tim's experiment

I am all for justice being tempered with mercy. The only statement in the Bokhary row that I agreed with was the magistrate’s observation that sending her to prison would ruin the rest of her life. This was probably true of many of the hundreds of people he has sent to prison during his judicial career, but it is nice to see enlightenment dawn, however late. Anyway, I am not by instinct a hanger and flogger, all right?

Still, I am moved to protest by the campaign Jake Van der Kamp has been running in the Sunday Post, to the effect that financial crime should be regarded as trivial, or better still as not really crime at all. I realise that it is common for people in dodgy professions – like salesmen of used cars, double glazing, Oriental carpets or uncompleted Hong Kong flats – to feel that the little tricks they play on the public should be regarded as a bit of harmless fun. But I did not think people in the financial business wished to be considered in that category. Although looking at some of the people they elect to Legco, perhaps they do.

Look, if the events of the last two or three years have taught us anything, it is surely that financial shenanigins have serious consequences. They lead to stagnant economies, bankrupt businesses, lost jobs, wrecked families, ruined lives. The consequences may be out of sight. That does not mean tbey should be out of mind.  Me Van der Kamp argues that financial crimes do not leave “blood on the pavement” so nobody is hurt, and the victims volunteered by swimming in a pool which they knew contained sharks. These attempts at mitigation tell us nothing about whether a crime should be treated seriously or not. “She was not hurt” and “she asked for it” are the two excuses most often offered by rapists and paedophiles.  The people who rob you with a fountain pen are gentlemanly types with nice cars, Jockey Club memberships and friends in the business media. But they’re still robbers.

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Watching the Global Football TV programme twirl past my nose (you have to watch something while you’re exercising and I have conscientious objections to 24) I suddenly realised that I had passed an unexpected statistical landmark. The entire 2010 World Cup had passed, and I had seen none of it.   Not one kick of the ball – no goals, no noteworthy incidents, no opening or closing ceremonies – nothing. I realise that for some people this might be unexceptional, and even welcome. I remember one of my colleagues on the Derby Evening Telegraph going out to get some public reaction to the latest development at the local footy club. “Son,” said the first person he asked, “if they played in my front garden I would close the curtains.” Not everyone is a fan. Well I am not really a fan, but I take an interest.

I remember sitting at home to watch the World Cup in considerable detail when it was held in England, and we won. I remember hiring a second hand television on behalf of a floor full of students so we could watch it in Mexico, although England had I think not qualified. When I had done five years as a sports reporter the urge to watch the whole thing had disappeared. Watching football was work. But I still tuned in for the odd game. If you work in the education business and have modern teaching technology you can now put your employer’s equipment to work and watch on a very large screen, which is fun. But as far as South Africa is concerned I missed the whole thing.

This is partly, of course, because they no longer have it on the old free-to-air television network. You can’t see anything unless you have cable. I fell out with the cable people a couple of years ago – a long story – so we just have the basic stuff. And the World Cup was not on it. No doubt I should have expected this. More surprisingly it was not on the news either. News coverage of every football league in the world includes a bit of footage. Usually a few seconds of action with a goal at the end of it. But this time the World Cup was an exception. No clips, however short, on the news. So the television news people were reduced to still pictures and occasional computer reconstructions, followed by live interviews with fans outside the stadium.  The excitement in South Africa, if there was excitement, was not conveyed. Even after the Cup was over the mysterious shortage continued. The Global Football programme has no clips either.

Now I don’t know if the World Cup people adopted this as an explicit policy, but the result of their efforts, at least in Hong Kong, was that you could not so much as see a ball being kicked unless you payed someone. It might be the cable people, or a cinema, or a bar owner, but the idea that this was something which a moderately interested person could watch for free has disappeared. So I suppose I was not the only moderately interested person who missed it completely this time around.  And I wonder how long the thing will last as the great show it used to be if this level of greed is deployed every time. Of course the game needs its avid fans. But it also needs the vast legion of occcasionally interested onlookers whose attention fosters the delusion that what happens on the pitch is important. The game needs to be talked about. If all the water-cooler conversations die after a few sentences because only the fanatics saw any of the games then interest will eventually be combined to a few rabid enthusiasts, as it is for rowing or chess.

Having said which being bombarded with the Olympics for two weeks was no fun either. Is there a happy medium in these matters?

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I am puzzled by the spectacle of the government fighting a flat-out legal battle over whether the mysterious Ms W (who was Mr W several operations ago) can marry her Mr Right. I mean we taxpayers have been pushing the boat out here. I have no idea what fees were paid to the QC flown out specially from London to argue on the government’s behalf, but I’ll wager she did not fly tourist and she did not stay in Chung King Mansions either.

I can see how we got to this stage. Faced with an applicant for marriage with a birth certificate in the wrong gender the bureacrat behind the desk would pass the matter to higher authority. This higher authority, still pretty junior, would take the safe course and say “no”. This would then work its way up the pyramid, with successive layers concluding that they must support the front-line staff and those people know what they are doing anyway. So the underlings say “no” becasue they think the matter should be decided higher up and the higher-ups say “no” because they think it should be decided by the underlings. This is how public administration works, or doesn’t work, as the case may be.

With the arrival of the court case the matter has to go to the Department of Justice, but to the part of the department where justice takes second place to finding legal pretexts for whatever the government has decided it wants to do. Since government policy is to say “no” the department says “no” and everyone is happy except Ms W. And so we go to court. Probably the best thing, actually. The gender situation is a good deal more complicated that it was when the law was drafted. And in all the paper-shuffling so far, nobody has really had a chance to sit back and consider the matter from scratch. Let a judge have a look by all means. But why the enormous trouble and expense? What has the government got to lose?

After all the fact is that this particular question is not going to come up very often. People in W’s situation have a hard row to hoe. Years of psychological confusion lead to prolonged and painful medical encounters. Finally making the longed-for transformation tends to lead to loss of friends and job. And having arrived, the new you is not going to be a prime property in the marriage market. Not only do you have an exotic personal history. Medical science has not actually reached the stage where pregnancy is possible. So the number of eager couples who are going to turn up at the registry with confusing birth certificates is minute. This is a decision which has virtually no practical consequences, except for those personally involved, for whom it is all-important. Saying “yes” would have done them a great kindness and done nobody any harm.

So why is the government resisting with such enthusiasm? I do not believe that this is a slippery slope situation. Are we really to believe that a homosexual man, wishing to contract a same-sex marriage, might undergo prolonged psychological therapy, have his hormones sabotaged, endure extensive and painful surgery to rearrange his private parts and turn himself into a woman to marry someone who prefers men…? This is nonsense. Some of our leaders lead a sheltered existence but surely there are experts who can put them straight on this sort of thing. The worrying rumour is that they are consulting the wrong sort of experts. It seems that a surprising number of our political appointees are members of fundamentalist sects of one kind or another. They spend their Sunday mornings being told that God intended sex to be conducted on rare occasions between married couples of opposing sexes in the missionary position. This is a poor basis for policy-making, but then these unelected people don’t have to tell us what they really think about anything.

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If oyu don’t remember who Mr Zinger was that is probably because you are not a serious Bob Dylan fan. Mr Zinger, a rich young man, killed a waitress in a Baltimore hotel and was jailed for a mere six months. Dylan’s song about the case is a small masterpiece, though not one of his much-covered ones. Perhaps it is a bit too long.

Anyway Mr Zinger came to mind because there has been much discussion lately about the way in which the law treats, or doesn’t treat, defendants with rich daddies and other attributes like, as the song has it, “friends in high office in the politics of Maryland”, or the local equivalent. This has always been a delicate topic. Teachers of law will tell you at an early stage that one of the characteristics of the Common Law is that all people who appear in the courts are treated equally. As in principle they are. We all recognise that the practice does not quite come out like that. One of the important functions of the law is to protect property, and this is of little interest to those who have little of it. Judges tend to come from a sheltered and educated background; defendants do not.  Anatole France wrote of “the majestic equality of the laws, which forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets and to steal bread.” An Englishman observed more succinctly that “the Courts of Law are open to all – like the Ritz Hotel”.  To put it bluntly, we all know that if you are a rich bitch with good connections and an expensive lawyer you can get away with almost anything short of murder (sorry, Nancy) whereas the outlook for Tin Shui Wai housewives fresh off the China train is less rosy. Such is life.

Still it is usual for magistrates and judges to go to some lengths to conceal this. And this is a useful convention, because they then have to think seriously about the issues of principle involved. So while unstirred by the affaire Bokhari I am quite disturbed that the magistrate shamelessly explained his benevolent approach to sentencing by referring to the defendant’s “well-off background”. Still this was a minor peccadillo compared with another case later in the week, in which the magistrate, jailing a man for indecent assault, said he would not risk the abuse he would get from the newspapers if he succumbed to a request for a non-custodial sentence for such a serious offence.  Leaving aside the question whether indecent assault is such a serious offence, this violates an important principle of judgeship. Magistrates and judges should not read newspapers if they can’t handle comments on their work. You boys and girls better all write out 200 times this quote from Lord Justice Salmon: “I am quite convinced that no judge … would be influenced in any way by anything he read in the newspapers. If he were he would not be fit to be a judge.”

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Interesting story in Sunday’s Post about the Real Estate Developers’ Association, which has apparently commissioned a very expensive PR firm (nothing but the best for our plutocrats) to find out what the public thinks of them and why. The first interesting thing about this piece of news is that it was not new. It was published the previous Tuesday here: http://biglychee.com/ We blogistas have to stick together.

The second funny thing about it is that the real estate moguls are going to pay a lot of money for something which many people would be happy to tell them for free. Many of us would be happy to have the chance to tell a selection of real estate developers what we think of them, which would go roughly like this:

The real estate business is populated entirely by lying scum whose attitude to ordinary people is much like that of shearers to ordinary sheep. They deploy shoals of legal landsharks to find loopholes in the laws designed to ensure that new buildings are reasonable in size, inoffensive in appearance and consistent with the government’s view of what would be in the public interest in the area concerned. Aided by subtle corruptionof the relevant parts of the civil service this enables them to inflict on our urban landscape buildings which are gross, ugly and frequently deployed in a way which not only spoils the view for everyone else but effectively prevents them from even seeing it. The industry’s ethics are non-existent, its aesthetics abysmal, and faced with a real estate developer as a potential son-in-law most of us would feel a strong preference for an ordinary decent murderer.  Added to these offences is their malign influence on public policy, which includes preventing the government from running a decent public housing programme, and slagging off the Chief Executive in Beijing if he does not share REDA’s bloated opinion of its importance to the local economy. We blame real estate developers largely for the fact that accomodation in Hong Kong is hideously expensive, and considerably for the shortcomings of our political system. Also we don’t like them. Too many come across in public as arrogant fatcats with antediluvian politics and obnoxious personalities.

As to what the expensive PR people will think up to remedy this situation, the mind — as they say — boggles. I am not going to try to help this bunch of bandits but some of the more objectionable individuals might improve the overall average perception if they contrived to drop dead in the street.

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The news that an 81-year-old minibus driver died while sitting in his cab without air conditioning, pursuant to the new rules on idling engines, raised a number of issues. I am not sure that I really subscribe to the inference drawn by professional drivers, that the new law will endanger their health. No doubt the inside of a roasting minibus is not pleasant. But when you are 81 the call from Saint Peter can come any time.

What this story does show is the total inadequacy of Hong Kong’s provision for the aged. Why was this poor man still working at an age when most of us expect to be enjoying ourselves – if we are still here? Because there is no old age pension, even for the very old. If I had been in Legco last week I would have thrown a banana myself, when Donald Tsang, asked if the conditions attached to “fruit money” could be relaxed a bit, wondered whether the government could afford it. Come on, the government has reserves oozing from every pore, it blows gazillions without a qualm on useless railways lines and new layers of political sinecures. It can afford whatever it really wants. Of course it is a tenet of every influential plutocrat in Hong Kong that if you take money from rich people and give it to poor people it just makes them lazy. But surely at some point in our lives we are allowed to be lazy?

Then there is the question of the environment. The official approach to this, as to other matters, is not to start with the important bits, but to start with the easy bits. Hong Kong’s air is filthy. Shall we get the power companies to give up using the dirtiest fuel known to man? Too difficult. Shall we persuade our brothers over the boundary that having a coal-fired generator in each factory is bad for your health? Sensitive. Will we persuade the transport industry to base its trucks in Hong Kong instead of filling our streets with mainland 12-wheelers which have carefully filled themselves with communism’s filthy diesel before crossing the border? Tricky. Will we persuade the bus companies to junk their older jallopies and get some electric, or at least hybrid, buses on the road? The expense, the expense! Will we grab a few elderly minibus drivers and fine them for keeping their engines running? At last a practical suggestion! 

Then there is a rather delicate question. Should a person at this age be allowed to work as a minibus driver at all. Let me declare an interest: I have reached an age at which this is a topic of some person interest. I do not suggest that there is some age at which nobody should be allowed to drive at all. People who live in places where the roads are quiet and the alternatives non-existent will need to make a different decision from those in places where the driving is demanding and the public transport adequate. Some people age better than others. Some were better drivers than others in the first place. But driving a minibus in Hong Kong seems like no country for old men. Whenever this topic comes up I remember my time as a court reporter, which occasionally included coverage of inquests. These are much more common in the UK than they are in Hong Kong. There is an inquest, for example, into every fatal road accident.  Where the road crash involved an elderly driver the unvoiced question always hung in the air, that perhaps if said driver had been more young and alert the accident would not have happened. This is a depressing thought, so I think I will hang up my driving licence at the age when the government starts requiring a medical check. After all if you hit someone — even the archetypal death-wish pedestrian crossing the road while deep in mobile conversation — you will always wonder, even if nobody ever asks…

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I was going to skip the constitutional reform shindig, partly because I am busy — my son gets married tomorrow — and partly because so many people have had a go already. But they have all missed something, which we will come to in a minute.

There seems to have been a certain amount of bias in the coverage of the whole thing. Much has been made of the split in the pro-democracy camp. But at least it has left the politicians in that camp with some dignity and respectability. After all in the long run people will recognise that it is possible to be devoted to democracy and draw two very different conclusions: that one should vote for anything which gets us nearer to democracy or that one should not vote for anything less than the real thing. The difference is really not one of principle, but of tactics. Judging by Phillip Bowring’s comments in the Post this morning he would not have voted for the reform package. I rather think I would have. The fact that we disagree on this point is not a problem. Of course the politician who told his voters that he would only vote for the real thing has no choice. Those who agreed to negotiate with mainland officials also have no choice. Having asked for the apparently impossible and been given it, to reject it would have cast doubt on the honesty of the whole process. Perhaps they should ask for more next time.

Leader and letter writers have been very excited about the “Long Hair” comment that Szeto Wah’s cancer seemed to have reached his brain. But this is an example of that fine old journalistic tradition, the quote taken out of context. Mr Szeto put brain health on the agenda by suggesting that anyone who voted against the government’s package had a problem with his brain. Having put brains into the arena Mr Szeto had no legitimate complaint about his own being examined, and indeed although other people have complained it seems that he has not.  I must say also that although I have the greatest regard and admiration for much of Mr Szeto’s distinguished record (and I think in the education functional constituency I voted for him several times) there is a certain poetic justice at work here. When he went out of his way to end the political career of Mrs Elsie Tu some pretty nasty things were said on his behalf.

But as I said before, at least the democrats emerge as real people, with real opinions. By contrast the pro-government politicoes look like poodles and the pro-Beijing ones like puppets, What do the Liberal Party and the DAB stand for, one wonders? Whatever they are told to stand for, seems to be the answer.

Now to the missing link. The government is now committed to having five “functional constituency” seats whose electorate comprises the entire population minus that smidgeon who already have functional constituency lay-abouts operating on their behalf. The only condition announced as part of the deal is that candidates will have to be nominated by district board members. This leaves a great deal to be decided. Least surprising headline last week was the one which said that officials were considering “some form” of proportional representation for these seats.

Now I must say that even for me (I was a constitutional historian in my youth) election systems are one of those topics like double-entry book-keeping and pension arrangements which are worthy but dull. The eyelids droop at the mention of their name. So let us keep this simple.

Officials are now pondering how they can fix the system to keep as many democrats as possible out of the new seats.  Given that in the absence of some mammoth mistake some 60 percent of the population will vote for a democrat this is a bit of a tall order. One solution would be to put stringent restrictions on the nomination procedure. If for example we say that any candidate requires the nomination of 15 district councillors from the same district, then we can hope that many “undesirable” possibilities will be unable to reach the starting gate. But this would be a bit blatant. Some less obvious variation will no doubt be attempted. We cannot do the simple thing: divide the territory into five constituencies. each returning one member. That would produce five democrats. So we are probably doomed in the end to some variation on party lists in one monstrous super-constituency covering the whole territory, and the electors having one vote each. This will produce five members who are answerable to nobody but with reasonable luck at least two of them will be from the DAB or its fellow travellers. Remember you read it here first.

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The government’s advertisements — I beg your pardon announcements — urging us to “Act Now”, raise interesting questions. Not about the merits of “acting now” a topic on which we have no power and will not be consulted. Nor about the merits of the ads — I beg your pardon announcements — themselves, though they were well down to the standards to which we have become accustomed. The announcements urging you to change the water in your flower pots at least offer an argument: standing water = moquitoes = tropical diseases. Act Now’s analogy with ballroom dancing was just an appeal to a poor metaphor. 

The question which will no doubt provide some entertainment and income for sundry lawyers in the near future is whether it is proper for a TV company to broadcast such a thing, when we have been repeatedly told that the broadcast media are not allowed to run political advertisements. As it happens we have some recent examples. A political party, the DAB, sponsored a radio programme. The DAB, as is its habit, did not defend this as either not an advertisement or as legal on other grounds. They said the democrats had also broken the rules, pointing to a paid ad from Ms Emily Lau announcing a political meeting. 

It seems to me, assuming that the DAB’s characterisation of Ms Lau’s broadcast is accurate, that both these offerings should have been refused by the station concerned, because both ought to be covered by the ban on political advertising. Clearly an announcement of a meeting ought to be covered by any ban on political ads. It is not asking people to buy something, but that is not what politicians do.  Media may, as a public service, report the date and time of upcoming meetings but a paid for announcement is an advertisement, like an announcement of a birth, marriage or death. The sponsorship of a programme may be a more subtle form of advertising, but advertising it is. Makers of expensive watches to do not sponsor programmes which consist of a ten-second look at a clockface because of a philanthropic desire to ensure that television viewers know what the time is. The sponsor hopes that people will think better of him because of his sponsorship. That does not, of course, mean that the DAB may not sponsor public-spirited programmes. It means only that such sponsorship may not be announced over the airwaves. If the party no longer wishes to sponsor a programme on those terms then the claims of public-spirited motivation are hypocritical, a common ailment in political parties. 

This brings us to the “Act Now” spots. I think you would need to have a very expensive legal education to dispute the point that these were political. The future constitutional arrangements for Hong Kong are clearly a matter within any reasonable definition of political matters. They are discussed predominantly by politicians, and the matter is to be decided in the Legislative Council, which few will dispute is a political body. And indeed the official spokesman who tackled the matter did not dispute that the subject matter was political. He said that Announcements of Public Interest were for the purpose of informing the public about government policy, and the proposed reforms became government policy once they were approved by Exco. 

We will perhaps leave to the lawyers, who enjoy this sort of thing, the question whether on the face of it this is enough. If broadcasters are prevented by law from broadcasting political ads this should surely include political ads offered by the government, whether or not those ads fall within the proper definition of an API. If I complain to the Broadcasting Authority that an API is a political ad is the authority going to reply that such announcements are above the law? What would happen, one wonders, if in an unguarded moment the government perpetrated an API which was indecent or obscene? Would the station which had actually broadcast it be allowed the defence that it had no editorial control over the matter? 

But I suspect these questions are unnecessary, because the official concerned was quite wrong in suggesting that a matter became “government policy” once it was approved by Exco. This might have been good enough in the old days when Exco was “The Governer-in-Council” and he did not have to take its advice if he did not like it. The Legislative council, in those days, was entirely chosen by the Governor and if it had flatly refused to do his bidding he could replace it in toto or rule by decree. However our present constitutional arrangements are different. Government legislation and spending require the approval of Legco. Changes to the electoral arrangements are explicitly stated to require the approval of Legco. Clearly Legco is constitutionally part of the Government. It is not the Chief Executive’s creature and nor is he encouraged to rule without it. Accordingly a decision on matters within Legco’s competence or requiring Legco’s approval cannot, it seems to me, become government policy until the council has had its say. Until that point they are still policy under construction, as it were, and cannot be regarded as appropriately uncontroversial for an API. This point has been nicely illustrated by the events of the last few days, in which it has been discovered that the proposals praised in the Act Now ads are no longer government policy, which now favours an amended version. So the APIs were APIs last week but would be political ads if aired again this week. Come on folks, the law may be an ass, or in the case of some lefty lawyers a weathercock, but surely it is not as stupid as that…

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It is a sad story when someone who is cycling along without a care in the world is struck by a falling tree, and suffers fatal injuries. One sympathises with the relatives and friends of Choi Kit-keung, who suffered this misfortune in Shatin last week. Having said which some of the resulting complaints have many of us barking, if you’ll excuse the phrase in this context, up the wrong tree.

Trees are a part of nature and like other parts, including us, they eventually grow old and die. When this happens unexpectedly, or is hastened by rough weather, they may, also like us, fall over. This is part of nature’s rich pageant and to expect our government to change it in the name of “tree safety” is fruitless and wasteful. Actually accidents involving falling trees are extremely rare. The last one before this was two years ago. Before that I don’t remember any. If you are hit by a falling tree you may rightly rail against the harshness of fate in your case. But from an overall point of view this is not a common hazard. The likelyhood of being knocked off your twig by a falling tree is extremely low: somewhere between being struck by lightning and being kidnapped by the North Korean Secret Service. You are far more likely to win the Mark Six.

So it is a spectacular waste of money to have teams of civil servants roaming the territory taking the pulse of sickly trees. And now, according to this morning’s papers, the district crime squad is looking into the matter. What on Earth could it have to do with them? Murder by Death Watch Beetle? Where are you, Agatha Christie, when we need you?

The serious side of all this is that in the brouhaha over trees an important point has been overlooked. Mr Choi was not beaten to death by the tree. When he fell off his bike he struck his head on  the pavement, causing the injury which killed him. So the moral of the story is not that the government should be taking more care of trees. It is that cyclists should wear crash helmets. I readily admit that when I was a kid we all rode bare-headed. But in many countries now the wearing of some sort of protective headgear is virtually universal, if not compulsory. In Hong Kong it is almost unheard of except among the serious racing fraternity. This should be changed. This would be a more constructive reaction to Mr Choi’s death than griping about government tree inspectors. It is of course perfectly legal to ride a push bike without a helmet. But if someone chooses to play roulette with his life it is too late to complain when the ball drops into the zero hole.

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Last week, in preparation for the football World Cup, the government launched an anti-gambling campaign. This clearly came from the same rhetorical neck of the woods as the anti-drugs campaign. Young people were urged not to gamble at all. There were no half measures, no exemptions for “harmless flutters” or games with friends for nominal stakes. Our young were firmly told to stear clear of gambling of all kinds. It seems that officials accept, at least as far as the younger generation is concerned, that gambling is a social evil and a potentially dangerous addiction.

This is a view with which on the whole I agree despite having, long ago, enjoyed a short but lucrative career as a bingo caller. Some people do not become addicted to gambling, just as some poeple do not become addicted to tobacco or, for that matter, heroin. But the harm done to those who get hooked probably ought to outweigh the rather modest pleasure provided to those who don’t. However this praiseworthy point of view sits rather oddly wth some other government activities. There was a “Don’t gamble fun fair” opened by Acting Secretary for Home Affairs Florence Hui, Director of Broadcasting Franklin Wong Wah-kay, Chairman of the Ping Wo Fund Advisory Committee (don’t ask) Dr Yau Wing-kwong, member of the Betting and Lotteries Commission Tsang Chi-hung, Director of Operations of the Hong Kong Police Paul Hung, chairman of the Hong Kong Football Association Brian Leung, and Legco member Dr Samson Tam.  Some of these people must be considered to be either confused or perhaps a touch hypocritical. The Betting and Lotteries Commission is not, as far as we know, dedicated to the abolition and suppression of betting and lotteries. Nor is the Hong Kong Police Force, whose efforts in this area are limited to protecting the lucrative momopoly in legal gambling enjoyed bythe Hong Kong Jockey Club. RTHK is far from free of information of interest to and intended for gamblers. And the government itself does very well out of the Jockey Club.

There was an interesting letter in the Post this morning, apparently part of C.Y. Leung’s non-campaign for the Chief Executive’s job, in which Mr Leung pointed out that the rather stingy space provided for orang otangs in our local zoo was no worse than the space provided for many human beings in our city. Mr Leung offered the statistical snippet that 43 per cent of all housing units in Hong Kong are smaller than 40 square metres. He did not, as he might have done, go on to compare this with the rolling hectares provided for the fun and games of the small minority of the population who can afford to own race horses.

There was a time when the government did not ban dangerous drugs. Instead it sold a monopoly to a person called the “Opium Farmer” and protected his monopoly by prosecuting alternative suppliers and their customers. This now seems a rather disreputable arrangement. It is, however, exactly what the government still does with gambling. What is the point of holding fun fairs urging people not to gamble when there is a government-sanctioned and approved betting shop on every housing estate, and so many top people are members of our local four-legged casino that the Court of Appeal thinks it would be hard to find a judge who was not on the roll? One thing which never works with young people is that line that goes “don’t do as I do; do as I say.”

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