tim's experiment

One of my more easily shareable birthday presents was a translation of a poem:

At the foot of Shade Mountain

The sky, a woolly tent over the wilderness

Blue is the sky; boundless is the wild.

Grass bends in the wind, cattle and sheep showing

Since I first heard of it 30 years ago I have found something strangely haunting about the vision of tall grass bending in the wind, revealing previously hidden cattle and sheep. I would love to see it. One suspects a certain amount of poetic licence here. Grass tall enough to hide a sheep I can accept, but a cow?  On the other hand experience has taught me not to jump to conclusions about these things. I used to think that the odd-shaped mountains in so many Chinese paintings were purely conventional, perhaps partly motivated by the desire to fill a very vertical canvas. Upon coming to Hong Kong, where photographs of Chinese mountains are everywhere, I discovered that the paintings were no more than faithful renditions of some unusual but perfectly authentic pieces of landscape. So I am keeping an open mind on the cow-high pasture. Still the place sounds beautiful, and reading things like this brings on a vigorous urge to get up there and see it.

This urge is then attenuated by reading the daily news, in which the picture of China, while still doing justice to the scenery, also includes currupt officials, violent policemen and a pervasive absence of anything recognisable as the rule of law. It is one of life’s little mysteries that a government which cannot protect the constitutional rights of citizens in the suburbs of its own capital should be so eager to extend its rule to distant islands and provinces. This poroduces a dilemma, particularly for foreigners who have studied Chinese history and culture before making the aquaintance of its modern manifestation. There used to be occasional complaints in Hong Kong that Foreign Office mandarins who had studied up on China developed a romantic attachment to the Tang Dynasty version of the country which was a severe handicap when dealing with the Deng Dynasty. One of my friends who, after growing up in Hong Kong, studied Chinese in the UK, lamented the number of his classmates who were distressed by the discovery that the country they had come to admire in its literary manifestations was in real life a nasty police state.

Of course the situation is in a way much worse for Hong Kong people, who would like to take their place in the great historical epic which is the heritage of China but are all too well aware that the epic has had some nasty moments in the last 50 years and not all of them have finished yet. In this morning”s papers was a story — not at all unusual — about a security firm in Beijing which had been caught rounding up petitioners, robbing and beating them before sending them back to their home provinces, under a business arraangement with the local governments concerned. What, I wonder, goes through the mind of a faithful local left-winger when he reads a story like that? It cannot be dismissed as capitalist propaganda. Like most such stories it comes from a mainland newspaper. One can say that China is better than it was, but when you start from a condition in which politically motivated persecution, violence, murder and even cannibalism are not just tolerated but encouraged as a matter of state policy, then a lot of improvement can still leave much to be desired. I suppose the solultion to the problem is to say that the government represents the country and “my country right or wrong”. G.K. Chesterton observed that this was like saying “my mother drunk or sober”.

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It is nice to see it almost universally recognised that the cost of housing in Hong Kong is becoming outrageous. Last week saw the passage of another grim landmark – a former public housing unit sold for more than a million dollars. I hope this made the idiot ideologies who insisted that public housing flats should be available for purchase by their occupants feel better. It made me feel that a flat which mighrt once have housed the desperate was now available to house millionaires. No doubt there will be limits to the gentrification of former public housing estates, if only for reasons of prestige, or lack of it. Still, we are left with a situation in which buying a small flat for a newly wed couple is beyond the reach of even two of the sort of salaries which most young Hong Kong people can command. Buying a flat in which one might wish to raise a few kids is simply beyond the reach period.

I do not seek your sympathy for me. Actually the Hamlett family benefited greatly from Mr Tung Chee-hwa’s demonstration that a government which controls the market in land can make house prices go down as well as up. While everyone was complaining about negative equity we bought a house which we could never have afforded before and we have not been able to afford since. What this experience illustrates, of course, is that price movements in any direction are not good or bad in themselves. They benefit some people and cost other people money. This explains why there is a certain infirmity of purpose in the government’s present attempts to reduce the rate at which the cost of housing is increasing. I put it in this rather elaborate way because I think to say that the government is trying to lower housing costs is to give them credit they do not deserve. There are two reasons for this.

One is that actually our legislators and their sycophants and small horses have their own interests at stake. If you look at the register of members interests, or take the trouble (thank you, SCMPost) to look up the interests of the political appointees who, at enormous expense, carry their briefcases, you will find very people who own no flats, quite a lot who own one, and a clear majority who own two or more. No doubt in a few cases the extra flat is for a relative, the domestic servants or the book collection. But in the majority of cases our leaders are investors in the very racket which they are now pretending to deplore. They have bought flats in the hope of making money by selling them at higher prices. I do not suggest that we shall see anything as shameless as people seeking to boost housing prices as a way of increasing the value of their own investments. I do believe that people in this position are likely to find arguments which tend to complacency more persuasive than those which tend to urgent action.

The second reason is the “negative equity” con. Look, if you buy a house its value as a resale object is a matter of pure fiction. You own a house or flat. You can live in it. If the price goes down you can still live in it. It is just as warm and waterproof as it was before. Now there is a catch in some places, and that is that you may need to move. If you live in a mining town and the mine closes then you will probably not be able to find a job locally. As large numbers of people are in the same position it is quite likely that the value of your home will fall, and you may well find it is worth less than the amount you still owe the bank. This presents an agonising dilemma and explains much of the pain caused in places like America and Spain by the bursting of local property bubbles. The choices lie between bankruptcy and unemployment, with a strong possibility of both. But this will never happen in Hong Kong, because ours is a small city with decent public transport. One would not, if given the choice, choose to commute between, say, Chai Wan and Tin Shui Wai. But it is possible, in the sort of times commonplace in sprawling commuter cities in other countries. So a Hong Kong person whose flat is having a downmarket moment can sit it out.

Negative equity is not a threat to home-owners. It is, of course, a threat to real estate investors. If the flat is worth less than you borrowed to buy it then your prospects of a profit are dim. It is also a threat to banks. Owners whose homes are worth less than the outstanding loan may be tempted to throw in the towel, send the bank the keys and leave it with a house or flat worth less than the loan for which it was supposed to be security. So any time there is negative equity we will here a concerted moan of dismay and sympathy for the victims, which is actually a hymn to hypocrisy. It will, though, be heard by Hong Kong officials, whose ears are particularly sensitive to any communication from the real estate business or the banks which support and batten off it.

So do not expect too much. It has been interesting, in recent months, to see how many people now recognise that Hong Kong enjoys government of the rich, by the rich and for the rich. It has been even more interesting to see many commentators suggesting that unless this is changed there will be some kind of violent explosion. This is all rather theoretical, though. And anyway, in a competition between greed and fear, greed usually comes out on top.

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It is beyond dispute that the tragedy in Manila was a tragedy. Grief is fully justified. Frustration with the local police is equally understandable, but perhaps less justified.

Should such an unhappy event take place in Hong Kong we will have to consider ourselves very lucky. Because it seems that everyone and his dog in this town, from Donald Tsang downwards via various pundits, columnists etc. to the man in the street. is an expert on the way in which such problems should be handled. The consensus among local talking heads is that the attempts to rescue the hostages were bungled, the police were bumbling, and this is why the whole thing ended in tears. Comparisons with the Keystone Cops were commonplace. The Phillipines, we were told, was a hotbed of corruption and incompetence, and that was why it should be punished with a government-organised travel boycott for not having a well-organised police force like ours, in which deranged cops only shoot themselves or – occasionally – each other.

The one thing which all these commentators have in common is, if you will excuse a blunt expression, ignorance. How many of us have watched live coverage of a hostage situation lasting several hours, after all? Answer, probably, none. We know that as hostage rescues go, having half the hostages killed doesn’t count in anyone’s training manual as a success. On the other hand having half of them rescued more or less unharmed is a distinct improvement on the worst possible outcome. Nobody learns anything about hostage rescues from news programmes, because on news programmes time moves very quickly. If the drama lasts an hour, or a week, you will only see 30 seconds of it: the SAS man swoops through the window, stun grenades pop distantly, the triumphant prime minister says a few words and it is on to the next sensation.

Consequently, I fear, most of us get our idea of what a hostage situation should look like from on-screen dramas of one kind or another. The problem with this is that they follow the rules for drama, which go roughly like this: the situation has to be sorted out in 90 minutes; the hostages, unless extremely obnoxious, must survive; the hostage taker, unless extraordinarily sympathetic, must die; the hero, who is usually a policeman, will unerringly make the right decisions. This is not because scriptwriters are dishonest, it is because time is money, viewers are easily bored, and they have to meet the standards set on other programmes. When do you ever see the hero go round the block in search of a parking place? He doesn’t, because there isn’t time for that sort of thing. What comes next has to come next.

The consequence of this long period of media training is that most people have no idea what a real hostage taking should look like. I have no idea either, but knowing your limitations is important. Some things – like construction sites and slaughter houses (or, to use the American euphemism, meat packing plants) – look a mess even when they are working properly. Others, like the annual meetings of listed companies, look smooth and well-organised even if the underlying reality is chaotic.  You have to wonder what the people who are complaining about the performance of the Manila police are comparing it with. Would they rather have German efficiency? At the Munich Olympics all the hostages died. Would they rather have the Brits running things, and have innocent foreigners blown away in the underground? Or should we call in the Yanks, and hope we don’t get the people who were in charge at Waco? I get the distinct impression that what most commentators really want is not the SAS or the Navy SEALS or the Los Angeles SWAT team or the Russian Spetznaz. What they want is Keanu Reeves.

Some of the complaints were clearly of cosmetic matters. One columnist complained that some of the Manila policemen were overweight. Another thought the hammer used on the coach windows disappointingly domestic. Oddly enough the only person I met who did not complain about the Manila police was a Hong Kong police person who might find himself in charge of a similar event here, if we are so unfortunate. His only comment was “There but for the grace of God go I.”  It is about time people recognised that hostage situations are unpredictable, difficult and do not always have happy endings. The Manila police may not be the bees’ knees of law enforcement. But they could be seen approaching a bus containing a homicidal lunatic armed with an M-16. Those of us who are not up for such dangerous activities would do well to shut up.

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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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