tim's experiment

Raders may feel there are more worthy recipients of thir sympathy than Tony Chan, fung shui master, seducer of elderly millionairesses and unsuccessful chaimant for the Chinachem moneypile. I do wonder, though, how Mr Chan can hope to get a fair trial on the charges of forgery which were apparently levied against him on Wednesday.
Generally if an event can give rise to a civil or a criminal case, the criminal case is done first (OJ Simpson was a conspicuous example). There are two reasons for this. One is that the interest of society in the suppression of crime should take precedence over the interest of individuals in pursuing legal claims against other individuals. The other is that the civil proceedings will in all likelihood be highly prejudicial of the criminal ones. A great deal of relevant evidence will be heard and reported to people who have no reason to believe at that time that they will later be involved in a criminal trial involving the same facts. Also the result will be a distraction. If the future criminal defendant wins, potential jurors may believe he has already established his innocence. If he loses they may jump to the contrary conclusion. This is particularly unfortunate because the standard of proof in civil matters is lower. Mr Justice Johnson Lam only had to decide on the balance of probabilities which will was the valid one. A criminal conviction requires proof beyond reasonable doubt.  The prosecution will now be helped by a wave of pre-trial publicity. Of course it sometimes happens, as in the notorious Oscar Wilde trials, that matters emerge in a civil trial which clearly call for a criminal prosecution afterwards. But that is hardly the case here. Given the appearance of two competing wills the possibility that one was bogus was there from the start and could have been investigated properly before the civil trial took place.

Under the circumstances it is perhaps a pity that the learned Lam rather let his mouth run away with him. Once he had found that the second will was a forgery there was no need for him to express an opinion on other matters not germane to this point, like who was sleeping with whom. I suppose it was necessary for him to report that he did not find Mr Chan a credible witness, but other aspersions on Mr Chan’s character were gratuitous. Rich nutty ladies are entitled to leave their fortunes to “scheming syc0phants” if they want to. Poor Nina does not seem to have had many alternatives. The whole case has been a monument to people’s willingness to appear unlovely in public if a few million dollars are at stake. I can’t think of anyone involved in the case who I would happily contemplate as a son-in-law.

Still, Mr Chan can still think himself lucky compared with the lady who was charged with driving while drunk and slapping a policeman last week. Reports of this case were spectacularly prejudicial, including names and pictures of defendant and victim, interviews with witnesses, accounts of television footage, and even the defendants’ previous convictions. Has the Department of Justice stopped bothering about prejudicial pre-trial coverage now, or are we only allowed to do it if it favours the prosecution?

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When I was still working for the SCMPost I wrote a piece congratulating (not entirely sincerely) local building inspectors on reaching a state of such progress in their work that time and money could be spared to pursue the owners of trivial adornments on three-story rural houses. One might have thought they had more urgent matters to attend to. And now that an elderly building has collapsed it seems they have. The department concerned has now decided to proceed urgently with inspections of hundreds of elderly multi-story buildings in run-down areas of the city. In other words they are going to conentrate on the most dangerous ones. Apparently nobody had thought of this move before…
Meanwhile a fascinating revelation in the Post, attributed to “a person familiar with renewal projects”. It goes like this: “Buying flats from developers usually costs much more than compensating individual owners. Instead of paying for a seven-year-old flat, the (URA) would have to compensate developers for the forsaken redevelopment opportunity.” Think about that. If the urban renewers buy your crumbling hovel from you, they will haggle over local hovel prices. If they buy it from a developer they throw money to compensate for his lost dreams. I wish I could say this was hard to believe.

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Actually the full name is Ruby Tuesday, named after a song with which fellow fossils will be familiar, and there is no Ruby, as far as I know. The restaurant chain has a few outlets in Hong Kong. One of the little mysteries of the local restaurant business is how it keeps going. There is nothing wrong with the food, and there are always plenty of customers, but the frequent flier benefits are amazing. For a small fee they will sell you card with which, for a year, you can eat at half price.  There are bonus points as well, though my family does not have the size or the appetite to qualify for them.

Still, the basic deal is spectacular. No, the regular prices are not outrageous. Nor is this a temporary expedient designed to get people to try the place. It has been going on for years. Recently they introduced a more expensive version of the card with which you can drink alcoholic drinks at half price as well. Needless to say local residents who go there tend to be equipped with the card. Indeed I am told that the children of the 80s turn up there in great shoals, but only if someone in the party qualifies for the discount.

The interesting thing is that this seems to defy the basic laws of restaurant economics, which state, or they did when I was covering such matters regularly, that only a quarter of what you pay goes on food. About half goes on fixed overheads and the rest is wages and, with luck, profit. Of course this wild generalisation conceals some odd wrinkles – the margin on tea and coffee, for example, is generally much higher, and wine, if you sell it, is a goldmine. But you rarely see anyone drinking alcohol in Ruby’s. So there is obviously something ingenious going on.

This is not going to turn into a food blog but Ruby is worth a try. The weekday set lunch is not covered by the discount scheme so you can experiment without the nagging feeling that everyone else in the place is paying half as much.

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To Shatin racecourse today to play the pipes in a sponsor’s “box” – a curious word for a space which could have accomodated a good sized dim sum restaurant. This was the first time I had been on the racecourse while racing was in progress. Alas, such is the size of the horse empire and the small role in its affairs accorded to visiting musicians, that we never actually saw a live horse. The life of a piper consists of a great deal of waiting around for a small burst of actual blowing. But even by those standards this was a long day. A morning rehearsal was cancelled so we waited for about five hours. The good news was that we had a pleasant space, and seats, to do it in.

I had brief glimpses of the rest of the premises. Some large windowless rooms full of screens and seats where people who were not even pretending to be interested in four-legged animals could track the numbers. Bits of transplanted hotel for the use of various privileged groups. Hordes of staff. The Jockey Club appears to be a sort of terrestrial Cathay Pacific Airways. Everything is done as it should be but none of the people doing it look happy. None of the punters seemed to be deterred by the thought that their opulent surroundings had been constructed with the money donated by previous pickers of slow ponies. Did I detect the smell of greed? Perhaps it was my imagination.

What was not my imagination was the occasional whiff of nicotine. It seems that the enthusiasm for banning smoking in crowded open-air spaces has not yet reached horse territory. Perhaps those legal eagles who think a plastic screen makes a dining space “indoors” could set themselves a real challenge by considering the legal status of the parade ring, which nawadays has a huge retracting roof.

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There is an old rule in journalism that you should not start a piece with a quotation. But there are exceptions to all rules, including this one. A good example is a piece by Albert Cheng in Saturday’s SCMP. This starts with a long quote. The gist of it is that the writer had tea with Donald Tsang and suggested that the government’s problems stemmed from failure to genuinely consult the people, and this deficiency could be remedied by better use of the existing consultation machinery. The author adds that Mr Tsang did not seem to take the point.

Mr Cheng then teases his readers by saying that they may suppose this quote to be from a critic of the government. Not so. Apparently it is from Mr Lew Mon-hung, a CPPCC member and a former member of the government think tank. This is really not that surprising. How many of the government’s critics are entertained to a chat over tea with Mr Tsang?

Mr Cheng thinks this is surprising, and so do I. But we think so for different reasons. Mr Cheng thinks it is surprising because in his view Mr Lew is overlooking his “duty to help the Hong Kong government implement various policies”. Mr Cheng objects to the “incompetence of some CCPC members from Hong Kong”. Their criticisms “supply the media with endless fodder, and provided significant leverage for the opposition to further weaken the government’s authority.” The duty of the government’s allies is to support it in a “disciplined” way. Members of the CPPCC are entitled to express their opinions, but only in private. and “maybe it’s time to weed out unqualified CPPCC and NPC members and bogus supporters”.

This seems to me a very fine example of the sort of thinking which got the government into its present mess. There used to an advertisement for (I think) toothpaste based on the idea that only your best friends will tell you if you have bad breath.  Many years ago a mainland official asked me if it would be possible to recruit advisers for the government in Hong Kong and I told him that it would be easy to recruit advisers but difficult to recruit advisers who would be willing to offer advice which was not welcome. He agreed. I was surprised by the quote from Mr Lew, not because I expect CPPCC members to support the government in a robotic fashion but because generally that is all they do. Mr Lew took the opportunity to give Mr Tsang some valuable advice — all the more valuable because it could not be discredited at source by being put put down to political hostility or opposition.

No doubt it would be useful to the government to have a chorus of dependable cheerleaders and Mr Cheng is obviously well qualified to be cheerleader in chief. But it would be even more useful to have a few people who cannot be dismissed as malcontents or Martin Lee fans or closet demogogues or whatever, who are prepared to tell the government publicly and privately what they think it is doing wrong and how it is viewed by ordinary members of society who would like to see it prosperous and popular. The suggestion that all in-house critics should be expelled from the advisory mechanism is just prompting the government to go further down a blind alley in which it has already spent far too long.

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I know commenting on politics is supposed to be a game for the polite, but aren’t some of us overlooking an elephant in the room? Several political parties are currently contemplating, or promising, a boycott of the non-referendum caused by five Legco resignations. Much has been said and written about the opinions on the matter expressed by sundry Beijing apparatchiks, and the results of polls of the public’s view of the exercise. Nobody has pointed out the obvious. These parties would lose.

They must know this. The system used in regular Legco elections was carefully designed to favour small political parties. If we used the usual simple first-past-the-post system in single-member constituencies then all the winners would be democrats. Our screwed-up system was designed to help the DAB, but it helps any small party. So much so indeed that large parties are tempted to masquerade as small parties by fielding more than one list in the same constituency. This arrangement opened the door to Legco for the Liberals, and in due course for the Social Democrats. But the underlying reality is that two-thirds of the electorate vote for something more or less democratic every time.

The by-elections are a different kettle of fish. Only one seat will be available in each constituency. It is a straight race to see who gets the most votes. Under these circumstances a Liberal candidate would be lucky to keep his deposit. A DAB candidate will get the 30-odd percent which is the party’s normal crop. I know the DAB has been recruiting eagerly, but on the other hand all those geriatric mercenaries who will wave any flag for a free lunch box and a bus ride have to be replaced as they pop their clogs. The agonising dilemma for the DAB is that if they don’t participate the forces of democracy and subversion win easily. If they do participate it helps said forces of democracy and subversion even more. Many democratically inclined people are going to have to wander out of their comfort zone to vote for the Party of Flying Bananas. Come to that in some parts of Hong Kong the Party of Fragrant Female Lawyers may be a stretch. But if there is an alternative anti-democratic candidate in the field then a clear choice has to be made. People know what they don’t like.

And where does all this leave the Democratic Party proper? Sitting on the sidelines. Perhaps they could change their party symbol from a pigeon to a chicken.

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I did not start this little outlet so that I could criticise the people still toiling in the vineyard where I laboured happily for so long, but what happened to the Sunday Post this week? Your lead headline, in the usual 60pt type, said “Convicted sex pests may still be teaching”. And since when, I wondered, did we inform readers about what may be happening? Next week: Martin Bormann may be alive and well, living in a Kowloon Tong old folks home. The following week: Michael Jackson may have faked his own death and may now be secretly touring selected Masonic lodges.  What is the point of having an investigation team (three reporters were credited) if you end up telling people what you don’t know?

The story of the story went like this. The three sleuths compiled a list of 31 school staff who had been convicted of offences in which sex was an ingredient, over the last ten years. I presume this involved a search for keywords in the Post’s digital archive. They then took the list round to the Education Bureau, and asked the EB spokesperson to find out, and tell them, which of the 31 people were now working in Hong Kong schools. The EB, and I find this neither surprising nor worthy of criticism, refused. At this point a serious investigator who wants to generate new information has to think of another move. Can we beg, borrow or steal a copy of the register of teachers? Can we compile our own by collecting school staff lists?  Alternatively, you give up the story and move on to something else. What you did not do, at least when I was an investigative reporter, was to write a story about the fact that the EB refuses to tell any passing stranger who walks in its door whether or where a person or group of people are working.

This little scandal was wheeled round a selection of the usual talking heads — chairman of Legco Ed panel, legislator for legal sector, parents’ organisation and so on — who all duly confessed themselves helpfully shocked, which was nice of them. Clearly, while reporters may not be popular, they are more popular than sex offenders, which is something to be grateful for.

Frankly I thought hell would freeze over before I wrote a piece defending a government bureeau — after all there is a whole department of civil servants paid to do nothing else — but the EB’s attitude seems to me to be entirely correct.  They keep a register. They remove from it teachers who have been convicted of offences involving abuse of their position. They urge schools to require new hires to state whether they have a criminal record, and also whether they are on the register.  Clearly the onus is on the schools to be careful who they unleash on their victims, and that is where it should be.  Some people would like to go for a more formal register, and we were taken on a quick global tour of other countries’ arrangements. But whatever changes are introduced, I doubt if they will cater for journalists who want to take a name out of a ten-year-old court report and ask where the person concerned has got to.

We also got a tour of selected horror stories from the ten-year  trawl of the archives. I could have done without this. Not only did it leave me thinking I needed to wash my brain. It also seemed to involve gross unfairness on people who were named as the perpetrators of offences merely because the reporters had been unable to find out whether they were teaching, dead, emigrated or … maybe working in the newspaper business. We also got names and details of two people who were aquitted.  They didn’t do anything, the court decided.  In any case, the charges of which they were aquitted involved adults. No doubt their joint appearance in a story about perverts in the classroom will cheer them up considerably.

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Our former dog – she died last August – was not much of a walker in her autumnal years. Five minutes and a quick performance on a newspaper were enough. Her replacement (we only lasted a week) is a frisky young thing, so I am now revisiting all the coutry walks within reach of an energetic dog and a mature owner. This has had its sad moments. I occasionally forget which dog I am walking. But it is nice to get out. Since my last career as a long-distance dog walker, though, one controversial amenity has appeared: concrete steps.

Some people get quite apopletic about the appearance of concrete in country parks so I had better explain straight away that for this particular flight of fancy there is a good reason. The stairs lead up to a hill-top on which a small reservoir has been built, so that a village in the valley below has a proper water supply instead of depending on informal tappings of a nearby stream. I must also say that the piece of path now replaced was not a popular favourite. It was steep, and being shady and windless was rarely dry. In a way I shall not miss it. On the other hand our piece of country park does exemplify the problem. Many of the paths have either disintegrated or been subjected to artificial help ranging from a bit of volunteer spade sculpture to full-blown replacement with concrete,

One long slope which I occasionally reached with First Dog  became a flight of steps some years ago. This was unavoidable. A much-used path eventually becomes a waterway in the rainy season. The water then sculpts a gully which could have been designed by nature to break ankles. Huge holes appear. Unless an alternative route is available the path has now reached the end of its natural span, and must either be replaced or decorated with warning notices suggesting that people should walk somewhere else. In other paths the efforts to patch things up with small planks embedded in the steps have reached decrepitude. The dirt which the planks supported has eroded away. Someone has tried to repair the steps with bricks and small splashes of concrete. But the steps are disintegrating. Drastic action will soon be needed. Some subsiduary paths which used to be difficult to follow have now disappeared altogether. Two small bridges have collapsed. Other paths which are still perfectly usable must be difficult to find if you have not used them before. They are very overgrown and there are no signposts.

And this seems to be the real problem. Hong Kong has some great walking and a lot of hikers. But the hikers, and the park-keepers, pay all their attention to the same few routes. The path which is much walked and frequently maintained is the one which goes up to the Maclehose Trail. Get off that beaten track and the only paths which get any attention are the ones required for access by the water people or China Light and Power. Whole networks which are clearly marked on old maps have disappeared. So the busy paths get busier, until they have to be concreted, and then the walkers complain. We need a local counterpart of that NGO in England which used to campaign to keep public footpaths open. Otherwise the popular and well-cared-for places are going to get awfully crowded. And those of us who like solitude at weekends will have to walk in Central.

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Interesting piece in this morning’s SCMP by Ms Regina Ip, on the passage of the railway resolution. Readers who are familiar with Ms Ip’s biography will not find it surprising that she sympathises with the senior civil servant landed with the job of propelling an unpopular proposal through Legco, nor that she is not overly sympathetic to street demonstrations. No doubt there are points which could be made either way on many aspects of this topic, but in one matter Ms Ip falls into serious error.

She points out, which I do not dispute, that there are laws against obstruction or molestation of any legislator “going to, being within or going from the precincts of the chamber”. I agree that “technically speaking,” as she puts it, demonstrators obstructing such legislators “might have broken the law”. Demonstrations commonly involve technical breaches of the law, even if no legislators are in the vicinity. In many countries the forces of law and order are expected to temper their enthusiasm for legality with a recognition that public manifestations of opinion are a valuable part of freedom of expression. So the breaches are tolerated. But breaches they are.
What I do not accept is Ms Ip’s inclusion in the category of potential lawbreakers those demonstrators who “pursued them (legislators) with jeers and insults.”

I do not believe that the powers and privileges accorded to legislators by law extend to the criminalisation of jeers and insults. Even if they did, they would be liable to overthrow by the courts, because the right to jeer at legislators is clearly a mode of self-expression protected by the provisions on freedom of speech in the Bill of Rights Ordinance, the Basic Law, and even – hilariously – the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China. It is the right of any citizen of Hong Kong to jeer at legislators. It may even be a civic duty, as so many law-makers have an inflated notion both of their own importance and of the respect and affection which they inspire in ordinary members of the public.

I do not suggest that people should be encouraged to insult Ms Ip. Indeed if anyone did so in my presence I would be very tempted to apply some instant and crude plastic surgery to his nose. But even as my fist met his face I would be conscious that he was in the right and I in the wrong. For legislators, jeers and insults go with the territory. They are a poor substitute for the slave who used to ride in the chariot of triumphant Roman generals with the specific job of reminding the hero that he was still mortal. But they will have to do.

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So we are going to get an express rail station after all. This is not all bad news. The question is not whether we want to be linked to the national express rail system; the question is whether we wish to be linked in the most expensive way that human brains can devise. I was impressed by the people who went to the trouble of producing an alternative, cheaper, plan. But this seemed to me a sad waste of their time.

The relevant bureaucratic manoeuvre in cases like this goes as follows: You criticise their plan. They chide you for only being destructive. You produce an alternative plan. The massive resources of the government are then devoted to pulling it to pieces, usually on the grounds that it is incompatible with some other plan which you haven’t been told about.

The official critics set about this task with such enthusiasm that by the official final debate some supporters of the government’s plan were arguing that it was “technically impossible” to put the station in the NT. Come, people, impossible is a big word. What would have happened if, a few months ago, Donald had sprung Archimedes-like from his bath with a cry of Eureka and announced that the government could solve all its problems by building the station in Taipo. Does anyone doubt that brains would have been stormed, shoulders put to the grindstone and noses to the wheel, imaginary problems would have been discovered to be illusory and real ones solved, so that we could all be told that this was the best of all possible plans, as the one the government currently favours always is.

So I stick to the sort of calculations you can do on the back of an envelope. These go more or less like this. The expense of the line is roughly proportionate to its length. So it would cost half as much in the NT. Putting it underground is at least twice as expensive as running it along the surface. So we could half the price by eliminating the tunnel — which if the station was in the NT we would not need anyway. This does not actually mean that three quarters of the vast sum voted by the Legco Finance Committee last weekend will be wasted. That would be unfair and inaccurate. Actually, all the money voted by the committee will be wasted, because the line could be built for a quarter of the real cost, which will come later.

The new line will not actually cost $66 billion. This figure was achieved by drastic massaging after the official total – which rose steadily through the planning process as such totals usually do – passed $80 billion. Sundry parts of the project which willl not actually have trains running on them were then transferred out of the total on the grounds that they were infrastructure which “would have to be built anyway.” They will, of course, still have to be paid for. Still in the future lie the cost overruns. Major public works tend to run over budget and those involving long bored tunnels tend to run massively over. A decent cheap connection could have been built from the money which legislators will be asked for later to make up for the optimism of the figures so far announced.

All this is the inevitable result of the foolish decision to merge the two railway companies. When we had two companies a project of this kind attracted two proposals, each of which had been prepared by a tesm which knew the win was likely to go to the cheaper one. Now we only get one proposal, for a sort of railway Concorde: a marvel of technology and a financial catastrophe.

The other interesting – though unoriginal – conclusion we can draw from all this is that the Functional Constituencies are not working as advertised. Remember all that highly-educated expertise and extensive professional experience which we were supposed to have installed in Legco through this system? It may be there, but it is not doing anything. There are members from technical, engineering, financial and business organisations and this was their chance to shine by asking searching questions about technology, engineering, finances and the business plan for the line, which seems to have come from the people who planned Disney. Instead they were staunch and dumb supporters of the official project. It is in the interest of professional and business groups to be beloved by the government and that takes priority over such trivia as exercising thedir specialised skills in the scrutiny of official extravagance. But we already knew that.

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