tim's experiment

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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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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