tim's experiment

I have occasionally wondered if Hong Kong might be best described as ruled by the rich and for the rich. The truth is perhaps worse. The latest proposed change to the law governing limited companies suggests we are ruled by criminals for criminals.

The idea that company directors should be able to conceal their names from inquirers stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of limited companies. That purpose is to allow people to do business without the risk of having their entire property seized by creditors if a deal goes awry. In other words the purpose of a limited company is to allow people to run up debts which they may not be able to repay. It is not only unnecessary but unconscionable that people enjoying this privilege should also be able to conceal their identities. I notice that there has been no talk of allowing people to remain anonymous if they trade under other names without forming companies. The Register of Business Names will presumably remain public. It would serve no useful purpose if it was not. The registers of doctors and lawyers will remain public. People can also consult the Societies Register to fund out who is behind harmless recreational clubs. It is entirely right and proper that anyone who is interested in the affairs of Dubious Enterprises Ltd should be able to find out who its directors really are. Nobody is forced to become a company director. Shy people can trade on their own account.

Whatever the merits of this argument, though, the scandal pales by the revelation (thank you Ming Pao) that the 16-member committee which approved the innovation included no less than 12 people who were company directors, every one of whom had in defiance of the law registered a bogus address as his home. The form they fill in requires a home address. It seems local businessmen, at least in Legco circles, prefer to put the address of an office or factory. This is a disgraceful episode. Come on you legislators! Does the phrase “conflict of interest” ring a bell somewhere? You were not put in that chamber to legalise your own crimes. Will we now hear from all those people who were pushing for Long Hair to be drummed out of Legco after his conviction for disrupting a bogus consultation meeting? Can we rename the committee concerned the Nameless and Shameless Committee?

All this has given rise to some interesting discussion of the status of that Hong Kong basic item, the ID card number. Of course when ID cards were introduced we were told that only the police would have the right to demand a look at one. Naturally, as was predicted at the time, once it was known that everyone had an ID card, all sorts of people arrogated to themselves the right to look at it. And they frequently make a note of the number. It is a good point, though, that the number as such tells people nothing, or almost nothing, about you. It does not incorporate your nationality, religion, appearance or sexual preferences. All it does is to give you a unique identity in a town with a shortage of different personal names. Connoisseurs may be able to tease a few fragments of Immigration information from the numbers and letters, but for most of us it is just like a human number plate. It is not, and is not supposed to be, like a PIN. So here we go: mine is XD680118(3). Although personally I think bloggers should be allowed to remain anonymous, if they desire it.

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The neew 3-3-4 arreangement is now running into rough water, as was to be expected. The problem (I claim no credit for predicting this: it was obvious) is the way students are now admitted and shunted into particular programmes. Actually the whole problem is unnecessary. Universities could have kept the old system under which students applied for a programme and knew when admitted what they would be doing. This was not incompatible with a four-year programme, or with a common first year devoted to General Education. But the heads of universities decided that admission should be on a Faculty or School basis. A few cherished – or influential – programmes were exempted from this toxic innovation. For the rest, the students have now discovered that many of them will not be able to pursue the programme of their choice. And they are not happy.

There are two reasons for this. One is that if a particular programme is more popular than others the university concerned will simply set a quota. Students who are not admitted to this programme will have to choose something else. This is annoying. It is made more annoying because the choice is effectively constrained by the entirely arbitrary administrative boundaries between Faculties or Schools. A student who is refused for Accountancy, for example, will not be able to switch to Computer Science because it is not in the Business School. Some restrictions will depend on decisions made long ago by accident: is History an Art? Is Geography a Science?

Even more annoying, the selection will be on Grade Point Average, or in other words on performance in First Year subjects which, by definition, have nothing to do with your hoped for Major. In other words, back to Examination Hell, boys and girls. The old A Level tensions have not been slackened; they have merely been moved from school to university.

This brings us to another looming problem. The educational advantages and disadvantages of students spending the years between 17 and 18  in school or in a university are something that can be argued over endlessly. But there are other issues. Students under the stress of important examinations and difficult decisions under uncertainty will have problems. Some of them will encounter illness, mental or otherwise; some of them will have relationship problems, some of them may just need a friendly ear. In school this sort of thing is catered for as a matter of course. Teachers accept that they have pastoral duties as well as educational ones. Students who have been in the school for years will know who they feel comfortable confiding in and can advise more recent arrivals. There is a structure of houses and classes which provides a social environment.

The first year in university, as we have now reconstructed it, lacks many of these features. The student is in a strange environment. He or she is one of several hundred admitted to a particular Faculty or School. Classes will be large. The student will be, or will easily become, an alienated and isolated individual, lost in a lonely crowd. The more alert universities are trying to construct some kind of advisory or tutorial mechanism, but under these circumstances progress is not likely to be impressive. The student does not belong to anybody yet, so nobody feels responsible for him or her. University teachers have had no training or preparation for the role of advisor or counsellor. Of course they have had no training for the role of teacher either but they do not believe this to be necessary. Many of them are reluctant to engage in an advisory role and some of them are acutely afraid of the blame, or guilt, which may settle on them if a case ends in tragedy.

This may seem a shamefully timid attitude but as a prediction about the future it is spot on. Tragedies there will be. This is an entirely avoidable consequence of universities setting up a system which requires in them qualities which they do not possess. That is, of course, not what you will read in the press releases. In universities, I have discovered, you do not get a higher standard of administration. You get more elaborate and sophisticated excuses.

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Excuse the four-letter word, but on my last trip back to the ancestral village in the UK I made an interesting discovery. The f-word has come out. Of course in my youth we used it, on occasion. And we all knew what it meant. But there was an unstated rule, even among the most foul-mouthed of us, that it was not to be used in mixed company.

This was not just some bourgeois convention found in “polite society”. Almost everyone who was older than me had been conscripted into the forces for two years. They had there learned a vast repertoire of really obscene songs which were commonly sung in the communal bath after rugby or football matches. We were not prudish in our speech, at least in men-only occasions. But The Word was not used in public speeches, or in the media. A whole generation of publishers had wrestled with the problem of how to handle That Word in books devoted to the War, then of recent vintage. Some used asterisks, some used substitutes which fooled nobody like “frig” or  ” “flick”. Few dared simply to censor the offending word. After all the Other Ranks had won the war as well.

In the 60s the polite convention, like so many others, came under attack. With the abolition of stage censorship it became possible to use the word in plays and this was, at the expense of some controversy, done. The Word briefly appeared on television – I was watching at the time – when it fell from the lips of Kenneth Tynan. Speaking in defence of a show called “Oh Calcutta” which plumbed new depths of indelicacy he maintained that the word, which he uttered, was now no longer controversial. This was not true, at least in my family, where the arrival of the first broadcast f*** caused much discussion, some of it critical. Mr Tynan was not punished for his trailblazing, but it was not – at the time – copied or repeated.

My first inkling that times were finally a-changing in this matter came some ten years ago when I went with my son – then about 14 – to Glasgow for a week. During the day we both attended classes and in the evenings we watched television for an hour or two before going out to eat. We stumbled across a cooking programme which turned out to be Gordon Ramsey exploring restaurant disasters. Mr Ramsey’s reputation as a man with an eff constantly at the tip of his tongue had not yet reached Hong Kong. So we were taken completely by surprise when someone asked the kitchen guru how he could tell if a piece of meat was done. “Remember the old saying,” said Gordon, “if it’s brown it’s cooked, if it black it’s fooked.”  Clearly cooking programmes are not what they were. I was a bit offended at the time. After all this was an hour when kids might well be viewing. But I later discovered that Mr Ramsay uses the same language in front of his wife and children, so no doubt he cannot be expected to refrain in front of other people’s.

On my last visit to the UK there had been further progress – or if you like further degeneration. Reality television is bleep-free but not fuck-free. During one perfectly respectable programme there was a loud conversation going on in the background, from which the word “motherfucker” floated audibly into the soundtrack. Nobody turned a hair. This development has not yet arrived in Hong Kong, where Mr Ramsey’s programmes unleash a veritable blizzard of bleeps. But it is probably on its way, so we may well consider whether it is a Good Thing.

Some people will no doubt say it is. Liberated ladies may dismiss the convention that certain words should not be used in their presence as an old-fashioned symbol of their inferior status, like men opening doors for them or walking on the road side of the pavement. Sociologists – or at least some of them – believe that in the phase of history when self-control and restraint were desirable and badly needed social goals it was useful to have a large range of polite inhibitions, even if some of them were unjustifiable. Now that we feel secure in our ability to refrain from genuinely anti-social behaviour we can take the skirts off our piano legs, as it were.

Arguments against? Well this has gone beyond the stage where people were using the word to discuss sex in public, no doubt a useful liberation. It has now become an all-purpose adjective, often used in insulting contexts. Frequent use will devalue it, so that now we find footballers reduced to assailing each other with racist epithets because “fucking cunt” has become so familiar as to be almost a term of endearment. I suppose in the end it’s a matter of taste, and this epidemic of public effing and blinding is not to mine. Perhaps I’m getting old.

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It is sadly rather common for writers about business and economics to forget that many of their most common concepts started as metaphors. This leads to abuse of common phrases like “bottom line”, which does not mean the point in your negotiation at which you will not give way, or “soft landing”, which does not mean an arrival on a runway at all. A more entertaining possibility is that writers whose sensitivity to this point has dulled will produce mixed metaphors, in which incompatible  specimens are paired.

Monday’s Business Post delighted discerning readers with a heroic example: NEW HUBS TO CUSHION EXODUS FROM DELTA. How, one might wonder, does one cushion an exodus? Would you want to cushion an exodus? And supposing you did, would a supply of new hubs come in handy? The entertaining possibility might also occurr to the suspicious reader that the headline would make just as much, or maybe more, sense if you threw it all up in the air and took whatever landed: New cushions to exodus hubs,  exodus to new hub cushions, new cushion to delta exodus from hubs…

The usual solution to problems of this kind is to read the story. But the story started with an intimidating intro (first paragraph) running to 53 words. This is usually regarded as too many and this was a good example of why. It announced a statement and then said it was wrong. What was wanted, and need not take up too much space, (I used to do this sort of thing for a living) was “China will remain a manufacturing centre despite some factories moving abroad, because most of those leaving the Pearl River Delta are only going to cheaper provinces further West, analysts say.” Still a fairly boring story, as most business stories are. I wouldn’t change the headline, which is very entertaining.

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We are all supposed to respect the law. But this requires some cooperation from the law itself. If the law does stupid things we will laugh at it whether we wish to or not.

This brings us to the case of Mr Ki Chun-kei, who appeared in Eastern Court on Thursday charged with assaulting no less than five policemen simultaneously. A Hong Kong Hulk, you might think.

Not so. Mr Ki was trying to cross the road in Causeway Bay during the annual July 1 protestfest. He found the road closed and followed the crowd in search of a place which was not. Mr Ki was, he told the court, not drunk. However as he was carrying an open can of beer we may suspect that he was not entirely sober either.

At this point stories diverge. Mr Ki told the magistrate that he heard other people whistling and joined in. It seems Mr Ki has mastered the art of whistling with two fingers in your mouth (I have never been able to do this, for some reason) which means he has quite a loud whistle.

According to the prosecution, however, Mr Ki deliberately approached the five cops concerned and whistled “at” them. We may note in passing that in terms of the physics of whistling this is nonsense. Once the whistle emerges from your lips it spreads out indiscriminately in the fashion of ripples on a pond. You cannot project it in any particular direction. We may note also that  some people may have been surprised by Mr Ki’s whistle but we would certainly have heard by now if there was any danger of people being injured by one, if only because whistlers would have deafened themselves.

Now assault is one of those flexible concepts beloved of lawyers. It is not a necessary part of the offence that the perpetrator actually touches, still less harms, the victim. So it would be dangerous for a layman to suggest that the law was in this case being stretched into areas where it was not intended to go. I notice that one of the officers involved claimed, no doubt without any prompting by the prosecution, that he had been temporarily deafened by Mr Ki’s wolf-whistle. Another officer said she was “scared and humiliated”. By a whistle? Are we recruiting such fragile spirits as police persons these days?

But really one wishes that the person considering this prosecution had deployed less of the legal theology and a bit more old-fashioned common sense. Demonstrations are often rowdy affairs. People use a variety of ways of making noises. We do not expect our policemen to put up with abuse but we do not expect them to be shrinking violets either.

If protesters are not allowed to whistle in the vicinity of policemen, whatever next? Will there be prosecutions over shouts, over drums, gongs, bagpipes? Is it now a criminal offence to while away the long walk from Causeway Bay to Central with a few satirical verses from the Policemen’s Chorus in the Pirates of Penzance?

We are not supposed to say the law is an ass, even though it is a quotation from Charles Dickens. But it should beware of behaving like one.

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Hong Kong universities are surprisingly traditional places. I suspect this is largely down to lack of self-confidence. Even the most prestigious local establishments suspect that they are too small, or too young, to be taken seriously. So they try to copy overseas examples, usually American. The problem with this is that we are clinging to a model which is dying.

Simplifying furiously we can say that there are two models of what being a university student involves. One has the students attending lecturers, the other has him or her attending tutorials on a one-to-one basis, or something close to it. Lectures, it seems, are now undergoing the process which killed a lot of live music when the gramophone was invented. In the old days the student could  only attend the lectures at his own university. The lecturer, consequently, did not really face any competition. He was stuck with his students, and they were stuck with him. This is no longer the case. MIT has put all its lectures on the web. Whole on-line universities have sprung up offering numerous courses, often free (you pay to take the exam). Our lecturer now faces hundreds of competitors for student attention. Indeed, like an opera singer, he now has to compete with people who are dead but recorded. Somewhere in the BBC archives are many hours of AJP Taylor lecturing on history. Where will we find such wit and learning today?

Exploring this issue the other week, The Economist’s correspondent noted with some surprise that the two oldest English universities, Oxford and Cambridge, both expressed complete indifference to the ominous trend. But they would, wouldn’t they, because they do not depend on the lecture system. No amount of technical agility will allow a teacher to have a face-to-face conversation with 100 students simultaneously. The essence of such a conversation is that there are two of you in the same room, breathing the same air, making eye contact and so on. The person giving a lecture can, like a stud bull, use technical help to sow his seeds broadly. A tutorial by technology ceases to be a tutorial. When I was a student (at Oxford) it was clearly understood that lectures were optional. You attended courses which were particularly interesting to you. Attendances, especially after the first week or two when many customers came to sample the goods on offer, were low. This did not bother anyone. Quality was of more interest: people who were doing ground-breaking work not available elsewhere would attract a discerning crowd, often including graduate students and fellow teachers. People who were merely reading the textbook they had published two years ago addressed a largely empty room.

In local universities we do not have this system. Attendance at lectures is generally compulsory. Well you can make attendance compulsory, but not attention. Students doze, send text messages, listen to iPods, read the book which has all the information in it which you are painfully presenting through a piece of mediaeval technology … This is not entirely surprising because speaking to a large crowd requires either consummate natural talent or extended training, and most academics have neither. Their research-besotted value system, which requires them to spend as much time as they can on research and as little as they can get away with on teaching, leaves little hope of improvement. Most lectures, actually, are crap. The system is overdue for the scrapheap.

The usual reason given for persevering with it is that the alternative is so expensive. This is a legend carefully fostered by the old-fashioned collegiate universities because it gives them an excuse for extracting more money from their government or their students. Actually it is not true. I heard it so often that I believed it, until I stumbled across a way of working out the consequences of abandoning lectures and having tutorials instead. The problem was that the university in which I was working published a staff-student ratio, but it was obvious to all of us that this was not actually the average size of the classes we were teaching. So I was looking for a way of connecting the number of staff and students in three departments with an actual average class size. Rather surprisingly this came down to a quite simple formula, in which the decisive ingredients were the number of contact hours required of students a week, and the  number of teaching hours required of staff. Just for fun I tried replacing the then customary 18 class hours a week with one, to represent a single tutorial. Assuming the average number of people in a tutorial was two – quite reasonable in my experience – we could have managed this with a staff workload of 12 tutorials a week. Most people would be quite happy to swap 12 hours of leisurely personal encounters for xix hours of mass teaching with its attendant preparation and grading. And many of us were teaching 12 hours a week anyway.

So actually we could have any system that we want. But I do not expect anything to change. Academics are disappointingly routine thinkers outside their own subject areas (and sometimes inside them as well). Extended deliberation on reform usually comes to the conclusion that we should offer what the most senior administrator present got when he was an undergraduate. So tradition marches on. As the late Chairman Mao said in one of his rare lucid moments, conservative things do not fall over unless they are pushed.

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Since I last visited the CY Leung affair there has been some progress. Everyone except the incurably partisan or dumb now recognises that the problem is not whether we can tolerate a Chief Executive with a legal trellis, but whether we can tolerate a Chief Executive who cannot give a straight answer to a straight question. Most of us, after all, would have been quite happy if when the matter first came up, candidate Leung had said “Yes I have illegal structures. Doesn’t everybody?” After months of wriggling, evasions and lies Mr Leung has migrated from the George Washington end of the spectrum to the Richard Nixon one, and some people who are neither instinctive rebels not committed enemies of the government now think that he should follow Mr Nixon’s example in choosing an early retirement.

Other people, including some writers for whom I have the greatest respect, now say that this will not and cannot happen. Mr Leung has Beijing’s blessing and our colonial masters will never allow their man to be unseated by popular opposition. Obvious bad precedent, from their point of view. Therefor people should stop calling for a replacement and should instead try to work with Mr Leung for constructive purposes. After all he is at least not a property developer. One writer went so far as to suggest that it would be statesmanlike for a democrat to reach out by going to Beijing. I presume this was a fancy metaphor because most of the democracts are barred from entering the mainland. They cannot even visit Shenzhen. Still I hesitate to dismiss this view as wrong. We cannot know what will work and we can only try one of the choices available so we will never know what would have been best. On the other hand it seems the statesmen inspiring this approach include Metternich, if not Macchiavelli.

It is odd to find yourself revisiting your youth after 60 years but the first political event to attract the attention of people in my age group was the Profumo affair. Profumo was a Minister of Defence who had an affair with a lady of sociable instincts who was also apparently sharing the bed of the Defence Attache at the Soviet Embassy. He denied having met the lady in a statement to the House of Commons and had to resign when the truth emerged shortly afterwards. Quite a lot of people sympathised with Mr P. There was no suggestion that secrets had been leaked. He had been a good MP and a respectable Minister. Mrs Profumo was no doubt used to the occasional infidelity. Few politicians seem to be able to resist the odd fling. The contrary view was that this was, in the end, a moral issue. We cannot stop people doing wrong but when we catch them at it we can and should drum them out of any office of prestige and power which they hold. Any gentleman could have an affair but if he lied about it afterwards he was no gentleman.

Now it is argued on behalf of Mr Leung that many successful politicians were not plaster saints, or indeed saints of any kind.  Mr Clinton, widely regarded as a successful politician, shared his cigars and much else with Monica Lewinski. John Kennedy was a surreptitious philanderer on a large scale, and so on. Indeed there is something in this. Every King of France after Louis IX (who was canonised – for refraining presumably) kept mistresses. Frederick the Great treated his wife appallingly, Catherine the Great had at least 14 lovers, Mary Queen of Scots probably murdered her first husband and Edward VIII was a notorious rake before he inherited the throne. The elected types are no better: anyone for “bunga bunga parties”? Modern writers now look with a certain suspicion on Gladstone’s attempts to rescue prostitutes from a life of sin, and Asquith’s infatuation with a lady young enough to be his granddaughter. Loyd George was known as “the goat” to his underlings, Julius Caesar as “the bald whore-monger” to his soldiers.

These things perhaps do no harm as long as they are not known. I doubt, for example, whether John Kennedy would have remained the idol of many admirers if his serial infidelities had emerged in his own lifetime. When they do emerge, though, we have to ask whether this sort of thing is acceptable in our leaders. After all the Chief Executive may be pretty small beer as a holder of political power — despite his grotesquely inflated salary — but he is still someone up to whom people look. It seems in many European countries sexual peccadilloes are not regarded as a problem. A mistress, so what?  I am not sure that I prefer the traditional Anglo-Saxon approach, which is more puritanical about such things.

But our local problem is rather different. Mr Leung, is, as far as we know, a paragon in many ways. As an example to aspirant young people, though, he has a spectacular disadvantage. He only got the job because he cheated. No doubt Henry’s extensive illegal basement was larger both in size and more flagrant in the principles involved than Mr Leung’s illicit adornments. But Mr Leung allowed and encouraged us to believe that he had no such things at all. So the question is not whether Mr Leung is disqualified from his job because he is a liar. Many political leaders have worse faults, I accept. The question is having been conned into giving him the job do we now let him keep it?  Hong Kong is not short of examples of unscrupulous behaviour. But to have such a spectacular display of successful duplicity at the top is going to undo an awful lot of well-meaning moral education.

I conclude with some surprise (I did not take this view about Mr Profumo) that this is a moral issue and the ethical thing for Mr Leung to do would be to resign.  There is no point in agitating about it. If he doesn’t see this himself he is either dim or dirty. In either case, I think asking people to cherish Mr Leung in the name of realism and diplomacy is asking a lot. Too much? It is not for me to say. But a lot, certainly.

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Had a small ailment the other day, and went down the hill to our local GP, from whom as is customary I received three days worth of assorted pills. These worked eventually and the problem cleared up.

When you think about it, this is actually rather miraculous. I weigh something in the region of 200 pounds. Most of this is water. The insertion of a pill, active ingredients scarcely bigger than a grain of rice, should make no impression at all. Yet a tiny pill can make a big difference, sometimes remarkably quickly. In my experience, for example, a couple of aspirins will dissipate a standard hang-over headache in about 30 minutes. Clearly our bodies, while in some ways remarkably robust, are in other ways very sensitive. A very small quantity of a strange chemical can produce drastic changes.

You would think, under these circumstances, that we would be more careful. But we aren’t. In fact industrialised societies produce huge quantities of chemicals which do not occurr in nature – and against which in consequence our bodies have no defences. If these chemicals are not actually poisonous they may cause dangerous confusion in our internal signalling system by mimicking some unsuspecting hormone. And of course they all get into the environment eventually.

I suppose something along these lines explains the prevalence of problems which were virtually or totally non-existent 50 years ago. When I was a kid I went through the entire educational process and encountered two people who had asthma. This was obvious because they were excused compulsory games. Nobody was allergic to nuts and none of us had the faintest idea what gluten was.

Times have changed. There was an interesting letter in the paper the other day from someone who had eaten something to which he was allergic in a local luxury hotel, despite asking the waiter about the ingredients. I think he asked about nuts but some sesame paste had sneaked in somewhere, so this may have been a rather simple misunderstanding. The writer, though, was quite offended, and asserted a right to be informed about the ingredients wherever he was eating. He had obviously had an unpleasant experience. But he seemed to be asking a lot. In food selling enterprises the person who brings the fodder to your table has very little to do with its production. And the range of things to which sensitive individuals might take exception is quite wide and in some areas rather technical. Yet the number of people with problems of this kind seems to have increased enormously. I realise there are other theories to account for this but it seems at least plausible that we are poisoning ourselves.

We are certainly poisoning me. Any visit to the urban area is enough to provoke my nose to bitter complaints these days. I suppose it’s the traffic fumes, a problem which Hong Kong seems to be quite unable to solve, or even meaningfully to confront. I was bemused to read the other day that the Police do not take action against people whose engines are left illegally idling, because the relevant ordinance designates the Food and Hygiene people as the enforcement authority. Come on, Force, this is too timid. If a policeman sees a crime being committed he is perfectly entitled to arrest the miscreant whether another department is officially in charge of the matter or not. This would be a more worthy use of your time than issuing meaningless parking tickets.

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RTHK’s City Forum is a venerable local institution. When I lived in Causeway Bay (1984-6) and occasionally popped out on Sunday mornings to see it live the set already looked tatty. No doubt they have replaced it since then. The show consists of a row of talking heads discussing some topic of the day. It is assiduously reported by the local media because nothing else of a newsworthy character happens on Sunday mornings.

And so we were treated on Monday to words of wisdom from one Stanley Lau Chin-ho, who sits on the Labour Advisory Board on behalf of the Federation of Hong Kong Industries. Why he sits on the LAB in this capacity is an interesting question. Hong Kong does not actually have industry any more. The Federation’s own study found years ago that “many Hong Kong manufacturers have moved their production facilities to the PRD to take advantage of abundant land and labour supply.” Consequently  “it has transformed Hong Kong from a manufacturing-based economy into one engaged heavily in servicing Hong Kong manufacturers that have moved their operations across the border to the PRD.”

So the federation comprises a band of bigshots who have moved all their employing operations over the border except for a few offices. Why these people should be regarded as having a right to be consulted about employment in Hong Kong is an interesting mystery. No doubt it remains unexplored because it would lead to the even more interesting mystery of why our non-existent industrial sector still has two seats on Legco.

Anyway, there is Mr Lau, our local representative of “the fat man, the very fat man, that waters the workers’ beer”, as the old song has it. What has he to say for himself?

Well I’m afraid the word “bullshit” springs to mind at this point. Mr Lau thinks having a standard working week qualifies as “Hong Kong to unreservedly introduce Western systems.” Now, he went on “many Western governments want to change their systems. Just trying to raise the standard working hours from 35 to 37 hours has caused riots and unrest in some countries. So we are very worried that if we legislate towards standard working hours, Hong Kong could be heading towards Western models like Greece and Spain.”

Mr Lau curiously failed to mention the possibility that some of his members might be very worried that legislation on standard working hours would cost them money. Harping on “Western” is presumably an attempt to tickle local prejudices. Actually there is nothing particularly Western about standard working hours. Consider the following figures for 1995, lifted from an ILO study of the subject:

Countries with no statutory standard hours: Australia, Denmark, Germany, United Kingdom, Nigeria, Seychelles, India, Pakistan, Jamaica, Romania.

Countries with a 35-9 hour standard: France

Countries with a 40-hour standard: Austria, Belgium, Canada, Finland, Japan, Luxembourg, New Zealand, Norway, Spain, Sweden, United States, Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Djibouti, Gabon, Madagascar, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal, Togo, China, Indonesia, Latvia, Russian Federation, Ecuador.

Countries with a 41-46 hour standard: Portugal, Switzerland (workers in industrial enterprises, offices, technical posts and sales staff in large commercial enterprises) Algeria, Angola, Burundi, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Namibia, Rwanda, South Africa, Tanzania, Republic of Korea, Mongolia, Singapore, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Slovenia, Belize, Brazil, El Salvador, Honduras, Uruguay (commerce), Venezuela

Countries with a 48-hour limit: Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Morocco, Mozambique, Tunisia, Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand (industry), Viet Nam, Bahamas, Haiti, Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay (industry) Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon

Limit over 49 hours: Kenya, and those Thai and Swiss workers not already covered.

Clearly this is not a particularly Western idea. Some Western coutries had no limit. Many other countries had limits. It is also difficult to see any pattern suggesting that having a limit sets you on the slippery slope to national bankruptcy. Many countries seem to do very well with a 40-hour norm, including China, where most of Mr Lau’s happy band of brothers do their employing and manufacturing. Spain was in the 40-hour category, but so were ostentationsly successful countries like Norway and New Zealand. Comparing the figures ten years later the UK had developed a 48-hour over-all limit (including overtime) Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, lots of East European countries and Mongolia had moved to the 40-hour category. There were still only three countries – France, Belgium and Chad – in the 35-39 hour category, so the riots point seems rather dishonest. Many Western countries may be trying to increase standard working hours but those trying to increase them from under 40 cannot number more than two.

Where is Greece in all this? Not slacking, apparently. According to a report by the European Working Conditions Observatory published in 2009 “Based on available date, the picture of actual weekly working hours has not varied with the passage of time. On the contrary, Greece has kept actual working time at very high levels compared to the other EU member states. This has brought annual working time in Greece calculated on a yearly basis (including the number of days of annual leave and time off) to equally high levels (1800 hours).”

So there you have it. Saying that having standard working hours would make us like Greece and Spain makes no more sense than saying having more saunas would make us more like Finland. Mr Lau would do us all a service if he stopped spouting spurious international comparisons and told us frankly that his members are against anything which might cost them money.

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One of the advantages of “one country two systems” is that we are not required to follow the Mainland system under which the truth is whatever is currently politically convenient. Or at least we weren’t until recently. Now it seems Mr C.Y.Leung’s efforts to encourage greater integration have extended to this unlovely convention.

There was a poignant coincidence on Wednesday. On the letters page of the SCMP (Soon China’s Mouth Piece?) came the first salvo from the “our leaders are wonderful in all circumstances” brigade. Entertainingly they contradicted each other. Julia Fung from Central thought Mr Leung had been elected (I must have missed that) because Hong Kong people wanted something and he should be given a chance to deliver it. Peter Kwei, on the other hand, cited Mr Leung’s achievements as evidence for the idea that “people at the grass-roots level” now thought Mr Leung was wonderful. Meanwhile on page A3 readers who were still dubious could find a convenient little guide to Mr Leung’s “twists and turns”, going back to May 2011 when he told reporters that he had “no illegal structures at his home.”

Well I have rather lost track of the updates on this point but it seems that at that time the number of illegal structures Chez Leung was somewhere between seven and ten. Some of the explanations do not hold water either. Mr Leung claims to be inexperienced in matter of removing illegal structures. Oops, another whopper. He removed one from his house in Stanley in 2000.

The only question remaining is whether it is acceptable to have a bare-faced liar as Chief Executive. I do not mind the man having illegal structures. Most people who own houses in Hong Kong have such things. But after so many twists and turns what is the point of him speaking in public about anything? There is no reason to believe a word he says.

Of course we should not really be surprised. Mr Leung’s status as a senior trusty in Basic Law matters clearly indicated that our mainland brothers thought he could be trusted to assert fearlessly that black was  white and two plus two made three, if the political circumstances demanded it. We can, perhaps, draw some useful conclusions for future Chief Executive races. The less the liaison office has to do with this matter the better. Their criteria are not our criteria.

May I in closing offer a warm welcome to my new reader from the blog-monitoring team at the Central Policy Unit. You can classify this one as “hostile”.

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