tim's experiment

In the Basic Law it says that appointments to certain senior positions must be approved by Beijing. That may be viewed by some people as a legitimate expression of the central government’s interest in ensuring that competent sycophants are running Hong Kong. But where, I wonder, did the idea emerge that when such persons wish to resign they cannot do so until the resignation is “accepted by Beijing”, as the papers always put it?

Henry (forget my mistress) Tang is only the latest senior figure who has said he or she was resigning, only to be told, apparently, that said resignation could not take effect until the panjandrums in Beijing had approved it. There is nothing in the Basic Law to suggest that this is necessary. The right to vet candidates for a position does not imply a right to grant or deny their resignations. You can choose your own domestic helper but if she wishes to resign she goes at the end of her contract. There is no practical advantage to having resignations vetted in Beijing. Leaving aside the level of ignorance of Hong Kong affairs to be expected in the person who actually makes the decision, the whole idea defies common sense. Someone who has submitted his or her resignation has demonstrated the lack of a vital qualification for any demanding job: the desire to do it. These senior officials are not employees of the Central Government. Their wages are paid by us. I do not see why we should be expected to pay some lame duck while he waits for official permission to hobble into retirement — or the Chief Executive “election” as the case may be.

Actually if you ask me it is about time some order was brought into this question of senior people resigning. Most of us have to give a certain period of notice. Top people, it seems, can play peek-a-boo about whether they are running for election or not, and then resign at the drop of a hat when the time is, in their view, right. This is a fairly sordid scene throughout, even without the adultery, but it doesn’t have to be as sordid as it looks now. Can we have a formal period of notice required for people who wish to leave for clearly foreseeable reasons, please? And less nonsense about needing permission from Beijing. Hong Kong does not permit slavery. An official who wishes to resign cannot be prevented from doing so.

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It would probably be too melodramatic to say that we are now witnessing a struggle for the Police Force’s soul.
Organisations do not have souls. At least, though, we must say that a largely submerged struggle is going on, over the question what sort of police force Hong Kong wants. This is the serious question behind the arguments – some of which are rather trivial – about whether particular crowd control measures were legal, whether rude signs about the Force should not be legal, and whether the Chief of Police should, on appropriate occasions, issue an apology.
Questions of this kind usually start with the traditions of the Force, but in this case we can dispense with that because the history of the Force is rather disreputable. In its youth it discharged many of the duties of an occupying army, firmly suppressing any symptoms of restlessness among the natives. It also provided, in the best colonial tradition, an outlet for restless young men of no visible talent who could come out to Hong Koing and become instant officers. The Force was, however, less interested in combating crime. It frowned on violent newsworthy felonies like murder and bank robbery, while casting a more indulgent eye over the sale of protection, vice and drugs to more or less satisfied customers. Winking at these latter industries provided a substantial extra income. Anyone who finds it surprising that the police sided with the government in the Red Guard riots does not realise how lucrative it was to be a policeman in those days. I do not wish to labour this embarassing point. Suffice to say that the band of retired policemen who turned up at Legco the other day to support their current colleagues could have chosen a more appropriate shirt colour than white.
So we will not dwell on the mutiny, the storming of the ICAC headquarters, the part-time jobs as guns for hire, the repeated claims that triads have been eradicated, later withdrawn (without apology), the real estate holdings in Toronto or the MacLennan Inquiry. Suffice to say that the Force, if not Asia’s finest, is at least no longer the Finest Police Force That Money Can Buy. The only point we need take from this murky history is that the Force is not a prisoner of its past. It can become whatever it wants, or we want.
There is a range of choices on offer. At one extreme there is the Carabinieri system, in which the police man a few heavily defended enclaves from which they emerge, usually in large groups and always armed, to deal with major crises. Many European countries used to have police forces of this kind. They were useful in times of war and revolution. But many of the functions of providing everyday security, suppressing crime and resolving minor disputes were simply not attempted in this model. They were left to the citizens, who made what arrangements they could with each other, or with local magnates, bandits or both. At the other extreme is the Dixon of Dock Green dream, in which the policeman is a friendly avuncular figure from whom the most timid individual would not shrink to ask the time. Dixon was of course a fictional person. Still something like this is not impossible, though no doubt easier in small towns than in big cities.
The English police have always recognised in a fuzzy sort of way that they need the public on their side. Citizens must be willing to call for help, to give evidence, to support adequate financing and manpower. Police work is in a sense like counter-insurgency warfare: winning is achieved not by locking up particular people or groups of people, but by gaining the support of the population, after which peace and order follow naturally.
Regrettably, Hong Kong’s police force took after the first of these models more than the second. This is not anyone’s fault. A foreign-officered police force in a colony is never going to be part of the family. And the Hong Kong population’s expectations of police were conditioned by experience in China, which consisted of decades of civil war followed by decades of communism. The idea of the policeman as a servant of the community was not familiar. Still, 14 years after the handover, it isn’t now either. Some of the comments on policing of demonstrations seem to come from people who hanker for the old Chinese system of law enforcement in which the magistrate presided over a large hall in which suspects were beaten until they confessed.
Some years ago there was a suggestion that the Police Force might like to rename itself as a Police Service. This was vigorously opposed from within the Force. Members told me at the time that they wished to remain a “paramilitary force”. The fact that Hong Kong no longer really needed a paramilitary force did not come up. The Force still devotes huge resources to training of a strenuous military kind in riot control, though we haven’t had a decent riot in decades. At the same time many of our police stations still look like small fortresses and attempts at a community presence, though certainly made, look half-hearted. It does not matter if the police continue to be addicted to bagpipes, mess kits, “Mr Vice, the Loyal Toast” and other regimental rituals. The phenomenal standard of foot drill is harmless, though the time spent honing this obscure accomplishment could perhaps be spent on more constructive matters. What is a problem is the number of policemen and admirers who apparently subscribe to the dictum attributed to Lee Kwan Yew: “If people were not afraid of me I would be a nobody.”
The problem for police forces, as for other large organisations, is that the public’s view of them is not decided primarily by their official stance, by the speeches of their senior officers or their media coverage. It is decided by the quality and content of face-to-face interactions with junior members of the body. If they feel they are being treated unfairly, or bullied, then no amount of PR is going to repair the damage. Some help can be provided by an honest apology when things go wrong, but this it seems is not accepted by the new police regime, which does not do apologies, even when a normal law-abiding citizen might think one was appropriate.
The disturbing thing about all this is that we have here an important matter of policy. Do we want a community-friendly police or do we want a fierce force? No doubt there are arguments on both sides but this should be decided by the government and the public, not by the individual whims of successive commissioners of police.
Meanwhile a word about demonstrations. The purpose of demonstrations, as any serious revolutionary will tell you, is not just to air views about public matters, it is to illustrate by a piece of compelling street theatre the essential oppressive nature of capitalism in general and the police in particular. So for the police, success is not looking oppressive. Failure is pepper-spraying primary school kids. OK?

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Away again, hence the absence of posts. My technical enthuisiasm does not run as far as uploading things here from distant hotels.  This trip was a piping for charity thing in Poznan. Poznan is the city in Poland which historians will remember as Posen, which is still its German name. Whatever you call it, Poznan is worth a visit if you are passing that way. It has everything you hope to find in an East European city: cobbled streets, historic buildings, big parks, pavement cafes and cheap booze. The old part of the town has a huge pedestrianised central square – so big that the town hall, an elegant antique with a performing clock – is actually in the middle of it, with a few other buildings. Round the outside are restaurants which all extend onto the pavement. Either there is no Food and Environmental Health Department in Poland or the local version suffers from common sense.

The interesting thing about Poznan is that this is not an ancient city preserved from warfare by luck and from developers by the accident of communism. This place has always been a fortified city. At the end of World War II the Germans and Russians had an extended slugfest which left the place thoroughly chewed up. But at this point the inhabitants did not call in the local counterpart of Norman Foster. Nor did they invite some real estate shark to treat them to the latest in modern malls. They decided to put everything back the way it was. In fact I’m told that during this process sundry previous “improvements” were quietly reversed, so that things were actually for the most part put back where they were in 1800. And the result is very beautiful. Much more beautiful than anything in Hong Kong, to be brutal about it. Which leads to a rather depressing conclusion: if the Red Army flattens your neighbourhood you can fix it, if you wish to. But once our property Panzers have given you a going over, there is no going back. Shame.

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I was surprised to read of Mr Grenville Cross’s attack on the Secretary for Justice, not because Mr Cross has on so many previous public appearances been a staunch defender of such secretaries, though he has, nor because I disagreed with it. I often disagree with Mr Cross. What surprised me was to see a breach of the unwritten rule which states that those who have retired from the vineyard should speak kindly of those who now toil in their place. This is not a law, of course, and Mr Cross has the usual citizen’s right to throw brickbats at the Secretary for Justice, if he supposes that the rest of us are not doing enough.

Mr Cross had, in effect, two complaints. The first was that it ill behoved the Secretary to complain that people were making public points about the right of abode for domestic helpers case, when he had made an unsuccessful effort to put the same points before the court himself. People had been publicly complaining that if the helpers were accorded the right we would be swamped by hordes of helpers, helpers’children and helpers’ husbands, all of whom would impose mammoth and unmanageable expenses on the education, welfare etc systems. This seems a bit unfair, or at least I hope it is. The objection to the campaign waged by opponents of the helpers is that so much of it is inaccurate. I do not know what points the government lawyers hoped to make in the late submission which the judge refused to entertain, but I suppose they were not going to say that the helpers would have to be paid the minimum wage, which is not true, or that they would all have an undeniable right to land in Hong Kong, which is not true either, still less that their children would have such a right. The whole point of the first right of abode catastrophe was for the government to establish, with the aid of Beijing, that you cannot inherit the right of abode from your mother if she did not have it when you were born. So if 100,000 helpers (who are of course already here anyway) got the right of abode tomorrow the number of children they would be able to import would be … zero. So I suppose, though of course we cannot be sure, that the government’s offerings on the implications of the judgement were going to be a good deal more nuanced than those of, say, Selina Chow.

Still, this is the sort of complaint which someone perhaps ought to have made. There is a whiff of hypocrisy in the official line that if we can’t say it in court nobody else can say it out of it. Mr Cross’s second complaint takes us into deeper waters. This was that people should be allowed to say what they like, as judges would not be influenced by it anyway. Lest I brutalise this by abbreviating it, here is a quote courtesy of the Post: “Strong emotions are sometimes stirred up in the community by particular court cases, both criminal and civil. But judges reach their decision on the basis of the evidence and on the application of the law, Judges are taken to be capable of excluding improper influences from their reasoning process, and this is fundamental to our legal system. His (the Secretary for Justice) whole emphasis should have been upon reassuring people that there is no reason to think that the judge will not reach a true decision on the evidence before him and the law.”

Now it is of course a fundamental notion of the legal system that judges OUGHT to reach their decisions without regard to “strong emotions in the community”, based solely on the evidence and the law. The principle is old enough to be enshrined in a little squirt of Latin: fiat justitia ruat caelum, or Let justice be done though the heavens fall. The maxim is usually attributed to the 18th century judge Lord Mansfield. But while this is a cherished objective Mr Cross is surely going too far when he says that it is fundamental to our legal system that this is what always happens. Judges are fallible human beings, after all. The law may, as Gilbert and Sullivan put it, have no fault or flaw, but people are people,  and judges are people too.

In fact in my explorations of legal history I have found that it is almost an invariable rule that any particularly stirring and cherished statement of the inviolability of human rights and the freedom of the subject turns out on close examination to have been a minority speech by a judge whose colleagues were succumbing to the passions of the hour. Sometimes there is not even a minority. Lawyers now cringe at the flimsy technicality used to justify the conviction for treason of Willam Joyce (aka Lord Haw Haw) in 1946. Joyce, an American citizen, had broadcast for the Germans during the war and been much hated. The people wanted him hanged and hanged he was, with the active connivance of the Court of Appeal and the judicial part of the House of Lords. Judges are part of the community and they cannot avoid feeling the passions which animate it. No doubt in a decade or two we will be embarassed by the contemporary judges in the UK and US who are prepared to trample on rights claimed since Magna Carta because they may impede the “War on Terror”. But that’s the way it goes.

The point, I think, is that there are some things which an experienced judge can put out of his mind and some which may be more difficult. I do not doubt, for example, that the sundry comments pro and con Nancy Kissel were like water off a duck’s back to senior judges, supposing they heard them. The merits of particular individuals or participants in court cases, the finer points of evidence, whether particular forensic techniques can be relied on, are the sort of things which we expect judges to be able to exclude from consideration. It is harder to be as completely confident when the sentiment being repeated on all sides is that a decision in one particular direction will lead to the end of Hong Kong civilisation as we know it, or indeed that if the decision is made in that direction then a political body in Beijing will be invited to overturn it, at the cost of further injury to our autonomy and rule of law. We may hope that judges will be able to ignore matters of this kind, but we are not required either by the law or common sense to assume that this will always happen.

In the end the rule of law is not just a matter for lawyers. It demands the support of all of us. One of the items of support required is that people should be moderate and circumspect in public discussions about matters upcoming. This is not a matter of law – even in Legco the ” sub judice”  rule is a convention, not a statutory requirement. It is a matter of good citizenship. People who make extreme predictions about the result of upcoming cases make it harder for the judge to deal with the matter dispassionately, and harder for us to believe that he has succeeded. So, unaccustomed as I am to agreeing with the Secretary for Justice about anything, I am with him on this one. People should shut up.

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I was reading a history book the other day, which I often do for fun, when I noticed that something was missing. This is not a serious omission and the book – “Why the West Rules – for now” by Ian Morris, can be recommended as a stimulating read. Still, when I was a fulltime student of these matters the numbering of years followed a simple system. The year you were talking about had a number. Before the number were two letters. If we were in the last 2000 years or so the two letters were AD, which stood for Anno Domini. So we are now in AD 2011. Anno Domini means “in the year of Our Lord”. The Lord referred to was made clear in the abbreviation used for earlier years, which was BC, meaning Before Christ. Now I am not a huge fan of this system because it means that with the older dates you have to count backwards. I often have to remind myself that 2000 BC comes before 1000 BC, and not the other way round, as you might think. But this system has been around for a long time and most of us are used to it.

Mr Morris, though was using something different. Instead of AD he had CE, and instead of BC he had BCE. The numbers were the same. You still had to count backwards in BCE. I had to look this up. CE stands for the Common Era and BCE stands for Before the Common Era. The “Common Era” is a translation of a Latin phrase Aera Vulgaris, which probably did not originally mean common in the modern sense. Alternatively you can ignore the history and say that the use of the Common Era removes a potential source of embarassment to non-Christians. The system is “common” because it is used all round the world by people of many religions or of none. For this reason some publishers recommend it. Humph. The counter-argument is that the AD/BC system was after all invented hy Christians and refusing to use the traditioonal labels is a concession to atheism or political correctness or both.

There are as usual some odd things about all this. The first is that the monk who initiated the system is generally thought to have made a mistake in estimating the year of Christ’s birth. So this event (for those who believe it happened at all – there is an interesting theory that the oldest Gospel was writtan as a fictional allegory and no real person is behind it at all) is usually given as happening between 2 and 4 AD. Or 2 and 4 CE if you prefer. So the year of Our Lord is not exactly the year of Our Lord at all. The system is a convenience. The second oddity is that people who boycott the AD/BC version because of  its religious significance are quite happy to continue with the usual days of the week, which are actually all named after gods of one persuasion or another except Sunday and Monday. The months are also polluted by religion – as well as two rather objectionable Roman emperors.

The Society of Friends (Quakers) seems to be the only religion which has noticed this point, and for many years refused to use the conventional names for days and months, instead managing simply with numbers – as Cantonese still does. Apparently most Quakers now regard the insistence on numbers as a bit unnecessary but they still often refer to Sunday as First Day.  For the rest of us, I don’t know. Apparently the reference to Christ is a problem for some people. The use of the Common Era arrangement was started in the 19th century by Jewish historians who presumably thought (the Lord thy God is a jealous God) that something terrible would happen to them if they mentioned Jesus, even in a date. On the other hand common sense suggests that a label is just a label, and as long as we all use the same one it doesn’t matter too much where it came from. Many physical units are named after scientific celebrities. If we discovered that the Mr Ohm after whom the ohm is named had stolen his results from someone else, and moreover was a nasty piece of work who abused his dog, deceived his wife and robbed his servants, would it matter?

I suppose it is all part of the march of euphemism, which requires us to refer to the blind, the halt and the maimed as “differently abled”, prostitutes as sex workers, and robber barons as the Real Estate Developers’  Association. I must declare an interest here. Having wasted so much of my youth mastering the intricacies of Latin I am often irritated to see this accomplishment becoming even more useless than it was in the 60s. Sic transit gloria, as we used to say.

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Ahoy there, South China Morning Post! Time for a few brief words about some basic pieces of nautical terminology. On Page 2 today, in that silly column called “talking points” (our editors will be looiking ahead at these developing stories…) we are told that “All eyes will be on the northern port of Dalian, with wide speculation that China’s first aircraft carrier will be launched to mark the anniversary of the founding of the People’s Liberation Army.”  Well some of those eyes are going to be sorely disappointed. On the opposite page fans are rushing to Dalian to see the aircraft carrier, the Varyag, which is already “at anchor” about a kilometre from the shore. To launch a boat means to put it in the water. If the Varyag is at anchor it is already in the water.

Is there another aircraft carrier on the slipway, or is the SCMP just bad at boat stories? Well there was another clue on the same page as the story, a picture of the aircraft carrier concerned. This was captioned “The Varyag lies anchored yesterday at the shipyard in Dalian ….” But the Varyag was not anchored in the picture. Both anchors could be clearly seen stowed in the usual place, one each side of the bow. And indeed you would not, after all, drop anchor in a shipyard, supposing you were in one. You would simply tie up. By a delicious coincidence, the story and picture on page 3 are right under a story headlined “Press council to look into newspaper errors”.

I am trying not to be too hard on the Post, but clearly some people have stopped relying on it for information. One of them is apparently its own columnist, Michael Chugani, who thinks that democratic countries should abandon democracy so that they can become prosperous and efficient … like China. ROFL.

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It is not often I feel moved to write, or even read, about competitive swimming, but a story the other day was provocative. Readers will recall that a year or two ago swimmers started appearing in a new suit, which covered everything, and was constructed from some high tech material which made them a bit faster. Records tumbled, people who could not afford the new duds complained, and the speed suits were eventually banned.

Now everyone is back in the old gear, records are no longer tumbling. In fact they are not being broken at all. This is apparently disappointing for spectators, who like to see records broken. I can’t think why, as you can’t tell until the announcement afterwards whether a record has been set or not, but there it is. We may note in passing that spectators are in for a disappointment sooner or later because speeds will hit limits set by biology. Racehorses, which have been racing a lot longer than human swimmers, have reached this stage. They go as fast as a horse can go without turning into a Pegasus and speed records are rarely broken.

Anyway, in the meantime, according to the story, the swimming authorities are wrestling with some way to keep crowds interested in a record-free meeting, and also struggling with the sponsors. It seems that the cover-everything Superman suit provided plenty of space for advertising. Now the male swimmers have gone back to something more like traditional briefs there is nowhere to put a logo on the upper half of the body, which is the only part likely to appear on television.

Now in the first place it seems clear that the suit problem is not going to go away. Hundredths of a second make a difference at this level so people are always going to be looking for an edge. The answer, it seems to me, is that the swimmers should wear no clothes at all. This would also solve the problem of attracting an audience, though no doubt it will not be exactly the same as the audience they get now. I suppose in the interests of hygiene they could keep those funny hats. They won’t be wearing much less than the beach volleyball people do.

This will considerably reduce the demand for competitive swimwear. But I suppose other sponsors will be interested. Of course there will be nothing to stick a logo on but where there’s a profit to be had people find a way. Some sort of removable tatoo?

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Many years ago in the UK there was a lady called Mary Whitehouse. Mrs Whitehouse was frequently quoted in newspapers and invited to appear on television to comment on media matters. This was because she was the spokesperson of a thing called the National Viewers and Listeners Association. Whenever a reporter was looking for someone to give a view which could be presented as that of the consumers of radio or television, Mrs W was the person to call.

Actually it was widely known in media circles that this was a con. The National Viewers and Listeners Association was not national. Mrs Whitehouse was a member of a nutty religious group and the NVLA drew most of its members, who only numbered a few hundred anyway, from the same Godsquad. Its claims to speak for anyone but a few Puritans were minimal. But it had no competition, so the phone calls kept coming.

Mrs Whitehouse’s counterpart in Hong Kong is Joseph Law, who rejoices in the title of Chairman of the Hong Kong Employers of Overseas Domestic Helpers Association. With this on his business card he is routinely wheeled out to pronounce on matters like the minimum wage for helpers or the requirement that they leave town in two weeks if dismissed. Mr Law’s opinions on these matters are entirely predictable. Whether they are typical is another matter. I have been an employer of an overseas domestic helper for many years. I have never been invited to join Mr Law’s association. I have never met anyone who has, though many of my friends also employ domestic helpers. The association has, it seems, no function other than allowing Mr Law to parade his greed and insensitivity in public and foist it on the rest of us. If the association has meetings they are not reported. If it has other useful and constructive activities they also remain below the public radar. If it has a website the Google machinery has so far failed to find it. Next time a reporter is tempted to ask Mr Law for a quote it might be a good idea to insert a request for his membership figures.

Mr Law’s latest public outburst showed that he is moving on from offering mean quotes about matters concerning domestic helpers to things which have nothing to do with his members, if any, at all. Wednesday’s papers were full of the DAB’s latest campaign, which is a disgraceful attempt to influence the court which will shortly be considering a request for judicial review of the rule that overseas domestic helpers do not qualify for the right of abode after being here for seven years. As this is in marked  contrast to the treatment of overseas bankers – and for that matter butchers, bakers, candlestick makers etc – there is some reason to suppose that the plea will succeed. That is no excuse for campaigning for a particular result. Does the DAB beieve in the rule of law? Of course not. Stupid question.

The party’s spokespoodle, one Starry Lee, explained that the DAB was publicising its spectacular predictions of social doom if helpers were allowed the right of abode because it was “only putting forward an estimate of the possible consequences and remind the government to be prepared for all possible outcomes.” Cobblers. The DAB is putting forward its lurid lies in an attempt to broaden its electoral prospects by appealing to racism and snobbery in the middle classes.

I am a little puzzled as to why Mr Law felt called upon as an employer’s spokesperson to join in this particular row. After all from the employer’s point of view it makes little difference whether maids qualify for the right of abode or not. Some may leave the business when they qualify for the ID card.  But if Hong Kong offers the additional attraction of the right of abode then no doubt replacements will be easier to come by. So as employers we may be attracted or appalled, but this is nothing to do with us.

Nevertheless Mr Law sailed in with the promise (threat?) that “If they rule in favour of the maids, I will ask the Hong Kong Government to seek an interpretation of the Basic Law from China. We cannot accommodate such a large influx into the population.” This suggests two possiblilities. One is that Mr Law erroneously supposes that any domestic helper who is awarded the right of abode will be able to claim a permanent home with her current employer. The other is that Mr Law is not really interested in labour issues at all, he is just another left-wing loony who thinks the world will end if the Basic Law is criticised in any way.

Or perhaps he’s just thick.

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To Lam Sang Wai this weekend, to see it before it disappears. Lam Sang Wai is an area of wetland near Yuen Long. It was certainly wet when I saw it because we had constant rain, but some of it is wet all the time. It is a rare piece of landscape for Hong Kong, being completely flat throughout. Neglected fishponds and paddy fields abound. Some of it looks like the Norfolk Broads, or like the Norfolk Broads before they were tidied up for tourism. Some of it looks a bit like the famous West Lake, with causeways dotted with trees running along the horizon. Few of the traditional residents are still there. The place is very quiet, though parts are within distant earshot of the Yuen Long Industrial Area. Birds chirp, butterflies flutter by.

The place boasts Hong Kong’s only remaining manpowered ferry. You stand on a sampan and a gentleman rows standing up and facing forward, with two rather short oars fitted with handles  on the end to make them easier to feather. I have never seen this arrangement in Hong Kong before – the fishing boatpeople scull over the stern with a single oar. No doubt it’s a good arrangement for a river boat.

There is a long road round the outside of the area, which seems to have been built to provide the Drainage people with access to the river bank. This has been extensively remodelled. We tried to cut through the middle of the peninsula, which was very quiet and spooky, but the path petered out. There are very basic public toilets. Three or four restaurants are run by surviving obstinate inhabitants. The place is a bit awkward to find but well worth a visit and quite out of the ordinary.

I fondly supposed that it was waiting to be engulfed by the Yuen Long New Town, at which point the government would shower money on the local landowners, half of whom would turn out to be Lau Wong Fat. But this is not the case at all. The whole place, apparently, has already been bought up years ago by Henderson Land (owned by the Lee clan which buys its babies in bulk) and there was actually an application to turn most of the wetland into a housing estate, golf club, commercial complex – the usual catastrophe. The application was approved, but for some reason Henderson did not go ahead with the work and a court case last year decided that the permission had now lapsed. The next move from the vandals – I beg your pardon the developers – is now awaited. Knowing the way Hong Kong works one cannot be optimistic about Lam Sang Wai long escaping transition into a golf course, etc, with no doubt a corner reserved for nature somewhere. So enjoy it while it lasts. Map and instructions here: http://www.wetlandpark.com/en/tour/nsw.asp

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I can’t believe the News of the World is actually going to close. It was a landmark. It should have been declared a piece of Unesco cultural heritage. When I was still at school it was already notorious. The News of the World’s basic idea — often imitated but never surpassed — was that court stories are an endless source of the magic ingredients: sex and violence. In those days the treatment was far from graphic. There would be a good deal on what you might call the foreplay but when you were expecting what is now, I believe, known as “the money shot” you would be fobbed off with something like “he then committed the offence.” Still, this was a good deal more than you got anywhere else — including at school, where sex education had not yet been invented. So the newspaper was compulsive reading for boys of a certain age.

When I was a court reporter it was well known that certain stories would get a warm and lucrative reception from the News of the Screws, as we called it. As our newspaper printed on a Wednesday it had no objection to your selling the same tale to the News of the World for use the following Sunday. Sadly stories of the necessary kind rarely seemed to come my way. I did once send them a story about a man who, arriving home drunk on a Saturday night, accused his wife of infidelity and shaved her eyebrows off to make her less attractive. As usually happened in such cases the wife turned up in court — still without eyebrows — to say that her husband was a good man when sober and deserved mercy. The News of the World’s copytaker greeted the story with enthusiasm but they did not use it. This was rather a relief; on reflection it seemed rather unfair that this particular couple should become nationally famous because he had chosen an original method of wife abuse. They did send me some money though. This was before the paper fell into the hands of Rupert Murdoch, for whom I am happy to say I have never worked.

One cannot of course escape the ogre’s influence completely and I have at various times met and even occasionally worked with people who had been employed in senior posts in the Empire of Darkness. I have to say that I cannot recall any from whom I would willingly have bought a used car and one or two of them were clearly crooks. It seems Mr Murdoch, though undoubtably talented in giving the people what they want, was prone to recruiting the ethically challenged.

However it is difficult to believe that the News of the World was the only British newspaper with ethical and legal deficiencies. I have no idea how widespread phone hacking may be — I left the country before mobile phones arrived so in my day we were not tempted. In the matter of bribing policemen and other people, however, I fear there is plenty of scandal to emerge at other places. All the popular papers do it, and have done it for years. If you talk to them or tip them off they will pay you. You expect it; they expect it. The reporters come equipped with large sums in unaccountable cash for the purpose. Occasionally someone gets into trouble for bribing a policeman or a prison officer, but usually everyone winks. Sometimes it leaks out: during the Falklands War several of the more patriotic popular  paper reporters endeared themselves to the troops by “sponsoring” bombs. This was meaningless and produced no news more interesting than a picture of a bomb with a message painted on it. I think the reporters concerned just did it from habit.  During the handover period, when almost everyone in Hong Kong was interviewed at one time or another, you could tell the British pop press. They were the ones who offered to pay you.

The moral of all this from Hong Kong’s point of view is that people should be more grateful than they are for the press we have got.  Even the popular papers do cover serious topics, don’t pay for stories and don’t make stuff up. Not everyone can say this.

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