tim's experiment

With a group of friends the other night we were comparing our housing arrangements.  One of us who described his flat as “typically Hong Kong” has 700 square feet. These he shares with his wife, three kids, grandmother and domestic helper. People who are not familiar with the Hong Kong housing scene might wonder about the helper. Those who are familiar will know that in order to rent or buy a flat, even of this modest size, you need two incomes, so help is indispensible. She is required to live in your flat by the Immigration Department.

If you take the footbridge which leads from the Shatin wet market to the public housing estates northeast of it, you will see some public housing “units” which have rightly been left empty and unfinished because nobody would wish to live that close to the passing crowds. Each “unit” is about the size of my carport. They are supposed to accommodate a family of four. People in Lancashire provide larger spaces for their whippets.

And this is the great unmentioned feature of housing in Hong Kong which is missed out in international comparisons, or in learned ponderings on whether we have a bubble or not. Hong Kong does not provide most of its people with what would be considered elsewhere a reasonable amount of space. It then charges them astronomical sums for the rabbit hutches on offer. Living in a house is a privilege reserved for plutocrats and indigenous villagers.

When I was a kid my family lived in public housing. Strictly speaking it was not a council house — a point in which my mother took some pride — because we rented it from the Development Corporation which was then building Crawley. The difference was rather theoretical. It had, as the estate agents would put it, kitchen, bathroom, two receps and three bedrooms. I suppose altogether there were about 2,000 square feet, including the garden shed and the space which was always provided in those days for your coal. There were gardens at front and back. Looking at it on Google streetview now I see that some later occupant built a garage in the back garden. There is still plenty of room, There is also a car parking space in the front garden, and some enthusiastic Chief Executive candidate has built a large extension on what used to be the dining room. No doubt he had planning permission. A glance at estate agents’ websites in the same town suggests that houses like this can be had for about 150,000-200,000 Pounds, say something between 2 and 2.4 million Hong Kong dollars. It would perhaps be unfair to compare this with the “dream house wi private gdn” advertised in today’s Pravda, at an asking price of $72 million. Crawley is not in London. If you don’t mind the commute there is a house on offer in Taipo for $8.8 million. This is a bargain but there is no garden. A house in Saikung offering 2,100 squ feet and lots of garden (“could keep a horse”)  is going  for $25m.  Houses in my own estate were reported a few months ago to have reached a resistance level at $20 million, above which apparently the cut taken by the government and the legal profession goes up painfully. However it seems we now continue onward and upward and one seller is asking $24 million.  Compared with my former home in Crawley the house is slightly bigger but the garden much smaller.

The result of all this is that for most people in Hong Kong there is no realistic hope of living in a house. Living in a flat is beyond the means of many. Actually owning a home of any kind is a distant dream unless your daddy’s rich or your employer is a bank, a bandit or the government. People in their 30s are living with their parents because they have no other choice.

This is not an accident. Nor is it a result of Hong Kong’s shortage of space. It is a result of government policy. The government is hooked on high land prices, so it runs the land market in a way which keeps prices high. Contemplating the approach of the C.Y. Leung administration it seemed the one thing we could hope for was that he would change this. He’s worked in the business, he should know what the problem is. The solution is no secret. The government has, after all, lowered land prices before when it wished to. Land sales need to be conducted on a regular basis, instead of only putting a site on the market when a big developer asks for it. Sites for sale need to be smaller, so that some contestants from outside the charmed circle of the usual suspects can be involved. And the government needs to run a vigorous and effective public housing programme, involving both sales and rent. These are affordable measures which have worked before.

But there is no sign of them being attempted this time, at least so far. Instead the government is apparently planning to tackle a symptom while ignoring the disease. There will be some kind of “youth hostel” for people who no longer wish to live with their parents. This is an interesting idea, with a lot of potential problems attached to it. To start with, running a hostel for adults is not like running a boarding school. Will there be visitors? Will there be overnight visitors? Will there be a bar? Will there be a smoking room? Will there be a contraceptive vending machine? This idea could lead to a lot of arguments. The other question is who will run the hostels. I fear we shall see the appearance of a well-connected left-wing organisation designed to divert government money into politically-correct pockets, like the one which produced a garbage national education syllabus. The question of who actually gets to stay in the hostel will then become politically delicate.

And in the end, this is a panacea. What is required is a general move in the direction of lower prices and lower rents. This will involve treading on some toes. The government should start trampling. If it solves this problem all the other little foibles will be forgiven. And if not, not.

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Considering that Hong Kong prides itself on enjoying the rule of law. it comes as a surprise to find that a whole category of laws have been allowed to fall into disuse from neglect.

Some months ago I complained that the reporting in the Hong Kong media of an unusually interesting divorce case had clearly breached the ordinance which purports to regulate the reporting of divorce proceedings. The law says that certain things may be reported, and no others. In this case the judge first made an order that some things should not be reported, though they are on the list permitted by the Ordinance. Later in the case he seems to have dropped the order, and everything was reported, including many interesting items which were not supposed to be. My letter to the editor of Pravda asking what as going on was neither responded to nor printed.

I tried sending an inquiring email to the Department of Justice. After a few days pause for thought this produced the reply that the Department only considers prosecutions in cases referred to it by the police. The responder added rather gratuitously that the department was not in the business of giving legal advice to inquirers. This was quite unnecessary. It is widely believed that the department is staffed almost entirely by people who are too lazy or too stupid to make it in the private sector. Nobody who has a choice will seek legal advice from them. All I wanted to know was what the department was doing about this particular ordinance, and the answer was essentially: nothing.

This conceals a change in policy. When I was an editor the Legal Department, as it then was, regularly monitored newspapers. A short detour into media law is necessary here. The two big hazards for newspapers are libel and contempt of court. Libel cases are pursued by the victims, if they can afford it; contempt cases are usually initiated by the judge in the court concerned. But there is also a set of restrictions imposed by statute on the reporting of various kinds of court cases. In juvenile court reports you may not give any clue to the identity of the defendant. In committal proceedings, as in divorce cases, there is a list of permitted items and everything else is banned. In cases involving sex you are not supposed to give clues to the identity of the victim. If a juvenile appears in an adult court jointly charged with an adult you are supposed to conceal his identity, which may lead to a very complicated situation. Anyway, when I was an editor these restrictions were policed by the then Legal Department. Newspapers which infringed were cautioned and even occasionally prosecuted. This kept the relevant laws in people’s memories and they were generally observed.

Contemplating the rather unhelpful reply from the Department of Justice I wondered what was going on. One possibility was that a popular judge on the brink of retirement had dropped a brick and everyone was pretending not to notice. However last week I ran into a very experienced court reporter and I was told that the situation is actually more serious.

The Department of Justice has stopped monitoring newspapers. As a result if you infringe the statutory restriction on reporting, you are neither cautioned nor prosecuted. Consequently they are infringed with increasing frequency. Details are reported from commital proceedings which should not be; people who should not be pictured (like the mother of a rape victim) are pictured, clues to the identity of juvenile victims of sex offenders (like the school they attended) are given. And nothing happens. All the restrictions outlined above have effectively become dead letters. I did ask some police friends if they were monitoring newspapers for infringements of this kind and they rolled on the floor laughing.

I suppose there is an argument that in this wired age the idea that information can be suppressed by keeping it out of newspapers is a quaint antique. If it’s not in Apple Daily it will be on Youtube or Facebook. So why bother? This may be a good argument for abolishing the laws concerned. But that is not what is going to happen. Actually I have seen this movie before so I can tell you what will happen. The situation will continue to deteriorate steadily until a case comes up involving some well-connected individual who really doesn’t want publicity. The Department of Justice will then swing into action and prosecute offending media, pointing out that the laws concerned are of great antiquity and should have been observed. There will be a wave of public revulsion and the defendants’ pleas that the law has not been enforced for two decades will fall on deaf judicial ears.

So it will all end in tears. In the meantime Hong Kong is not a good place to be a rape victim.

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Talk about the law’s delays. You will recall the case of the cyclist who stopped at a traffic light and was rammed (as we can now say, the proceedings having finished) by a car driven by a senior retired policeman. The cyclist was charged with careless cycling and not having a bell. He pleaded guilty to the bell. Hearings over the careless cycling seem to have occupied at least three days, spread over a month or more.  As Hamlet said, “Rightly to be great, Is not to stir without great argument, But greatly to find quarrel in a straw, When honour’s at the stake.”  Even given that honour was at stake, though, this seems an awful lot of fuss for a rather trivial matter. Anyway I gather that readers in distant territories where the Hong Kong newspapers do not circulate are agog for the result of the proceedings. So here it is: the cyclist was aquitted.

And now that the thing is over we are free to comment, as we were not before, that common sense rebels at the notion of prosecuting a cyclist who is run over by a car driver. What nonsense! The driver, in his defence, said that the cyclist “just appeared in front of him”. This inspired in at least one reader the thought that this is what things do when you are not paying attention. There is apparently no prospect of the driver being prosecuted, though if the cyclist was not careless that leaves only one possible culprit. It seems that members of the law and order industry stick together. The magistrate made no order as to costs, so being innocent turned out to be rather expensive. As the fines for careless cycling are fairly trivial, cyclists who are run over by retired cops would probably be well advised to plead guilty.

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Well I suppose someone has to keep jumping on this error or we shall see it all the time. Spectacularly erroneous piece about human rights in Pravda last week.

It was perched rather insecurely on a speech by a failed Canadian politician to a conference in Latvia. Why this gentleman was elevated to the status of a spokesman for “the West” I am not sure. He said, apparently, that Russia and China represented the biggest strategic and moral challenge to the Western democracies. I would have thought this was rather obvious. These are big countries, heavily armed, pursuing a social model which is different from the democratic one. This is not good enough for Alex Lo, though, who believes that Russia and China are just being picked on because  “the West”, or that part of it for which Canadian  nonentities speak, “needs an enemy to maintain its own ideology”.

Mr Lo went on to wonder whether China could not “try to achieve freedom and betterment for its citizens by striking out on its own path?” This rather avoids the question whether freedom and betterment are actually the main priorities of an insecure collective dictatorship, but the worst is still to come. Freedom, said Mr Lo, comes in many guises: social, political, economic, moral and religious. He then expressed willingness to give up “the purely formal right to vote” in return for freedom from hunger and the freedom “to dream of a better future”.

Now let us see what is going on here. Human rights do indeed come in many guises. They are, however, generally considered to come in a hierarchy: some are more important than others, because they are a necessary prerequisite to enjoying any rights at all. The right to life, for example, is the most important and fundamental freedom because without it you are dead and freedom from hunger or freedom to dream are no longer any use to you. Now people who criticise the absence of human rights in China are not complaining that there are no elections. Still less are they complaining that China does not follow the lines of “Western democracy”. Democracy comes in many forms and people who would like to see a democratic China would be quite happy if the Chinese model turned out to follow those of the Phillipines, Japan or India, which are not Western at all. The basic complaint about human rights in China is that the citizens do not enjoy even the most basic ones. They may be killed, tortured or imprisoned without trial by, or with the active connivance of, the state.

Note an interesting point here. If Mr Lo wishes to exchange the right to vote for the right to dream there is a certain symmetry there. He gives up something; he gets something. If, on the other hand, he abandons the fundamental rights to life, to a fair trial, or not to be tortured, then he sacrifices nothing of his own, because as an overpaid columnist on a pro-China Hong Kong newspaper these things are unlikely to happen to him. He is prepared to trade other people’s suffering for a better life for himself.

We must at this point concede that in recent years the protection of fundamental human rigthts, even in countries which can reasonably claim to have invented them, has wilted. Murder by drone, for example, is a clear violation of the right to a trial of the intended victim, and the right to life of the “collateral damage”, the current euphemism for dead innocents. Water-boarding and other mistreatment of terrorist suspects is clearly torture and clearly wrong. Jailing people on suspicion for a period (as in the UK) or indefinitely (as in Guantanamo) is an obvious violation.

Governments everywhere are very good at thinking of reasons for curtailing their citizens’ rights. They do not need newspaper columnists to do it for them. This is why the right to vote is not “purely formal”. If you have a vote you can turf the bastards out. And if not, not.

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Much attention has been bestowed – well it has been wasted – on analysing the composition of the new Executive Council. This is based on a serious misunderstanding of the way committees work..

It is axiomatic among anthropologists who have taken an interest in this area that the most important decision you have to take about a committee is its size. The number of people who can talk together in an informal way round a table with some minimum guidance from a chairman to keep things on topic and orderly is about ten. You can creep a little above this number if some of the people present are in effect non-participants – secretaries or nodders (a nodder is a yes-man who is too frightened to speak), but soon after passing ten an inexorable change takes place. People stop talking and start making speeches. They identify with the body they represent on the committee rather than with the work of the committee as a whole. People write scripts which they read out, rather than responding to what other people have said. In discussions, intrigue and interest replace more constructive motives. Undser these circumstances the committee is a ritual, not a decision-making body. This process can be observed over a majestic historic scale in British history as the Great Council, which sufficed for Saxon Kings, was surmounted by the Council, then by the Privy Council, and then by the Cabinet, as each body grew too large to carry on any real work. The British Cabinet is now, of course, well over the limit and it is commonly observed that all the real work is done in its committees, which are smaller.

The Executive Council, actually, is not even (as commonly described) the Chief Executive’s Cabinet. It has no real power except to give advice. A British Prime Minister who cannot carry his Cabinet with him is in serious danger of compulsory resignation; Mr C.Y. Leung, on the other hand, can ignore any advice he doesn’t like, and people who work at City U tell me that this is not inconsistent with his personal management style.

The thing which should be a cause for some concern here is that if the Executive Council is too big to wield its own powers, such as they are, then these powers will have migrated elsewhere. Somewhere in the government machinery will be a small group or groups who hold a meeting before the Exco meeting at which there is real lively discussion and real decision-making. And we do not know what this is or who sits on it. Of course the arrangements for this vary. In government consultative committees there is usually a pre-meeting between the secretary (who is a government official) and the chairman (an appointed non-official sycophant). The secretary explains the items to be discussed and the government’s suggestions for what should be decided. I was bemused by the little dust-up over whether the chairman of the Antiquities Advisory Board had “colluded with the government”. What do people expect?  In other places there are more formal arrangements. When I was a member of the Senate of the University of Lancaster it had a Senate Steering Committee comprising about eight people including representative of all the obvious interest groups, including the students. The Steering Committee, whose minutes were public, met before each Senate meeting to decide which items should be held over, which might be offered for passage en bloc because they were uncontentious, and which should be debated. It occasionally asked for more information to be provided or for some named expert to attend. The point is not that there is one right way of doing this sort of thing, but that it must be done by someone. If we do not know who that someone is then it is probably the chairman and secretary putting their heads together. The material over which they ponder will come from the people doing the real work. My experience of University Senates is that attempts to improve it in a large deliberative body are rarely successful, though occasionally necessary. Executive Concillors will no doubt, as is traditional, agonise over small bus fare increases and pass gazillion-dollar railway schemes on the nod. So it goes.

Anyway the upshot of all this is that it does not matter who sits on the Exsecutive Council. This is perhaps just as well because the list recently published did not inspire a great deal of confidence. Mr Leung’s plan to have his Secretaries grouped with a Deputy Secretary for something else in charge of each group is much more interesting. It may solve the problem presented by government departments which ignore each other except when they are looking for someone to pass a buck to. But it has not been approved yet. Which pretty much goes for the Leung set-up as a whole.

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The Chief Executive scene has taken a curious turn, and a rather embarassing one for those of us who firmly kicked Henry Tang into touch because of his illegal structure problems. It seems something strange was going on. Somewhere in the bowels of the Central Government Liaison Office is a little man who really chooses our Chief Executive, and he imposes some odd requirements. To be a serious candidate you must be a rich prat living in at least two houses in one of the most expensive areas of Hong Kong, said houses to feature a large collection of illegal structures. Both the serious candidates met these requirements. What are the odds against this sort of coincidence happening by chance?

I do not blame Mr Leung for moving into his house without checking the legality of various adornments. When one buys a house one tends, as I did, to assume that what is there is legal, or at least tolerated. Indeed I imagine a lot of minor embellishments of the kind which Mr Leung is now hastily removing probably are tolerated. Illegal additions to high-rise buildings are a safety hazard. Subdivided flats are firetraps. Small amendments to low-rise detached houses are only going to fall onto the owner, which could be considered poetic justice. In any case I expect someone who has shelled out millions of dollars for a house on the Peak is not going to skimp on the structural safety of his vine trellis, illegal though it may be.  Of course you can say that when unauthorised building works became an election issue it would have been prudent of Mr Leung to check his plans before pronouncing himself legal.

What bothers me is not the additional structures but the revelation that Mr Leung lives in two houses which set him back a combined $66 million. Mr Leung habitually describes himself as a “surveyor”. I realise that surveyors come in a variety of shapes and sizes hut it has not hitherto been regarded as a profession which produces large numbers of millionaires. I suppose “real estate speculator” doesn’t have quite the right political tang to it and “company director” is a bit vague. But it doesn’t really matter too much now. We can all see that Mr Leung’s very praiseworthy sympathy for the poor and oppressed is not based on recent personal experience.

This is a serious deficiency shared by many of our political appointees. I am tempted to suggest that all potential Secretaries should be exiled to Tin Shui Wai for a week with $1000 in cash and no plastic, there to live in a public housing flat and to be required to travel by public transport to and from the new Central Government Offices every day. Then they will make an interesting discovery. Being rich feels like hard work, but it is not nearly as hard work as being poor.

This brings me to the interesting case of Mr David Li, who has decided (according to some sources it was decided for him) to give up his post as the functionally elected representative of Hong Kong banks in Legco. Mr Li announced his retirement with the interesting further comment that looking back on his 20-odd years in politics it had all been “a waste of time”. Of course the short answer to this is that, as Tom Lehrer put it, life is like a sewer: what you get out of it depends on what you put into it. Mr Li did not put much into politics. For many years he was the member of Legco with the worst attendance record. When he was present he often left early. He eventually lost the title, not because he became more energetic, but because Timothy Fok is even worse.

Having said that, Mr Li has a point. People in legislatures everywhere struggle to make sense of the way in which they spend much of their time. Many speeches are made for the benefit of an outside audience. They are of no interest to anybody in the chamber, sometimes including the speaker himself. Much of the “action” is either meaningless or ineffective. The government wants tame votes, not trouble. If you are not supernaturally loyal then office is out of the question. The choice is between self-emasculation and obscurity. There are solutions to this problem for people who went into politics because they wanted to make a difference. Unfortunately Legco has far too many members who just want free parking in Central and something nice to put on their business card. Even turning up seem to be too much for them these days. Members were tired, we were told after the latest quorum catastrophe. They had been working five days a week for a change, like the rest of us.

Anyway for members who wish to avoid Mr Li’s ennui and disillusionment, the solution goes like this. First, if you are elected by a contituency, hold surgeries. I suppose if you are representing the city’s bankers these will be rather upmarket affairs called something else, but the principle is the same. Your constituents have problems. They will not bring them to you unless you reach out to them. I used to assist in a minor clerical way at a surgery of this kind. Many of the cases were very interesting. You will need to develop some expertise in where people can get help and which government department does what. This is educational and will help you to ask Legco questions without looking stupid.

Second, find an issue which needs a voice in Legco. Avoid topics which are routine bones of contention between the parties. Find something worthy, neglected and non-political like special education, animal welfare, the plight of cage-dwellers or the way the arts are taught – or not taught – in local schools. Then become an expert. Read the reports and the books, if any. Talk to the people. Talk to the academics. Talk to the officials (yawn). Get in touch with the NGOs and go to some of their events. Then you will find you have something to say to your fellow members. Some of them may even find it interesting. This will of course keep you quite busy, but the choice is yours. You can try to make yourself useful or do nothing for 20 years and then complain that you were wasting your time.

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I did not start this blog so that I could chronicle the Decline and Fall of the South China Morning Post. But the demise of our once fabled English-language newspaper is turning into a saga with all the ingredients of Greek tragedy, including a growing sense of terror and pity among the audience.  I do not propose to bore you with my thoughts on the internal row over why the death of Li Wangyang only merited two paragraphs. Every newspaper in town except the Post has wallowed in this story.

What bothers me is the collapse of quality control on the op ed page where long thoughtful pieces entertain readers who have finished the letters. I have noted with mounting dismay the frequency of long dimwitted diatribes from some Shanghai businessman who thinks everything up there is wonderful. I do not expect to get any political sense out of businessmen.  But on Tuesday we plumbed new depths. The article was called “Leung’s election a vote of confidence in Beijing” and it was written, we were told, by a Prof at the Peking (sic)University’s Centre for Hong Kong and Macau Studies. Jiang Shigong, the author of the piece, is apparently the deputy director of the centre. Careful readers of the biographical details will have noted that he was for four years a researcher at the Central Government’s Liaison Office in Hong Kong. A card-carrying apparatchik put out to grass then.

This article was the sort of thing which gives Social Science a bad name. A modest array of well-known facts was adorned with a monstrous inverted pyramid of implausible interpretation. Prof Jiang’s thesis is that since the handover Hong Kong people were “full of fear, distrust or even hostility towards the Central Government’s exercise of sovereignty in Hong Kong”. This is a startling departure from the usual official left-wing line, which has historically been that Hong Kong people were beside themselves with joy at the handover. I know this was the official line because when I disputed it in a column one of the Legco comrades tried to get me fired. Prof Jiang now says that this fear,  distrust etc., have dissipated, because Hong Kong people generally preferred CY Leung as a candidate for CE to the owner of Hong Kong’s largest illegal basement.

On the strength of this rather feeble preference for the least toxic of the two serious candidates Prof Jiang “feels the heartfelt acceptance of Chinese sovereignty in Hong Kong”. Or as he put it in a paragraph which suggests academia rather than journalism as a future career, “the 2012 popular election was … undoubtedly a popular endorsement for the central government’s exercise of sovereignty in Hong Kong. It symbolised that Hong Kongers had officially and psycho-culturally acknowledged the central government’s sovereignty, so that Hong Kong was not only reunified with mainland China in the legal aspect but also in the hearts of the people.”  This is unmitigated hogwash, as anyone who lives in Hong Kong ought to know.

In case you deo not want to take my word for this, on Wednesday’s City pages there was a bulletin from the real world where you find out what people think by asking them. This was headlined “Mistrust of Beijing at post-1997 high”. It had been written by a real journalst, and reported that according to the latest research by the usual people at Hong Kong U, 37 percent of the people polled said they distrusted Beijing. This was 3 percent up since last March, before the CE election. Researcher Robert Chung cited several recent incidents (Bo Xilai, Chen Guangcheng, Li Wangyang) as accounting for the decline in trust. Dixon Sing, a political scientist (they’re all over the place) at the HKUST, said that “The results show that Hong Kong people have an impression that the communist party is intolerant of dissent and is willing to resort to high-handed repression. The intolerance and repression are a world apart from Hong Kong’s core values.”

So there you are. Political Science seems to produce different results when it is done in Beijing and when it is done in Hong Kong. Journalism on the other hand, as practised at the South China Morning Post, is rapidly becoming less ambiguous.

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An unfortunate coincidence, but it couldn’t happen to a more deserving victim. Mr Tony Blair (yes, that one – the former UK Prime Minister) is in town just as we are all getting the details of his warm support for the late unlamented Libyan despot Muammar Ghaddafi.

Mr Blair is a slimy duplicitous creep with a strong line in self-deception. But that is normal for professional politicians. His role as jackal to Mr George W. Bush’s tiger in the waging of unprovoked aggressive war on fictional pretexts is now old history. But we are still finding out other things about Mr Blair. Tony now considers himself a man of faith. Indeed it seems he considered himself a man of faith for quite a long time before revealing the fact, because it would have been politically inexpedient. Faith is apparently now his thing, anyway, and Mr Blair’s idea of a contructive use for his status as an elder statesman is a thing called the Tony Blair Faith Foundation. In pursuit of this he was billed to give a speech about faith at the University of Hong Kong today (Thursday). Readers who feel as queasy about this as I do may be reassured to know that the term has finished so Mr Blair’s thoughts on the matter will not be dripped on unsuspecting students.

According to the SCMPost Mr Blair’s speech was to be followed by a 30-minute question and answer session. Anyone who was short of an interesting question could turn to the front of the City Section, where we were given a detailed update on the case of Mr Sami al-Saadi, who was – with his wife and four children – lured to Hong Kong, arrested, bundled onto a plane and sent to Libya, where the whole family wound up in the Tajoura prison, Mr Saadi’s home for the next three years. Mr al-Saadi, who was then a dissident or a terrorist but is now regarded as a heroic resister of despotism,  is suing everyone involved in this nefarious undertaking, which seems to have been illegal from beginning to end.  Mr Blair appears in the timeline provided by the Post’s editors: March 23: CIA fax sent to Tripoli … March 25: British Prime Minister Tony Blair meets Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi. March 28: Saadi and his family deported to Tripoli. What did the prime minister and the lethal Libyan nutcase talk about, one wonders. Faith?

Actually I think the greatest service Mr Blair could do for faith would be to keep his filthy fingerprints off it. You should not buy a used religion from this man.  He is living proof of the difference between religiosity and righteousness.  If you see him around the place, please give him a kick for me.

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I gatrher that readers are agog to hear what happened to Mr Turner, the cyclist who “collided” with a car while he was stopped at a traffic light. First day of the hearing was yesterday. The case was then adjourned until Friday. Seems the law is working at its usual speed: the actual accident occurred last August. Further news when it arrives.

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The legal status of cyclists in Hong Kong is interesting. In theory they are subject to the same rules as the rest of us. In practice they can be seen every day flouting traffic signals and rules, riding without lights at night, occupying more of their share of the road – or in other places the pavement – without any consequences.

Happily, though, an exception has occurred. According to today’s papers tomorrow will see a cyclist hauled into court and prosecuted … for not having a bell. It appears that I was quite wrong in supposing that cyclists were above the law. You can do all the things outlined in the first paragraph. But you must have a bell.

I must in the interest of completeness add that the cyclist concerned is not being prosecuted for said absence of bell alone. He is also being prosecuted for careless cycling. This is, in my experience, another first. What on earth is going on? Well the defendant is 50-year-old cycling fanatic Martin Turner. Apparently Mr Turner was on his bike, as he often is, when he stopped at a traffic light in Central. He then collided, as legally careful copy puts it, with a car which was coming up behind him. The bike was mangled and Mr Turner also needed some running repairs at Queen Mary Hospital.  The car was driven by a retired Assistant Commissioner of Police, a feature of the case which certainly sets the mind running down interesting channels but on which I dare not comment.

Suffice to say that I hope the magistrate in Kwun Tong Court tomorrow is awake, because his disposition of the case will certainly attract close scrutiny. Without trespassing on the matters which will be in dispute before the court I can I think say with some confidence that this case is going to be really interesting.

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