tim's experiment

One of the recurring sad features of recent years has been the way that government branches previously regarded as professional and impartial have been sucked into the cesspit of partisan persecution of people the government does not like.

The epidemic has now progressed so far that it is easier to list the few survivors. One of which used to be the Audit Commission. For many years the commission engaged in the entirely apolitical pursuit of financial glitches in the smooth working of public administration.

Amid some bleating from the victims, it cautiously spread its purview from the counting of beans to the more delicate question of whether their spending was producing the desired results.

It has not previously felt it necessary to extend its activities to local universities, possibly because they are not financed in the way in which government departments are. Universities get a block grant from the UGC. It is up to them what they do with it. Also the objectives of a university are difficult to define. Unblocked drains or solved crimes can be counted. The inculcation of wisdom or the creation of knowledge are harder to quantify.

Still, no doubt we can all do with an audit. But if universities were to be added to the list there was a trap for the unwary. They should not have started with Chinese U. It is difficult to say whether this choice was a consequence of total political naivety or a high level of political conformity, but the message should have been clear.

Chinese U has become something of a target for the more lurid wing of the CPC fan club. It is the only university to have had its constitution tinkered with, the only one whose choice of Vice Chancellor was criticised. The ICAC is looking into a research centre. The Director of Audit should have been aware of the danger that taking up this topic would look like one of those inter-departmental pile-ons previously inflicted on independent bookshops and insubordinate media outlets.

I am not sure why Chinese U attracts so much attention from the People’s Puppets. It may be due to its origins as a refuge, half a century ago, for academics who correctly supposed that they would have a better time in colonial Hong Kong than in “liberated” China. Or it may be due to the perception, for which there is no evidence, that Chinese U students were unusually rebellious in 2019.

Like the Polytechnic University, Chinese U was geographically unlucky, being next to an important transport artery. This made confrontations inevitable and consequential. Whether Chinese U students were more rebellious than their counterparts in universities less strategically positioned we do not know. We also do not know how many, or even if any, of the protesters who engaged in disorderly behaviour at Chinese U were actually students of the university. Ignorance is, alas, no bar to prejudice.

Just in case we didn’t get the political message the audit report zeroed in on national security matters. Apparently the university did not include in tenders or contracts a clause saying that the relationship could be cancelled for national security reasons.

The question which this raises is: why should it? Endangering national security is a crime. If the university suspects that one of its paperclip suppliers is endangering national security its proper course is to notify the police. Whether a crime has been committed is a matter for the courts. Taking your business elsewhere should wait. Universities do not include in their contracts clauses forbidding the employee from engaging in murder, fraud or illlicit sexual relations with students. That is not generally regarded as a deficiency.

The auditor also stated – and if he did not realise how this would be reported he should have done – that none of the university’s 33 food outlets had a food business licence. This is because they do not need one. Food outlets catering only to staff and students do not need a licence.

Aha, says the auditor, but some of them were serving people who were not students or staff. Apparently the auditor’s underlings took the trouble to trot around the campus and see where they could get served. This is a bit unfair. Chinese U is in the middle of nowhere. Outsiders turning up in its catering outlets are not a problem.

Then we come to the bookshop. The bookshop was, apparently, selling some small items which were not books. So? Also the contract with the bookshop said it should not engage in “unlawful” action but did not mention national security as such, and the university had not supplied the bookshop with any “guidelines” on avoiding national security risks.

The funny thing about this is that the bookshop is operated by Commercial Press, a firm well connected with the local state organs. I can think of some criticisms of Commercial Press – which operates the only bookshop left in Shatin – but indifference to the requirements of national security is hardly one of them.

I realise that the higher ends of accountancy are a cerebral, or even surreal, area, but they surely do not require the abandonment of common sense. The auditor complained that the university had not followed in all its intricate details the usual tendering process in arranging for two bank branches.

Could this be, one wonders, because there are only two banking networks in Hong Kong and the university, like other similarly isolated places, wanted one branch from each of them?

The complaint that many of the people offering retail services on the Chinese U campus have been doing so in the same way for years, with no change resulting from tenderings or renewals, has a simple explanation.

Offering services on university campuses in out-of-the-way places is not a road to riches. Most of the potential customers are only there for 30 weeks of the year. It is more like working on a luxury yacht (boss on: work like dog; boss off: nothing to do), than a conventional retail experience.

I confess that when I lived in a village near Chinese U I occasionally visited their supermarket. It is very small, even by Hong Kong standards, and was never busy. I may have dropped in for a cup of coffee once or twice. Sorry.

Unaccustomed as I am to agreeing with the Standard’s Mary Ma (whoever that is this week) I think she made an important point the day after the audit story hit her front page. The Audit Commission is supposed to “make sure public resources are used properly and effectively”. This latest exercise suggests that it is not setting a good example.

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According to reports the Chief Executive is going to propose doubling the proportion of “non-local” students which Hong Kong universities are allowed to admit to undergraduate courses.

This is intended, according to “sources”, to turn Hong Kong into a higher education hub. Another hub? Are we getting a bit hub-happy?

The move will raise the share of non-locals in the student body to 40 per cent, or from the current 15,000 to – presumably – something in the region of 30,000. To put it another way of the 15,000 UGC-funded bachelor’s degree places available each year the number reserved for non-locals will increase from 3,000 to 6,000.

The announcement came tricked out with some painfully obvious efforts to spin it in a nice way. The admission of local students, the “sources” said, would not be affected because “non-locals enroll through non-JUPAS avenues”. This is nonsense. The way in which local students will be affected has nothing to do with the admissions system. They will be affected because 3,000 places which were previously available to them will be offered instead to other people.

Universities, said “sources” would be encouraged to recruit students from Southeast Asian countries and “regions participating in the Belt and Road initiative to avoid the non-local quota being monopolised by mainland students”.

At the moment three quarters of the “non-locals” admitted are from the mainland.

This is likely to continue to be the case. Local universities now have lots of experience of recruiting students for “self-funded” (or as they say in the outside world, profit-making) post-graduate courses. The mainland market has many advantages.

The main one is that it is big. Advertise in a few publications, put up a decent web page, turn up at three or four “higher education fairs” in big cities, and you are contacting a very large number of potential customers.

Other markets are small, further away, have few people rich enough to contemplate sending their children to Hong Kong for four years – even if we are covering tuition – and need to be addressed in different local languages.

So mainlanders it will be. This is not a complaint. During my teaching years I encountered three waves of mainlanders and they were all generally nice kids in different ways.

We started with a few carefully picked individuals on lavish scholarships. They were selected with great care and although some mainland academics said rather snootily that of course they wouldn’t send their very best students to Hong Kong, detecting academic promise in 17-year-olds is not an exact science and these students were excellent.

They were often the most successful student in their classes and went on to win prizes and scholarships.

The next wave was not selected. They were the offspring of parents who could afford it. They were a pleasant enough bunch but a lot of them seemed to have come to Hong Kong primarily for the shopping. The result was unexpected. My local students had been quite happy to see mainlanders hogging the academic limelight and seemed to regard them respectfully as interesting freaks with a deficient sense of work-life balance.

The appearance of women (few local men and no mainland ones choose journalism) who dressed in what they supposed to be the height of fashion even on working days managed to spark in some locals a competitive spirit which had not been provoked by the academic stars. Although many local students still dressed like – well, like students – sartorial standards in my classes leapt upwards.

The third wave was the intake to our local version of the taught master’s degree. They were an educated bunch obviously. A degree was a requirement. Many of them seemed to have been very lucky in their English examinations though.

One year I was lucky enough to have a Norwegian student who spoke fluent putonghua and reported to me after the first class that the mainlanders had been horrified at how difficult my accent was. There is nothing wrong with my accent. I was a paid broadcaster for many years. I can only conclude that this is what happens if you ban the BBC.

Anyway the fact that many of the new non-locals will be mainlanders is not the main problem. Clearly 3,000 places disappearing from the JUPAS system would make it harder for locals to get places. If the places are not taken from the JUPAS system then universities are going to have to cater for a larger population.

Two Legco members offered comforting thoughts. Chow Man-kong (education) who works at the Ed U, thought the quota should go up to 50 per cent, adding that many lecture halls were big enough to accommodate a few more students. Prof Chow had not been reading the small print. If the quota goes up but the student population does not there is no need for larger lecture halls.

Ling Nan Prof Lau Chi-pong said the influx would not hinder local students’ search for dormitories as “These non-locals would have to settle their accommodation before coming here and Hong Kong’s public transport system is well developed.” But he added incoherently “no matter how far the students live, the universities will have to take care of their accommodation.”

Clearly some people, possibly including the Chief Executive, have not sorted out the details yet. Will the increased quota require a decreased quota for locals? If not, will the universities be provided with more money? UGC courses are massively subsidised. Do we really want to spend oodles of money on educating other people’s children? Will the non-local students have priority for student dormitories, upon arrival or for the whole course?

Above all is there a market for this? Prof Chow suggested that the government should set up a centralised student recruiting agency, which suggests a certain lack of confidence. This would “target top students and those from the middle class”. An interesting notion. Does Prof Chow’s university, one wonders, prefer students from the middle class? And is that even legal?

The problem which nobody dares to mention, of course, is that the attractions of Hong Kong as a high education destination for mainlanders have wilted somewhat of late. Our universities used to able to offer subjects like history, politics and journalism in ways which simply could not be found in mainland universities. Nowadays, not so much. We still have business, I suppose. This will perhaps in due course be revised to make it palatable for patriots. Capitalism with Chinese characteristics?

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Michael Brock was a sympathetic and thoughtful teacher who guided me through 19^th century English politics. I always tried to follow his example when I became a teacher myself.

But the most important thing he taught me was not about English politics but about university politics. We were discussing some obviously fatuous decision of the University Senate, and I expressed bewilderment that so many people who in their academic work were dispassionate and logical, could be so prejudiced and irrational when running the university in which they worked.

This was an error, Mr Brock said in his gentle way. The fact that people could think dispassionately and logically in their work did not mean they would think dispassionately and logically about anything else.

We had stumbled across what is now a commonplace of psychology: mental habits are, as they now put it, domain dependent. Habits and processes from one area will not necessarily influence others.

So we find that there are university professors who believe in fairies, cold-eyed financial analysts who carry lucky rabbits’ feet, and so on. This problem afflicts even the most eminent scientists. Linus Pauling is a good example. He won the Nobel Prize for his work in chemistry, and the Peace Prize for his efforts in global politics. He spent much of the later part of his life campaigning, in defiance of any serious evidence, for the idea that massive doses of vitamin C could cure the common cold, and cancer.

Mention of the Nobel Prize brings us to the local example which brought this matter into my head. I have been following, from a safe distance, the small scandal which has arisen at Hong Kong University, where a whistleblower, or possibly some whistleblowers, have alleged that the President and Vice Chancellor has been violating some bureaucratic rules on the spending of money.

I know no more of this than we can read in the newspapers and nothing in this item should be interpreted as implying any opinion as to the guilt or innocence of the P and VC, Zhang Xiang.

As often happens on these occasions some interesting snippets emerged into the light of day. One of the matters in dispute concerns a project to refurbish the private dining rooms reserved for senior staff. There are three of them. Am I alone in thinking three is perhaps a bit excessive?

Anyway the P and VC deployed lawyers and a private PR company, the University Council set up a small committee to look into the matter, and into this bubbling brew stepped Professor Fraser Stoddart, alias Sir James Fraser Stoddart, a global authority on the structure of molecules, a winner of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2016 and a freshly minted Chair Professor at HKU.

Apart from musings on international academic culture which I shall not visit, Prof Stoddart made two points in an open letter. The first one concerned one of the whistleblown complaints: that President Zhang had hired a headhunting company to look for a new vice president and medical dean, without going through the usual tendering process.

“I think organisations often have small windows to attract top talent and if they follow the rules and use Google search they may lose the desired individuals,” the prof was reported as saying. “Speed is of the essence. It has to happen literally in hours. It has to happen in hours. Not days, not weeks, not months. It has to happen in hours and things are not at HKU.”

University administrators all over Hong Kong then had to pick themselves off the floor on which they had been rolling while laughing. This is just not the way these things are done in Hong Kong and it probably shouldn’t be. The appointment of a vice president usually takes up to a year involving what is called a “global search”.

It must be said that the results of the global search are often disappointing. Since there is an unofficial expectation that the successful candidate will have a Chinese name and already be doing a similar job elsewhere the list of serious candidates often comes down to a few people who are already vice presidents or similar in US universities, or even a Hong Kong one.

Still, administrative cultures vary; it is not uncommon for people used to the way things are done in other places to find Hong Kong procedures frustrating. I happily plead guilty to occasional bursts of barely suppressed rage myself. But it is the way things are done here.

I suspect the underlying problem here may be that Profs Zhang and Stoddart are used to the way things are done in America. Hong Kong organisations generally – not just the universities – tend to have elaborate procedures, often adopted on the advice of the ICAC, intended to banish any whiff of nepotism, favouritism or corruption. This is an objective to which most Hong Kong people subscribe with enthusiasm. I hope the rules were followed. If they were not the council is quite right to take the matter seriously.

Prof Stoddart’s other point was about whistleblowing. He said the complaints should be ignored because “Anonymous letters and emails are not worth listening to, much of which are probably fabricated.”

This is not good enough. Of course people who wish to complain about the P and VC of their university are going to do so anonymously. Hong Kong’s protections for whistleblowers are very sketchy and in any local institution presidential enthusiasm for frank public discussion of alleged errors is limited.

If complaints cannot be made anonymously and investigated properly on that basis they will not be made at all. The Police and ICAC accept anonymous complaints for similar reasons. University councils should do the same.

I see Prof Stoddart was only appointed by HKU on September 3 of this year. A bit early, perhaps, to be participating in this sort of affair?

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The gentle purlieus of our local Anglican cathedral resounded to unaccustomed dissent last weekend. The innovation which had some of the devout pouting in their pews was the addition of the National Flag – I hope I do not need to say that this means the PRC flag – to the usual ecclesiastical adornments.

The flag was not exactly flown. It hung rather limply from a pole, but in a prominent position in front of the pulpit. The idea apparently came from one of our legislative puppets – I beg your pardon, poppets – Mr Peter Koon, who combines the service of an avowedly atheist regime with a position of some consequence in local Anglican circles.

Bishop Mathias Der, presiding, was reported as saying that “We are here to pray for the country, and the flag is here to commemorate [National Day],” which could be considered a bit of an innovation.

He went on to say in his sermon, “If we were to display the British flag before 1997, would there be the same volume of debate online?… mainly it’s because we have some misunderstanding of our country.” But this opens up an interesting question. As far as we know the cathedral did not display the British flag before 1997. Why not?

After all the Anglican church has not exactly been known for taking a critical look at the powers that be. In fact ever since it was founded by Henry VIII as a contrivance for getting his Royal paws on Anne Boleyn’s knickers, it has been notably willing to go along with whatever regime was running the country.

This stellar record of conformity is even celebrated in a satirical song, The Vicar of Bray, which can be found in a reasonably modern version, with subtitles, here. An interesting tabular summary of the way the Book of Common Prayer has sought divine help for the King and the Royal family here.

.We must in fairness note that there is some biblical justification for this flexibility. The founding Christian said we should “render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s.” The early influencer later known as St Paul wrote that “the powers that be are ordained of God.”

We must also note that the Anglicans are not the only denomination with political problems. My father’s enthusiasm for Catholicism evaporated during World War 2 when he noticed that young men on both sides were being urged on to kill each other by the same church.

But having accepted all these points in mitigation we are still left with the question: are there some places where it is not appropriate to wave the national flag and is perhaps a Christian church one of them?

This is not a matter of misunderstanding the country concerned. As the Bishop so delicately put it, “There is a period in every country that, if held to the scrutiny of modern standards, would require improvement.”

We do not choose our country. We have to try to cherish the one we are issued.

In most contexts there is nothing controversial about flying the national flag. Outside a government building it is expected, in many places. I am afraid I was raised in a comparatively flag-free environment, where flags usually appeared only outside embassies and international hotels, but one gets used to local variations in this matter.

Some American citizens take a pride in raising and lowering the national flag in their front garden every day. German cities offer a confusing medley of flags because there is usually one for the city, one for the state and possibly one for the region, as well as the national effort.

We must recognise, however, that although many of us may not take it very seriously, the flying of the flag is not a mere municipal adornment. It wordlessly communicates something, and that is why local loyalists who would like to see more people agree with them are encouraging places which did not previously display the flag to get the banner manner going.

Patriotism is a legitimate sentiment – we will leave Samuel Johnson out of this – but it is not a part of religion, and nor is it a part of rationality.

I felt some unease at reports that the Chinese University of Hong Kong was proposing not only to fly the flag on its buildings – an acceptable token of respect for the people who pay for them – but to have a Flag Guard and a ceremonial flag-raising ceremony at formal occasions. This was billed as part of the university’s effort to inculcate patriotism and other worthy urges in its students.

I understand that this particular university has been under some pressure because of the perception in leftwing circles that it is not entirely committed to the new regime and the version of history which goes with it. Still, all this seems dangerously at variance with what should be the university’s primary mission, which is the pursuit of truth through the use of reason. This is not compatible with having a body of doctrine which students are expected to adopt uncritically and without question.

You have to wonder, also, whether now that national education is cropping up everywhere from kindergarten to high school there is really a need to inflict it on university students as well. Surely they will have got the message, if they are ever going to get it?

Flying the flag from a cathedral pulpit raises similar questions. I hesitate to write anything about religion, which is not one of my hobbies, but surely people do not go to church to pray for the country, though they may throw in prayers for a variety of worthy causes while the call is in progress, as it were. People go to church to pray for salvation and forgiveness, I would have thought, to worship and to share the hope of eternal life and other unlikely eventualities.

Bishops who wish to offer spiritual guidance need to know where their boundaries are. We may all need instruction in the comparative merits of various national histories. But this had better not come from them.

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There was something engagingly optimistic about the official estimate that the Red Hill Estate – where some homeowners’ illegal extensions were blamed for dangerous landslips during recent rough weather – had maybe another 70 houses with illegal extensions of one kind or another.

Come people, let us be more realistic. It is more likely that almost every house in the estate has unapproved changes of one kind or another. This is only partly because rich people think the planning laws do not apply to them, because you could say the same about almost any village in the New Territories.

The underlying problem is that Hong Kong planning laws are an impossibly clumsy instrument when applied to low-rise housing.

Consider the village of Sheldon in the UK, where one of my esteemed colleagues had a converted farmhouse to which he would retreat between bursts of academic activity. Sheldon is in the English Peak District. It is not pretty in the conventional way that English villages are expected to be pretty; there are no half-timbered cottages, no thatched roofs.

Sheldon’s claim to fame is that it has not changed its appearance in the last 300 years or so. The houses are all low-rise and fairly basic. They are walled in the local stone and roofed in the local slate. The village is a popular backdrop for film and television companies making historical dramas.

This uniformity of appearance is no accident. Every building in the village is now “listed”, which means any change requires the approval of the local authority. Changes which would modify the appearance of a building are simply not allowed. You can have double glazing if it looks like single glazing. Central heating boilers must vent their flues through an existing chimney. Window frames must be wood, or look like wood. And so it goes on.

The concern with appearances is accepted by the villagers because it makes their homes more attractive and valuable. Front gardens are carefully tended to enhance the look of the place. The council follows its own rules. When it reluctantly conceded the need for a bus shelter the resulting construction – in the local stone and slates – was an attempt to build what a bus shelter would have looked like if they had buses in the 1600s.

Hong Kong is not, alas, nearly as good at preserving historic buildings as the UK is. But the rules applying to buildings are strikingly like those found in historic villages. Construction must follow the approved plan. The building, once completed, must remain as planned. Changes need permission and unauthorised ones must be reversed.

This makes perfect sense in a town where most modern residential buildings run to 30 floors or more. Failure to follow the structural parts of plans could lead to a major disaster. Flat owners cannot be given free rein to fiddle with their property. Every flat has to support the flat above and protect from the elements the flat below.

This intrusion on property rights makes less sense when the house is just a house.

Almost every house in the New Territories has a flat roof (except, if the Buildings Office is reading this, mine) on which the owner is expected to be able to walk. In theory this is for open air activities like sunbathing, barbecue or putting out the washing.

However it’s a load-bearing floor, so most owners erect some sort of structure on it. Look at any rural village from the air and you see a fine variety of rooftop structures, most or all of them illegal.

This is encouraged by routine abuse of the Small House Policy, under which indigenous villagers, if male, can build a three-storey house.

If the villager plans to stay in Hong Kong he can have his “house” constructed as three flats. He can then inhabit the ground floor, let the other two, live on the proceeds and devote himself entirely to exploring the finer points of mah jong. A nice rooftop structure will turn the top flat into something close to a duplex, permitting a higher rent and attracting a better class of tenant.

Another odd feature of the Small House Policy is that the patch allocated to the house is exactly 700 square feet. The “villager” who has exercised his small house rights and now proposes to return to his home in Manchester can only sell you the house, and nothing but the house. Even the land under the balconies invariably supplied remains the property of the government, over which you are allowed to walk to reach your front door.

Of course in wet weather this turns into slushy mud, leading to the construction of a path. This expands by degrees into a patio on which you can park the shopping while you fumble for your keys, inflate the kids’ paddling pool, and other useful things. This looks a bit Spartan so you add flower borders and the odd potted plant. You then discover that these are being browsed by the local wild pigs and put up a fence. You are now in illegal occupation of government land.

These abuses are so widespread they are part of the culture. Architects will design in features which will facilitate surreptitious enlargements later. Builders do not ask if the job they are doing is approved by the government or anyone else.

Homeowners who are well connected to the government’s consultative machinery or the local criminal fraternity (or both; they overlap) do not have to worry about complaints. If there is a complaint, the builder who removes the offending item will offer to restore it once the heat has died down.

At the same time, inspections can be very picky once official alertness has been switched on. One home-owner who obediently removed a glazed structure from his balcony was bemused to receive a visit from an inspector who did not wish to see whether the glass had been removed, which he could see from the street, but wanted to see whether the balustrade specified in the original plans had been restored.

The capricious approach in which nits are picked while elephants in the room are ignored tends to discredit the whole system. People like Leung Chun-ying – and me – who are scolded for having wine trellises in our yards wonder if the relevant department might have more important calls on its attention than garden furniture.

The system is a mess. Asked to suggest changes one is tempted to reply that, as the Irishman put it when asked the way to the Post Office, “If I were you I would not start from here.” Still we must try. Would it be too daring to suggest that occupants of houses up to four storeys high should be allowed to make minor changes at their own risk?

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We continue to make legal history of a rather dubious kind. Consider the case of the four Hong Kong U students who appeared in court this week and, after the usual mitigation oratory, were remanded in custody while the judge ponders their sentence.

The first of several interesting things about this event is that the offence was purely an expression of opinion. The four students were among the members of the student council which, the day after a man had stabbed a policeman and then himself, passed a motion lamenting the death of the attacker, and describing him as a “martyr”.

You may think, as I do, that this was a thoroughly misguided opinion. Indeed the students seem after further thought to have come to the same view, because the following day they retracted it.

What boggles my mind, having dabbled extensively in student politics in my time, is the majestic intervention of the law in what is usually considered a rather impractical and private matter.

In student political circles one hears thoroughly misguided opinions in large quantities. Some of them make their way into motions and some of these motions are passed. The passed motion then lands with a soundless plop in the great well of public opinion, which does not, to be very honest, care what students think about anything.

It is true that people once blamed the Oxford Union for World War Two on the grounds that passing a motion that “This house would not fight for King and country” had encouraged Hitler. I cannot think of a more recent example. Riots, protests or occupations attract attention, as they should. The passage of motions causes no ripple in local politics, let alone national ones.

These days I suppose the misguided motion can be put on the internet, like everything else. That does not mean anyone takes much notice of it. Indeed it seems the only reason why the Hong Kong U case became a cause celebre was the storm of abuse from people who disagreed with it.

The result of this, of course, is that an obscure event which happened two years ago is still in the news, as it is here. Competing with all that good news about Hong Kong we have the discovery that ill-considered student oratory is now a serious criminal offence.

Which offence it might be brings us to a curious feature of the recent proceedings. The judge, Adriana Noelle Tse Ching, faithfully followed the current judicial practice of subjecting anything offered in mitigation to scathing criticism as soon as it arrived. This led to a curious discrepancy.

One of the defending counsel pointed out that there had been a plea bargain: the prosecution agreed to drop a charge of “advocating terrorism” and the defendants agreed to plead guilty to “incitement to wound with intent”.

To the untutored lay mind this looks rather as if they are admitting that the motion encouraged an attack which took place the day before it was passed, an innovative concept. No doubt it makes sense to lawyers.

Anyway the deal clearly proceeded on the basis that the incitement to wounding charge was a less onerous one than the advocating terrorism one. But the learned judge rejected this suggestion on the grounds that the maximum sentence for inciting to wound was life imprisonment. Sticking to terrorism would mean a maximum of ten years.

So in her view the defendants had admitted a more serious offence with which they had not been charged, in return for having a less serious one dropped. Was there some confusion here?

The judge, it is reported, said that the students must “bear the consequences of their legal strategy”, which sounds a bit ominous, especially as she followed up with “It’s about time for someone to learn there are consequences to actions.”

It is difficult to know what was going through the judge’s head at this point. Was this a reminder that defendants must bear the consequences of their counsel’s errors? Or was it a comment on the case as a whole, in which case I cannot resist the thought that there was no action here. The crime, if it was a crime, consisted of speech.

There was no suggestion that the deplorable motion was followed by an epidemic of knife attacks, or even by an epidemic of equally objectionable motions being passed by other student unions. It was an error by people who did not know the law.

Rather similar, in fact, to the judge’s own action in having two people’s mobile phones seized on the grounds that the rules require phones to be switched off in court. Not so. The Judiciary’s policy is that you may text, but not talk. In the light of this case you would do well to choose your words with care.

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At last a holiday! After three years of COVID confinement I managed to put a spoke in our long-awaited getaway by breaking a bone in my foot a month before scheduled departure.

Medical opinion was gently but firmly in favour of cancelling the whole outing, but after waiting so long and spending so much I decided to go, and promised to treat my foot as gently as possible. I would wear “the boot” at all times. Officially this is a “walking boot” but you can’t walk very far in it.

This led to my insertion into the obscure world of “special assistance”, as they call it in the airport business: arrangements for people who cannot walk, or cannot walk long distances.

It turned out, to my surprise, that there is a great deal of variation in the way this is done.

If you are leaving Hong Kong the arrangement is very simple. You are installed in a chair while the checking-in lady summons your pusher for a suitable time. Your pusher – mine was a lady – turns up with a wheelchair of the usual folding kind, and propels you the whole way to the departure gate, via immigration, security, lift to lower level and a long walk along one of those Chak Lap Kok fingers.

She deposited me in a chair next to the departure gate, and returned at boarding time to make sure I got on the plane all right. This is a splendid arrangement and I am sure a pleasant surprise for visitors from some places. On arrival it works the same way: one solo pusher wheels you from gate through customs, immigration, baggage pick-up and out to your taxi, lift or whatever.

Transiting through Frankfurt is a completely different experience. You are met by a man who takes you upstairs in the lift. There you are passed to another man, driving an electric car. He takes you to the internal train station, where another specialist gets you on and off the train.

Upon arrival you meet another specialist who will take you through immigration and pass you to someone else. It feels rather like a game of football in which you are the ball. I think there were seven passes. On the other hand I must admit that the overall result, coordinated by some distant controller over the mobile phones which everyone consulted regularly, was entirely satisfactory. I was delivered to the right place in plenty of time.

And so on to a short flight to Basel. Basel is a small local airport, whose main claim to fame is that it actually has two exits: one to France and one to Switzerland.

It does not have those tubes down which you walk from the aeroplane to the terminal. Instead there is a wheeled flight of steps which is pushed up to the exit. But I did not have to walk down them. Here we encountered for the first time the Magic Bus. This is officially a Disabled Passenger Vehicle, or commercially an Ambulift. It is basically a van like the ones airlines use to load food and luggage. Its distinguishing feature is that the whole back can be lifted up to the height of the aircraft door.

So I hobbled into the van, which then lowered itself and drove off to the terminal. There is room for three or four wheelchairs and seats for some pushers or traveling companions. We later encountered a subtly different version which is permanently in the “up” position but has a lift to move you up and down.

Next stop was the UK, where the “special assistance” work is generally farmed out to a specialist company. We went through four airports and they all seemed to be wearing the same uniform. They have their own system, in which there are gathering places called “pods”. You are moved from pod to pod, passing through the usual formalities on the way, until you reach the “departures pod” from which you are taken to your gate.

This seemed to work very well with departures. Arrivals sometimes not so good; it seemed they did not have any advance notice of the number of disabled people on the plane, so there was sometimes a shortage of pushers, or of wheelchairs.

UK airports do, though, have a specially designed wheelchair for airport use. It is higher than the standard folding model and easier to get in and out of. The arrangements for the feet are simpler and there is a place for your hand luggage.

On the other hand there is no provision for the passenger to push. You are a helpless piece of baggage, as the airlines generally seem to want their passengers to be.

Still, being a helpless piece of baggage has its compensations. You miss a lot of queuing. Also you meet a lot of kind and helpful people of different nationalities. The only downer we came across was a grouchy pusher in Frankfurt on the way home. He insisted lugubriously that we would miss our flight and would have to stay two days in Frankfurt because there was no flight to Hong Kong tomorrow.

Actually we got on the flight with some time to spare. Or at least we were not the last passengers on. The grumbler’s colleagues really went the extra mile to get us home on time. One of them even turned up in security to urge the man who was frisking me to get on with it.

So on the whole an interesting experience, though if you are able-bodied I do not recommend investing in a surgical boot and a walking stick for a more restful flight experience.

My requirements were quite modest, because I could walk short distances and handle stairs. I did not need one of the special wheelchairs that can take people right to their seats on the plane, or the stair-climbing machinery they have in some places.

But however disabled you may be, if considering air travel I would like to urge you to go for it. There are a lot of people out there who are willing and eager to help you get where you want to go. The system works. Book “special assistance” in advance and enjoy.

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