald Tsang?

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So you thought after all this fuss about how the next Chief Executive would be “elected” that the winner would at least be the CE? Think again. The Chinese government will appoint whoever it likes, whether or not he (or she … fat chance) has won the election, or even participated in it.

This was the message buried in the last paragraph of a seriously boring non-story in this morning’s Sunday Post, most of which was devoted to the fact that some academics had suggested postponing the Legco vote on the elections. In a desperate effort to suggest that this was worth telling us about, the reporter said it received a “lukewarm response” from top officials and lawmakers. This seemed a funny way of summing up the responses of Carrie Lam (currently acting CE) and Exco convenor Lam Woon-kwong, who both said it was “not feasible”.

The last paragraph started “Meanwhile…” indicating a polite change of topic. It then introduced Professor Lau Siu-kai, vice chairman of “the semi-official Chinese Association of Hong Kong and Macau Studies”. Professor Lau is best known as the scholar who capped a career spent telling the world that Hong Kong people were not interested in politics by predicting that the demonstration against national security legislation would attract only a few thousand protestors. I take it that the reason for stressing his current semi-official status rather than his past as a reverse Cassandra (believed …but wrong) is to imply that Prof Lau is privy to official thinking in Beijing.

Just in case this is true, this is what he said (in the Post’s words): “election results obtained under universal suffrage would only provide a ‘reference’ for the central government to decide whether to appoint the elected candidate.” In other words, if our rulers do not like the election result they will over-rule it and appoint someone else. Well this is interesting. After all we have been told time and again that systems of universal suffrage vary, that there are various obstacles to public nomination, Mr Cameron was not elected by the general public, America has an electoral college, and so on. But the one thing which everyone else’s systems for electing a president or prime minister have in common is that the winner does actually get the job. In universal suffrage with Chinese characteristics, on the other hand, we have a distinctive feature. The winner only gets the job if the Communist Party leadership likes the look of him.

Really it makes you wonder what all the fuss is about. We have been told that this is a historic opportunity, that people are in danger of being deprived of the right to vote, that Hong Kong stands on the brink of a new epoch, and such like blather. Actually, all we are being invited to do is to provide a “reference” for the central government. Calm down, everyone. It doesn’t matter what electoral system we use. The winner doesn’t necessarily get the job anyway.

Meanwhile (to coin a phrase) next to Professor Lau’s paragraph we have a picture of Carrie Lam raising two fingers. In some cultures this is polite as long as the fingers face away from you and rude if they face you. In other cultures the reverse is true. Ms Lam is saying f*** you in Greek. Rather similar to what Prof Lau is saying in English.

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I have written before about the continuing failure of our legal leaders to enforce legal restrictions on media coverage of trials. These restrictions are intended to protect the rights of defendants and victims. If they are not enforced they will fall into disuse and the rights of defendants and victims will not be protected. Another grim landmark in this continuing process was passed last Tuesday.

An elementary point made in all media law courses is that one should generally not publish pictures taken of defendants outside the court. This piece of advice is of great antiquity. The reason is to avoid polluting the evidence of witnesses who may later be asked to identify the person they saw doing the crime. If they have already seen a picture of a person described as a “suspect” then they may be influenced in the direction of identifying that person as a criminal. Bold media outlets may decide to publish a picture if they believe that identity will not be an issue at the trial, in which case no offence is committed. But this is a dangerous game because you don’t really know. The prosecution is not obliged to tell you, and even if they do there is no legal bar to them changing their mind later. Also the issue may come up later from the defence, for example if the defendant offers an alibi. A further problem is that if the defendant is pictured in a “criminal” context this may influence future jurors.

Now turn to the SCMPost City Section for last Tuesday, on the front of which is a four-column picture which will be a boon to future writers of “how not to do it” textbooks. Here we see a gentleman called Zheng Xingwan, who at the time was the only person arrested over the Queenie Law kidnap case. He had been charged with a mass of verbiage “commonly known as kidnapping”, as the Post’s reporter put it, and been remanded in custody. And there he is in the picture, large as life, and just in case he doesn’t look criminal enough for you, wearing handcuffs.

Readers may wonder if this was the approach favoured by other media. Well two Chinese-language news websites had the same picture and put a black rectangle over the eyes. Presumably their parent newspapers did the same. The Standard reported that Mr Zheng had arrived with a bag over his head, and printed a picture in which he was still wearing it.

Was this a one-off oddity caused by the absence of specialised sub-editors, an ill-advised economy popular with newspapers in these internet-threatened days? Not at all. This Friday (May 15) the City section has on page C4 an even larger (five columns) picture of a Mr Rashid Khan, who was leaving court after being charged with manslaughter. I do not know if identity is going to be an issue in Mr Khan’s trial, but he is going to have an up-hill struggle if it is.

What is going on here? I am left with a number of possible theories which I suppose I shall have to share with future students. The law on this matter is either:

1. It doesn’t apply to the Post.

2. It doesn’t apply to cases involving mainlanders or people with Pakistani surnames. Other ethnic minorities remain a question mark.

3. It doesn’t apply to government-friendly media outlets.

4. It doesn’t apply to anyone now, because the Department of Justice (sic) has lost interest.

Having tried to get the Department interested in this topic before, without success, I am putting most of my money on number 4. Readers may feel this is a matter which does not concern them. After all mainlanders or Pakistani hawkers accused of serious crimes may be guilty. And this is something which is not likely to happen to us personally. This is too complacent. The erosion of legal rights always starts with the despised — suspected criminals, ethnic minorities — but it will if left unchecked get round to the rest of us in due course. The price of freedom, as Thomas Jefferson apparently did not say, is eternal vigilance.

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Having at times been quite rude about Alex Lo I should perhaps in fairness record my admiration for and agreement with his piece this morning. This concerned the case of Shih Chiao-jen. Mr Shih is 73 years old and was in danger of losing his job as a security guard because of his age. So he bought a forged ID card on which he was 11 years younger. This eventually came to light and he was charged with possessing a fake ID card to commit an offence. And duly sentenced, by a magistrate, to four months in prison. After a public outcry the magistrate refused to change the sentence. “I don’t understand why there’s a public outcry,” he said. “But that’s understandable because they’re not lawyers.”

As Mr Lo rightly commented this is a poor theory. It is more likely that people objected because they were ordinary decent human beings. Actually if you are a connoisseur of legal matters you can see that the magistrate made an elementary error. He pointed out that the “starting point” for this offence is a jail term of 15 months, so four months represented “an abundance of human sympathy”. Not so. The “starting point” for offences emerges from comments by the Court of Appeal on attempts to overturn sentences as excessive or inadequate. Faced with a social problem the Court of Appeal tends to look like the man with a hammer to whom every problem looks like a nail. Deterrent sentences are applied, despite the massive amount of evidence that longer sentences do not deterr criminals. Still, the circumstances in which these norms are established are always relevant and the magistrate has ignored them. The offence of having a fake ID card dates back to the early 80s, when ID cards were introduced. The object of the exercise was to suppress unauthorised immigration from China. People who appeared before the courts for possessing fake ID cards were people who were not eligible for a real one. Clearly in such circumstances the offence was a blow at the very basis and reason for the introduction of ID cards. It is an elementary error to suppose that the sentencing habits emerging from such cases should be applied to the case of someone who was entitled to, and held, a real ID card, but wished to have one with a later date on it.

Pretty poor magisterial performance, if you ask me. But then the contribution of the prosecutor was hardly helpful. Mr Shih, opined the prosecutor, had “duped” multiple property managers. This is a preposterous theory. We must suppose that anyone who employed Mr Shih met him and had an opportunity to observe him in an interview and/or at work. They had ample opportunities to form their own estimates of his agility and alertness. No sane person would base his assessment of these matters on the age given on a person’s ID card. Property managers are not stupid. Wish I could say the same about lawyers.

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After a tiring day Mrs Hamlett and I got on the train in Hung Hom and settled down in the First Class section, which at that stage was empty. If you get on in Hung Hom you can get a seat in cattle class so most people don’t bother with First, though it only costs a couple of bucks. As there was plenty of room we sat opposite each other, with the bags between our feet.

I don’t usually do this, because it means there is an empty seat next to me, and a surprising number of passengers are a bit nervous about sitting next to a foreigner. But we had the place to ourselves until Kowloon Tong, where the train fills up with border-bound mainlanders. At this point a lady sat down opposite me in the seat next to my wife. She urged her companion, who was still making for a seat elsewhere, to sit next to me. They made an interesting pair. As so often when two ladies go out together one (the lady opposite) was making a fashion statement: plucked, permed, powdered and wearing a micro-dress which in my youth would have been regarded as a daring swimsuit. Her friend was also pretty, but not working at it: sneakers, jeans, glasses… There was a wheeled suitcase.

After a few moments the lady with the legs leaned forward and explained that her friend wished to be photographed with me. Would this be all right? No problem – we leaned towards each other and cellphones were plied. Then it turned out that Legs also wished to be pictured with me so they swapped seats and there was further photography. After this we talked. Legs spoke heavily accented but pretty good English. They had of course been shopping and lived in Shenzhen. It was nice shopping in Hong Kong, she said, because people were so polite and welcoming. If you left a shop without buying anything they would politely say “goodbye and hope to see you again”. Apparently in Shenzhen if you leave without buying anything they get angry. It is surprising, but nice, to find that Hong Kong is regarded as a paragon of hospitality and politeness, even if the standards being applied are not perhaps very high.

Then the conversation turned to me and went along the usual lines: “You live in Hong Kong!” “Wah, so long!” “Do you speak Cantonese?” “Do you speak Chinese?” “Is your wife Chinese?” So I introduced my wife and we all agreed that she does look Chinese. At this point the train was just leaving Tai Wai and we were interrupted by the arrival of a KCR lady with the little gadget which tells them whether you have paid the First Class extra or not. And I regret to say that, as it turned out, our two friends had not. So we all got off in Shatin, us to go home and the two ladies to be taken off to the nearest dungeon for whatever mediaeval ordeal the KCR inflicts on people who travel without a First Class ticket. I have seen this happen to mainland visitors before.

I infer two things from this. One is that despite the horror stories about the deterrent effects of people camping in the streets or campaigning against parallel traders, serious shoppers are not in the least discouraged. Public abuse of shoppers in Hong Kong will have to get a good deal worse to compare with the sort of dressing down you can get in Shenzhen just for looking at something without buying it.

The other is that misunderstandings about the First Class carriage are a problem. I know the KCR puts up lots of notices on the matter but there still seems to be some confusion. Perhaps on big shopping days they could do announcements, or have a guard on the train door?

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Jetstar Hong Kong is a local company which wishes to run a low-cost, no-frills airline of the kind which everyone in Europe uses on shorthaul routes. If you are wondering why it has taken more than two years — with no end in sight — to achieve this modest objective, an interesting light is shed by a piece on the back page of this morning’s Business Post.

This is misleadingly headlined “Why is Jetstar so keen to become a Hong Kong airline?”. Jetstar is already a Hong Kong airline. It is a Hong Kong airline not allowed to operate. The reason for this is historic. When Hong Kong was returned to the bosom of the Motherland the rules about airlines were of necessity rewritten. Normally this would have involved the sort of local ownership rules imposed on television stations. But this would have had the unwanted effect of kicking both of the two incumbents out of business, because Hong Kong Airlines was owned on the mainland and Cathay Pacific in the UK. So the drafters came up with a new phrase. You could be a local airline if your “principal place of business” was Hong Kong. This is not a criterion used in other places. So when Jetstar applied to be a Hong Kong airline there was an opportunity for a long and expensive legal argument. This was eagerly taken up by the two incumbent airlines, who have the usual aversion to low-cost competition. Hence the two years and counting. Meanwhile Jetstar is, ironically, the only participant in the process which is Hong Kong-owned, mostly by Shun Tak.

The piece lurking under the headline offers an interesting conspiracy theory. The author, David Dodwell, asserts that no low-cost airline can hope to make a profit in Hong Kong, because of the “ferocious competition” here. So there must be some other reason for the project. It is, Mr Dodwell suggests, because a “local airline” will be represented in negotiations over landing rights and such matters between Hong Kong and other places. So they will know what is going on. Qantas, from which Jetstar rents its trade name, is a “troubled airline” so this does not matter too much, but Singapore Airlines is taking a stake in Hong Kong Airlines, so the Hong Kong government now has two “Trojan horses” to worry about.

This is a bit of a scare story. One part of it struck me as a bit odd. Mr Dodwell says he “sat through the tedium of the ATLA arbitration drama”. And you have to wonder why a sane person with no stake in the matter beyond a lingering suspicion of Trojan horse manure would do such a thing. Mr Dodwell, the newspaper informs us, is the “executive director of the Hong Kong Apec Trade Policy Group”. But this is not a full-time job. Mr Dodwell is also (where would we be without Google?) a senior counsellor for Vriens and Partners, and chief executive of Strategic Access Limited, “a Hong Kong-based strategic advisory and government relations firm.”  We are on the trail of something here. Never mind the strategic advice – Mr Dodwell earned an honest crust as a journalist for many years. What we are dealing with here is public relations for companies which do not have to worry about what the public thinks of them. They can work directly on the government.

And which of the local industrial behemoths does Mr Dodwell ply his pen for, which might involve him turning up for the tedium of the the ATLA hearings? No doubt this is a commercial secret, and there is more than one, and Mr Dodwell likes being bored in a public spirited sort of way. Still, in 2005 it appears that “David is account director for the Swire Group, Hong Kong Air Cargo Terminal (Hactl), Ocean Park, Hongkong Electric, Bechtel, Jardine Matheson, Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group and a number of Government clients”. The Swire Group includes Cathay Pacific.

Clearly Mr Dodwell is doing a good job for his clients, whoever they are. Whether the South China Morning Post is doing a good job for its readers is another matter. Articles like this should be clearly labelled as press releases from one of the parties concerned.

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Wow, what a lead story on Post Page 3 — the one they call “leading the news” — this morning. Only a corner left for a brawl in the cockpit of an airliner between two pilots. Similar squeeze for 17 people arrested in Malaysia for plotting “terror attacks”. Down the page goes a Xinhua-like piece on plans for “urban clusters” in Central China. Never mind that stuff. Lead dish of the day with the distinctive 60 point all caps headline is “10 pan-democrats indicate they may sign reform petition”. Exciting stuff. Some people might have preferred this as a front page lead, as the only thing the Post could find for that purpose was a story about the increasing use of robots in Guangdong factories. But there was something weird about the 10 pan-democrats story. Total absence of evidence.

Earlier the Post had a story indicating that a nameless individual had decided to collect signatures on a petition urging the pan-dems to vote for the goverment’s election package. Why this person was so shy was not explained. Not did the Post explain why it was willing to run a story on a completely unattributed and uncheckable basis. The latest update shamelessly depended on the same source, variously described as “the person who conceived and drafted the petition”, or “the instigator”. The Instigator, whoever it is, now claims that the petition has had a positive reaction. About 10 “public figures from the pan-Democratic camp” have “indicated their interest in signing” the thing. They also remain nameless. Indeed one must fear that in the end they will remain signatureless as well, since “indicating their interest” sounds suspiciously like a euphemism for “did not say no”.

The reporter, who was not, thank God, one of my students, devoted four paragraphs to the spooky organiser and his anonymous possible supporters, concluding that the split in the pan-democrats had deepened, because Nelson Wong and Alan Leong had expressed different views on the Great Matter when they met on a radio programme. Mr Wong’s reported reasons for wanting to “pocket” what was on offer were not quite the sort of thing advanced by officials. Apparently he said that “Leung has been telling lies every day and he might have a chance of re-election if the reform  is vetoed.” But Wong is in the Democrat Party, Leong in the Civic Party. Why should they be expected to agree?

“The pan-democrats” is a useful label for a group of politicians who have some things in common. But the pan-democrats are not a party or a church. Being shunted into that group by political correspondents does not oblige you to agree with all the other people in the group about everything, or indeed about anything. If someone in the DAB starts agitating for the reform proposals to be rejected, then that will be news. Pan-democrats can think what they like. Of course those who are members of parties may feel obliged or pressured to toe the party line. As our fictional DAB person will. But it is pointless to report that the pan-democrats are split. They are supposed to be split. If they wanted to be a party they would form one.

What really gets my goat is the anonymous signature collector. I realise there are times, especially on the mainland, when a person might wish to express a view anonymously out of concern for his or her personal safety, prospects of staying in work and out of prison, etc. But agitating in Hong Kong for people to support the government line does not come in that category. I also realise that in political plotting there is sometimes a stage in which one does not wish to publicise the preparations. Fair enough. But you cannot have it both ways. If you’re interested in publicity you should show yourself. It is time for this nameless collector of nameless signatures to stand up for what he or her believes in. Otherwise we are free to conclude that the Instigator is a coward, and probably a liar as well. This is politics. They don’t call it “public life” for nothing.

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Two similar stories in Tuesday’s English-language newsrags, from which I think we can infer that somebody held a press conference. Amalgamating the information provided in both stories we can produce a list of dramatis personae who were present. For the Council On Smoking and Health: Executive Director Vienna Lai Wai-yin and chairman Antonio Kwong Cho-shing. For the Hong Kong University School of Public Health: Professor Lam Tai-hing and Associate Professor Daniel Ho-Sai-yin. The ostensible purpose of the proceedings was to announce the results of a survey, commissioned by COSH and conducted by the SPH, into the public’s use and knowledge about vaporisers, or e-cigarettes. The basic principle of these gadgets is that a little wire heats water, which you inhale. The water can according to taste be given a variety of flavours, or a drop of nicotine if you happen to be addicted to the stuff. Basically you are inhaling steam, which is harmless enough as long as it is not too hot, and in my youth was a popular folk remedy for a blocked nose.

However this is not the way COSH sees it. In the view of single-issue fanatics who have been persecuting smokers for years anything with cigarette in its name must be the work of the devil. So the purpose of the survey was to put some wind into the sails of the COSH effort (incorporated in newspaper ads the next day) to persuade the government to ban the gadget outright. Actually the survey did not amount to much. In fact it amounted to so little that the Post’s reporter ignored it altogether, regaling his readers instead with the old statistic that an earlier survey had found 1.8 per cent of respondents were using the things. I shall refrain, although nobody else did, from describing the activity as “smoking” because this is flagrantly misleading: there is no smoke, and no tobacco. The resemblance to smoking is in the fevered imagination.

For the ostensible purpose of the press conference we had to turn to the Standard, which reported that the survey was conducted last year, and that 809 respondents were interviewed, of whom 74.5 per cent were “aware” of vapeing (as fans call it).  The survey also found that 4.4 per cent of the people aged 15-29 had vaped at least experimentally, compared with only 1 per cent of those aged over 30. At this point readers with highly-tuned statistical antennae will smell a rat. How many of the respondents, they will wonder, were in each age group? This is an important matter because if the size of the sample is too small then the conclusion is worthless, and it is no good having a sample of 800 if a question is only addressed to some of them. Happily this small detail was revealed. There were only 248 people in the 15-29 age group. That is not enough. To meet academic standards, which are not particularly exacting, you need what is known technically as a 95 per cent confidence level, and to reach that you need a sample size somewhere in excess of 400. So the survey result which we were being invited to share, in horror, was garbage.

Of course there was plenty of other stuff to write about. This consisted of what the lawyers call obiter dicta, which is the polite legal term for judges rabbiting on about matters on which they have heard no evidence. So Prof Lam was worried that there were harmful chemicals in e-cigarettes, which is disputable, and expressed fears that young people would get “hooked” on them. Come of it, Prof: no nicotine, no addiction. Prof Ho thought that new harmful ingredients “kept emerging”, which is nonsense, and cited two substances which have to be found to be carcinogenic at high temperatures. This is a well-known piece of research, and the temperatures required are much higher than those supplied by vapeing. If you tried to inhale steam at such temperatures you would cook your tongue. Prof Ho also recalled as a triumph that the government had banned mouth snuff in the 80s, “so that’s why today we don’t see any cases of people with cancer because they chewed…” Dear me. This has the logical structure of the lady in New York who used to go outside her house every morning and bang a gong. A neighbour asked her why she did it. “To keep the tigers away,” she said. “But there are no tigers round here,” said the neighbour. “You see. It works!” Prof Ho also, we were told “rebutted the claim” that e-cigarettes were safe, saying that there was no evidence to prove this.

The COSH gloss on all this was interesting. They thought the government should follow the WHO advice that e-cigarettes should be regulated in the same way as traditional products. By which they mean totally banned. But traditional products are not totally banned, so there seems to be a piece missing in this argument somewhere.

Both newspapers managed to get a quote from the Sec for Food and Health, Ko Wing-man, who told the Standard that the government would “carefully study” the call for legislation and told the Post that the government was “inclined to agree with it”. Mr Ko thought there was a “proven risk” that youngsters would graduate from vapeing to smoking.

Now let us make a few things clear. The hysterical opposition to vapeing has no scientific basis. Here is the comment by Marcus Munafo, professor of biological psychiatry at Bristol University, on a rather similar attempt to present the issue as a youth epidemic in the UK: “To describe electronic cigarette use as ‘a new drug use option’ and part of ‘at-risk teenagers’ substance using repertoires’ is unnecessarily alarmist, given the evidence that regular use among never smokers is negligible, the lack of evidence that electronic cigarette use acts as a gateway to tobacco use, and the likely low level of harm associated with electronic cigarette use.” The evidence from places where vapeing has been common for some time is overwhelming: the vast majority of users are people who want to stop smoking cigarettes. It is also widely known that many of them succeed. Some of those who switch to vapeing because it doesn’t require them to forgo their nicotine fix do actually find that they can gradually reduce the nicotine content to zero. The addiction, it seems, is as much to having something to fiddle with, put in your mouth and suck as it is to the actual nicotine content. Switching to vapour is the most successful way yet invented for hard-core smokers to avoid the substantial known hazards of real cigarettes. So if vapour is banned the consequences will be that large numbers of people who might have lived longer healthier lives will stick to their cancer sticks and die young. This is a curious way to improve public health.

I would also like to urge the School of Public Health at HKU to consider whether it is really appropriate and desirable for it to put out junk results in support of public agitation which it approves of. The purpose of such a school is to elucidate the scientific facts on which policy should be based, not to squirt propaganda into the public prints.

If the profs wish to continue as a political force then they need to get their heads round a few general public policy principles which are relevant here:

1. It is not acceptable to ban activities for adults because they would be dangerous for children. There are many things which would be dangerous for children, ranging from smoking, drinking and driving to getting married and signing contracts. The solution is to put minimum age limits on the activity, not to rule it out for people who are old enough to make their own decisions.

2. An activity should not be banned merely because it is dangerous for the person who chooses to do it. People in Hong Kong are free to hang-glide, Scuba dive, ride bicycles in busy roads, free-fall parachute, or join the French Foreign Legion if they wish. Restrictions on freedom are justified to prevent harm to others.

3. It is not up to people who invent or choose a new activity to prove it is safe or see it banned if they cannot do so. Those who wish to use the coercive power of the state to impose restrictions have the burden of proving that they are necessary. You cannot “rebut” the argument that something has no known hazards so far by pointing to the possibility that some will be discovered in the future. I realise that where the issue concerns chemicals and the human body this will sometimes mean that hazards are discovered the hard way. But if things are to be banned on the basis of scientific speculation we shall never make any progress. When the first railway trains appeared it was seriously predicted that if they travelled at 40 miles an hour the passengers would be unable to breathe.

4. People who want proposed prohibitions taken seriously would do well to avoid the argument that the controversial item has already been banned in Singapore.

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I don’t like to rain on anyone’s funeral parade, but am I the only person in Hong Kong who thinks the posthumous adulation of Lee Kwan Yew is grossly excessive?

We are, since great antiquity, urged to say of the dead nihil nisi bonum. A pleasing convention. Also the passage of time lends a certain patina to the great figures of our youth, even if they were not particularly popular at the time. Most English people now look back in sorrow rather than anger at Harold Wilson, for example. Aged rabble rousers like Tony Benn are treated as national monuments as they enter their dotage, and earn praise from surprising quarters when they finally pop their clogs.  Longevity itself commands respect, so that people who have never liked a Cliff Richard song still concede that the lad has had an extraordinary career.

Having said which, I do not recall Mr Lee as one of the great figures of my youth. In fact from a safe distance, and seen through the sort of independent media he did not allow in Singapore, he appeared as an obnoxious little despot, bullying those he could bully and fawning on those he could not. Appreciation of his successive electoral successes was diminished by the amount of cheating and fixing going on. A slightly loony air was added to the story by warnings about chewing gum, tourists being refused admission if their hairstyles were unconventional, and scientifically illiterate concerns that the stupid were breeding more quickly than the intelligent. I do not know if it was ever true that you could be jailed for failing to flush the loo in Singapore, but it is significant that this was widely believed.

It is interesting that Mr Lee inspired so much praise, even when he was alive, from other political leaders, but this is a symptom of a phenomenom first identified, I think, by Conor Cruise O’Brien. He observed that over every gathering of international leaders hovers the odour of an Orwellian pigsty, and that the pigs have an instinctive fellow feeling for each other based on their shared love of power, however obtained. Mr Lee was, of course, not much more than a puffed-up Mayor by international standards, but he made up for this by virtually achieving power for life.

In some ways he reminds of those Renaissance princes who ruled Italian cities and followed the principle enunciated by Machiavelli that it is better for a prince to be feared than to be loved. Success is getting safely into your grave without being overthrown or invaded, with bonus marks for passing the job on to your eldest son.  Mr Lee would perhaps not mind being compared to Lorenzo the Magnificent. But where are the artistic masterpieces?

Mr Lee’s economic achievements seem a bit oversold. Other Asian entities managed to combine dramatic growth with a measure of civilisation and even democracy. He can be credited, perhaps, as an early observer of the fact that if you want foreign investment the easiest way is to provide international business with what it likes in a foreign country: a functioning phone system and a workforce with no rights.

The idea that Singapore is now a first-world country holds up if you look at per capita GDP. If you look at living standards it doesn’t. I read an interesting piece of research the other day by a Singaporean writer comparing his country with Norway, which happens to be similar in population, GDP, and the size of its sovereign wealth fund. He found that 80 per cent of Singapore’s population earned less than a cleaner on the statutory minimum wage in Norway. The Singapore people paid more in tax and compulsory savings than the Norwegian street sweeper, and got less for it. In Norway, to start with, education and health care are free.

Singapore does, on the other hand, have a surprisingly large number of millionaires. It’s a paradise if you’re rich, but most of the population isn’t. The fact that the Lee family is on the up-market side of the distribution makes it less acceptable, in my view.

I realise that some of the adulation now being bestowed on Mr Lee’s ghost comes from people who would like to recruit him as an early supporter of the view that Chinese people were so traumatized by four centuries of being ruled by foreign emperors that they have neither the ability nor the wish to rule themselves. If a Western person said this it would be an example of prejudice and discrimination. If a Chinese person says it then it’s a legitimate yearning for strong government. This is the political counterpart of those sexual tastes which run to leather straps, chains and whips. And in both instances, the enthusiast envisages himself as the one with the whip.

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