tim's experiment

The political impasse in Hong Kong is beginning to resemble the Palestinian problem: everyone can see what needs to be done except the only people who can do it.

The solution has to come from the Government. This is after all what we grossly over-pay them for. The people in the street are amateurs.

The solution must start from a recognition of the problem, which is that people will not longer follow a leadership which they despise. This requires an acceptance from our leaders that, as the old Prayer Book put it, “we have done things which we ought not to have done, and we have not done things which we ought to have done. And there is no health in us.” It is no good hoping that when the protesters give up and go home we can all go back to where we were. It will “never be glad morning again.” Nor is there any point in reflexive attempts to score political points by investigating the financing of Occupy, or compiling flagrantly biassed videos, or pushing out half-forgotten old men to urge surrender. It is a characteristic of protests that the protesters have little time for advice from those who do not share their objectives and their hardships. So if you are a billionaire, or the former Chief Executive who abolished the wholly elected municipal councils, you can save your breath. Anyone else who hasn’t risked the pepper-spray facial is not going to get much of a hearing either.

It is good that the government talks to the students, but this is not going to lead to an exit because many of the protesters are not students and do not accept student leadership. What is necessary is for the government to work out what needs to be done and do it, without supposing that it can negotiate a prior quid pro quo, and without listening to those people who will decry any change as giving in to illegality. When it appears that people have a government which is sensitive to their needs and desires, then people will go home.

The steps that might work, which vary in difficulty, may be listed roughly as follows:

1. Mr Leung has to go. He is quite right in saying that this will not solve the political problem. But that is not why people want it. They want it because they are fed up with him, his weasel words, his sleazy friends, his undisguised contempt for the political views of the majority of the population and his inability to appreciate, let alone articulate, the desires of Hong Kong people.

2. An easy one: the fence round the “Civic Square” should go. If the government is worried about the vulnerability of its front door, reinforce the front door.

3. There should be an inquiry into the handling and regulation of protests. This is not intended to pillory the police, but it has become clear that there is a very large gulf between what the police regard as a routine way of controlling crowds, and what many of us find acceptable. This has to be bridged somehow. People need to be able to demonstrate without, as a matter of course, wearing goggles.

4. We should humbly ask the NPC Standing Committee to reconsider its decision on political development, in the light of the undisputable fact that the information on which that decision was based — supplied in good faith if you will — has turned out to be hopelessly wrong. The committee may refuse, or may having reconsidered reaffirm its original decision. That is its right. Hong Kong people may have to put up with the arrangements currently on offer. They do not have to put up with being told that those are the arrangements they asked for.

5. There should be an end to the politicisation of appointments to advisory and other posts in the government’s gift. The Chief Executive has the right to appoint people he likes and who support him to the political sinecures created by the “responsibility system”. There is no justification for allowing political history to influence appointments to tribunals, advisory councils or public bodies like the MTR board or the Airport Authority, and it is fatal for suspicions to arise about appointments to the leadership of the police and the ICAC. What is required is an independent body like the one which appoints judges.

6. Another easy one: Mr Robert Chow should be quietly told to fold up his tent and go home. No petition or demonstration organised under his auspices can be taken seriously, and continuing attempts to conjure up a spurious “silent majority” are a symptom of an establishment which “doesn’t get it”.

7. The continuing erosion of freedom of the press needs to be addressed. The easiest way of ensuring that all voices can be heard might be to allow community radio.

8. Instead of displacing some hapless rural villagers the government could meet at least some of its land requirements by curtailing the huge acreage devoted to rich people’s hobbies. We do not need so many golf – or horse-racing – courses. Of course it would take years for anything along these lines to bear fruit, but it would be a move in the right direction.

9. The MPF needs reform to make it less friendly to financial landsharks. And a serious intention to introduce a small but universal pension would go down well.

10. Some serious undertaking about the arrangements for the Nominating Committee – which may after all be unavoidable – would show good faith. Let us have no nonsense about Legco having the last word. The Government’s tame majority will give it whatever it wants. An end to corporate votes would be a good start.

I do not suggest that the Government has to do all of these things. But it has to do enough to suggest that it has got the message. Hong Kong people do not want a government which listens only to the Liaison Office and the Real Estate Developers’ Association. Is that so hard?

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I see that a gentleman has been charged with accessing a computer with dishonest intent because he posted messages urging people to resist police attempts to clear Mong Kok. There is no suggestion that he was not entitled to access the computer, which was his own. And so a legal abuse continues.

The relevant part of the Crimes Ordinance goes like this:

“(1) Any person who obtains access to a computer-

(a) with intent to commit an offence;
(b) with a dishonest intent to deceive;
(c) with a view to dishonest gain for himself or another; or
(d) with a dishonest intent to cause loss to another,whether on the same occasion as he obtains such access or on any future occasion, commits an offence and is liable on conviction upon indictment to imprisonment for 5 years.
(2) For the purposes of subsection (1) “gain” (獲益) and “loss” (損失) are to be construed as extending not only to gain or loss in money or other property, but as extending to any such gain or loss whether temporary or permanent; and-

(a) “gain” (獲益) includes a gain by keeping what one has, as well as a gain by getting what one has not; and
(b) “loss” (損失) includes a loss by not getting what one might get, as well as a loss by parting with what one has.”

Now the clear intent of this amendment, which was drafted carelessly and apparently not perused by any awake legislator) was to criminalise gaining access to a computer which you were not entitled to access. And for some years after it was passed (in 1993) it was interpreted in this way. The change came when someone in the Department of Justice (as it had become) was looking round for some way of getting at a hospital employee who had revealed that the department’s bulletins on the health of the then Secretary were lies. Generally it is not a criminal offence to reveal to the public that officials are deceiving them, so some legal creativity was called for.

The offence of dishonest access was wheeled out for the purpose, and there was perhaps some faint justification for this. After all the hospital employee concerned, though he had legitimate access to the computer for his work, was arguably acting outside his duties when he used his access to expose official mendacity. Since then, though, the offence has suffered from galloping mission creep, and is now routinely charged if anyone has done anything illegal involving a computer. A judge recently ruled that a mobile phone had enough microchips in it to qualify as a computer, thereby adding the possibility that this charge can be used for any offence involving use of your phone.

I maintain, and will continue to do so until contradicted by the Court of Final Appeal, which will no doubt have to settle the matter eventually, that this interpretation is absurd. After all there are many offences for which the maximum penalty is much less than imprisonment for five years. Are we to suppose that the legislature intended, and the ordinance means, that such an offence is trivial if committed with your pen, but a serious matter deserving of extended incarceration if you use your computer? It’s crazy. Why were the couple who recently lost a spectacular libel case involving emails not charged with this offence? It doesn’t require criminality – only a dishonest intent to deceive.

Logically the results of this could be scary. Your car has more microchips in it than your mobile phone. So when you switched it on you “accessed a computer”. So the policeman who catches you speeding has two choices. He can give you the usual ticket or he can charge you with accessing a computer with intent to commit an offence, to wit, speeding. There is no requirement that the offence should be serious. Go directly to jail, do not pass Go, do not collect 200… What of a man who texts a message to his wife saying he is in the office when he is actually in his mistress’s flat. Clearly a dishonest deception. Is this now criminal?

Let me in closing answer before it is made the point that I should ask the Department’s prosecutors to comment before criticising them like this. I have tried asking them what they were up to about other matters and was told in reply that the Department of Justice does not give free legal advice.  Why any sane person would want legal advice from that source was not explained.

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ATV, for overseas readers, is one of Hong Kong’s two terrestrial television stations. It is the second station. Long ago it was a cable station. Then the other lot, TVB, started a free-to-air service. By the time ATV realised that people were not going to pay for something which someone else was offering free it was too late. TVB was the station most people watched and so it has remained ever since. One of the theories advanced to explain this that the shops used to sell TVs pre-tuned to TVB’s Chinese channel and most consumers never learned how to change it. This is difficult to believe. I am more inclined to the theory that the design of public housing flats made it necessary for everyone to watch the same channel. Most estates had, and have, communal corridors with everyone’s front doors opening on to them. The only way to get any natural ventilation is to leave the front door open, and most flats are fitted with metal grills so this can be done without inviting passers-by in. But this arrangement means that in any flat you can hear at least six televisions, and if they were tuned to different programmes it would spoil it for everyone.

Anyway there we have it. TVB has historically made money and ATV has historically lost it. One of the results of this has been a constant succession of owners, not all of whom were the sort of people you would want as a son-in-law. Another consequence is that the English channel (both stations are required by their franchises to offer an English channel) is the television equivalent of Walmart. Everything it shows is either dirt cheap or paid for by someone else. The station has a nice line in American evangelicals of the sort who occasionally delight non-believers by being caught with their fingers in the till or their private parts in places they are not married to. Of course they pay the station to show their stuff. This looks awfully similar to advertising but it would be churlish to complain in the financial circumstances.

However lately a strange twist has appeared in this story. The people who run Hong Kong football (a bunch of quarrelsome millionaires) have persuaded the government that the absence of decent football in our city is a serious deficiency worthy of repair with public money. Hong Kong has a flourishing amateur soccer scene but the standard of the professional league is low and attendances are accordingly small. One of the things the football people decided to do with this avalanche of other people’s gold was to pay a television station to cover football. They asked both stations how much they would charge to do this job and took the cheapest offer, which was from ATV. This is a puzzling decision on several levels. One is of course that as few people watch ATV the soccer supremos are not going to get much for their money. Apparently TVB asked for a million or so more, and well they might. Another question is whether this will work. After all it is not what happens in other places. Elsewhere the television people pay for the right to televise sport. Evidently people who are keen on a sport develop a taste for watching it on television. Whether seeing it on television will produce a taste for live attendance is another matter.

The problem is that it will not, of course, be the only football that people can see on television. There is a familiar story that modern technology produces winner-takes-all situations where previously prosperity was spread around. Live musicians used to be able to ply their trade knowing that their internationally famous rivals could only be in one place at once and that was unlikely to be just down the road. Nowadays live music has to compete with recordings made miles away by people in other countries, and indeed people who are now dead. So it is harder to make a living than it used to be. Watching football live provides some special attractions in terms of atmosphere and fresh air. Watching it on television, on the other hand, invites comparisons with other games you can watch on television. This will bring the local rubbish into competition with leagues in places like Europe and South America where the football is much more skilful and exciting. So I am not optimistic. ATV does not seem to have much idea about football, actually. On the English channel they are currently touting a new acquisition: games from Scotland! Apparently nobody has told them that there are only two big clubs in Scotland: the Glasgow ones – with occasional competition from Aberdeen if that club is having a good year. So most of the matches are either one-sided or not very good.

It is tempting to see some nefarious political factors at work here. The way in which the Chinese authorities have stifled press freedom in Hong Kong is to get cooperative rich people to buy up media organisations, and make the journalists follow the party line. Often the resulting decline in quality and trustworthiness results in the newspaper or magazine losing money, in which case the owner can close it. He has done his duty. An independent voice has been silenced. The problem with ATV is that if its luckless but politically well-connected owners let the thing go bankrupt then the franchise will be offered to someone else. So they have to keep it going somehow. The government gives money to the football people. The footballers give it to ATV. How nice for everyone concerned. Except us viewers.

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In my experience of protests, which is 40 years out of date, the trickiest bit is the ending. Someone or some people have to craft an arrangement which leaves the protesters feeling that their actions and feelings have had some useful effect, without asking the authorities for things which are not in their gift. There has been a good deal of speculation lately about some sort of agreement, most of it by people who have spent the last year pelting Occupy Central with abuse, so their suggestions are perhaps unlikely to be taken very seriously.

Of course nothing I write here is likely to be taken seriously either, but as a purely theoretical exercise here is a sketch of what I think a sensible agreement to end hostilities might look like.

1. Lufsig must go. I realise this is going to be difficult but from a purely practical point of view it is essential. The problem is not that he is disliked by many and distrusted by even more. That is sad, but has been true since before he was elected. Nor is it an insuperable problem that in moments of crisis he turns into the People’s Parrot, reading a script prepared in the Liaison Office. Crises don’t come up that often. But the Chief Executive is not just an office worker; he is the symbolic head of Hong Kong, the person who opens bridges and bestows decorations. He also presides over all the UGC-funded universities. Since the events of the last week he is regarded by most people under 30 and a good many of the rest as the Man of Blood, who unleashed chemical weapons on unarmed demonstrators. Even Confucius would agree that if a father gasses his children you can kick him out of the house. Having an unpopular leader can happen to anyone. Having one who is loathed by all your best and brightest young people is unacceptable. People who think this is unfair to Mr Leung can console themselves with the thought that if he had kept his foot off the gas pedal Occupy Central would have been a harmless token two-day affair on a public holiday.

I realise there are a lot of faces at risk here and it may be necessary to approach this desirable end by a circular route. Mr Leung might have an unfortunate slip in the bathtub, or contract some obscure ailment requiring six months attendance at a specialist Swiss clinic. Or our colonial masters could demonstrate their often-voiced confidence in his administrative talents by giving him a job at national level, requiring residence in the nation’s capital.

2. Politics. Clearly it is no use asking the Hong Kong government to agree to any changes in the electoral arrangements approved by the NPC Standing Committee. But there would be no constitutional impropriety in the our government asking the committee to reconsider the matter.  And there is a good reason for doing so, because the request for this reconsideration could be accompanied by an admission that the assessment of Hong Kong opinion submitted before the committee’s previous discussions was a pack of lies, or whatever the diplomatic euphemism for such things is. As part of the agreement the Government would agree to commission an independent and reliable assessment of Hong Kong people’s opinions on political reform which could be submitted to the committee with the request for reconsideration. It is of course still possible that the request would be refused, or that after reconsideration the committee would reaffirm its original decision. At least it would do so knowing what Hong Kong people really want.

3. Reform. Recent events have revealed a huge gulf between the government and the governed, which is nothing short of scandalous in such a small place. Clearly one reason for this is the galloping politicisation of the advisory and consultative machinery, and the activities of the political appointee whose shameless task is to stuff every body to which the government makes appointments with Leung loyalists. This is not a good idea. Great organisations (the MTR springs to mind for some reason) are not helped if their boards are stuffed with Left-wing has-beens and never-wozzers selected for their political propensities.  The government’s network of advisory bodies was not set up to provide the Chief Executive with a cornucopia of lucrative part-time jobs for distribution among his friends. And the results are parlous: the government cannot hear the people sing because it is deafened by the chorus of adulation from its fans, who crowd every publicly available rostrum. The solution, I suggest, would be to set up an independent body to oversee all appointments in the government’s gift except those (the “accountability” crowd) which are explicitly designed to be political.

4. Policing. Here we have a tricky matter. Many protesters have no quarrel with the police, and those who have will generally concede that the police person on the street was just following orders from higher up. Cosmopolitan columnists have pointed out correctly that police handling of demonstrations in other places has on occasion been much worse. Most Hong Kong people still feel that we are lucky in our police force. On the other hand it cannot be disputed that since the present Commissioner took over there has been a consistent and considerable increase in the amount of force, and particularly the amount of chemicals, observed at protests. The Commissioner, Mr Andy Tsang, does not look like a square peg in a square hole. I realise that intellectual firepower is rather a low priority for street police people and a robust common sense is more valuable. Still, high command requires some sensitivity to the political and philosophical nuances of police work, and Mr Tsang brings to the post only an obdurate refusal to consider that his people can do any wrong. One gets the impression that if a squad of plods in full riot gear were filmed raping a nun in the middle of a protest Mr Tsang would defend this as a necessary part of the restoration of social discipline.  Still, if Mr Tsang gets the hoof it will be interpreted in police circles as an implied criticism, and this would not be helpful. So while one may hope that he will be encouraged to consider the delights of retirement (for which he is old enough) we should not, I think push for it.

Nevertheless the events of the last week do suggest that in some areas our police force has lost the plot. A person who is protesting may be a bloody nuisance, he may be committing a crime (though obstructing the streets of Central does not seem to be taken very seriously when done with a double-parked Alphard) and he may be disobeying orders. He or she is still a citizen who has the right to be treated as such. Pepper spray is not issued, or at least it shouldn’t be, so that individual police people can administer summary punishment to those they disapprove of by giving them a squirt in the face. The Force also seems to have overlooked the fact that the promiscous use of pepper spray in industrial quantities has made their warnings totally ineffective. Anyone near enough to the police lines to read the sign waved in the air has either hidden behind an umbrella or been sprayed. The sign is displayed to a sea of umbrellas, while policemen walk up and down behind the line directing a squirt at anyone who is not protecting his eyes. So the sign is clear enough on television but invisible to those at whom it is directed.

Clearly there is a need to reconsider the police approach to these matters, and we may legitimately insist that there is an inquiry, conducted by the police themselves, into whether it is still necessary and appropriate for the whole Force to be rotated through PTU training, whether the approach embodied in that training is appropriate to a society in which the right of assembly is constitutionally protected, and whether there should be some further restriction on the use of chemical weapons in situations where life and property are not in danger.

Well there it is – a dream – for there are no signs that the government is prepared to make any real concessions at all. It still seems to think the people are on its side, even though Mr Robert Chow’s phantom army of petition-signers and hunger marchers has dwindled to a few hundred rather suspicious-looking old men. A free and complex society needs to be governed with the consent of the governed. No victory will last if it is won at the cost of that consent.

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Well it seems almost everyone concerned now agrees that using teargas on peaceful protesters was a mistake. This brings us to an interesting question: who is going to get the blame? The Post’s compendious exploration of the subject, the work of no less than four reporters, was populated by a surprising number of anonymous people.
An unnamed government spokesman was quoted as explaining that the riot police had been withdrawn because people had calmed down, which was a funny way of putting it. Another anonymity, dubbed only “the source” (may the source be with you, political reporters) said that top officials had discussed how to ease the tension and noticed that the situation was less fraught in places where tear gas had not been used. So in this version the riot police were not withdrawn because people had calmed down, but because the tear gas barrage was stirring them up.

This suggests that we may feel a certain anxiety about the career prospects of the commander at the scene, who was also among those not named. A rare person with a name, Police assistant commissioner Cheung Tak-hei, said the commander at the scene “decided to use tear gas and the force deemed it appropriate at the time”. I take this to mean that the man on the spot asked his superiors for permission before giving the fatal order. Mr Cheung presented the barrage as a safety measure: “After repeated warnings police used the minimum force in order to maintain a distance between the protestors and the police so as to prevent injury. We used pepper spray, but the situation did not improve, so that was why we used tear gas.” This is a puzzling version. There seems no reason on the face of it why not having a distance between the protesters and police should be dangerous, at least to the police. I realise the police may not have a ready-made banner for this purpose but I would have thought that a loud request to leave a bit of space might have been tried. One notes also that tear gas was fired no less than 87 times. This seems a lot of gas if, as Mr Cheung conceded, the gas was “ineffective”. We are also left to wonder why this simple tactical explanation was not offered on the night of the outrage by the Commissioner of Police, whose explanation then was that police were “resuming social order”. This is important because it seems the decision was widely shared. According to “the government source” the Chief Executive and the Commissioner of Police were “informed of the decision”, presumably before it was implemented.

Clearly both of these people could, had they thought fit, have asked the commander to think again, or if so minded ordered him to keep his tear gas to himself. According to our source “The Chief Executive was of the view that it was better not to use tear gas on the protesters. But he respected the judgment made by the commander on the scene.” This is the sort of weasel explanation we expect from the Chief Executive in person – he was against it but he was for it… The underlying message, though, is clear. Mr C.Y. Leung was asked. He could have said “no” or “yes”. He said “yes”.  He consented. No wonder people want him to resign. Actually it seems a variety of motives were at work here. The commander on the spot thought he was in danger of being pushed backwards into Central, a fear which may have been justified. The Commissioner of Police wanted to assert the Force’s right to control the streets, which does not justify instant collective punishment. If the police think people are breaking the law they should arrest them. That is the way our legal system works. As for the Chief Executive, who knows? There is a price to be paid for predicting six months in advance that protests will lead to violence, if your side is the one which cuts loose with the chemical weapons. Were there is some small corner of Mr Leung’s brain a few cells leaping up and down below conscious thought level saying “this will show them I was right”?

No doubt this matter will be subject to further exploration. During that process I hope someone will ask Mr Cheung what he implied by the term “minimum force”. Does this mean that the police had some further goodies which they might have unleashed on harmless citizens if they had not been so Gandhian in their self-restraint. Were we spared only by the nameless pacifist at the scene from rubber bullets, real bullets…? What is the maximum level of force which the police feel appropriate for use against peaceful protesters? I’m not sure I want to know the answer to that question.

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I know the police are only doing their duty in the way they’ve been trained to do, and it’s a tough job and they’d really rather be chasing real criminals, etc. etc. which is all true. Having said which I think it says a lot, and none of it nice, about the way Hong Kong is policed that people turning up for avowedly peaceful demonstrations arrive not fearing but expecting to be subjected to pepper spray and tear gas. Nobody has suggested for a moment that the demonstrators being threatened with rubber bullets as I write were going to destroy property, attack police or get into street fights with counter-demonstrators. The escalating levels of violence are all down to law enforcement.

There is no mystery as to why this takes place. It used to be said that the Army is always preparing to fight the last war. The Hong Kong Police Force is still busily preparing to deal with a kind of riot we haven’t seen since the 1960s. Every police person, at some point in his or her career, attends a residential course in the New Territories. This takes months and is conducted at enormous expense in a complex specially intended for the purpose. And the training is in “public order” work. It involves the full panoply of riot control technology. Trainees learn how to handle shields, batons, helmets, gas grenades, shotguns (rubber bullets for the firing of) and the ubiquitous pepper spray. They wave the banners, fire the chemical weapons, charge simulated rioters (who are played by other police people with a certain understandable zest) and clear them from the scene. This equips them to make an invaluable contribution to the sort of confrontation which used to erupt on the street of Northern Ireland or even, occasionally, in the less salubrious parts of English cities. It is totally inappropriate to the problems presented by a few hundred students engaged in an unauthorised demonstration on a Sunday afternoon.

It is nice to know that if we ever have a real riot our police are well equipped to deal with it. In real riots cars are torched, shops pillaged, and police lines pelted with bricks and petrol bombs. In such circumstances a resort to counter-violence is not just defensible but necessary. The forces of order clear the street, and we all applaud their courage and dedication. When the street is filled with peaceful demonstrators with their hands in the air, on the other hand, a different approach is called for, and a barrage of pepper spray is not it. I notice with dismay that the delivery of pepper spray has changed. It used to come in a little aerosol like the ones carried by nervous ladies on the streets of American cities. You held up the gadget and it sprayed the stuff in the face of anyone within about six inches of it. This has now been supplemented by a sort of hose pipe which can be deployed in the second rank of the police phalanx and squirts spray in industrial quantities in the general direction of the opposition. I do not think this is an improvement.

We all wonder what is going on behind the scenes here. Have the police been instructed to “crack down” on particular activities, groups or individuals? Is Lufsig relaying instructions from elsewhere for a firm hand? Or are we just witnessing paramilitary fantasies being played out in the streets? When I was a post-graduate student I attended lots of demonstrations for research purposes. I never saw a helmet with a visor, a gas mask or a shield. I never got so much as a whiff of tear gas or pepper spray. Policemen in their usual uniforms prevented access to places which they had been assigned to protect, and arrested demonstrators who went over the top in their efforts to get in. Keeping demonstrations peaceful sometimes required a serious effort. I remember an occasion when the Commissioner of Police for London ran — not walked but ran — across Grosvenor Square to urge the leaders of a procession to keep moving as they passed the American Embassy because it is an axiom of crowd control that if the leaders of a procession slow down there will be problems behind them.

This is not the way things are done in Hong Kong. The government does not talk to its critics and the police do not talk to their demonstrators. So we get last night’s scenes. Pepper spray and tear gas are no joke. They are chemical weapons within the meaning of the relevant international treaties. They are supposed to provide a non-lethal alternative to opening fire with real bullets, not the first resort if curious passers-by refuse to go home. Do we have a police force or an occupying army? Not my decision.

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Here is an everyday story of Hong Kong employment. A large corporation, finding itself employing a large number of unskilled people on menial manual work, decides to outsource the operation to a number of contractors. This makes no immediate difference to the employees – they are simply transferred from one employer to another.

But the arrangement is cheaper. Why is it cheaper? Because the employees, having in legal theory been fired and rehired, are no longer entitled to a number of benefits, like severance and sickness pay, which are calculated on the basis of length of service. Moreover, because the contracts are re-awarded every two years the peons whose work is the object of the exercise will never qualify for these benefits on the scale which was clearly intended by the original legislation. In other words this is a classic story of an employer using a legal wheeze to deprive his employees of their dues, and thereby to save money.

By now you will be wondering which of the usual suspects I am going to name as the perpetrator of this rousing piece of chicanery. But this is where the story, which can be found in its full glory on Page 3 of the latest Sunday Post, gets interesting. Because the perpetrating employer is none of the numerous local taipans notorious for their ingenuity in finding new ways to grind the faces of the poor, water the workers’ beer and generally demonstrate that great fortunes are based on great selfishness and greed. Not at all. The perpetrator in this case is none other than our rich and generous government. And the victims are the ladies (as they usually seem to be) who sweep our streets in a rather old-fashioned way with giant brooms. This is all the province of the Food and Environmental Hygiene Department, the very same hotbed of bureaucratic inefficiency whose hordes of uniformed myrmidons descend on any eatery rash enough to put a table on the pavement outside, and which takes six months to issue a routine restaurant licence.

The best bit is still to come. At the end of the story our intrepid reporter Jennifer Ngo (who will I fear be sweeping streets herself if she keeps writing this sort of story in the present climate) as a matter of course asked the department concerned for its side of the story. The only comment the department would make was that the outsourcing policy was “designed to ensure the best use of public money”. This is right up there with the MacDonalds non-apology as one of the PR catastrophes of the year. I am sure I speak for the vast majority of taxpayers when I say that our hopes for parsimony in the spending of public money do not run as far as expecting the government to cheat its own staff.

What an obscene spectacle we are presented with here! Imagine all the things going on simultaneously: Henry, then FS, is expanding his house to accommodate his wine collection; Lufsig is adding the tenth illegal adornment to his two houses on the Peak; Rafael is blowing millions on a Shanghai floozy; Donald is riding in millionaires’ yachts; several tens of worthless political flunkies are being added to the government on ridiculous salaries; billions are being blown on unwanted and overblown megaprojects; while down in the streets of Sham Shui Po a Mrs Fok, who plies a broom on our behalf, is being robbed of basic employment benefits to save a few pennies.

As it happens I know our local street sweeper quite well. When I kept office hours my morning dog walk coincided with her daily appearance at the top of Sui Wo Road. She is small, exuberant, not much given to spending money on dentists but very conscientious. She has been doing the job for at least 20 years. Just think of the genius who noticed the money that could be saved by wriggling out of paying sick pay to an employee like this! Then ponder the terms and conditions of employment this desk warrior is enjoying. And then weep, or vomit, according to taste.

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Well goodness me, some unexpected people have decided that it is time to oppose tyranny. They are being rather selective about it. We are not invited to oppose the nearby regime which tortures and murders its opponents, censors its media and bullies its neighbours. Oh no. We are invited to reject the “tyranny of the minority” which refers to the inconvenient constitutional fact that if all the democrats vote against sham universal suffrage then it will not pass. This piece of oratorical overkill had its first outing from the pen of Sir David Akers-Jones. One tries not to get too “ad hominem” in these matters but I cannot resist the thought that Sir David, after a long and successful career in the administration of colonies, seems to have come by his distaste for tyrannical minorities rather late. The same can be said of the politico who took up the theme and the phrase the following day. This gentleman was a Legco member of the Functional Constituency persuasion. Consequently he has long been a beneficiary of the split voting system, which means that any proposal rejected by the functional constituency group is defeated, even if a clear majority of members have voted for it. This has happened quite often in the past few years and I do not recall the gentleman concerned making any objection.

Anyway the label is misconceived. If the drafters of the Legco voting arrangements had intended amendments to our constitutional arrangements to be decided by a simple majority of members voting then they could have said so. It is common in these matters to require some kind of super-majority, and this in turn inevitably entails the possibility that a proposal supported by a simple majority will not be passed. The reason for arrangements of this kind is to ensure that proposed amendments are supported widely, and not just by a bare majority. The minority who vote against an amendment are not being tyrannical. They are merely exercising the rights conferred on them by the constitution. The fact is that the proposed changes to the CE election arrangements are not widely supported. The only reason they have any hope at all of passing Legco is because of the number of the People’s Puppets who sit in there. If the proposals can’t pass without that much help then their failure is well-deserved.

Of course that will not stop some people blaming the democrats. Indeed there was a fine illustration of the lengths to which the government’s press poodles will go to blame the democrats, in today’s Post. Michael Chugani was complaining about high property prices. These are, apparently, all the democrats fault. The argument goes like this – instead of acting up, throwing fruit and agitating for more democracy the democrats could have been agitating for lower home prices. Therefore it is all their fault. No blame attaches to the responsible minister. No blame attaches to the CE who promised us all cheaper homes if he was elected. No blame attaches to the millionaires who conspire to keep prices high All the blame goes to the democrats. This involves willfully ignoring two inconvenient points. One is that the democrats did not stir up Legco proceedings in the name of more democracy; they were agitating for an adequate and universal old age pension. One can argue over whether high home prices are a more important social issue than poverty among the aged, but the latter is a respectable issue worth complaining about. The second point Mr Chugani has apparently forgotten is that the democrats in Legco have no power. Even if they devoted the entirety of their efforts to complaining about home prices there would be no consequences. Indeed the government will reject any suggestion, however worthy, from the democratic camp precisely because it comes from the democrats, and implementation might earn them political credit.

There is far too much of this partisan crap in the Post these days. Will someone please start a real newspaper in English?

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I have always felt that comments on Hong Kong matters should be offered rather carefully by those of us who can escape the consequences of our advice by moving to another country. This is clearly not a widely held view, but there it is. There is a role for outsiders: our view may allow us to spot lies and misdescriptions; pointing such things out is useful. But I am regularly irritated by citizens of free countries who feel moved to write to the South China Morning Post editor offering advice to Hongkongers, usually of a rather timid kind. It is not for us to urge Hongkongers to fight for what they believe in. But it is also not for us to urge them to surrender without a struggle. Still, there we are. At least foreigners in Hong Kong can be expected to have some idea of what they are talking about.

I was, however, moved to incandescent rage by a piece authored by one Tom Plate. Mr Plate – Professor Plate, actually – does not live in Hong Kong. He has never lived in Hong Kong. He lives in Los Angeles, where he enjoys such rights as the right to vote in elections, and indeed the right to run in them. Prof Plate feels, however, that these may be essential for Americans, but for lesser breeds without the law something more authoritarian may be perfectly acceptable. He has written admiring biographies of Lee Kwan Yew, Thaksin Shinawatra, and Mahathir Mohamad.  Condescension or racism? Perhaps a bit of both.

Prof Plate’s take on Hong Kong matters is wasted on the South China Morning Post. It would fit Xinhua. The economy “soared” after 1997 (I could have sworn there was an Asian financial crisis about that time) and we were all apparently deliriously happy until an argument blew up over the voting arrangements for the CE. Not having been here, Prof Plate has apparently not heard of previous arguments about national security, national education, milk powder, locusts and what have you. He presents the choice as between elections with a nominating system which produces candidates who “love China” (which he optimistically interprets as meaning “more or less supported Beijing”) and “opponents in Hong Kong wanted a wide-open, free-swinging nomination process.” This was, Prof Plate believes, far more democracy than Beijing could stomach. At this point in his musings democracy suddenly appears in quotes, it being apparently a local delusion here that free elections are a part of democracy.

Prof Plate then outlines the decision of the National People’s Congress, which he characterises as an “unsurprising and not so awful compromise.” Which is, if you’ll pardon the expression, pure unadulterated horse shit. The arrangement is not a compromise at all. It is in fact the most extreme of the proposals put forward for consideration in Hong Kong, having been raised months ago by the FTU, a Beijing mouthpiece. Prof Plate thinks the democrats at this point “went bonkers” (what does this man teach?), despite the fact that Beijing was trying to meet the democrats at “some halfway point”. From where to where, one wonders?

Prof Plate has a serious claim to be the most ill-informed person to grace the SCMP’s letters page for some time. He supposes there were no elections in Hong Kong before 1997, which is not true. He supposes that Chinese officials never comment on the internal affairs of other states, which is nonsense. He thinks the Xi Jinping administration is moderate, which is a bit premature. And he has a nice line in political platitudes like “it’s rare that one side or the other gets everything it wants”, as if Hong Kong people were insisting on a whole loaf instead of half of one, when they haven’t actually been offered anything yet except a big fraud.

Please people, if you live in the home of the brave and land of the free, refrain from writing op ed pieces for overseas newspapers urging the merits of cowardice and slavery.

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The question how to elect the next Chief Executive is not an insoluble problem. Even if you accept that what is not in the Basic Law is not acceptable and there must be a nominating committee and the nominating committee must look rather like the existing election committee … the situation is not hopeless. People generally do not want or expect a completely free and fair election. The problem is that if the nomination process is totally fixed then the ensuing exercise of universal suffrage is meaningless. So we want to see a reasonable range of competing candidates offering meaningful alternatives. We do not want to see a process which produces a choice between two matched millionaires with unblemished records of grovelling to the Liaison Office, toxic personalities and no administrative ability, distinguishable only by the size of their illegal basements.

Now I do not believe that the constraints imposed by the Basic Law make a reasonable choice impossible. Some suitable reforms of the election committee and some sensible arrangements for its procedure could produce a system which, while a long way short of public nomination, ensures that candidates with substantial support are fairly considered. So far, though, apart from a few voices crying in the wilderness, nobody seems to be working on this. And the committee currently preparing its views on the matter could well make it impossible. Of course the committee is not helped by the fact that it is working on the basis of the SAR Government’s thoroughly misleading report on the matter. Still, let us be more specific. If there is a requirement that all candidates secure the support of half of the nomination committee then the situation will be beyond repair. The nomination committee will not be a nomination committee; it will be a vetting committee. No sensible democrat could vote for a proposal incorporating this feature.

The conservative (which means pro-Communist – it’s an upside down world) forces seem to be relying on the notion that the general public will be vigorously in favour of anything they come up with. This is unlikely. To take an extreme example, we can all see that if the universal suffrage election featured one single candidate personally selected by the incumbent, then it would be no improvement on the present system. This may seem an unlikely scenario but it used to be so common in Latin America that the technical term for it is Spanish: candidato unico.  Possible electoral arrangements can be arranged on a scale with candidato unico on one end and maybe the system which made Boris Johnson the Mayor of London on the other. The question which then arises is where on the scale does a system move from worse than nothing to better than nothing, and where in relation to that point are we heading. And I fear we are heading for the wrong place. A lot of people will feel that the present system, which allows a genuine debate between different views preceding a fixed election, would be better than a system in which the choice of candidates was fixed and no real discussion was likely at all – bearing in mind that we are not going to get a real choice either way.

After all we know where we are with Lufsig. He is a puppet but a public puppet. Allowing his successor puppet to masquerade as the people’s choice  is not an obvious improvement.

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