tim's experiment

The disorders at a demonstration in Central on March 6 provoked interesting responses. Let me say at the outset that like everyone who was not there – and probably a good many who were – I have very little idea of what happened. So I proceed on the basis that everyone was doing more or less what they were supposed to do. The interesting thing is not the game, but the post-match comments.

First up was the Secretary for Security, Ambrose Lee. Mr Lee was asked about reports, which seem to have been accurate, that an 8-year-old boy was sprayed with pepper foam during the festivities. Now this report did not present any huge difficulties for an official spokesman. Clearly no sane officer would deliberately target a child with pepper spray. One would expect that with the spray, as with any other police weapon, the officer concerned would recognise his responsibility to be sure where it was pointing and who was going to get the good news before he pulled the trigger. Maybe in the excitement of the moment someone was a bit generous in his spraying. Or maybe someone jogged his elbow. No harm was done to the child and no harm would have been done by a polite expression of regret that someone had intercepted something which was not intended for him.

Instead, however, Mr Lee uncorked some verbal pepper spray of his own. It was, he said, inappropriate to be using children as a weapon to defend amid confrontation”, and it was “bad for children to bring them to those violent scenes”.  The problem with the first part of this is that no evidence has emerged, from Mr Lee or anyone else, that children were being used as any sort of shield or defensive weapon. No doubt Mr Lee would say that his remarks were entirely hypothetical and were not intended to apply to any particular individual in particular. Let me say in a similarly hypothetical way with no resemblance intended to any real person living or dead, that a minister whose response to a minor PR problem was a resort to venomous lies would not be fit to be a minister.  The problem with the second part of Mr Lee’s observation is that it is his job to preserve public order, not to issue retrospective travel advisories if the result of his efforts is a public brawl. Demonstrations in Hong Kong are generally peaceful. It is his job to keep them that way. His account of the proceedings was that protestors “were not willing to leave in a peaceful way, which led to a police decision on using a minimum level of force”.  If the result was unfit for children perhaps the level of force was not as minimal as it could have been.  I have seen something of police anti-riot rehearsals. Clearly our boys are well prepared to deal with a screaming mob bent on the destruction of all that we hold dear. Whether training for this eventuality is the best possible preparation for dealing with protesting members of the Hong Kong middle classes is another matter.

Mr Lee’s performance, though, was a model of soothing sanity compared with the performance later in the week from the Commissioner of Police. Asked if he would care to apologise to the pepper-sprayed kid, Mr Tsang Wai-hung flatly refused. “I don’t think we have done anything wrong,” he said, reassuring those timid citizens who supposed that the use of chemical weapons on primary school children was an essential part of law enforcement. “It is really an Arabian Nights if maintaining law and discipline needs to apologise.”  Now someone, and I fear Mr Ambrose Lee is not suitable for this task, needs to take Mr Tsang aside and point out one or two things. The first one is that it is not the job of his Force to maintain “discipline”. The police are the servants of the public, not its masters. Enforcing the law is quite enough.  The second is that there is nothing in the law of either Hong Kong or common courtesy which suggests that if you have a good purpose you are absolved from the obligation to apologise for your mistakes. All policemen seek to uphold the law. Nevertheless in the course of this laudable pursuit, accidents happen. Officers kick down the wrong door because they got the address mixed up. Innocent bystanders are hit by bullets intended for criminals. Detective constables with over-active hormones rape women in police stations. Innocent railway passengers have their heads blown off by anti-terrorism squads. Sooner or later Mr Tsang is going to have to say “sorry” for something. Last week would have been a good time to get some practice.

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I was in the Bank the other day – the luxurious part where you get a seat, a cup of coffee and a paper to read while you wait – and they had a television on to one of those irritating news channels which runs a tickertape across the bottom of the screen. This was not distracting because the tickertape was in Chinese, as was the sound. So I looked at the pictures. 

This was one of those bulletins often found on Hong Kong television, which consisted entirely of the recent doings of senior officials. First up was the Financial Secretary, looking like a freshly whipped cur and surrounded by dubious men in black who looked like they might be something important in organised crime. I later found that these men were actually the government’s loyal legislative supporters, who had just been revising the FS’s budget for him.  Then we came to Donald, who was still complaining about his sub judice encounter with a protester. Those of us who have watched the Bokhary clip on one of its news outings will realise that the correct form in these matters is for the victim of the alleged assault to take a few seconds to ponder his next move, before giving a yelp, clutching the offended spot, and collapsing onto the pavement. Mr Tsang seems to have taken this polite convention to extremes by taking a ten minute rest, giving a speech and having dinner before he decided he needed to collapse into the nearest hospital.  After Mr Tsang we had the constitutional team, who had just been put through the wringer by legislators who had discovered that – as predicted on this blog many moons ago – the detailed arrangements for the five new constituencies had been designed deliberately to be as undemocratic as possible.  I don’t know why anyone finds this surprising. Next time the democrats decide to take the 30 pieces of silver and put the rat in democrat they will get better value for their betrayal if they insist on a few important details – like single member constituencies.

Leaving these details aside the whole spectacle, in purely visual terms,. was depressing. All the officials concerned looked tired. Our Chief Executive’s hair line is retreating rapidly towards his collar under the strains of office. Nobody looked happy in his work, nobody looked inspired or inspiring. We are led, in short, by a government which has passed its “best before” date and is fast approaching the one where it would be dangerous to feed it to your dog. The great merit of those crude democratic systems which almost force the politicians to sort themselves into two contending parties is that this situation is handled very well. Old tired governments are painlessly euthanised by the electorate and replaced by eager new faces. In time, of course, the eager new faces grow tired and stale in their turn. Meanwhile, though,  the fielding team  has refreshed itself, thought new thoughts,  purged the stupid and the senile, and is ready for another go.  What a contrast with our own dear government, which is condemned to eternal life, staggering zombie-like towards a forgotten destination while a large audience hoots and throws fruit.  If they weren’t so grotesquely over-paid you might feel sorry for them.

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As I write this I have no idea what is in the budget. At least, not officially. A lot of stuff has been leaked, as now seems to be the habit. Still, I do not know, as of now, whether the FS has decided to raise the tax on cigarettes or not. Nor is that relevant to my complaint, which is that the question has become rather hysterical.

After all this is a prettystraightforward policy issue. Arguments for: raises money, discourages young smokers. Arguments against: government doesn’t need money, tax applies to all smokers regardless of age, if difference between prices in HK and prices in Shenzhen gets too big, lots of cigs will be smuggled. Both sets of arguments can be supported with statistics. In theory, a job for the technocrats. In practice this is a topic which attracts fanatics.

So we were treated to screeches of horror because the Financial Secretary had done something terrible. He had not kicked his dog, beaten his wife or, heaven forbid, actually been seen smoking one of the poisonous things himself. He had, in the course of the usual charade of public consultation which precedes the budget, met representatives of the tobacco business. Nobody suggested that he had made any decision as a result. The mere holding of the meeting was enough to arouse a horde of  health harridans of both sexes. It was, apparently, not enough that the government already taxes the business. It should also ostracise it. True believers know that the dreadful industry is populated by people of matchless cunning and supernatural persuasive powers. Merely being in a room with a tobacco baron is enough to reduce a government official to a state of helpless puppetry, putty in the nicotine-stained hands of the fag pushers. Or so they affect to believe. Personally I think this is nonsense. The FS meets all sorts of people. Some of them I rather disapprove of. No doubt he considers all the points put to him, and does not overlook the possiblity that interests are mixed up with the logic. So the Jockey Club sees merit in more gambling, the construction industry sees merit in more building, the booze people urge the advantages of cheaper booze and real estate salesmen want lower stamp duty. So it goes. Arguments should be considered on their merits, not on their origins.

But this is not the way fanatics work. Also up for the firing squad was the Lion Rock Institute, which had criticised the idea that taxation should be used to manipulate people’s behaviour as incompatible with complete personal freedom, which it is. The Institute, we were told, had accepted money from organisations which, in turn, had accepted money from the tobacco industry. Its opinions were therefore tainted with nicotine and should be disregarded. This is not fair. I usually disagree with the Lion Rock Institute. They are in my view a bunch of free market nutcases. However they seem to be a sincere and consistent set of free market nutcases. Opposition to tobacco taxes is entirely consistent with their views on a wide variety of other subjects. People are entitled to have their arguments considered as arguments, not dismissed by association. Actually having tried in vain for many years to get any of the tobacco puritans to address the question of freedom I do not expect the institute to have any luck either. But still. Argument ad hominem is fallacious and misleading. If the tax is an infringement of freedom it remains an infringement whether the person pointing this out is a pawn of the tobacco industry, a member of the Falun Gong or the last survivor of the Armenian Massacres. Some health experts need to meet a logic expert.

Actually this is a knife that cuts both ways. The public health business has become a substantial academic industry, populated by people who have made a career out of attending each other’s conferences and citing each other’s papers. Nobody actually reads most of that stuff. The industry has its own consensus. The researcher who fails to substantiate the expectation that in all and any circumstances tobacco is a threat to your health will be drummed out of the magic circle. There was a good illustration of the results of this approach the other week. A Canadian researcher had established that you can detect small particles in the air even if you are a few yards from an outdoor smoker. I presume this requires a gentle breeze or no breeze at all, but it is very unsurprising. We have all caught an outdoor whiff occasionally. Was this dangerous? The researcher announced that the concentration of particulates exceeded someone’s safety limit. He then added that the safety limit was for 24-hour exposure. Honesty might have suggested admitting, at this point, that the odd whiff of particulates that you might pick up as a passer-by was no hazard at all. But this is not the way these things are done. The smoke, we were warned, might be a hazard to people with lung conditions or breathing problems. No evidence was provided for this. But then “might” is a very flexible word. Science also has its dogmas.

Meanwhile the persecution of local smokers (of whom I am not one) continues. The latest wheeze is the ban on smoking in “public transport interchanges”, even if they are in the open air. This means effectively that you may not smoke at bus stops, because the railway stations banned smoking years ago. This has been interpreted in a sweeping way to include places which have very little to do with public transport. In Shatin, for example, it applies to the pedestrian ramp which goes from the ground floor up to the podium on which the station, and other things, sit. It is true that some people use this ramp to get from minibus stops downstairs to the station upstairs. But it is not part of the bus station, nor of the station. And many people use it who are not users of buses or trains, because it is the only way of crossing the railway for a few hundred yards in each direction. So it allows pedestrian connections between, on the mountain side of the tracks, important landmarks like the LCSD headquarters, the Shatin Government offices and Ikea, with on the river side of the tracks, New Town Plaza, the Tiown Hall, Law Courts, Town Park etc. Even more contentiously, according to the new signs, the Public Transport Interchange includes a stretch of pavement in what I think is Pai Tau Street which has no connection with buses or trains at all.  No doubt officials will say that the new signs conform to the plans of Public Transport Interchanges which were provided for public information. Well there were 130 of them, and curious would-be inspectors had to go to the Lands Registry, wherever that is. Clearly officials have used this as a pretext for surreptitiously extending no smoking rules over large numbers of open spaces which have no connection with public transport and where the odd whiff is a minor inconvenience if you notice it at all. What a bunch of weasels.

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Lately I have been casting an editorial eye over a great deal of written material produced by my colleagues. The accumulated documents will shortly be exposed to the visiting eyes of a team who will assess our activities. So one wishes it to look good, or at least correct. One of the recurrent problems is the spelling of a few words, like programme, centre and colour, which have different spellings in the US from those used elsewhere. Now there is a school of thought which maintains that there is no such thing as correctness in these matters. As long as the reader knows what you mean the language works. I think this is lazy. The reader is entitled to expect that he or she will be spared gratuitous surprises. At least there should be consistency.

On the whole I think in academic contexts we should probably aim a bit higher. There is no such thing as a good spelling system or a bad spelling system. All of them are merely sets of arbitrary rules. What we expect of an educated writer is that he should use one recognisable set consistently. As a matter of courtesy this should be the set of rules with which most of his readers are familiar. Now the Hong Kong education system, for obvious historical reasons, has always used the non-US system, which for reasons of brevity is usually referred to as the British system, though it is used in plenty of other places, and indeed would hardly be worth taking seriously if it were not. I repeat that this is not because the Brit system is in any way better. There are no value judgments to be made between spelling systems. It is simply a useful convenience if we all use the same one.

As far as the local universities are concerned, on the whole we do. Taking the two easiest words to check up on, The University of Hong Kong offers programmes and supports centres. So do the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the former Polys, Baptist U and Ling Nan. Shue Yan University has programmes but does not yet seem to have sprouted centres. To this general consensus there is one spectacular exception: the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. The HKUST does not have Programmes, and neither does it have Centres. Instead it has Programs and Centers.

As it happens I remember when this rot started. About ten years ago the then Vice Chancellor took exception to the fact that the university had both centres and centers, and decreed that in future all centers should be so spelled. Or as the Americans would say, spelt. I recall writing a piece at the time for one of the local newspapers pointing out firstly that the Hong Kong education system taught our students to write centre, and secondly that the university would look dangerously illiterate if it mixed up two different spelling systems. The university seems to have recognised this problem, and solved it in a perverse way. They have changed all the spellings to the American system. I expect there are some Britishisms lurking somewhere but all the things you can easily check on the university website have been Americanised, right down to the unnecessary full stops after abbreviations like Prof. They have even adopted “meter” (which has only been the legally endorsed  US version since 2008) instead of the internationally agreed “metre”. This seems a rather controversial choice for a scientific establishment.

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Was this a huge anguished effort to save the Vice Chancellor’s face by pretending that the “Center” order was merely the first step on a long march to a different spellling system? Or is the place just full of scientists and technologists who do not care? Having spent a certain amount of time with the website I conclude that if there is anyone in the university who can write good plain English free from jargon and academic fad words then he or she is kept well away from the internet spout. My bull shit detector was already muttering to itself when I found ” Transforming the UG Experience”, which starts with “The undergraduate academic program structure will be re-engineered to encourage students to become autonomous and life-long learners”. The detector was ringing merrily long before I got to the end, where we meet the aspiration to “develop an internationalised campus community that is fully integrated into the undergraduate learning experience”.

The losers in all this are the students. No doubt the ” undergraduate learning experience” includes some effort to introduce these scientific types to the consumption and production of good plain English. But it starts with a tacit announcement of the university’s contempt for their English studies so far, which did not take into account the university’s aspiration to have an international campus community with a foreign spelling system.  Maybe in 50 years time the world will have adopted the US system throughout. In the meantime the UST sits on its hilltop like a sort of orthographic Alamo defying the surrounding hordes who like U in their humor.  I do not say this is wrong. I do say that it’s rude. Using the same spelling system as everyone else is a useful courtesy, like driving on the right side of the road. Which is of course the left.

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Here is a lttle puzzle. Some time ago, readers will recall, there was a big row over the road which runs through Fairview Park. Residents complained that large lorries used this residential boulevard as a short-cut to nefarious non-agricultural doings in nearby villages, even though the government had provided a new, slightly longer, road expressly for their use. The intrusion of large trucks in what was basically a low-rise housing estate posed obvious dangers, a point driven home when a boy cyclist was killed by one of them. The management of the estate, after carefully considering its legal position, decided to ban articulated trucks from the road. This was an entirely sensible suggestion but it was bitterly opposed by residents of said nearby villages. At no point during the ensuing fracas did any official voice make the fundamental point that this was a private road whose owners had a perfect right to bar from it any vehicle of which they disapproved, whether the result was inconvenient to third parties or not.

Now come to the more recent past and the problems of the residents of Tsoi Yuen Tsuen.  The village, the SCMPost told us yesterday, “must make way for the $66.9 billion Hong Kong-Shenzhen-Guangzhou rail link”. Actually this is not entirely true. The link will not run either through or under the village site, which is actually needed for a large siding. This in turn is only needed because of the idiotic and extremely expensive decision to put the whole line underground. I also do not think much of that $66.9 billion price tag. That figure was itself the result of vigorous massaging – previously the government had admitted to something in the upper 80s. And since the project was approved there have been spectacular rises in the predicted costs of other MTR projects. Face it, folks, this white elephant is eventually going to leave us no change from $100 billion. I suppose the government has to get rid of the surplus somehow.

Anyway, be that as it may, the villagers have to move, and many of them settled on a vacant plot in Yuen Kong, another village. Their move has been delayed because the only access to the new site is a road through the existing village, and the road is private. The owners refused to allow the newcomers to use it unless they paid sums initially reported at several hundred thousand and rising to $5 million later. The names of the extortionists were never divulged. Officials might have been expected at some point in this fracas to intervene, as they did in Fairview Park, to ensure that the owners did not use their legal powers to inconvenience other people, even if those other people wished to kill their children. Not a bit of it. The official line was that this was an entirely private matter involving potential users of the road and its owners. Officials would not touch it with a barge pole. In the end the would-be migrants were rescued by Mr Lau Wong-fat, who recruited a mystery donor to pay the mystery extortionist or extortionists. Clearly Mr Lau is wasted on Exco – he should be negotiating with Somali pirates, to whom some residents of Yuen Kong display a remarkable resemblance.

This is a depressing spectacle. If the government really wishes to discourage unreasonable behaviour in New Territories villages it has plenty of means at its disposal. Relying on Mr Lau is pathetic. It is also wrong in principle. Mr Lau is the chairman of the Heung Yee Kuk, which represents indigenous villagers. They are only a small minority in the New Territories population and it is unfair to say the least that the affairs of the region should be run entirely in their interest.  Also Mr Lau has a famously poor memory. I felt a twinge of sympathy for the Tsoi Yuen villager who wanted the agreement in writing, though it will be interesting to see who, if anyone, will sign it.

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Have you read the controversial Mrs Chua’s book on motherhood? I thought not. Nor should you. Writing a newspaper article claiming that American mothers are no good and that is why California’s universities are full of Chinese kids is a provocation. To do it as a way of promoting a book is OK if that is what the book says. But apparently it isn’t. The book is comparatively boring. Mrs Chua was just trying to pull a few people’s short hairs so that her book sales could surf on a wave of public controversy about “tiger mums”. This is dishonest. Unless she wishes her kids to be Hong Kong real estate salesmen when they grow up, she is setting a bad example.

In any case, having been a parent myself, I think people should be strenuously discouraged from offering amateur advice on the subject, especially if that advice is based only on their own experience. Families are different; schools are different; children are different. What works in one set of circumstances will not work in another. My mother was not a tiger, but she believed in encouraging any constructive interest that came along. Finding that I asked many questions about signs and newspapers, she decided to teach me to read at the age of about three. For me this was a complete success. I had read the complete works of A.A. Milne by the age of 5, those of C.S. Forester by the age of 11. I was omnivorous and no doubt in the long run this helped. My twin brother did not share the interest so he was allowed to wait until he learned to read at school with everyone else.

I am sure Mrs Chua is right in supposing that, other things being equal, children whose mothers encourage them to do their homework will do better at school than those whose mothers do not. but the difference is probably not that great, compared with the influence of genetics and peers.  And this certainly does not justify the current enthusiasm for stories about supermums whose kids, at an improbably early age, can play the harpsichord, ski down Mount Everest on one foot, and are going to Cambridge to start a Mathematics degree. I understand the enthusiasm for extra-curricular activities. In Hong Kong, where the parks are miniscule and the streets are death traps, you cannot let kids out to play with their peers. The alternative to piano and Kumon is that your offspring are shut up in the usual tiny flat with little alternative to watching TV.  Still, taking these things too seriously is counter-productive.

I meet many students who have studied the piano. This is so common that it is generally not mentioned on applications at all unless the young lady (men do not generally do journalism) has reached Grade Seven.  Yet when put in a room with a piano, very few of these advanced learners have actually aquired a taste for playing, or a repertoire of pieces that they enjoy, and can entertain other people with. In the old days the point of learning the piano was that you could tinkle tunes which the people could hum, and the whole family would gather round the piano to sing them. In Hong Kong it’s just another string of examinations. After the last exam, nothing.

Sport is a healthy thing for young people. And I have noticed that even four decades after I graduated, when I turn up at reunions those of us who wasted much of our youth on the river have lasted rather better than most of our more conscientious contemporaries. But here again there is a danger that what is compulsory will eventually be dropped with a sigh of relief when freedom arrives. Kids should do things they enjoy, if you want to establish a habit. I was distressed to see in one of the superkids stories that the brats concerned were getting up early every day for swimming training. Swimming has always seemed to me the least mind-expanding of sports. You go up the pool, turn round and go down the pool. Then you do the same thing again, and again, and again…. God knows football is not an intellectual pursuit but it involves choices and some social skills.

So if your kid is playing Mozart, starring in the minirugby team and getting top marks for spelling, good for you. If your kid isn’t, don’t beat yourself up over it. Youngsters proceed at different paces and will find their own interests if encouraged. Years ago they had an exam in the UK called the 11 plus, which you took at the end of primary school. This was supposed to pick out people of promise. I did very well in this exercise. On the other hand my university room-mate had failed it.

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The Heritage Foundation is traditionally described as a “right-wing US think tank”. This is presumably because “bunch of loony market fundamentalists” would take up too much space. This week the foundation announced again that Hong Kong topped its index of economic freedom. This was not a very stunning piece of news because Hong Kong has been similarly honoured for the previous 16 years.

In some places this would no doubt be greeted as a piece of welcome news. In Hong Kong it is so obviously idiotic that most people greeted it with derision. Even the back page of the Business Post, where you might expect to find this sort of thing taken seriously, greeted the news with scorn and satire. Those of us who live here know, of course, that Hong Kong is not a bastion of untramelled economic freedom. It is a festering hotbead of monopolies, duopolies and cartels, ruled by a government which does very well out of its control of land supply. The only people in Hong Kong who had a kind word to say for the Heritage folks were the Hong Kong government itself, which came out with a fawning, forelock-tugging welcome for the accolade, suggesting hilariously, among other obvious lies, that the local administration seeks to “establish an appropriate regulatory regime to ensure the integrity and smooth functioning of a free market.”

One can of course see what the Heritage Foundation’s problem is. If you believe with a fervour usually reserved for more theological matters that economic freedom is conducive to happiness, prosperity, political freedom and a clean environment, then you have to produce some encouraging examples. Unfortunately most of the countries which are demonstrably successful in producing happy and contented citizens are places like Iceland or Denmark which not only regulate their economies but also have generous welfare provisions. One does not wish to make the United States the shining example, because the whole point of the exercise is to influence US policy in the direction of freer markets. So the Foundation needs a plausible specimen of prosperity which is neither nominally communist, which eliminates China, nor avowedly dirigiste, which takes care of the European candidates, as well as India and Brazil. So Hong Kong is it. The fact that this clashes violently with the established facts about how Hong Kong works can be glossed over. Most Americans know nothing about the rest of the world and the index is intended for their consumption.

This would be a piece of harmless fun if the foundation could restrain itself from commenting on Hong Kong’s domestic matters, but it can not. The publishers of the index expressed misgivings about the minimum wage legislation and the prospect of some legal effort to ensure competition. Most of us would not give a fig if Hong Kong lost its top spot in the foundation’s index but no doubt the prospect will worry some people. Actually there seems to be a logical problem here. I understand that a minimum wage is an interference in the working of market forces. That is its purpose. But a law against anti-competitive practices seems to be something the foundation would welcome, if it was really concerned with the free play of the invisible hand, and not with fostering opportunities overseas for American business.

Hong Kong is not, by international standards, a tough place to do business. But some of the consequences of economic freedom call for remedial action. Being the place in the world where this point is least understood should not be regarded as flattering. And the degree of ease can be overstated. Certainly its very easy to set up an import/export company. On the other hand if you wish to open a restaurant…

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Time has alas caught up with my last passport. This is a sad moment because it means saying farewell to an interesting collection of chops and visas, some of which I am unlikely to collect again. The replacement process is reasonably painless. One goes to the British Consulate, an improvement on the arrangement in Lancaster, where the passport people shared premises with the unemployment benefit office, an arrangement which used to lead to interesting misunderstandings. Here the wait is not excessive, the charge is reasonable, the staff are friendly.

I remain resentful that the handsome dark blue hardback which used to stand out in a pile of passports on any group tour has now been replaced by a soft little red thing, with European Union on the front. Some further changes have been made since my old passport was issued. The pages of translation, which tell Immigration officers in 22 languages the meanings of such vital terms as “name” and “sex”, have been moved to the back of the book, next to the page where such matters as my name and sex (the demure use of “gender” for this purpose has apparently not yet reached the Foreign Office)  are actually recorded. The inside front page, which used to say only “European Union”. “United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland” and “Passport”, but said them in 12 languages, has now been tidied up.

The same phrases are provided, but now only in three languages. One of them, mercifully, is still English. I am not sure about the other two. The language which renders European Union as “Yr Undeb Ewropeaidd” might I suppose be Welsh. Actually providing this translation seems a bit unnecessary, certainly as far as the word “Passport” is concerned. The Welsh word for Passport is Pasbort. I would have thought Welsh speakers could have worked out what Passport was. Perhaps they’re thick. The other language has a passing resemblance to some of the technical terms used in Scottish bagpiping, so I suppose it might be Gaelic. Why Her Britannic Majesty’s Sec of State for Foreign Affairs bothers with these lingistic adornments is beyond me. Most of the few people who speak Welsh or Gaelic are perfectly capable of reading English. If the Foreign Office wants to help British citizens who can’t handle the language they would probably help more people if the extra language supplied was Urdu.

The other thing which has changed is the instructions which come with your new travel document. These now tell you that your passport contains a sensitive electronic chip and should be treated like a mobile phone. It must not be bent, twisted, dunked, heated, steamed, microwaved or put near a television set. It should not be allowed to sunbathe. I have never heard of anyone microwaving their passport but I suppose after the famous case of the woman who tried to dry her cat in a microwave oven we are taking no chances. The irony in this is, of course, that if you were designing a passport from scratch and you knew it was going to contain a fragile chip, you would not produce the pathetic floppy thing which we are now offered. You would go for something solid like the traditional blue hardback which was abolished as unEuropean. While one bureaucrat was moving to snappy paperback passports, another one was planning to insert therein a sensitive chip which should not be bent or twisted.

This is the sort of thing which often happens in large organisations. Indeed it happens in Hong Kong. I notice that the MTR Corp is still planning its network so that everyone will have easy access to Hung Hom, where the old mainline station will be devoted entirely to trains to China. Meanwhile, at enormous expense, a new station for trains to China is being constructed on the other side of Kowloon. Needless to say it is too late to change any of this…

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Readers who suspect that judges live on a distant planet barely visible from the Earth will not have been surprised by the performance of Mr Justice Alan Wright in the Court of First Instance last Thursday. In His Lordship’s dock was a Ms Ng Wai-bing, whose story is rather interesting.

The court was told, according to newspaper reports, that in 2007 Ms Ng’s husband (who may or may not be Mr Ng, Hong Kong habits in this matter being unpredictable) was charged with managing a vice establishment. Ms Ng was waiting in the room outside the court where witnesses, friends of participants, people whose case has not come up yet and other hangers about sit on hard benches produced by resentful previous customers in prison workshops.  She overheard a policeman urging witnesses in the upcoming case to “nail”  the defendant. We only have Ms Ng’s word for this part of the proceedings but in view of what came later the story is plausible. Now policemen are not supposed to coach witnesses in this way, but Ms Ng thought her testimony in the matter might well be dismissed as unreliable or irrelevant. She was the defendant’s wife, after all, and also Hong Kong judicial figures tend to be impervious to complaints of police malpractices. Ms Ng was familiar with this point because she is a former police person herself.  So in order to produce evidence which would brook no dispute she started taping the conversations in the waiting room, and over four months (this seems to have been a very complicated case) collected 47 recordings.  As a result of this evidence-gathering exercise the case against her husband was dismissed, and two of the officers involved in it are now awaiting trial on charges of attempting to pervert the course of public justice. In other words, a miscarriage of justice has been prevented, and two suspected criminals have been brought to book.

Naive readers might suppose at this point that Ms Ng might be eligible for one of those awards occasionally dished out to law-abiding citizens who help the police. Well perhaps that is a bit optimistic. Oddly enough these awards do not seem to find their way to people who help the police to avoid infelicities in their own behaviour.  What may come as something of a surprise is that Ms Ng was not only not praised; she was charged with contempt of court. Quite how this worked in legal terms did not emerge very clearly from the newspaper reports. The Post had some quotes from Ms Ng’s lawyer which suggested that what was going on was an extension of the ban on recording in court on the grounds that the waiting room was part of the court.

Reading the quotes provided from Mr Justice Wright’s judgment, on the other hand, suggested a more general offence of conduct whereby confidence in the administration of public justice might be impaired. Certainly reading the story reduces one’s confidence in the conduct of public justice, not so much because of the possibility that someone might have bugged the waiting room, as because of the possibility that policemen are coaching prosecution witnesses with impunity and Wright J thinks this happy state of affairs should be preserved. There was a substantial risk, he said, that litigants or witnesses would be deterred from attending court if they thought that someone might be eavesdropping or recording their consultations and conversations. This is, with respect, nonsense. The waiting room is a public place. Everyone can eavesdrop on everyone else. People who want to have private consultations and conversations have other places to go to. In any case, as judges frequently observe when giving the green light for phone tapping, close circuit cameras, random breath testing and other intrusions on privacy, the law-abiding have nothing to fear.  The thought that someone may be taping your conversation is a yawn unless your conversation consists of an attempt to pervert the course of justice. Mr Wright, though, thought Ma Ng’s conduct a “singularly grave instance of contempt of court”. It was “unprecedented … throughout Common Law jurisdictions”, he had been told. Presumably by the prosecution, whose research on this point may not have been very enthusiastic.

At this point Ms Ng must have been looking forward to the chance to sew a few mailbags, read the whole of War and Peace, and sample the Correctional cuisine for a few months. And indeed she was sentenced to nine months. A friend who helped with the recording got six months. But Mr Wright seems to have had some inkling that this outcome would be seen as somewhat bizarre by many people denied the benefits of a lengthy legal education, because both sentences were suspended for 18 months. So Ms Ng walked from the court a free woman, and will stay that way unless the temptation to commit contempt of court again becomes overwhelming in the near future.

The story behind this story will be familiar to former students who have been subjected to my version of media law over the years. The law on contempt of court in the UK was reformed in 1981. In 1987 the Law Reform Commission recommended that Hong Kong should have a comprehensive Contempt of Court Ordinance which would incorporate reforms and also remove uncertainty. Like so many of the commission’s recommendations this one was ignored. So the law is still a mess. So it goes.

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Our beloved Post was in a right tizz this morning over the number of accidents involving minibuses. “Minibuses’ high crash rate fails to spur action,” complained the lead headline. The story started with the news that the accident rate for minibuses was 7.5 times that of all other Hong Kong vehicles, said that this “translated” into 21 deaths and 187 injured last year, and proceeded to accuse the Transport Department of dragging its feet despite the “alarming figures”.

Further statistics floated in further down the story. We were told that the accident rate for minibuses was 255.2 per thousand vehicles, compared with 34.1 per thousand for all vehicles. Alert readers would have spotted at this point that they had already been misled. The minibus accident rate is not 7.5 times the rate for all other vehicles, it is 7.5 times the average for all vehicles including minibuses.
Looking at it another way we were told that only 0.76 per cent of the vehicles in Hong Kong are minibuses, but they are involved in 5 per cent of all accidents. And the question which all this left in my mind is where are the alarming figures? We have all heard the rumours that, as the story put it in due course, “minibuses are notorious for speeding and violating traffic regulations”. I have heard, indeed, that the late night express to Sheung Shui is the most exciting ride in Hong Kong outside Ocean Park. But if we are going to hang a story on the statistics they had better be the right ones. And these weren’t.

Look at it this way. The number of accidents per minibus is bound to be higher than the average. Most Hong Kong cars do a half-hour drive to the office in the morning, and half an hour back in the evening. Much of the “driving” actually consists of sitting in tunnel queues, where a serious accident is scarcely possible because everyone is moving so slowly. Some car drivers don’t even do that. The owner commutes by public transport and drives for fun at the weekend. Minibuses are on the road all the time. Of course the number of accidents per minibus will be higher. I expect we would find that the rate for taxis and buses is also above average, for the same reason. If we want to know whether minibuses are unreasonably dangerous then we need another figure. We could try the number of accidents per mile travelled. Or we could use that great favourite of the airlines the number of accidents per passenger mile. Or if we prefer we could try the number of accidents per trip. I am quite willing to believe that whichever figure you used the outcome would be alarming. But if you are going to beat a government department over the head with the statistics you need a figure which means what you say it means.

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