tim's experiment

We do seem to get a lot of apologies these days. Up last week was Mr Donald Tsang apologising — again — for his expensive taste in publicly-funded hotel accomodation. Well OK, we probably ought to let that one go. There is no point in him resigning with a few weeks left. Mr Tsang should be allowed to shuffle quietly towards the scrapheap, apology accepted, sins (if there is nothing else in the closet) forgiven.

He should, though, tell his underlings to stop providing defensive bulletins on his behalf. Hot on the heels of the apology came an offering from the private office of the Chief Executive, to the effect that Mr Tsang was not really to blame because he did not book the hotel rooms himself. This is probably the limpest apology for an excuse ever to hit Hong Kong newsprint.

There are two things which can be said in Mr Tsang’s defence. One is that he really does need a suite. Not necessarily the best one in the house, but some sort of suite. I have been urging future reporters for 30 years to avoid at all costs interviewing contacts in hotel bedrooms. Of course most of the time nothing will happen but this is asking for trouble. There is something about being in a small room with a bed and a young lady which brings out the Dominique Strauss-Kahn in a man. I was not impressed by the suggestion that Mr Tsang’s refined taste in rooms was a necessary consequence of his exalted rank, but clearly we cannot have the Chief Executive of the Hong Kong SAR meeting people in a hotel coffee shop.

The second thing which can be said is that Mr Tsang was continuing a long tradition of extravagance and greed which goes back into the Colonial era. Senior civil servants in Hong Kong were for many years in the happy position of deciding their own remuneration and terms of service. The results were predictably generous. So senior types have palaces on the Peak and fleets of servants, justified by their “need to entertain”, cars which are supposed to be for public purposes are misapplied to transporting bigwigs to work, policy secretaries have personal assistants, personal secretaries, personal toilets and what have you. I remember in the 80s it was discovered that if you were really senior you could retire, collect your farewell pile of gold and pension, and then carry on working at the same salary, thus being effectively paid twice. Our senior civil servants vie with those of Singapore for the title of most conspicuously overpaid in the world. Mr Obama leads the free world on a comparative pittance. Mr Tsang’s extravagance is perhaps unreasonable, but also very traditional.

On the other hand the idea that he did not know what was going on is totally untenable. This might work if the problem had only happened once. But in 40-odd overseas trips it cannot have escaped Mr Tsang’s notice that the accommodation he was staying in was really rather nice and no doubt commensurately expensive. A word from him would have been enough to inaugurate a more parsimonious policy. Qui tacet consentire videtor, as the lawyers used to say– he who says nothing will be taken to agree.

Actually I hope the next CE will seriously consider how many of these trips are really necessary. Hong Kong has a Trade Development Council to inform and attract overseas investors. We are not allowed our own foreign policy. And if he must go, can we at least have an end to the preposterous nonsense of sending an advance party to make arrangements? I understand the need for the CE to have a few underlings with him. Like the emperor in a Cantonese Opera he needs a couple of “fragrant flowers” behind him as a mark of rank. But there is no need for the preparatory trip. A travelling CE is not a circus.

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The left-wing line on the right of abode for people born in Hong Kong has been making surprising progress considering it is arrant nonsense. I was distressed to see it surface in Frank Ching’s column last week.

The basic situation goes like this. According to Article 24 of the Basic Law permanent residents of the HKSAR include “Chinese citizens born in Hong Kong.” To put it another way, if you are a Chinese citizen born in Hong Kong you are ENTITLED, under the Basic Law, to be a permanent resident. Rather surprisingly the government contested this point in a case some years ago. The Court of Final Appeal decided that the law meant what it says. Note that despite some efforts to sow confusion this has nothing to do with the right of abode issue which was subjected to reinterpretation in Beijing, because that concerned the status of people claiming residency through parentage, not through place of birth.

Now the line which is being pushed is that actually the judges are being obstinate. There was a body called the Preparatory Committee – apparently an offshoot of the National People’s Congress – which decided that people born in Hong Kong should not be permanent residents. All that is necessary is for the judges to take into account this statement of what was intended in the Basic Law. They are being sticklers for a peculiar common law tradition by refusing to do this.

Let us note first of all how far we have come from the pro-Beijing line as peddled in the run-up to 1997. In those days the Preparatory Committee was never mentioned. I am not sure that the general public even knew it existed. The Basic Law was drafted by a Basic Law drafting committee, which was presented as an autonomous body comprising mainly Hong Kong people, deciding matters on their merits subject to the limits set to Hong Kong’s autonomy by the Joint Declaration. Then there was the Joint Liaison Group, which was explicitly described as “not an organ of power”, and there was the shadow Legco, meeting in Shenzhen. These three bodies did the public part of the preparations. Of course we all supposed that there was a certain amount of string-pulling behind the scenes, but if anyone at the time had suggested that the Basic Law drafting committee was merely a front for a Preparatory Committee meeting in Beijing he would have been accused of outrageous cynicism and “lack of trust”. It is a recurring delusion among Chinese officials that trust is something they are entitled to, not something they have to earn.

Now to the Common Law. It is nonsense to suggest that judges in the common law tradition never interpret the law in creative ways. They have to do it all the time, either because the law is not clear or because the circumstances to which it applies were simply not envisaged by the legislature. There is an interesting recent book by a late Law Lord, Tom Bingham, devoted mainly to exploring where exactly the borders of judicial discretion lie. There is a string of “rules of interpretation” which judges apply and in difficult cases they may go through all of them to see which ones fit. But this creativity has to give way to one important priority, which is that if the statute is clear then it must be taken to mean what it says. The judge cannot overrule it, even if he suspects that parliament might wish him to do so, or that the result in the case before him would thereby be more satisfactory and just. This is elementary. Judges interpret the law; they do not overrule it. The Basic Law says that persons born in Hong Kong are permanent residents. There is no ambiguity, no wriggle room. The law is perfectly clear and judges are duty bound to apply it.

We should disabuse ourselves of the notion that outside the Common Law world things are different and more enlightened. It may well be that other jurisdictions are more interested in records of the legislature’s intention, when they are dealing with an ambiguous statute. But judges in Germany and France are in the same boat as judges in England and America when the law is clear. Their job is simply to apply it. This is a common feature of countries which enjoy the rule of law. If the law says that the speed limit in Sui Wo Road is 50 kph then no amount of fancy legal footwork is going to get a judge to contemplate the possiblity that what the legislature really intended was a limit of 70 kph.  The line between the places where judges enforce the law as written, and the places where judges enforce what is politically convenient, is not the line between Common Law countries and Civil Law countries. It is the line between countries which enjoy the rule of law and countries which do not.

This is the line which Mr Ching is apparently willing to see Hong Kong cross. Shame on him.

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I am a regular reader of Jake van der Kamp’s stuff in the English newspaper you have to pay for. I am sure Mr van der Kamp is a sociable fellow, kind to children and animals, generous to charities and so on. I usually agree with him. But he has one curious habit which grates. His attitude to any scheme to improve the lot of the poor is the same as my dog’s attitude to fire hydrants – he just can’t walk past one without peeing on it.

Sometimes the attack is no doubt justified. Measures to change society are often ill-designed, and even if well-designed can lead to unexpected consequences, sometimes profoundly disappointing ones. On the other hand if the quality of a writer’s criticism varies considerably it generally means we are dealing with a prejudice, not a reasonable opinion. Consider Jake’s line on the government scheme to offer travel subsidies to workers who live in distant new towns. They are, officials suppose, discouraged from taking jobs in more central areas by the prospect of giving a good deal of their hard-earned wages to Kowloon Motor Bus, or one of that crowd. Jake’s line, to which we have now been treated twice, is that the travel subsidy will be completely futile. He explains that the employer of such a worker will simply reduce his or her wages by the amount which the government is supplying.

This is nonsense. There are three ways of showing that it is nonsense. One is to try to imagine how it works out in practice. “Good morning Mrs Wong. As you are now receiving the government travel subsidy I am going to cut your wages by $600 a month to make up for it.” I yield to nobody in my willingness to believe the worst of bosses, proprietors, taipans, moguls and “the fat man, the very fat man, who waters the workers’ beer”. But can you really imagine a local Scrooge coming out with a line like that?

The second way of showing it is nonsense is, oddly enough, to refer to Adam Smith. In German economic circles they have a special term “the Adam Smith problem” for people who have read the Wealth of Nations but neglected the companion work on “Moral sentiments”, by which Smith meant the fact that people do not actually behave in the way that economic theory suggests they should. This is a point which economists have rediscovered recently, or some of them have. People are not mere automatons pursuing wealth at all costs. There is an innate sense of fairness in most of us, and Jake’s idea would have it wide awake and rattling the bars of its cage. It would, after all, be manifestly unfair if a worker who lived in Central were paid $3,000 a month and one who lived in Tin Shui Wai was paid $2,400 on the grounds that the government was paying her bus fares.

The third way of looking at it, I suppose, is to ignore all this new-fangled nonsense about human nature and just apply traditional economics. If bosses in Central are paying $3,000 a month for cleaners then the lady who finds herself suddenly getting only $2,400 will change her job for one which attracts the going rate. It is true that the going rate may come down a bit, because more people from Tin Shui Wai will be interested in working in Central. For the same reason there should be a rise, albeit no doubt microscopic, in the wages paid in Tin Shui Wai because some people who were formerly in the job market there are now working in Central. But in the traditional view of these matters the market reaches equilibrium at a particular price level, and there is no room for bosses to deduct the workers’ other income, any more than they can, for example, cut the wages of someone whose son becomes old enough to go out to work and help the family.

I do not expect the government’s scheme to be enormously effective, because commuting a long way involves time as well as money. But I do not believe the money will effectively subsidise employers. There is quite enough of that going on already.

While we are on transport matters I must also respectfully disagree with Mr van der Kamp’s view of suggestions that the MTR should not raise its fares. Jake says that the result of this is that travellers will be subsidised by the taxpayer. But nobody is suggesting that the MTR should receive a subsidy to help it keep its fares down. They are suggesting that the money should come out of the MTR’s ample profits – most of which it pays to the government, which already has more money than it knows what to do with. They’ll be shovelling it down a hole next. The hole is calle the High Speed Rail Link.

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We all love the ICAC. Some of us hate graft, some of us have been brainwashed by their advertising, some of us just enjoy seeing millionaires arrested. But we all love ’em. Still, there is such a thing as pushing your luck.

Lurking on the back page of the Business Post this morning was a little Lai See snippet recording that the author, Howard Winn, had attended the first day of a three-day Symposium organised by the ICAC on the theme of “Fighting Corruption in a Changing World”. On his arrival Mr Winn was shunted to the press corral, which was behind a rope at the back of the room and was totally unfurnished. That’s right: no seats. It was as bare as a police press pen and I suspect almost as far from the action. Mr Winn pleaded his advanced age and was eventually allowed to sit with the delegates. The other reporters were kept standing in the press pen. I imagine they were pretty pissed off. If there is one thing worse than being expected to cover three days of speeches standing up it is seeing the SCMPost person getting favourable treatment again.

Now I suppose forcing the reporters to stand up doesn’t come up to much in the cruel and unusual punishment category. The pews which now clutter European cburches were a 19th century innovation: before that people stood for the entire proceedings and sermons sometimes lasted for three hours. When I was a sports reporter we sometimes had a press box, sometimes had a seat and a phone, and sometimes just stood on the touchline or the riverbank with the rest of the punters. This being in England it was usually raining, too. Still, what is acceptable in these matters varies from place to place and from time to time. In the early 80s lunch meetings were a favoured venue for officials to make announcements. Reporters often turned up and were given the same food as everyone else. Later the organisers of these things replaced the full lunch for reporters with a pile of sandwiches and a cup of tea on the Press Table. Later still the free refreshments for the scribes disappeared altogether, at roughly the same time as the government official speakers did. Nowadays such meetings are rarely reported. If one turned up to a meeting of this kind now refreshments would be a pleasant surprise. You would, though, and this is the point which I have been approaching rather timidly, expect a seat.

And this brings me to the big puzzle. The ICAC has a large and well-manned unit headed by a seasoned press pusher from the Information Services Department, devoted to cultivating its relationships with the local press. What were this crew, who are all employed at unimaginable expense to the public purse, thinking? Was the press invitation only meant to cover the opening ceremony? Was this a cunning wheeze to make sure that nobody would stay to cover anything else? It does not take much for well-intentioned organisations to stay on the right side of reporters. We no longer expect red packets. The ICAC being the ICAC, even such modest presents as a sandwich and an OJ may be off limits. But for crying out loud at least give people a seat!

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An unlikely offering cropped up in our local bookshop the other day: a volume entirely devoted to tricky questions posed in university admission interviews.  It is by John Farndon – a prolific man according to his blurb but previously unknown to me – and is called “Do you think you’re clever?” which is apparently one of the questions used by sadistic interviewers at the Cambridge U Law Department.  This book sheds an interesting light on what happens when obscure middle-aged men suddenly find themselves in a position of power. There are some trick questions: “How many animals did Moses take on the ark?” Answer, none – the guy with the ark was Noah. There are some impossibles: “What is fate?

Some questions are actually rather specific to a particular department. “Do you think Chairman Mao would be proud of today’s China?” was posed to Oriental Studies candidates, who might have been expected to have some idea on the matter.

Most of the examples are from Oxford or Cambridge, which came as a surprise to me, because when I was interviewed for the former the questions were quite conventional, though not in all cases easy. Mr Farndon appends a little essay on each one by way of the answer you might have given if you had had time for some thought and research. I suppose he picked questions which looked usefully provocative for this purpose. So some of the most tricky ones are only mentioned in the preface. I particularly enjoyed the (suspiciously entertaining) story of the Philosophy interviewer who opened the proceedings with “Is this a question?” to which the intended victim replied “”Well if this is an answer I suppose it must have been.” Philosophy departments seem to spawn stories of this kind. When I was a student we all heard about the philosophy exam question which went “Why?” According to the legend one examinee had scored a First for the answer “Why not?”

As luck would have it one of my bursts of interviewing came up while I was reading the book. No doubt you will be wondering if I succumbed to the temptation to baffle a few future MA students with some variation on “Can a computer have a conscience?”  or “If God is omnipotent, can he create a stone he can’t lift?”‘ Actually I was not tempted. Different people have different interviewing styles, and mine tends to the pleasant fireside chat end of the spectrum. This is no doubt partly because Hong Kong universities do not put a lot of stress on the interview and the interviewer does not have to worry that his fugitive impressions of the candidate are going to make a great deal of difference. Partly it is because I learnt a long time ago when doing a postgraduate education course that interviewing is extremely unreliable and research has disclosed that the predictions of interviewers are hopelessly unreliable. As this was the conventional wisdom 40 years ago you might think universities would have come up with something else by now. You would be wrong. Academics make a great fuss about the research they do themselves but they take no interest at all in other people’s research into their own activities. Nobody outside departments dedicated to the subject reads education research.

Interviewers with more power or a larger applicant to place ratio no doubt feel the need to be more inquisitorial. Jimmy Carter – the former president – never forgot his unsuccessful interview with Admireal Hyman Rickover, the father of the American nuclear submarine fleet. The opening exchange went along these lines:

“You graduated from the Naval Academy in 19XX?”

“Yes Sir.”

“Were you first in your class?”

“No Sir.”

“Why not?

At the other extreme, job interviews in the journalism business are often a formality designed to preserve the fiction that the editor decides everything. In these cases the real decision has been made by the head of the relevant department and the interview is often conducted in a pub — or it was in the old days; I understand journalists do not drink so much, now.

Oddly enough there is some evidence that interviews can be useful, if you are careful. I am indebted for this observation to another highly recommendable book: “Thinking, fast and slow” by Daniel Kahneman, who is famous as the psychologist with a Nobel Prize in economics. Mr Kahneman, in his youth, was in charge of the interviews used to allocate conscripts to different parts of the Israeli Army. He had, it seems, heard the same stories I had heard about the uselessness of interviews, and also had the benefit of looking at the records of previous interviewees, which showed that the interview was not detecting anything useful. To try to make the whole procedure more effective, he standardised it. Particular topics were to be addressed in the same order, using the same questions. The results would be turned into numbers but the interviewers would not give an overall score. The adding up was done by Mr Kahneman afterwards on a very simple basis. This procedure improved the results, which now gave useful indications of who would be good at what. But it upset the interviewers a great deal, because they felt they were being turned into automatons. In the interests of good relations Mr Kahneman then invited the interviewers to give an overall score at the end of each interview. Interestingly the overall score resulting from this procedure also proved quite a useful indicator. The message is simple. If you want to get meaningful results from comparative interviews you should standardise the procedure so that every candidate gets the same interview and is scored in the same way. This is crude and boring for the interviewers but works. I fancy, though, that we shall not see universities adopting it any time soon. People’s ability to deceive themselves in matters of this kind is almost unlimited. So applicants to the older universities should continue to brace themselves for pearls like  “Is Nature natural?” or “What happens when I drop an ant?”

But they will not get that sort of thing from me. Many of my colleagues regard interviewing as a chore,  but I rather enjoy it. This may be because journalism attracts a lot of female students, so one tends to spend quite a lot of interview time contemplating a pleasant sight. I am old-fashioned enough to believe that one should try to make the experience as pleasant as possible for them also, although some of the people I interviewed for undergraduate purposes were clearly terrified. Sometimes they looked at me with such apprehension that I wondered if they had ever talked to a foreigner before. Sometimes — it seemed a harmless enough question — I did actually ask if this was the case. Usually, to my surprise, the kid concerned had never talked face-to-face with a foreigner before. This is a problem easily solved. I urge anyone approaching a university interview with this gap in his resume to wander down to Central, grab a foreigner and talk to it for a few minutes. We don’t eat people.

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A sad and serious matter: a few weeks ago a young doctor who had AIDS was “outed” by the media. He then committed suicide. I am always wary of speculations about suicide. The real motive may not be known even to the suicide himself, and he is not around to correct mistakes. Still for what it is worth the conclusion to which most people jumped was that he realised it would be impossible for him to continue to work as a doctor because of the publicity, and despaired. Well perhaps. We should all feel sorry for the guy. It was the comments which were more interesting.

A spokesman for the doctors said that reluctance to consult a doctor with AIDS was totally unjustified. “Clinical procudures” had been perfected which made it perfectly safe for a doctor with AIDS to continue to practise. The clear implication was that this medic should not only have been allowed to continue to practise, but that he should have been allowed to do so without his patients knowing that he had the disease.  The chairman of the Equal Opportunities Commission took a rather different line, claiming that this case was an example of “stigma”, on whose demerits he expatiated at length.

I think in this context the idea of stigma is not terribly helpful. It is usually best reserved for occasions when someone is a victim of unreasonable prejudice or stereotyping. Refusing to employ former mental patients, or former prisoners, might be a reasonable example. I am less heppy with the idea that it should be applied to a case in which patients may have been reluctant to be treated by a doctor who had AIDS. Let us leave aside the question of how he got it, though — despite all the flapdoodle about conventional intercourse and the general population — this is a difficult disease to get unless you are into rough sex or drugs. The question is whether it is so self-evident that an AIDS sufferer should be allowed to practise medicine as to justify either not telling patients at all, or criticising those who know and avoid the sufferer for unreasonable prejudice. And I think the answer is no.

The problem is that your relationship with your doctor is not just a normal customer-supplier thing. Indeed the medical profession derives much of its prestige and mystique from this important difference. Your doctor is a man (or woman) with your life in his hands. You will tell your doctor things you might not tell your spouse. You will allow him to handle parts of you which are normally private. You need to be able to trust this person.  I would unhesitatingly condemn someone who refused to employ a HIV-positive plumber. But your doctor is not just going to have access to your drains.

Generally speaking the medical profession seems to accept this. We all know that some men prefer to be seen by a male doctor, and some women by a female one. Some of my compatriots expend substantial amounts of time and money to make sure that they see an expat doctor, though personally I believe this is a big waste. There are probably people who prefer their doctors to be young, and people who prefer them to be old. I imagine patients in search of Traditional Chinese Medicine expect the purveyor of this dubious product to be Chinese. If you, as a client, prefer to stipulate that your doctor does not have AIDS this seems to me to be something you have a right to, disappointing though some observers may feel your preference to be. And since you have a right to it, you clearly have the right to the information which you need to make an informed decision.

This may seem to the medical fraternity an unreasonable position. The question has come up before and it did then. But this is not simply a question of whether you can catch a disease from your doctor. I recall many years ago, when AIDS was still invariably fatal, a sufferer was invited by one of my colleagues to talk to our students. I was quite happy with this and indeed we would have invited him back if had survived longer. But your relationship with a doctor is not just a matter for clinical judgments and scientific determinations. It is necessary for you to be comfortable. Patients may be averse to a variety of characteristics in their doctors and that is their privilege.

This may seem a bit rough on doctors who get AIDS, but it is the penalty for working in a prestigious profession. I imagine a barrister who had AIDS might lose a lot of clients too. For doctors there are at least some branches of the profession which do not depend on a supply of live clients. Pathology is an honourable pursuit and the patients never complain…

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Well well. Here we have the former Head of Surgery at Hong Kong U convicted of a variety of charges, involving altogether $3million, and you might think that the clink of the gaoler’s key was an inevitable consequence, or failing that – the poor old gent is 71 after all – at least a stiff fine. Not a bit of it. Prisoner at the bar, you will be taken from here to a place of public need, there to perform 240 hours of community service. As the convict, Dr John Wong, has passed the retirement age (and I assume Hong Kong U is unlikely to invite him back, under the circumstances) he presumably has ample free time. So this could be considered scarcely a punishment at all. I am indebted to Alex Lo’s excellent piece in Saturday’s paper for the statistic that this comes to $12,500 per hour. Mr Lo also provided details of some cases which made an interesting contrast with Mr Wong’s, in which sundsry humble souls had been less lucky in their judges.

What puzzles me is that parts of the judge’s lengthy explanation for her sentence, or lack of it, seemed to contradict each other. Dr Wong, she said, “could have opted for a lucrative private practice, but he chose to achieve his ideal and spent his whole life working for the less fortunate and to serve the public.” This is very moving, but left me thinking that judges often over-estimate their knowledge of the world. To a young doctor the choice between private practice and a career as a teacher offers pluses and minuses on both sides. There is no guarantee that private practice will be lucrative. You may finish up making a respectable living on a public housing estate serving the public. On the other hand the university offers what is effectively an iron rice bowl, generous perks, long holidays and the chance to pursue your own interests. Generally speaking university teachers who are guilty of theft are not accorded gentle sentences because of their selfless career choices, and I am not sure doctors should be singled out in this regard.

Later on in the judgment we came to the point where Dr Wong had diverted $700,000 from two HKU accounts (a process known to the legally uneducated as theft) to pay for a driver for himself. The judge said this was not done out of greed, but because Dr Wong strongly believed that “the university should have contributed to the cost of his commuting.” I take this to mean that Dr Wong did not qualify for a personal car on the firm and the university refused to make an exception. Actually this is probably a point lost on judges (who are ferried to and from the courts at public expense) but it is the normal arrangement for people to pay to get themselves to work. The most interesting thing comes next, though. The judge said that Dr Wong could not have been motivated by greed, because the court had been told he had a personal fortune of $120 million.

Just a minute. Were we not just allowing in mitigation the fact that Dr Wong had forsworn the lucrative pastures of private practice to “serve the public”?  So where did this $120 million come from? It seems there are two possiblities. One is that Dr Wong came from such a wealthy background that he never needed to worry about money in the first place. The other is that a career serving the less fortunate in the corridors of Hong Kong U is not the exercise in Gandhian asceticism that judges may suppose it to be.

Well there we are, it’s done. No point griping. No doubt the prosecution will decide not to appeal. I cannot say there is much point in sending 70-year-old men to prison. On the other hand it doesn’t do much for 20-year-olds either, but judges do not seem to worry about this so much. I think two observations are in order. One is that judges should be more sceptical about the horrors of working in universities. Everyone who has had a real job before he became a tertiary teacher finds the lifestyle amazingly leisurely. Of course there is no shortage of academics who will tell you that they work really hard. These are the people who have never had a real job. Actually the money is pretty good and people who have marketable skills (like doctors and, ahem, journalists) can do paid work in their considerable free time.

The other point is that this mitigation thing should be taken with a pinch of salt. Of course counsel for the defendant has the right to make whatever points he can in favour of his client. And the defendant is entitled to ask his rich and influential friends to write letters saying what a wonderful chap he is. On the other hand at this point in the proceedings the usual adversarial safeguards are rather lacking. The speech in mitigation does not need to include any witnesses or evidence for its assertions. The flattering letters are not balanced by cross-examination of their writers or an opportunity for the prosecution to drum up letters saying that the wretched defendant is a greedy autocrat who deserves jail. A good case could be made for the view that an educator who steals is committing a serious offence because he is setting a deplorable example to his students. Indeed I believe that in cases where the defendant was younger or less prestigious this point has been made as an explanation for a more vigorous sentence. Justice must be seen to be done. Every time a member of the local establishment gets conspicuously gentle treatment in court a million onlookers conclude that there is one law for the rich and another for the poor.  This is a point which seems to escape the Hong Kong judicial mind rather often.

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Considering the amount of assorted skullduggery which goes on in the New Territories, the Heung Yee Kuk is being strangely naive about the consequences of the CE election. This week we were told that the Kuk expected some concessions from the new CE on its hot issues — illegal structures and the Small House racket — in return for supporting CY Leung at the polls. Now let us leave aside as entirely irrelevant in this context the impropriety of election winners rewarding pressure groups or electoral college members in this way. No doubt it happens. I do not doubt that it happens all the time in elections conducted by the Kuk itself. Still, there are some further facts of life to be considered about how this works, in those places where it works.

The trade-in value of election support depends on how much the candidate needs it. In the early stages, when he is trying to establish a name and get some momentum going, expressions of approval are very valuable. Mr Leung was in the early stages a long shot, widely regarded as a mere prop to provide an election-like stage setting for the coronation of Henry Tang. When Mr Tang’s candidacy started to unravel there was still a good deal of reluctance to switch to Mr Leung, partly because people did not feel dignified changing horses too quickly and partly because Mr Leung has some problematic features in many people’s view. So support and praise at this stage were still undoubtably both welcome and valuable. I expect many people who came out for Mr Leung in this period will be tactfully rewarded is some way. So it goes.

However at this stage the Kuk was still in the Tang camp. There was no mystery about this. In the auction for the Kuk’s favours Mr Tang had offered the idea of the nine-story village house. Mr Tang is not a bad man and it may be that this offer was neither as naked or as explicit as the newspapers made it appear. Still, there was no doubt about its effect. The Kuk did not develope a liking for Mr Leung until the closing stages of the race, when Mr Tang had clearly hit an iceberg and the Liaison office was telling those lost sheep who still did not know whom to support that they should go with the public preference. Of course at this stage every sycophant, spear carrier and fellow-traveller on the election committee was with Mr Leung and he would still have been elected by a comfortable margin if the Kuk had stuck to its original choice. Gentlemen, under these circumstances the value of your support was zero. Your prospects of being rewarded for supplying it are similarly nugatory.

Of course this does not mean the prospects for illegal structures and Small House abuses are completely dim. You can try your luck in court. The government may chicken out at the end as it has often done before. But claims on Mr Leung’s gratitude are doomed to fall on deaf ears. When  he wanted it, he didn’t get it. When he got it, he didn’t need it. Thanks for nothing.

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Funny how some predictions do well quietly and some come noisily to nothing. The paperless office, which has been confidently expected for some 30 years, still glimmers on the horizon like one of those legendary mirages which lure desert travellers to their doom. The cashless society, on the other hand, which was often predicted in the 80s and hardly mentioned since, has crept up on us very successfully.

I noticed this the other day because I found a two dollar coin floating around on my desk at home. “I’ll spend it,” I said. “If you can,” replied my wife. And indeed on further reflection I am having some difficulty in working out when I shall get rid of the thing. Until quite recently we made most of our minor purchases in cash. For the big things we might use plastic. Some retailers had their own cards, but they were not very popular, except with employers of domestic helpers. The Octopus was for public transport.

Nowadays at least half of us seem to use Octopus for all the minor stuff. I do not personally like the idea of an Octopus that feeds itself from my bank account, so I do occasionally have to take some money out of the bank. But this comes in big notes – my Octopus is a wrist-watch so I am quite happy to fill it with $500 at a time. I also need notes occasionally to feed the Octopus-like card issued by my favourite coffee shop. I suppose people who drink still probably pay cash in bars, though the more upmarket places will let you run up a bill and then pay with a card. The wet market still runs on a cash basis but how many of us go there often? The only other people still holding out are taxi drivers.

Now my views on taxi drivers are coloured by the fact that at one time long ago I was one of them. This was not a career choice – the newspapers were on strike so I needed a job for a few weeks. Fortunately I was working in Blackpool – to drive a taxi in London you have to pass an examination in local geography called “the knowledge”. It takes as long as a degree and is much more demanding. In Blackpool you were allowed to keep a map in the glove box.  I understand the local objection to Octopus is that it will hit the tips. Taxi drivers feel that most riders will simply wipe the card on the gadget without adding a bit extra, even if this is technically possible. This is a serious matter because taxi driving does not pay very well and the tips, being shared with neither the employer nor the tax man, are an important item. I understand the Octopus people, in a desperate effort to get their machinery into taxis, are proposing to pay $2 a ride themselves for the first two years in lieu of the lost tips. Observers of the local taxi scene think this will work … for two years. The drawback is that if we all know Octopus is tipping on our behalf we will, I suppose, get out of the habit entirely, and even if the drivers revert to cash they will not longer get that little bit extra. Anyway those of us who wish to be kind to taxi drivers will still have a use for a bit of change.

Another possibility is restaurants. I know a lot of people add a tip to the number on the credit card. But I understand a lot of restaurants just treat this as corporate income and do not separate it for donation to the staff. So if you want to tip it is better to give cash and I always do.

So this is what it has come to. Coins are almost only used when you need a small present. When I was a kid it was customary to hide some sixpenny pieces (which were very small and supposedly silver) in the Christmas pudding as a small present for consumers. Little did we know that this sort of use for coins was one day going to be the only one.

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