tim's experiment

Dear Henry,
Sorry mate, it’s time to pack it in. Always a shame to abandon a dream, but some things are just not meant to be. Watching you on television last night, trying to slide the Building Ordinance blame gently towards your wife, was the most stomach-churning spectacle to grace the Hong Kong goggle box since a python regurgitated a half-digested calf in Saikung 20 years ago. If you still had a serious chance we might at this point spend some time on the need for a Chief Executive to be a person of character, willing to take responsibility, willing to recognise that sometimes the buck stops on his desk.

The fact is, though, that your Kowloon Tong fuhrerbunker has not just revealed you as a man with an easy way with the law and a distressing faculty for half-excuses. Worse than that, it has made you a laughing stock. The idea of a multi-millionaire with a secret underground retreat and a bottoms-up view of his own swimming pool is going to launch a thousand jokes, many of them hardly compatible with the minimum level of respect appropriate to a Chief Executive, even in the eyes of an old anarchist like me. As this point somes home to selection committee members you are likely to be in more danger of coming third than of winning. You had a good run, you don’t need the money, and no doubt our imperial masters will be able to find some prestigious consolation prize in the vicinity of the CPPCC. Get off the stage while we’re still laughing, before we all start throwing fruit.

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For people who were kids in the 50s, sequences of three digits conjure up long forgotten visions of steam locomotives. In the days of steam a locomotive was classified by three digits which told you the number of driving wheels — the middle figure — and the number of other wheels in front and behind. So Thomas the Tank Engine was 0-6-0, the Titfield Thunderbolt was 0-4-4, the exquisitely beautiful Stirling Single was 2-2-4 and the record-breaking Mallard was 4-6-2. And so on. The numbers were always even, because the locomotive wheels always came in pairs: one each side. To those of us raised with this system the arrival of 3-3-4 suggests a railway engine designed by an idiot, with one or two wheels missing. Unfortunately on closer acquaintance with Hong Kong’s so-called educational reforms they still suggest a machine designed by an idiot, with one or two wheels missing.

In the two decades I have been working in Hong Kong higher education I cannot recall an innovation which inspired less enthusiasm and confidence. Universities and their components are already setting up Crisis Committees — under a variety of tactful names — to deal with the crises confidently expected. We do not know what the crisis will be yet but that there will be one is not in doubt. This is one of Donald Rumsfeld’s “known unknowns”.

The problem is not with the principle of the thing. Whether young people should spend — broadly speaking — the period between their 17th and 18th birthdays in the last year of school or the first year of university does not make a great deal of difference, as long as the total remains the same … which it will. Under the new system there will be an increase in the number of students staying until age 17, then a decrease in the year until 18, and then the same number as there is now. The implementation is the problem.

When the idea of four-year degrees was first mooted, all sorts of university people had interesting ideas for the use which could be made of the extra time. This decision, however, was ruthlessly preempted by the Heads of Universities Committee, which without consulting anyone audibly, decided that the extra year would be spent on a preparatory year of General Education. We need to be careful in our wording here, because some people have described this as “a liberal general education”, or “a general liberal education”. which is misleading. Liberal education has nothing to do with it.

Liberal education is an idea usually ascribed eroneously to the 19th century divine Cardinal Newman, who used the term in a detailed (but not implemented) plan for a new university in Ireland. But this grossly overstates Newman’s influence. Liberal education is a widespread explanation for the university curriculum because the great Prussian educational reformer Wilhelm von Humboldt embodied it in German universities, whence it was exported by immigrants to America. In some parts of the 20th century the fact that much of the American university education system was based on German models was … embarassing. But even Humboldt’s fans admit that he did not invent the concept either. It can already be found in Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, published in 1765, and it is clear from the way Blackstone used the term that he expected readers to be familiar with it. As you might expect from this era Liberal Education was intended for aristocrats, as an alternative to the then traditional university education, which was intended for priests. The hope was that young aristocrats could be persuaded to take an interest in more edifying pursuits than the traditional aristocratic hobbies: sex, husbandry and hunting, with occasional warfare. Indeed Blackstone defends law as a part of the liberal curriculum (he was the first Professor of Law at Oxford) on the grounds that it would prepare students for their future roles as Justices of the Peace and MPs. Both of these jobs were at the time entirely unpaid roles, taken up by people who had time and money to spare. But Liberal Education on this model is not a free-for-all. It requires the study of specific components, basically classical (i.e. ancient Greek and Roman) history and philosophy. This was not the doddle now offered under the label of Classical Studies because the Greek and Roman works were to be read in the original languages. By the time of Humboldt some pure science had been added but the ancients were still there. The degree course was supposed to explore the foundations of knowledge, not tour the whole building.

General education is a different kettle of curriculum. It provides some basic required subjects distributed around the university, and requires the student to spread his patronage around: so many subjects in the Science
Faculty, so many in Business, so many in Arts, and so forth. This actually has very little to do with the educational merits of syllabus tourism, and a great deal to do with the convenience of university administrators. If they are honest (which they rarely are on this topic) they will admit that the great merit of forcing students to spread their attention is that this cushions the administrative inconvenience caused by changes in the popularity of different subjects. Let us say the number who wish to take Sewerage Studies halves, and the number wishing to take Logical Positivism doubles. We still do not have to fire sewage specialists, or hire philosophers, because the students must in any case spend half of their time spreading their custom around the university. So there will still be some demand for sewage and the effect on philosophy will be halved.

However in order to convince us all of the merits of General Education a large number of eager enthusiasts were imported, with the consequence that at some universities the idea did not stop at the end of the first year, but effectively consumed the second. In effect, committees devoted to planning the new four-year curriculum found that they barely had room for what they were doing in three. In fact in some places, including the one where I still occasionally push the Powerpoint, the eventual total was somewhat less. Students studying Journalism in the new four-year programme will have 45 units of Journalism out of a total of 120. In the old system they had 54 from 90something. Personally I do not think this is an improvement. Some planners, quite understandably under the circumstances, decided that they really were not called on to do anything new at all: they simply dropped the old three-year curriculum into the space remaining and left it at that.

Enthusiasm was not encouraged by other things which were going on at the same time. The UGC continued its efforts to sort out local universities into five sheep (mainly teaching) and three goats (mainly research). Previous attempts in this direction had been a total failure. All the UGC-funded institutions want to be research universities so they all pumped up their research output. The UGC’s latest wheeze replaces research output as the key to prosperity with the results of a competition which the goats are expected to win. Money will be bestowed on those who are successful in garnering competitive research grants. Woe to the researcher whose work does not happen to require a large grant. He is likely to be unpopular. Universities bidding for the goat category redoubled their efforts to push staff into doing more, and more competitive, research. At the same time the UGC unveiled its new bid to appear to take teaching seriously. This is called OBTL (Outcome Based Teaching and Learning) and posits an elaborate structure of planned and advertised objectives, methods, activities and evaluations, leading to course objectives which support programme objectives, which in turn are conducive to Graduate Attributes sought by the whole university. Complaints that this was a negation of university education, in particular because of the insistence that nothing should be taught unless it could be counted immediately at the end of each course, were met by the reply that people complaining “did not understand” OBTL. I must say this came as a surprise to me. Trying to help colleagues to get their heads round this system I find that the more they know about it the less they like it. One wonders what Humbold would have thought of it. Well actually we know what Humboldt would have thought of it, because he thought of educational institutions as working communities entailing the exchange of ideas between professors and students, not sausage factories in which students would be stuffed with predetermined dollops of knowledge. “The university teacher is no longer the teacher, and the student is no longer the learner, but himself does research, with the professor guiding his research and supporting him in it.” Clearly whatever we are doing it is not Liberal Education in the traditional sense. Anyway whether you like OBTL or not it involved another avalanche of unsought extra work, so some reluctance to consider the finer points of the four-year curriculum was to be expected.

The first four-year problem will probably be admissions. The university heads also bent their brains to this problem, and ordained that admission to all programmes should be initially to the faculty or school, with students choosing their Major later. Exceptions were made (only a foolhardy Vice Chancellor would meddle in the arrangements of the doctors and lawyers) for “professional programmes”. But for the rest of us, Faculty or School it is. The problem with this is that as a result there will be thousands of applicants to each portal. And as the new examination system offers a much narrower range of grades than the old one did, many of them will be difficult to tell apart. But as there will be thousands of applicants it will not be possible to take other things into account, much less do anything really time-consuming like interviews. So the results will be reinterpreted in a variety of interesting ways to differentiate the students. This, by a gross misuse of language, is called “broad-based admission”. Students who fear that their chances of success in the new system are difficult to predict are quite right. A small collection of results will be tweaked in a variety of ways to magnify differences between students, so quite small differences in your exam success may make a very large difference to your chances of going to the university you really want. The attraction to universities is, as usual, administrative convenience. Once they have admitted you it is too late to change so if quotas force you into a Major you didn’t want then you will have to lump it. Students will have to conform to the university’s plan, not the other way round.

There is an emerging theme here. When university reform is conducted on a top-down basis the convenience of administrators’ effortlessly trumps the desires of the people actually doing the teaching, while their victims — the students — are not considered or consulted at all. Of couse the new system is being presented as a benefit to students. How could they say anything else? General education, we are told, will introduce students to the whole wide range of human knowledge. This is a worthy objective, but one unlikely to be achieved by leading the horse to the trough and then holding its nose underwater. There are plenty of ways in which interested students can broaden the range of their knowledge without them being dragooned into doing so at the taxpayer’s expense. Or we are told that this new arrangement will help students to make a more informed choice of Major. This will no doubt be true for students who arrive at university with little or no idea of what they want to do, though they will probably not be allowed to leave the faculty which admitted them. But what about the student who knows and loves his subject already, and expects the university to allow him to extend and deepen his appreciation of it? He will probably not welcome a compulsory year of academic tourism, even if the spots visited are interesting — an optimistic assessment.

We seem to be moving towards a system in which your first degree is largely spent on paying tribute to the university system and the people who run it in their own interests. If your chosen career actually has educational requirements you will have to do a Master’s degree, at considerable extra expense on a self-funding (for which read profit-making) basis. This is not a wildly attractive prospect. Indeed I understand educational officials actually expect about 30 per cent of the potential users of the new system to give it a miss. For a little more money and a lot less time you can go to the UK and choose a degree devoted to the subject of your choice which you will complete in three years. Those of us who work in Hong Kong universities are often asked for advice about degree choices. A depressing number of us find we have to mention this exodus as an attractive choice for those who can afford it.

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Concern about the number of mainland ladies coming to Hong Kong to have their babies has mysteriously transformed itself into a preoccupation with the fact that the resulting kids have an automatic right to live in Hong Kong. Hence the solution to the problem now being touted on all sides is to come up with some legal way of removing the automatic residency from the off-spring. This seems to me to be rather unrealistic. It is not based on any careful research among mainland mothers-to-be and depends on a rather poor stab at their likely motivations.

No doubt if you are a pregnant mainlander the prospect of your kid having the right to live in Hong Kong is not unwelcome. But it hardly seems a strong enough attraction to offset the considerable cost, inconvenience and even danger involved in having your baby in Hong Kong. After all his or her right to live in Hong Kong is going to be a rather fragile asset. The kid is going to stay with you on the mainland, in the majority of cases, until he or she is old enough to leave home for work or university – say 18 years. In that time a lot of things could happen. The Hong Kong government may change the law so that your kid is no longer a resident. Or the need for permission may disappear: in most places citizens are allowed to travel freely within their own countries. This arrangement has not yet reached China but things are getting looser. Another possibility is that after 18 years no sane mainlander wishes to move to Hong Kong anyway, there being no attractive difference any more. If something really dire happens in China, Hong Kong can no longer expect to be left out. So giving birth in Hong Kong, as a long-term investment in the future of your sprog, doesn’t have a great deal going for it.

Meanwhile there are other more cogent reasons which have nothing to do with the Basic Law of the Hong Kong SAR and relate to parts of China’s current arrangements which local left-wingers would perhaps rather not draw to our attention. The One-child policy, to begin with, is still policy. Mothers embarking on a second pregnancy are still subject to a good deal of discouragement and some post-natal persecution. No doubt having it in Hong Kong is not a complete solution to this problem, but it helps.

There is also the matter of mainland medical services. We are occcasionally assured that some hospitals in China are as good as any hospitals anywhere, but the average standard is quite low, and corruption is a problem. There is also the matter of unscrupulous suppliers of necessities like baby milk. In a country where people are prepared to poison babies to make a fast buck, mothers-to-be may feel that the hazards of having their babies on the threshold of a Tuen Mun casualty department are worth risking, and indeed smaller than the dangers of a conventional delivery nearer home.

Given these attractions you have to wonder whether mainland mothers would be significantly deterred by an announcement that their off-spring would no longer be instant Hong Kongers. Actually if people really believe this is the main consideration the problem could be solved very easily by announcing that all babies born anywhere in China would have the automatic right to live in Hong Kong. This would entirely remove the incentive to give birth in Hong Kong and the babies, when grown, would still have to solve the sort of problems which face would-be migrants anywhere: jobs, housing, culture shock …. And of course if the present arrangements are still in force they will need exit permits from the Chinese authorities.

But this will of course not happen. There is no room in our inn. Perhaps we should offer a stable.

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One of the small fears which haunts newspaper design departments is the possibility of an advert clashing painfully with the story next to it. Airlines do not want their ads next to stories about air crashes, car makers do not with to be neighbours to complaints about the safety of their chariots, oil companies do not wish to wallow in warming stories, and so on. Still, accidents do happen, sometimes just because of coincidence. There was a memorable specimen during the problems in the Congo many years ago. The story was headlined “Two nuns raped in Congo”. The ad underneath was for pipe tobacco. It went “Gentlemen prefer Three Nuns”. In my early page planning days the ads people would try to avoid this sort of thing by putting on the plan they sent you the spaces to be reserved for ads, and some indication of what the ad was. However in these electronic days nobody uses paper plans any more so this habit has subsided. Hence the unfortunate coincidence in Thursday’s Hong Kong Standard.

The ad concerned a “Business Opportunity in the United Kingdom”. This was described as “a large, successful and profitable property business in Birmingham”. Investors could take a half share for about 10 million Sterling or buy the whole thing for twice as much. I have no reason at all to doubt the bona fides of this offer, and if I had a few million pounds to spare I would be happy to consider it. No doubt more details will be forthcoming to serious inquirers. I suspect, however, that there will not be many of them, because the story next door was about a couple who had pocketed HK$22 million of investors’ money by promoting a fraudulent enterprise involving the sale of preserved fruit. Readers who had waded through ten paragraphs of prune fraud were probably not minded to pursue property investments in Birmingham, however prosperous, if the only contact was a yahoo email address.

Moral? Advertise your business opportunities in the business pages, perhaps.

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I have wanted to visit Tai O for a long time. Many years ago, when the Standard was a real newspaper for which you had to pay, it had an investigative reporting team of which I was a member. Somewhere I still have the prize we were awarded for a story about Tai O. But we did not all actually go to Tai O, which was even less accessible then than it is now. One member went on a freebee, ostensibly to look at, and spend the night in, one of the stilt houses, of which more later. My main contribution was to tell her to keep her eyes peeled and ears to the ground, for it is axiomatic that in neglected outlying areas rarely visited by reporters there are stories waiting to be discovered. She duly returned with the expected feature on stilt houses and the makings of a cracking story on the local smuggling scene, with which we did very well.

So, at last, to Tai O. This is much easier than it was, because there is now an MTR line to Tung Chung. From here you can get a ferry, which is rather intermittent, or a water taxi. Or, cheaper, you can take the bus. This is quite a luxurious model by Hong Kong standards (Lantau has its own bus company) and is very frequent. It chugs over a pass through dramatic mountain scenery to the south side of the island. It visits a few seaside villages, and then chugs over another pass through even more dramatic mountain scenery to the north western corner of Lantau, which is where Tai O is. There is a bus station and a car park. From here on you are on foot.

The main tourist attraction is the stilt houses. As most of Tai O is either swamp or mudflat the inhabitants built out from the slim slice of terra firma on thin piles driven into the dirt. The effect looks a bit haphazard and fragile, but it seems they are safe enough. Some eager NGO has been renovating the stilt houses so most of them are now coloured the silver of, I presume, unpainted tin sheet. A few curmudgeons still have the traditional rust and some extroverts have painted their stilt houses in lively colours. Most of the houses look very much like those wood and tin sheet structures which used to carpet Hong Kong hillsides and were called squatter huts. Squatter huts were regarded as a plague and new ones were frequently demolished by a special unit of the Housing Authority. Whether the official hostility was due to the dangers of landslips and fires, the desire to free land for development, or sympathy for hut occupants is hard to say. Anyway most of the urban squatter huts have disappeared, though you can still find a few if you know where to look.

The inhabitants of Tai O managed to persuade the local sprig of the Hong Kong government to try a different approach. The huts have legal water and electricity. Emergency phones and public fire extinguishers dot the hut areas. Tai O people are said to be keen on keeping their traditional arrangements. A few of the huts still have an odd shape, like a small railway carriage or a large loaf. I presume these are modelled on the structures people used to have on live-aboard sampans.

Like most distant villages, Tai O has a large and prosperous primary school and a lot of old folks, but not much in between. It is a noticably hospitable spot. Ancient citizens will happily show you round their homes if you look interested. Other attractions: there are a lot of temples. The streets, which are too small for motor vehicles, make for pleasant walking. A variety of street food is offered and there are some pleasant eating spots on the river side of some stilt houses. I would like to note here the particular kindness of the staff in Solo: when I fell asleep on their sofa they did not throw me out, they put a blanket over me so I did not get cold.

It will be interesting to see how things go for Tai O. It obviously gets more visitors nowadays and is trying for s many as it can attract. There is a small museum. Sino Land is turning the old police station into a boutique hotel.  I understand they do not expect it to make money, which is perhaps just as well. There is a bed and breakfast in the main street with a promising bar but it closes when the owner is tired or busy with other things, so you need to book in advance. There are almost no “village houses” of the usual type, which perhaps goes to show that the demand depends on the ability to abuse the policy by selling to outsiders, which is hardly practical in Tai O because it is so far away. If you are trying to amuse someone in Hong Kong for a few days and you want something completely different, I recommend the trip. If you have time this is also the centre for dolphin watching.

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No doubt we all rejoice in the news that Mr Michael Suen has recovered from Legionnaires’ disease. Bulletins on the subject provided an interesting sidelight into the secret lives of our leaders.  It was reported that the malevolent microbe was lurking in the plumbing of Mr Suen’s personal accomodation in the new Central Government Offices. Specifically, it was reported that Mr Suen’s aministrative infrastructure includes a personal toilet.

And the question this raises, of course, is why? I presume Mr Suen was not personally responsible for the arrangement. I presume also that the Educational portfolio is not the only one believed to require a personal privy for the overpaid placeman in charge of it. This means that among the unsung assets of the new government HQ there is a large collection of personal loos, provided at unimaginable expense, invvolving not only a great deal of superfluous porcelain and space, but a lor of otherwise unnecessary plumbing. There is of course no need for this sort of thing at all. There is no magical quality about a Policy Secretary’s privates which requires them to be pointed only at a personal pissoir. Secretaries could use the facilities provided for their colleagues. It would give them some incentive to make sure that these facilities were of a high standard, and give them some opportunities for informal interaction with colleagues they might otherwise not meet.

Unfortunately this nonsense has filtered down from the top. The new paperwork palace features not just a private entrance for the Chief Executive but a private drive. Civil servants who recall meeting Chris Patton in the lift find that they do not meet his successor there because if Donald visits a government building he always has a lift reserved for his private use. In the light of the revelations about Mr Suen’s arrangements we may speculate that a toilet is reserved for Donald on there occasions as well.

I wonder what our eager would-be CEs think of this. Is Henry Tang, now masquerading vigorously as a Man of the People, also the proud possessor of a personal office toilet? Does CY Leung, also a paper proletarian pro tem, approve of special facilities for Exco members? Is it any wonder that people in the street regard policy secretaries with contempt when our leaders go to such lengths to avoid contact with the victims of their activities?

There is a small serious point lurking here. There will certainly be a surplus of male toilets in the new government palace, firstly because architects cannot get their heads round the point that women take longer, and secondly because the provision of such facilities never takes into account the number of people of each gender who will be using them. There will be a shortage of female toilets for the same reasons. Nothing will be done about this because all the senior staff have toilets of their own. This is a small specimen of the great overall principle that our leaders have no idea what they are doing becaue they are so sedulously segregated from contact with ordinary people and the circumstance in which they live.

A small prize for the Legislative Councillor who asks how many officials are entitled to personal toilets provided at the public expense. And for Mr Suen, an interesting thought: you wouldn’t have caught the horrible disease if you had been using the same plumbing as everyone else.

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Has our glorious government changed its policy on land sales? The SCMPost seems to think so. On December 22 we were treated to a headline which went “HK selling less land to avoid market turmoil”. The headline accurately reflected the first paragraph, which went “The Hong Kong government is reducing land supply sharply to pre-empt possible turmoil in a market that is already feeling the chill of the Eurozone crisis.”

That seems fairly clear: market feeling Euro-chill, turmoil looming, government cutting land supply to avert said turmoil. But that was not what the newspaper said in the rest of the story at all. It seems that the sub editor (not a very bright specimen – “pre-empt” indeed!) worked out what he thought the story ought to have been, and stuck that on the front.

Reading on we came to the solid figures. Last quarter’s land sales were sufficient for about 1,770 flats. This year’s first quarter will add a further 430. The government’s most recent official plan was to build about 30,000 flats a year, so there is clearly something funny going on.

Over to Carrie Lam, who is in charge of these matters. The five sites to be sold in the next quarter would not be  “a huge supply”, she understated. Perhaps, she continued cautiously, 430  flats was a “modest figure”. But, she went on, “taking into account what we have done already, I think this is a very good initiative to continue the momentum of supplying land.” Which suggests, to put the matter bluntly, that the lady is out to lunch. The question of initiative does not arise. The government sells land all the time. “What we have done already” was to provide for 1.770 flats in the last quarter, when the official target called for 30,000 divided by four, which is 7,500. And we are not continuing “the momentum”, such as it is, if the next quarter’s figure is less than a third of its predecessor. But there you have it: no Euro-zone, no turmoil, no policy to cut the supply of land.

Some of this we get from Louis Chan, who is not an official of any kind: he works for Centaline. He said the government had noticed the proprerty market was “struggling” and was trying to use the land supply to “stabilise the market”. Still no mention of turmoil or Eurozones.

Then we came to another property professional, Alnwick Chan, who thought the constriction of supply was a simple accident, because some large sites were not ready. And then the story turned, very properly, to the comments from politicians. It did include the interesting statistic, for those wondering what a “struggling” market meant, that property prices had fallen 2.53 per cent from their peak last May.

Nobody concerned in this story comes out of it looking very good. Carrie Lam seems to have some difficulty in finding words to describe her Bureau’s activities which have any connection at all with reality. The SCMPost seems to have managed to recruit someone who can edit stories without reading them, or thinks he can. The property people are squeeling like stuck pigs at the possiblity that prices might actually droop a bit. And the fall so far is very disappointing.

What is going on here, I suspect, is that we are in the midst of a property bubble, which has nothing to do with the Eurozone and everything to do with vastly inflated prices. When bubbles burst there are recriminations. If officials are not selling land they will escape blame, or so they hope. This grubby desire effortlessly trumps their clear duty to increase the supply of a commodity which is in short supply, otherwise citizens would be living in proper homes instead of subdivided flats or illegally converted factories. Government of the rich, by the rich, for the rich continues.

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Both our declared candidates for Chief Executive had a bad day on Tuesday, on the same topic. They have discovered, or been advised, that people are highly concerned about the number of mainland mums coming to Hong Kong to give birth. Henry fielded a question on the topic on a radio phone-in programme. Asked if the government could solve the problem by denying the right of abode to the resulting off-spring he said this could be done only by changing the Basic Law or having it “interpreted” by the NPC standing committee in Beijing.  In fairness to Mr Tang he was reported to have said afterwards that seeking an interpretation would be “a blow to the rule of law in Hong Kong”, which is true, but beside the point.

CY Leung, meanwhile, was pushing the idea that pregnant mainlanders should be stopped at the border. Actually I understand that they are already stopped at the border if they do not have a reservation at a Hong Kong hospital. Mr Leung also considered seeking an interpretation, but said it would “only address issues concerning the children’s identities”.

What both our would-be future leaders seem to have missed is that interpretation is not supposed to be an alternative to legislation. It is not properly used to let the Hong Kong Government circumvent some administrative inconvenience by changing the meaning of the Basic Law. The objection to interpretation as a solution to the pregnant mainlander problem is not that it would take time, though it would, nor that it would be a blow to the rule of law, though that is also true. The fundamental objection is that interpretation should only be considered if there is difficulty in understanding what the Basic Law means. The right to interpret is the right to resolve issues where the Basic Law is not clear. It is not carte blanche for instant amendments along the line of “where the Basic Law says ‘black’ it means ‘white'” variety.

If the government does not wish people born in Hong Kong to have the right to live here then it must change the Basic Law. Where the law is clear, “interpretation” is not on the menu.

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Driving through the Lion Rock Tunnel the other day I noticed that the car in front of us was going very slowly, and wandering about its lane. Was the driver drunk? Hardly, at 11 in the morning – though my only encounter with the new hi-tech random breath test machinery was at a similar time on a Sunday, so perhaps there is some wrinkle to local drinking that I have not spotted. After a while we came to the other side of the tunnel, and the end of the double white line down the middle of it. I changed lanes and overtook. If there is a nutter on the road I always feel you are safer in front. My wife then explained the mystery: the erratic driver was deep in conversation on her telephone.

I cannot imagine how anyone can be foolish enough as to suppose that they can conduct a serious phone conversation and drive at the same time. Of course we all think we can do two things at once and if the road situation is peaceful or you are waiting at a traffic light then no harm is perhaps done by a few words. But a conversation the length of the Lion Rock Tunnel?

I suppose fossils like me are spared a certain amount of temptation by our old-fashioned relationship with the phone. When I was growing up a family thought itself lucky to have one phone. Indeed at one time because of a shortage of connections we shared a “party line” with a family across the road. This was an interesting arrangement because it meant that when one user picked up the phone he might be treated to an ongoing conversation conducted by the other. In those days the family phone sat in the living room, or sometimes the hall. It was securely moored in place by the wire which connected it to the wall. There was little temptation, or indeed opportunity, to do anything else while you were using the phone. Things were a bit more flexible in the office, but not much. Some people would sell you a piece of rubber which would enable you to perch the phone on one shoulder. This would leave both hands free for typing. But serious typists used headphones. So you will not be surprised to hear that while I am fond of my mobile phone and make some use of its non-phone abilities I also occasionally still forget to take it with me in the morning.

Digital natives who have grown up with this sort of thing are less inhibited. I received an email the other day inviting me to sign (electronically) a pledge not to text while driving. Apparently AT&T had agreed to donate $2 per person who took the pledge to an organisation seeking to improve the safety of young drivers. I am not sure I am quite the sort of pledger they had in mind but I earned the $2. Really, though, I thought the pledge request was a bit insulting. What sane person could possibly be tempted to try to key in a text message while driving? Apparently the answer to this question is you would be surprised. Texting while driving is a recognised cause of accidents among young drivers in countries where there are numerous young drivers. If you ferret on Youtube you can find some fairly gruesome propaganda videos intended to discourage the practice.

A less serious problem from the same source is that many young people now assume that they are always calling a mobile phone. When there was only one phone in the house it often happened that nobody was particularly close to it when it rang. Also, some people in those days thought there were more important things to do that answering the phone, and would carry on with whatever they were doing. “You get it,” would be shouted, and then there would be an argument. The caller, meanwhile, would be patient. After all the person who was going to answer might be upstairs, in the garden or on the toilet. So most callers gave it a couple of minutes.

This is no longer the case. When at home I still use an old-fashioned wire-in-the-wall job. This is not because I am a hopeless nostalgic but because on our hill the mobile reception is bad. You can get text, you can connect calls, but you cannot really hear each other. So the phone rings, I drop what I am doing and proceed at a reasonable speed to the warbling machine, and when I pick it up … silence. The caller has already abandoned hope.  This category of failed calls should not be confused with the one where a cold caller from some survey or marketing company hears “hello” and concludes that he or she is not going to be able to conduct his conversation in Cantonese. Then you hear an audible click.

The moral of this story is that if you are calling someone, give him time to answer. He may be in the bath.

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It is interesting to see that the SCMPost’s editorial writers now implicitly reject most of their newspaper’s analysis of the District Council elections. After the polls had closed we were treated to a rich variety of verbal sauces poured over the cold statistical figures to make them warm enough for public consumption. The voters, we were told, had punished the democrats for neglecting local issues. They had punished the democrats for lacking that unity found so effortlessly in the pro-government camp where all the strings are held by the same puppet master. The voters had rejected the throwing of bananas and shouting of abuse in the Legislative Council chamber. Or they had punished the Civic Party for having leading members who had appeared in court in cases against the government. The revised explanation for the poll results is simpler: the winners cheated. We will not go into the further ramifications of this story, which are that the government was warned long ago about loopholes in the election regulations but the official in charge of such matters, who happened to be Stephen Lam, was too busy for such things, being heavily engaged in the effort to abolish by-elections.

Let us just accept that there is a problem. If you want to register as an elector there is at present no effective check to stop you pretending that you live at an address where you do not. Even, it seems, if your bogus address does not exist. This means that you can vote in the constituency of your choice, whether it is the one you live in or not. We must I fear believe that there has been a good deal of this going on, the tip of the iceberg being represented by those electors who were stupid enough to claim residence in the same small flat as 14 other people, or in non-existent flats, buildings etc., leading to trouble with the police or the ICAC, depending on whether the elector actually voted or not.

The solution proposed for this problem, unfortunately, is totally ineffective. It is that when a voter registers, he or she should be asked to produce “proof of address”. Now if someone wants you to prove who you are, that is easy. You produce the ID card issued by the Hong Kong Government. This contains data which have been verified and compared with your birth certificate or passport. The ID card has a unique number and a variety of anti-forgery features. It is a durable piece of plastic with the government’s authority behind it and is not issued lightly. Proof of address is a different matter.

Oddly enough I was reminded the other day that the Transport Department now demands “proof of address” when you renew your car’s licence. The department thoughtfully provides on the back of the relevant form a list of possible “proofs” , which goes “e.g. water/electricity/gas/mobile phone bill or bank correspondence.” Note that “e.g.” What it means in practice is that almost any respectable piece of correspondence will do, providing it has your name and address on it. And this is actually no proof of anything at all. Indeed there is a flourishing black market in proofs of useful addresses. When I lived in Kowloon Tong we received regular offers to pay our electricity bills. The generous supporter asked only that he or she should be registered as the consumer of the electricity concerned. This would enable him or her to take advantage of Kowloon Tong’s superior educational infrastructure by “proving” residence. Naturally, people who send out bills do not really care who is receiving them as long as the bill is paid. So there is no “proof of residence” corresponding to the “proof of identity” provided by the ID card. Requiring proof of residence will make cheating a little harder, but not much.

What could be done? Well we could consider the British system, where every householder is required to report annually who lives in his dwelling. Giving false information on this topic is a fairly serious matter and abuses are, it seems, rare. People who move at inconvenient times may find it hard to vote and individuals who happen to be in transit or abroad may be left off the register. But on the whole the system automatically registers most of the population. Our government prefers a non-automatic system in which people have to register themselves. I hope this preference is not connected to the well-known implications for the turn-out. Other things being equal in electoral systems with automatic registration this runs to 60-70 per cent. If registration requires a separate effort on the part of the would-be elector then turn-out struggles to beat 50 per cent.

Anyway, officials had better come up with something. Many of us already have a distinct impression that our leaders are not too keen on elections.

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