tim's experiment

Let me say at the outset that the campaign to discourage smoking has been hailed as the greatest public health success of the last half century. It has improved many lives. Unfortunately it also attracts more than its fair share of busybodies who enjoy tampering with other people’s pleasures. And in the strong consciousness of their own righteousness these people can sometimes be less than honest.

Those of us who have been around for a while can remember when the campaign for non-smoking areas was presented as a defence of the minority who — in those days — did not smoke and did not wish to inhabit smoke-filled rooms. This was a fair request which many smokers supported. But once it could be claimed that non-smokers were a majority, the concern for minority rights evaporated. Even suggesting that people who wished to smoke were making a choice to which they had a right, and should be able to pursue without unreasonable inconvenience, became sacrilege. And so we have now reached the stage where the habit is banned almost everywhere indoors, and in a good many places outdoors as well.  Restrictions are more and more aimed not to protect non-smokers but to persecute smokers.

This brings me to the latest complaint, coming soon to an op ed page near you, which is that pubs, finding that customers who smoke have to do so on the pavement outside, have taken to providing the odd table and chair for them. This is not condemned as a threat to anyone’s health, which it isn’t. It is attacked as causing obstruction to the pavement, and involving an unlawful extension of the pub’s operating area. Now it may be that there are people out there who have for many years battled against the endemic obstructions on Hong Kong’s pavements. Goodness knows there are enough of them: bus stops, street signs, queueing enclosures, overflows from shops of various kinds, PCCW junction boxes, post boxes, litter bins … the list is endless. If such a person emerges and complains about pubs putting chairs on the pavement he should be listened to with respect. If, on the other hand, the person complaining has never shown the slightest prior interest in pavement obstruction, then we can safely conclude that the complainer is a hypocrite who is using obstruction as a convenient stick with which to continue the persecution of smokers.

It is, I know, depressing to see huddles of smokers round doorways or the outsides of pubs. But it is not their fault that they gather there. They gather there because they are not allowed to smoke anywhere else. This has no doubt contributed to smoking becoming rather a rare habit in Hong Kong. Anti-smoking fanatics now need to get their heads round an unfamiliar idea: enough is enough.

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Having been writing newspaper columns for a long time I get the occasional irresistible urge to offer fatherly advice to people who came to the game more recently. This advice is ignored, of course, as is only proper. But it makes me feel better. So here we go.

If you are a columnist you should not use the space allotted to you to rebut or dispute criticisms made of you elsewhere. There are several good reasons for this. One is that your first duty to your readers is to be entertaining and informative. A recitation of your virtues is likely to be neither. Regular readers have already decided what they think of your opinions and prejudices. They are not going to change views formed over numerous readings of your previous efforts just because you say so.

Then there is a temptation to be less than explicit in stating what you are complaining about. I was flattered to find Alex Lo responding to one of my comments about his work, but the reference was carefully anonymised and I suspect a lot of readers did not understand what was going on. As I have maybe 100 readers and the Post, I think, still has about 100,000 it is conceivable that 99,900 readers were neither convinced nor entertained; they were just baffled.

Then if you do explain clearly what you are disputing, you may well introduce a lot of people to a criticism which they missed. Michael Chugani was complaining last week that some writers in the Chinese press call him a “Leung fan”. I imagine I was not the only reader to whom this came as a complete surprise. It had not occurred to me that Mr Chugani was a Leung fan, though having got the idea into my head I was not helped to get rid of it by Mr Chugani’s defence, which seemed to be that he is a fearlessly independent thinker who just happens to agree with Mr Leung about everything except television licences.  Still Mr Chugani is entitled to his opinions, whatever they are. What bothers me about him is the contrast between the fearless piranha in print, and the fawning sycophant on television. I understand that different employers want different things, but this is not a happy picture for someone who frequently accuses other people of hypocrisy.

And he went on to make a catastrophically misguided defence of media owners who curb or slant coverage because they have business interests in China and do not wish to offend the authorities there. Why, Mr Chugani wondered, was it OK to close a loss-making publication “for business reasons” but a source of bitter complaints if you modify coverage “for business reasons”? The answer to this question is simple. Because “business reasons” encompasses a wide range of possible behaviours, some of which may be objectionable while others are not. Someone who closes a loss-making magazine is merely executing a sentence already passed by readers and advertisers. No enterprise can go on losing money for ever. An enterprise which is incorrigibly loss-making has failed. It is like a racehorse with a broken leg, just waiting for the man with the bolt gun and the trip to the dog food factory.

The media owner who orders his staff to avoid “sensitive” stories, on the other hand, is responding to business reasons extraneous to the business itself. He is in fact modifying the service presented to the public in an effort to protect his personal financial interests. Journalists are supposed to avoid conflicts of interest. If your savings are invested in Megabucks Corp you will not (or at least should not) be allowed to cover their activities. Clearly if you come across a story which is going to depress the share price you will be tempted to overlook it. Coverage should not be modified to suit the personal interests of the reporter. And it should not be modified to suit the personal interests of the proprietor either. Proprietors have the opportunity (though not all of them take it) to have their pictures in the paper, to encourage policies which they conceive to be in the public interest, to choose people whose instincts they share to run the publication. That does not mean it is acceptable to trim coverage so that your widget factory in Dongguan will not be given a hard time by the locals. Journalism demands some level of honesty. A newspaper which is not making every effort to tell the truth will sooner or later start telling lies. I fear that Mr Chugani sees this coming and is preparing not to notice.

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There is a story about an old lady in New York who used to emerge from her house every morning and let off a firecracker. Eventually a curious neighbour plucked up the courage to ask her why she did this. “It keeps the tigers away,” she replied. “But there are no tigers around here,” said the neighbour. “You see,” she said, “it works.” This is a fairly simple logical offer to spot. An equally classic example was offered on the letters page this morning by a Mr Wergin, who said that “the crime rate figures clearly show that the Hong Kong Police’s stop and search tactics are working”. Well Mr Wergin had somehow got his statistics in a twist, because he claimed that the crime rate in New York is twice that in Hong Kong, and the crime rate in London ten times as high, which is nonsense. But even if it were true, the causes of crime are a complex matter. Hong Kong had a low crime rate long before it had an honest police force or the compulsory ID cards which provide a pretext for stopping people. If promiscuous use of stop and search was the cure to all criminal ills then police forces all over the world would be doing it. They aren’t and it isn’t.

Mr Wergin though, was a model of dispassionate logic compared with our glorious leader Mr CY Leung, who is either a real dimwit or posing as one because he thinks that will make him more lovable. A couple of days ago the under-secretary for financial services and the treasury, whatever that is, resigned. The lady gave no reasons but said she had been intending to leave for a while. Naturally this produced a rash of headlines suggesting something was rotten in the state. This lady was the fifth political appointee to resign since the team took office. Now I have no idea why this lady resigned. I also have no idea whether the rate of resignations from what Mr Leung is pleased to call his team is remarkably high, or just normal. People do move on from time to time for a variety of reasons. If you have a larger team you will in the normal course of events have more departures. Still, this lady is being replaced by a 63-year-old retired civil servant, which does not suggest an abundance of willing recruits. This is not the way it seems to Mr Leung, though. He honoured the occasion with this priceless quote “Our politically appointed team of secretaries, under secretaries and political assistants is the biggest ever in all government terms.  What does it show? It shows that many are willing to join our new government and serve society.” Oh no it doesn’t. Nobody has ever suggested that the comparatively small politically appointed teams of the Tung and Tsang administrations were constrained by a shortage of willing recruits. The only reason Mr Leung’s team is bigger is because he was willing to waste more money on it. Actually these positions are very well paid and there would be no difficulty in filling a much larger roster with people who were “willing to serve society” for a directorate-level salary and all the perks that money can buy. What the size of the Leung team shows is that he has shamelessly mass-produced expensive non-jobs for political cronies. It is hardly surprising that people can be found to sign up. Beats working for a living.

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It’s the week for mind-blowing police statistics. Last year our beloved constabulary conducted 1,637,334 “stop and searches”. This is the procedure which starts with “Excuse me sir, may I see your ID card?”, or for less prestigeous clients “Oi! You. What you got in that bag?” The victim is asked to produce the card, empty pockets, open bag, etc. We have all seen this going on. MTR exits are a favourite spot. It seems rather unlikely that anyone on his way to commit a serious crime will be travelling by MTR, but there it is.

The interesting thing about Hong Kong’s figure is that it is about twice the figure for New York, which has both a larger population and more crime than we do. Even so the practice is so controversial that the latest Mayor ran on a promise to reform and reduce the practice. The figure for London – roughly the same population as New York – is about one third of the Hong Kong one. Here the matter is also controversial, not so much because the thing is in principle objectionable but because in practice those stopped and searched are disproportionately from minority groups – or, in words of one syllable, black.

Looking further at the figures it appears that this is a very ineffective method of catching criminals, and that the more you do it the less effective it is. In London, stop and searches produce an arrest rate of 10-12 per cent. In New York about 6 per cent lead to the searchee being arrested for something, though critics note that only about half of these cases lead to a successful prosecution. In Hong Kong only one in 113 led to “crime detection”. We may suppose this sorry figure to include those whose only offence was not to have their ID card on them when required to produce it, which is not a crime in London or New York.

This is not a laughing matter because conducting stop and searches on this scale uses up a lot of police resources. If we suppose the average duration of one of these little chats to be ten minutes then our annual total of incidents represents 6,600 40-hour working weeks. In other words this activity consumed the equivalent of 128 policemen’s work for an entire year. And that is assuming that the policemen concerned are operating solo. All those people who complain that our Force neglects the crime of their choice – parking in Central, cruelty to animals, upskirt photography, speeding on Lamma, rape, murder, etc – can now see why. Hordes of constables are standing around on street corners waiting to conduct vain searches of passing pedestrians.

Another way of looking at the figures is to say that if you are a New Yorker you can expect to be stopped on average once every 11 years or so. If you are a Londoner you can expect to wait a bit longer: on average your number will come up only once in 16 years. In Hong Kong, with our smaller population and higher rate of stoppages, you should on average be stopped about once every three years. This is an interesting figure because I have been here for 30 years and have never been stopped and frisked yet. I was once subjected to a random breath test while driving (I think they were testing the equipment because 11 am on a Sunday seemed an unlikely time to catch drunk drivers) but that doesn’t count. And indeed from my observations of embarrassing scenes at MTR stations the searchee is almost invariably a young man carrying a bag. The other group often stopped, according to my students, is attractive young ladies, but I think that is just for entertainment purposes. And as might have been expected we heard complaints last week that in order to leave so many upstanding citizens frisk-free, other groups were being victimised. Suspicion falls particularly often on members of racial minorities.  Official spokesmen denied any “profiling” was going on, but it seems the Force has a pretty good idea of who they think is suspicious.

Only it isn’t a very good idea because less than one in 100 searches produces any tangible result. The other 112 unsuccessful stops are not costless. The citizen so victimised is delayed in going about his lawful pursuits. His time is taken from him and if the proceedings are not conducted with the utmost tact his dignity as well. Those people who are stopped frequently are going to develop a hostile view of society in general and the police in particular. This may be inspiring more crime than it prevents.

Clearly no rational consideration of the sensible uses of police time or the purposes of policing can justify this overuse of an ineffective and offensive technique. It has become a habit, fostered by the “management” technique of asking people to produce records of work done, however meaningless that work may have been.  Given the present “we never apologise” posture of the Force we shall, I fear, not see any signs of official contrition over this. But perhaps, behind the scenes, someone could inform the boys and girls that stopping and searching only counts as productive work if it produces something. Those officers whose suspicions are too easily aroused by the innocent should find another way of looking busy.

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Real confusion in this morning’s SCM Post. At first I thought it was a simple matter of the same story being used by the News people and their sporting counterparts. On A13 we had “Elvis has left the building, and image, to new owners”. Not a bad attempt at an interesting headline, though I did wonder why Hong Kong readers should be interested in 15 paragraphs on a change in the group of fat cigar smokers who have the right to make whatever money can still be made from the dead King.

On C11, in the sports section, we had “Ali joins Elvis on branding firms books”. Only seven paragraphs this time. Sports version is credited to AFP in New York, News version to AFP in Memphis. But wait a minute. If you examine the headlines carefully you can see that this is not the same story at all. The company is called Authentic Brands Group (ABG). The AP version – from Memphis – includes several other companies which need not concern us here, but the only actual quotes are from members of Presley’s family. And the gist of the story is that ABG has bought the rights to Elvis, which it did not previously own. Elvis’s afterlife was formerly the property of a thing called CORE Media Group, which is also to blame for American Idol and So You Think You Can Dance. There is no mention of Muhammad Ali.

In the AFP version – from New York – on the other hand  ABG already owns Elvis (and Marylin Monroe). Ali is the new acquisition and the rest of the story is about him. Elvis only gets a mention because ABG is introduced as “the company that owns licensing rights to Elvis Presley”.

So what the Dickens is going on here? Well don’t ask me – I only know what I read in the newspapers, which on this topic are not very helpful. The Guardian did not cover the story (at least  on its web-site, which is searchable). The BBC had the Memphis version, but it also supplied a link to the ABG website, on which the latest news was Ali and Elvis was not mentioned.

In the end one has to wonder, who cares? This posthumous branding rights racket is a peculiarity of American law, which is made by Congressmen most of whom are for sale, and benefits people engaged in the morbid, if not sordid, business of making money out of dead people’s fame. If this must be covered at all, shouldn’t it be on the Business pages?

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A campaign is under way to drive down the level of local wages. Of course it is not described like that. Employers may be insanely greedy but they are not stupid. So we are presented with a “manpower shortage”. What this was doing as the lead story on the front page of the SCMP I do not know, but the campaign is gathering steam so we need to consider exactly what it is.

The most eye-catching feature of the Post’s headline was the announcement that “industry leaders” feared the manpower shortage. I thought Hong Kong’s industries had all long since migrated to more congenial environments north of the border where stroppy workers are dealt with properly … and shot. On closer inspection, though, it seemed that “industry” was being used in the more general sense to apply to three pursuits which have to be done here because this is where the customers want the work done: construction, restaurants and old folks homes. These are, apparently, “key sectors recently identified by the government”, which was news to me. How can construction be a key sector? Either a building is needed or it is not. If other industries are prospering then more buildings will be needed, and if not, not. Anyway leaving aside the official status of the three industries where was the evidence for a shortage and what was the government supposed to do about it?

We’ll take the second question first. The government was supposed to reform the importation of labour scheme so that the proprietors of building firms, restaurants and aged homes could benefit from the resulting influx of labour. Among the benefits would be a reduction of wage levels in the industries concerned. This is an elementary feature of those laws of supply and demand on which employers are so keen when discussing minimum wages. More pay, fewer workers. More workers, less pay.

For it is an elementary fact of economic life that there is no such thing as a manpower shortage. This is not only because half the workforce are not men, but also because there can only be a shortage at a particular wage level. The way the invisible hand works is that items in short supply become more expensive, conjuring up more supply. There is no job in Hong Kong that cannot be filled – at C.Y. Leung’s salary level.

And indeed it turned out that the main evidence the “industry leaders” were offering for a shortage was that they were being compelled to pay higher wages.

Let us start with Thomas Ho On-sing, chairman of the HK Construction Association. Mr Ho’s complaint was that “A cement mixer with no experience is getting paid $1,100 a day”. Now I have no idea what a cement mixer does – in normal English it means one of those machines which you shovel materials in and tip cement out of. I suppose Mr Ho is referring to some kind of machine operator, I suppose also that since experience is valued the job involves some skill and judgment. We may also suppose that it is done outdoors in a relatively dirty and dangerous environment. And the question which then arises is: what is wrong with the person doing this job being paid $1,100 a day? The job has some unattractive features and it is only right that these should be offset by generous financial compensation. I have no doubt that Mr Ho could recruit people in Bangladesh – or the Philippines – willing to do it for half as much. Where is the benefit in that for Hong Kong as a whole?

Next up we have Simon Wong Ka-po, President of the Federation of Restaurants and Related Trades, as the food biz now calls itself. Mr Wong fondly recalled the days when you could recruit a waiter for $35 an hour, and complained that it was now necessary to offer $60. So? This means that if you work 40 hours a week, which is enough for most of us (I have been a waiter), then you will take home $2,400 a week or, in round figures, $10,000 a month. Would Mr Wong, I wonder, like to live on $10,000 a month?

The old folks home spokesman did not have any horror stories of being forced to pay decent wages for a change. He was barking up a different money tree. The government “should pledge that a certain percentage of people will be getting a place in subsidised homes”, he said. Oh yes. So much more congenial than giving people a decent pension and letting them make their own choices.

The following day we had a contribution to this chorus from Shirley Yuen, the chief executive of the Chamber of Commerce. Miss Yuen cantered through the usual material: disappointing number of imported workers, why can you not import a waiter, etc. and then got down to the nitty gritty. “The unions say we should protect local workers by not importing workers. But are we protecting them when we do not do so? If we don’t do so, will we even lose the whole industry?” To which the answer is “No”. No ifs, no buts, no maybes. We will not lose a whole industry and the suggestion is a silly scare tactic which will frighten nobody.

Business people are entitled to try to persuade us that what is good for them is good for us. Sometimes no doubt this is true. Exhibitions of shameless greed make this less obvious.

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There are times when a columnist has the chance to put in words what many people are thinking, and earn the gratitude of all those who were hoping that someone, somewhere would say in public what they were thinking in private. Having in the past been occasionally quite critical of Alex Lo’s efforts I would like to record my profound gratitude that someone, whose pulpit is much bigger than mine, has told the Hong Kong SAR Government that its stance on the question of what should be done next about the Manila bus tragedy was erroneous to begin with and in the light of recent events in the Philippines now appears obscene. The politicians at every level who have chosen to dip their bread in this old pool of innocent blood should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves. The kindest thing you can say about Hong Kong’s stand on the matter is that with so much else going on there is a faint hope that nobody outside the SAR will notice it.

I notice that since Mr Lo’s first words on the subject he has been joined in the good fight by several people who usually write for the newspapers and a few who don’t. A surprising level of unanimity has emerged, marred only by the crazy cow who writes for the Standard, who thinks the situation calls for “balance”. Apparently, however, as of yesterday morning, the people who make these messes on our behalf have not even considered that this might be an appropriate time to drop the deadline idea. I hope they realise what they are playing with here. We do not think much of the leaders chosen by the Liaoison Office on our behalf. We think far too many of them are conformist mediocrites and a few suffer from toxic levels of either ambition or greed. As they stagger from crisis to crisis we try not to get too impatient. They are a sorry bunch. But we do not hold them in contempt. Yet.

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If you only plan to read one book this year, please consider Poverty in the Midst of Affluence, by Leo Goodstadt. This is not happy reading. In fact reading it made me extremely angry. Mr Goodstadt is to be commended for getting through the whole book without resorting to the violently abusive prose which his information would have inspired from a less respectable writer, like me.

The book sets out to answer the question why, as Hong Kong has grown richer over the last 20 years, the social problems associated with poverty have become more conspicuous. The answer is not pretty. He records how, in the closing years of the colonial administration, the civil service reluctantly, with much back-sliding and occasional sabotage, created a welfare state, in which medical help was virtually free at the point of delivery, large numbers of needy families were provided with public housing at reasonable rents, decent education was available to all and a start had been made on meeting the needs of the indigent elderly. He goes on to show how this structure was surreptitiously dismantled, mainly though not only in the period of Donald Tsang’s tenure as CE. This was accompanied by recurring criticism of the whole notion of “welfare” and the deliberate demonization of anyone who needed to receive it.

It is distressing to recall that many of us simply did not realize that this was going on. Mr Goodstadt notes that constitutional matters were taking a lot of attention, but that is really no excuse. What were our media doing, for example, when the government dismantled the public housing building programme, disbanded the teams who knew how to do it, and handed over the Housing Authority’s land bank to private developers? Was nobody connecting the dots and seeing what was going on here? We now find ourselves in a situation where it will take five years to produce any new public housing. This is one of the areas where defenders of CY Leung say he inherited a mess. But do not waste your sympathy on weasel-face: it’s his mess. He was the Convenor of the Executive Council at the time.

The frightening thing to me is the way in which it has now become possible to advance in public arguments not taken seriously since the 18th century. For example we are told that the erradication of poverty is impossible. Now this does, it is true, depend on how you define poverty. If your poverty definition is the bottom 10 per cent of the population then some people will always be there. But Hong Kong’s definition is a percentage of the average household income. There is no iron law of economics or anything else that says there have to be some people below this line, unless of course the percentage is 100. In fact some countries which measure poverty as a percentage of average income have virtually eliminated it. In Sweden, for example, the poverty rate is three percent.

Nor is it true that, as one appalling letter writer put it the other week, poverty has to be painful because otherwise people would not work. People work for a variety of reasons and countries where the fear of actual starvation has been eliminated do not find that work stops. Actually this is a red herring, although one of great antiquity. Back in the time of the first Elizabeth people who did not want to contribute to poor relief complained that their money was going to “sturdy beggars”.  Officials and politicoes, including Mr Leung, have been happy to encourage the impression that Hong Kong’s modest social security offerings were seducing the workforce from their proper allegiance to underpaid employment. Actually most unemployed people in Hong Kong (it varies a bit from year to year – about 80 per cent) do not claim social security and most of the people who do claim it are not available for work because they are too old, too sick, disabled or children in families headed by people who are disabled, sick etc. This is another area where a vigilant media might have done a better job. Some of the official statements on this topic were grossly misleading. On the strength of them the proportion of government expenditure devoted to social security payments was halved between 2001 and 2011.

Another newly popular antique is the notion that any interference in the terms under which people are employed is a distortion of the labour market, a threat to economic efficiency and destructive of jobs.  As far as destroying jobs are concerned this is a lie masquerading as a prejudice. The point has been extensively researched. Minimum wage laws do not result in lower employment rates. Probably this is because in the real world the job market is very different from the much-simplified (but useful) model developed for the purposes of classical economics. As for regulating the terms of employment, we should not forget what employers are capable of if greed is given full rein. The argument that employment conditions should be left to the benevolence of employers and market forces was, I think, first advanced against an act passed in 1788 to regulate the chimney sweeping industry. It prohibited the employment of children under eight for this purpose and also stipulated that they should not be sent up a chimney while the fire was lit, a precaution which was apparently often overlooked. Employees need protection. This should no longer be disputable.

In closing may I welcome Mr Goodstadt’s critical look at what has been going on in the field where I still occasionally work, higher education. Before the hand-over successive governors had sought to expand the proportion of the school population going to university by increasing the size and number of the UGC-funded institutions. After the handover the expansion of higher education consisted of making the degree a four-year course instead of three years. The only increase in student numbers was the launching of the Associate Degree, a new qualification, unloved, unwanted, unsubsidised and unclear in its purpose. All the local universities started offering ADs as a money-making enterprise. Many of them keep the AD students on a different campus to avoid any possible contamination. Moving from the AD to a real degree is not encouraged and under the new four-year arrangement the lucky student who makes the change will take five years to get a degree which used to be offered in three. Education generally has become increasingly expensive, with the predictable result that children from poor families rarely reach local universities, which have become a semi-compulsory finishing school for the middle classes.

Some months ago I wrote in this blog that government of the rich, by the rich and for the rich was continuing. Readers of Mr Goodstadt’s excellent book will discover how true this is.

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A moment of enlightenment this morning while reading Alex Lo’s piece in the Post. I have been impressed for a long time with his ability to keep writing five columns a week. This is not a record – someone on the Irish Times, according to legend, wrote six columns a week for 30 years – but five a week is still a lot. Bernard Levin used to do three a week for the London Times, but complained when he stopped that this was too many. I used to have an irregular cycle – one weekly, one fortnightly, one monthly – which meant I occasionally had to do three in a week and it was not easy.  I had a full-time job as well but that was not the problem; inspiration is the critical item, not time.

So here we have Alex churning them out, and I suddenly realised this morning how he economises. There is a standard structure which is used again and again. We start with a local issue. This morning it was Occupy Central’s complaint that the Registrar of Companies had refused to register it as a company because its objectives  – or some of them – were illegal. Mr Lo opined, and this is clearly a good point, that the Occupy Central people were being a little disingenuous in pointing to their legal activities, however numerous. Civil disobedience is what gives the movement its importance and interest, and that is illegal by definition. This takes about half a column. Then we get a bit of international comparison, which gives the writer a chance to show off his cosmopolitan erudition. And then having loaded our tar brush we slap it over all the people we disapprove of, usually defined in very broad terms. Today it’s “many protesters today”, a category so vague that you can say anything about it. More often it’s “the pan-democrats”, although as the P-Ds are not a political party and encompass a very wide range of views this is no real improvement on “some demonstrators” or “many protesters”..

This is a nifty structure which can be used again and again. Start with a small reasonable point, throw in a bit of intellectual decoration, and then blame it all on whichever of your pet hates you feel like. This will save me time in the mornings because now I know how this works I only need to read the first paragraph and the last.

Meanwhile on the op ed page we have an unlikely new star in the local journalistic firmament: Carrie Lam, who has a day job as the Chief Secretary. You would think that having a whole government department devoted to explaining the government line Ms Lam could do without half a page of newsprint. The whole point of journalism is that a professional reporter can get Ms Lam’s thoughts down to about 10 column inches. Reprinting officials’ speeches looks like a way of saving money at the readers’ expense. That is not what bothers me about it, though. After all readers can draw their own conclusions about that question. What bothers me is that the by-line is a lie. Ms Lam does not write her own newspaper pieces, or for that matter her own speeches. This is not the way government works. Senior civil servants have what they conceive to be better ways of using their time. Speeches, articles, and other verbal contributions are written by a PR flunkey. I realise that having an op ed piece by Joe Wong with a little line at the end saying that Joe is the Chief Secretary’s press pusher doesn’t quite have the pizzazz of a piece by the Chief Secretary in person. But there is such a thing as honesty, and pretending that Ms Lam writes for the Post is not it.

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