tim's experiment

It’s the season when schools eagerly flaunt their latest star performers, in whichever exam system they go for. So we were introduced last week to four students who scored 5** in all seven subjects they took in the DSE.

This is a wonderful achievement and certainly the result of an impressive combination of ability and hard work.

A little discordant note for lovers of the humanities: all four of the super students “took physics, chemistry and biology as their electives,” said the Standard.

I wonder what is going on here. It is true that if you are aiming to hit the exam high spots the scientific subjects have one helpful feature. It is possible to answer a technical question in a way which is absolutely right.

If you have correctly memorised the reaction, the process or the organism then your answer can be given full marks. This is much less likely to happen in the vaguer or more ambiguous subjects. The square root of 4 is always 2. Whether Garibaldi or Cavour was the maker of modern Italy is a matter on which views may differ.

Consequently it is a routine complaint that people marking essay-type questions do not use the full range of possible grades. If you are being graded on the usual 100-point scale you can get 50 more or less by filling a page; the mid-point will hover around 70 and the examiner will be very reluctant to go above 90.

There are occasional exceptions. Long ago during my brief period as a schoolteacher I did give one hapless candidate zero, fortunately for a mock exam. I had to explain to the young man concerned that he had written a fine essay on the Swedish King Charles XI, but the question was about Charles XII.

The converse of the scientists’ willingness to go up to 100 per cent is their difficulty in catering for weak candidates who really need what used to known as a “gentleman’s pass”. The drawback of compulsory academic tourism (or breadth components in the curriculum as we are supposed to call it) is that some people find themselves in classes for which they have neither interest nor aptitude.

When I was teaching at a local university we had tricky cases every summer: individuals who really needed a basic pass in something in order to graduate. In the arts subjects a certain indulgence can be extended – the marks are all somewhat subjective anyway. The scientists had great difficulty with this because their exams produced automatic and unambiguous results, and sometimes a resit just produced another automatic and unambiguous failure.

Anyway I do not seek to detract in any way from the astonishing achievements of the four young scientists, but I do wonder if anyone who picks arts subjects has an equal chance of glory.

The other thing which may be going on here is that schools are shunting their best students into the science stream. This certainly happens in some places. Journalism departments are not looking for academic stars and academic stars generally do not seek us out.

The best local student we ever had was recruited outside the system on the strength of her stellar performance in a Polytechnic (as it still was) non-degree course in Bilingual Communication. She was doing that because she had been put in the A Level sciences stream and failed the complete physics/chemistry/biology set. This woman eventually won an award as the best graduating student in the whole school.

Now I realise that a society needs scientists. But it surely needs poets, composers, writers, lawyers and journalists as well. Politics does not lend itself to a scientific approach, even though it is a curious factlet that most of our national leaders have engineering degrees.

The social sciences are not really sciences, and many people, including me, think they never will be. But decisions have to be taken, and taken now, about many things on which science has only so much to say.

What we do as a society about wealth, health, sex, education, crime … cannot be determined by science because these issues involve values and ethics. These are not easy matters and a society which leaves them to its dumber members will not prosper. Schools should not be shunting all their finest young minds into a laboratory.

Although I suppose, these days, that may be the safest place for them.

There used to be a traditional English saying that it was no use locking the stable door after the horse has bolted. This of course dates back to the days when horse metaphors were instantly understandable.

The Broadcasting Commission proposes a new variation on this ancient notion of foolishness: it wants to unlock the stable door after the horse has bolted.

The commission is now engaged in “consulting the public” about a proposal to water down a requirement imposed on all broadcasters that controversial news items are covered properly. As HKFP put it “Under the authority’s TV Programme Code and Radio Programme Code, licensees must ‘ensure due impartiality is preserved’ in news and current affairs programmes about public policy or issues of public importance in Hong Kong. Due impartiality requires licensees to ‘deal even-handedly’ when opposing points of view are presented.”

It now appears to the commission that this may be seen as conflicting with a more recent requirement imposed on broadcasters, that they must devote at least 30 minutes a week to “national education, national identity, and the national security law.”

The public is now to be consulted about the possibility of exempting the prescribed patriotic half-hour from the impartiality requirement.

The funny thing about this is that Hong Kong broadcasters do not seem to be having any problem with the impartiality requirement. They interview government officials, whose correctness is beyond dispute. They interview Legislative Councillors, 89 of whom are proud members of the People’s Puppets. Issues of public importance involving opposing points of view are as rare as hen’s teeth.

Admirable balance was preserved in the coverage of the great golf course land grab, with various public figures coming up with interesting reasons why public housing should not be built on their playplace.

Apart from this, contentious public issues have been thin on the ground, and troublesome people are no longer interviewed. Many reliable sources of “opposing points of view” are in prison. Some others are understandably intimidated. Journalists who are still interested in such things worry about the possible consequences of tactless interviews for them, and their contacts.

In short, I don’t know what the commission is talking about. The impartiality problem has been solved because on many important matters, there is only one permissible opinion.

It is still a shame to see it abandoned. Impartiality is not an end in itself: it is an indispensible aid in the search for truth, which in turn requires the recognition that the truth is often elusive and no one source has a monopoly of it.

Actually there is no reason why “national education” could not be conducted in an impartial way. No nation has a completely unblemished history and no modern society is without problems. National identity is an interesting concept which can be approached from a variety of points of view, and the national security law – wonderful creature though it is – is surely not so perfect as to be altogether beyond criticism.

There is a danger that patriotic programming will become so formulaic and, indeed, propagandistic that viewers and listeners will be unable to take it seriously and it will consequently be a failure.

Broadcasters should not be expected to instruct us that Mr Xi is a cross between Confucius, Einstein and God. Hongkongers with access to a wide variety of uncensored China news will not be impressed by the insistence that the People’s Paradise is without fault or flaw.

John Stuart Mill wrote that “Both teachers and learners go to sleep at their post as soon as there is no enemy in the field.”

But that is from “On Liberty”, a book which I fear can no longer be regarded as acceptable in a Hong Kong public library. Indeed eSports (video games played for money) briefly visited the news pages last week because a competitor’s nom de guerre included the word “Liberate”. He was suspended for three years.

Let us turn then to John Milton, whose “Areopagitica” is harmlessly named after a Greek hilltop. Milton was an active and paid government propagandist during the Commonwealth (1649-60, since you ask) and relevantly wrote this: “I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.”

Hong Kong kids are not happy. This distressing conclusion was a by-product of a survey conducted by the Hong Kong College of Technology and the Chinese University, aimed at discovering the extent of gaming disorder.

Gaming disorder is apparently an unreasonable obsession with computer games. The researchers interviewed 2,770 primary or secondary students and diagnosed the disorder in 12.6 per cent of them.

This is interesting but provokes a certain sense of deja vu. Citizens of my age can remember periods of concern about teenage addictions to, at various times, American comics, violent videos, motor scooters, Walkmans (Walkmen?) video games of the old stand-up in an arcade variety, Tamagochis, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, mobile phones, Pokemon cards, vaping, drinking, and the deplorable examples set by various role models from Mick Jagger to Justin Beiber.

We must of course remember that in the old story of the boy who cried “wolf” there was eventually a real wolf. So I remain agnostic on gaming disorder. Still, other figures picked up by the way seemed more disturbing.

The researchers found that 49 per cent of interviewees diagnosed themselves as having moderate or severe depression, 53.3 per cent had moderate or severe anxiety, and 62.8 per cent had moderate or severe stress.

Even if you accept, which I doubt, that the 12.6 per cent with gaming disorder had as a result also suffered from depression, anxiety and stress, that still leaves a very large slab of the juvenile population suffering from one or more of these problems, from other causes.

Sceptics will no doubt argue that self-diagnosis is not very satisfactory. Subtle differences in the way the question is put can have a disproportionate influence on the results. Researchers whose main focus is on the effects of some other variable – in this case games – may choose to tolerate a lot of unreliable responses to tease out a publishable and interesting result.

If you wanted to be rude you could complain that the threshold for reporting a disorder in this piece of work was so low as to make the results meaningless. If we all have mental problems perhaps this is an unavoidable part of the human condition.

I am not comforted. The fact that the total number of people reporting one or more mental health issue totalled 165 per cent suggests that the researchers had stumbled across a great deal of unhappiness. There must surely have been some respondents who reported no such problems. This suggests that there were a great many – possibly a majority – reporting two or more.

On a pessimistic view this could be considered unsurprising. Many respectable scientists now fear that the planet will have become uninhabitable before today’s students reach their fruit money.

Closer to home it may well be that a lot of young Hong Kongers do not subscribe to the official view of recent history. They do not feel they were rescued from “black violence” by the arrival of the national security law. On the contrary they see promises broken, ideals and dreams trampled, their leaders and inspirers jailed or exiled.

Anyone who is not stressed, anxious or depressed has not been paying attention, they will think.

It is perhaps a pity that the researchers did not extend their view to inquiring why so many students wanted to play computer games for a lot of time. Is there an attraction besides the artistically laid cybertraps which keep people coming back for more?

Inside your computer is a world whose rules you understand, which behaves in a predictable way and responds to your controls. With care and attention you can be a winner.

Outside your computer is a world which has no time for you, which presents you with an educational obstacle course on which everyone will sooner or later “fail” except the lucky few who wind up studying medicine at Harvard or Oxford, you have no control over events and merely singing about freedom and democracy will get you flung out of your school.

This may seem a counter-intuitive solution to the problem of gaming addiction but could the best answer be to make the real world more attractive?

I have to thank local golf enthusiasts for providing a great deal of innocent amusement for those of us who have no strong feelings about the game, and perhaps subscribe to the observation – first recorded in 1910 and often misattributed in a crisper version to Mark Twain — “to play golf is to spoil an otherwise enjoyable walk.”

We get it. To have a golf course to play on if you like golf is nice. To have three courses to play on is even better. And to see one of them defiled by the construction of a public housing estate is distressing. Quite apart from the loss of eight holes, there is the prospect of playing a rich man’s game under the windows of thousands of publicly housed paupers. Might someone laugh at your scuffed shots?

Still the creativity displayed at recent hearings on the government’s plan to use part of a golf course for housing speaks of desperation.

Let us start with the owl. This owl, needless to say a rare and threatened species, could apparently be found roosting in one of the trees which is likely to be removed when the golf holes go.

This is not a convincing argument at all. A golf course is not a nature reserve. Those strips of woodland are not provided as a refuge for homeless hooters; they are just there to keep the golfers far enough apart to reduce accidents.

Meanwhile the creation of the course itself requires the construction of a wholly artificial landscape. Large quantities of fertiliser encourage the grass; generous dollops of weedkiller discourage its competition. Wild animals which might threaten the grass (e.g. pigs) or the golfers (e.g. pythons) are vigorously discouraged.

A golf course, in short, has all the disadvantages of a zoo and none of the compensating advantages.

Then we come to the question of whether the truncated (two-and-a-half courses) remains of the facility will still be enough for the purposes of entertaining visiting events, one or two of which, we were told, could give Hong Kong a “big boost”.

As a piece of geometry this does not add up. It is a characteristic of international golf contests that all the participants play on the same 18 holes. That leaves the space occupied by the remaining 28 holes in which organisers could surely fit the usual infrastructure of tents, car parks, television towers and what have you.

As a piece of economics it does not make sense either. It appears that just as no millionaire fraudster fails to find a lawyer who can explain his innocence, no international spasm of sport fails to find an economist who will predict a “big boost” for the staging country or territory.

These claims have lately been subjected to careful examination and been found to be wholly fictitious. Even big sport circuses like the Olympics or the World Cup Finals do not move the needle in a substantial economy and putting them on absorbs a large amount of money paid in advance, little of which comes back.

Foreign spectators at events of this kind come in three categories. There are those who were already in the country, resident or visiting, and took in the sport as an added attraction. Then there are those who were planning a visit, for business or pleasure, and changed their schedule to include the sport as well. The third, smallest category, comprises those who actually make a special trip.

Analysis of the audience routinely finds that most of them are locals. If they had not stumped up for tickets, hot dogs, jugs of Carlsberg etc they would have spent similar amounts on other entertainments on offer locally.

It may be that the “big boost” on offer is reputational rather than economic. Hong Kong has had some rough press lately, particularly (by coincidence) in some countries where golf is a major participant sport.

Unfortunately these are places where the ability to assemble a cast of young millionaires and watch them fight over a large pile of Saudi money is not going to do a great deal for our reputation. It’s a better story than the current efforts to encourage and recruit international bounty hunters, but that’s a low bar.

The most cherishable argument against desecrating our palace of golf came from a local resident, who reported that he had resorted to his nearest temple, and there cast the fortune-telling sticks which are a common facility in such places. The sticks had warned that Hong Kong would face a catastrophic future if the threatened holes were replaced by public housing.

Now I have an open mind on this sort of stuff. It is not the Hymns Ancient and Modern/Book of Common Prayer kind of thing which featured in my youth. Still, every New Year I am down at our local temple, putting the permitted three joss sticks in a sandbox in front of a multi-story gold-plated God. I spin the windmill, beat the drum, make a contribution to the temple expenses and buy a small lucky charm which we hang inside the front door.

There is more to life than science, logic and “common sense”. I do not claim to know what that “more” might be but we all have our own ways of acknowledging that it is there.

So I am happy to respect the views of those people who suppose that the fortune sticks, or the various other things used for this purpose – trained birds, tossed coins, crystal balls – may give some indication of the road ahead.

I am, however, very dubious about the utility of this sort of thing for the makers of detailed town planning decisions. A prudent fortune-telling stick may express a general view on the desirability of golf courses, but a prediction of dire effects for the territory as a whole if the golf club is pruned … strains credulity.

And what, one wonders, is the Town Planning Board to do if some rival prophet, anxious to help the public housing programme, tells it that a precisely opposite message emerged from his close examination of the entrails of slaughtered chickens?

In the end this is no laughing matter. I sympathise with those golf club members asking “Why us?” when other possibilities are being neglected. The PLA’s ample land-holdings are untouchable because of politics, the Jockey Club’s because it shares its proceeds with the government on a large scale. Too late now for a lucrative sideline in golf gambling.

Still, unaccustomed as I am to agreeing with our lovely leaders, Hong Kong has thousands of golfers, and hundreds of thousands of people in horror housing. Business must come before pleasure.

An anonymous but outspoken netizen recently dubbed the Hong Kong Police, or perhaps just the national security specialists, our Gestapo-po. This seems very unfair.

It is a commonplace that some languages spring into use in particular circumstances. Discussions of music can hardly avoid Italian. The writers of restaurant menus instinctively reach for their French. These choices honour the unique historic contributions of the Italians to music and the French to fine food.

It is less clear why discussions of authoritarian regimes or secret police forces always veer in the direction of German.

People often complain that people of my generation make too much of World War Two. Well we grew up with it. All adults had been affected in one way or another. Both of my parents served in the Army; grandparents were dug out of the rubble of their house during the Blitz, aunts and uncles were child evacuees from London. In the 50s bomb gaps still scarred most European cities.

But there can surely be no excuse for younger generations, who seem to have developed the same habit. Even the august Economist has this verbal tic; writing about restrictions on business research companies in China it said this: “In areas like Xinjiang and chipmaking, investigations now appear entirely verboten.” Well OK we want some elegant variation on ‘forbidden’, but why not ‘interdit’ or ‘prohibido’?

Hitler was an awful person and his era in Germany was an awful time, but it only lasted 13 years from 1932 to 1945. Adolf did not invent despotism or genocide, and nor was he the last person to practise them.

It is difficult to assign degrees of nastiness to national leaders but as the 20^th century’s worst mass murderer Hitler trails both Stalin and Mao, who lasted much longer and caused harms with which their surviving citizens are still living.

Michael Lewis wrote after a visit to Berlin that the Germans seemed to have accepted the role of “history’s bad guys”. It is surely time to put this behind us.

Comparisons with the Third Reich are also unfair to our police force, which may no longer be its cuddly old self but has not explored torture, assassination or rounding people up for extermination.

Actually the only thing it has in common with the Gestapo is its size. It is difficult to find an unambiguous figure for either force because they both employ or employed civilians and part-timers, and changed over time. But something between 30 and 40 thousand seems about right.

As the Gestapo had the whole of occupied Europe to deal with and the Hong Kong police only have to worry about tiny Hong Kong this raises an interesting question: do we need so many cops and if so why?

Happily the United Nations has collected a lot of data on the size of police forces which can be accessed here. The usual way of standardising for size is to consider the number of police people per 100,000 population.

Unfortunately this doesn’t really cater for the fact that small places need a certain number of people if they are to have a police force at all. So you get freakish numbers for places like Pitcairn Island (no. of police: 2, no. per 100,000 inhabitants 3,509) the Vatican City (130 cops, 15,439) and Niue (16 cops, 1,038).

Taking the microstates into account, the UN determined that the median ratio per 100,000, which can be considered the norm for a decent-sized country, was 300. It also noticed that in West Asia, Eastern and Southern Europe the figure was more like 400. So Hong Kong’s figure (35,804 with a ratio to population of 477 in 2020) could be considered rather high.

This may be partly a colonial legacy. In the days when the BBC screened documentaries about the then Royal force, the number of people involved in routine call-outs was a constant wonder. A British Z car was a family saloon with two men in it. Its Hong Kong counterpart was a long-wheelbase Landrover containing an expat inspector to represent the interests of the government, a sergeant to give orders, an interpreter to tell the inspector as much of what was going on as it was seemly for him to know, two constables to do the actual work and a driver.

Whatever the cause, Hong Kong’s police to population number seems a bit large compared with the sort of places with which we like to compare ourselves or consider as possible emigration destinations: England and Wales 227, Canada 184, Australia 264, US 242. Denmark, often cited as the world’s happiest country, gets by with 196 and Finland, usually its rival for the title, has 132.

Outstanding in the other direction is our perennial regional rival Singapore, with 44,162 police people giving a police to population ratio of 810. This seems particularly extravagant when compared with the figures for our motherland, which acknowledged 2,000,000 police people – a suspiciously round number – giving a force to population ratio of 143.

This seems to be the sort of figure we might aspire to. But do not hold your breath. Countries run by the army have large armies. Territories run by the police force …

Two stories on the same day nicely illustrated Hong Kong’s attitude to mental illness.

One concerned a legislator (no names or party affiliations, not to protect the guilty but because I have sworn off politics) who suggested that “recovering mental patients” could be shipped across the boundary to the Greater Bay Area to complete their recovery in the bosom of the motherland.

This was too much even for the Standard’s anonymous leader writers, who generally approve of suggestions from pro-government legislators – virtually the only kind we have these days. Whoever Mary Ma was on the relevant day she was quite scathing about the idea: violation of ‘one country two systems’, example of misguided patriotic “babyism”, mental health entirely a matter for Hong Kong, and the public wished mentally ill people to be cared for close to — or better still where possible by — their families.

A more entertaining report said that you could now buy on the usual internet shopping sites tote bags and tee-shirts decorated with the logos of the Castle Peak Mental Hospital and the Siu Lam Psychiatric Centre. The centre is run by the Correctional Services Department and accommodates mentally ill prisoners, including those so ill as to be indigestible by the legal system.

Under the logo, in Chinese, are the words “discharged patients’ souvenir”. I find it difficult to believe that people would take this seriously. Would a discharged patient really want a “souvenir” of what is rarely a pleasant experience? Having been given such a thing, would he wish to flash it in the street?

Still, purchasers reported interesting effects from carrying a bag of this kind. Several claimed that colleagues started treating them more civilly. Some said they felt “safer”. One user was reported as saying that “People gave me their seats on public transport and police would escort me on the streets.”

In fairness to netizens, who are often portrayed as boundlessly gullible, some people thought the bags were a parody. However the government is reportedly taking them seriously. The Customs warned of possible criminal liability for trade mark abuse, the Equal Opportunities people waved the Disabilities Discrimination Ordinance and the hospital management said the public should “understand mental health issues in a positive manner.”

But there we have Hong Kong and mental illness in a nutshell: the wish that the whole problem would go away, preferably to Shenzhen, and a lingering fear of anyone who has a problem of this kind.

These attitudes go back way beyond the handover. Late period colonial governors understood that their duties included turning Hong Kong into a respectable facsimile of a European social democracy: a colony of which citizens of a welfare state need not be ashamed.

So with varying degrees of reluctance colonial civil servants constructed a rather sketchy social security system: public housing, public hospitals, government schools, money for poor people…

And after the handover, when the pressure was off, the same people started surreptitiously dismantling the whole thing. Public housing construction ceased, hospitals started charging for some medicines, universities charged the full cost of some courses.

But there was no need to curtail the provision for mental health because this had simply been missed out in the first place. Hong Kong has, for example, less than 400 psychiatric doctors, about half the number the World Health Organisation recommends for a population of our size.

In official theory we will catch up with the WHO’s recommendation in about 20 years. But given that doctors generally and psychiatrists in particular are warmly welcomed in all the most succulent emigration destinations a more realistic timetable would involve the word “never”.

We also have 600 clinical psychologists, who aspire to help. But they are not doctors, and consequently are not allowed to prescribe drugs. As the treatment regime for the more serious kinds of mental illness usually involves suppressing the symptoms with drugs for a year or two in the hope that the ailing brain will sort itself out, the heavy lifting falls to the psychiatric doctors.

As a result the wait to see one of these people can be up to two years, and the average “consultation” lasts eight or nine minutes. For what this feels like at a personal level I recommend The Impossible City, a Hong Kong memoir, by Karen Cheung. Unfortunately you are unlikely to find this in your local library.

For comparison, while we have about 1,000 mental health professionals, we have 15,000 medical doctors of the conventional kind, 25,000 social workers, and 34,000 police people. Priorities?

Hong Kong’s aged citizens, of whom I am one, enjoy two unusual benefits, which partially at least compensate us for the absence of a meaningful system of pensions.

The less controversial one we owe to Mr Leung Chun-ying, who rarely gets a kind word from me but credit must be given. He had the idea that old people were greatly hampered in their movements by the proliferation of pedestrian bridges and walkways, all of which required us to climb a flight of stairs to gain access.

So a rolling programme has been in progress since Mr Leung’s term of office to provide a lift in every spot where a senile pedestrian might otherwise be faced with a flight of stairs.

This is not controversial with the SAR’s financial planners because it is not a fixed recurring item of expenditure. In times of austerity it can be slowed or even suspended. Indeed it has tended to proceed quite slowly. Any self-respecting Victorian engineer would have built a major terminus in the time it took to put a lift on the north side of Shatin station.

The other more tricky item came in so early in Mr Leung’s term that I suppose we must give at least some of the credit to another former chief executive whose praises I rarely sing: Mr Donald Tsang Yam-kuen. This allows us dinosaurs to travel on buses and trains at a flat rate of $2 a trip.

This is the sort of thing which gives our financial planners nightmares, because once granted it is difficult to withdraw, and the cost is much influenced by factors outside their control.

The spectre which haunts Hong Kong’s budgets is that one day there will be a massive submarine eruption and Hong Kong Island will suddenly triple in size, making land virtually worthless and cutting the government’s income from land auctions to a minus number, with developers seeking to be paid to build on the copious quantities of land available.

This has always seemed to me rather unlikely. After all a great bonanza threatened when the old airport closed in 1998, liberating a huge area of land already reclaimed and smoothed for aviation purposes. Somehow this was wrapped in red tape with such effectiveness that it has trickled out over the ensuing quarter century, and some of it is still being auctioned now.

The $2 a trip concession is a great boon, allowing old people to get out and about without worrying too much about the effect on even the flimsiest finances. Unfortunately this led Ms Carrie Lam into greatly expanding it in 2021, when the government needed a popularity boost.

The initial scheme only kicked in when you hit 65 years of age and covered only the MTR, buses and green minibuses. Ms Lam not only extended it to other forms of public transport but lowered the qualifying age to 60.

I must say that even those of my friends who are in the 60-65 bracket find the lowering of the age limit welcome, but a bit odd. After all most of us do not retire until 65, and people with meaningful or rewarding jobs often go on to 70. Many people these days live longer and healthier lives than they did when 65 became the conventional European retirement age 150 years ago.

Anyway whatever the merits of this arrangement it is beginning to look expensive. It is expected to cost more than $3 billion this year, rising over the next decade to $8.6 billion. It may well be that there are more focussed ways of helping the elderly poor which would be a better use for this money. It may also be, of course, that the figure for a decade away is hopelessly wrong. You cannot feel confident in 10-year predictions from a government which usually gets its one-year predictions wrong.

Still there are certainly some problems with the scheme. One is that at the moment (this is being changed with the introduction of a card with a picture of the holder on it) anyone can carry and use an aged Octopus card. There are in fact three times as many aged Octopuses in existence as there are aged people, which looks a bit suspicious. The MTR is the only transport means which still has people with no driving duties who check tickets occasionally, and it catches the vast majority of the 4,000 or so cases a year in which people are found using the wrong card.

A more subtle problem is found on the buses, where there is no control over passengers leaving, so everyone pays the fare to the end of the line. Passengers who are paying the real fare are consequently deterred from getting on a long-distance bus for a short trip.

If your fare is fixed at $2 on the other hand, the easiest way of – for example – getting a bus from Wanchai to Causeway Bay is to get on one bound for Chai Wan and get off at the next stop. The fare for the full trip is about $14, so the bus company will collect $12 from the government, which is nice for the bus company but a bit of a waste from the government’s point of view. I am not sure how widespread this sort of thing is, but there are certainly some people doing it, including (in emergencies) me.

A brutally simple solution would be to cancel all Ms Lam’s changes, but we cannot do that because it would be an admission of error on a large scale. A pleasantly non-committal one would be to wait and see whether the introduction of the more secure card – which rejoices in the lovely name of Joyyou – produces a reduction in the number of $2 trips, as the users of anonymous and fraudulent Octopusses drop out of the system.

But sooner or later I suppose we shall see the $2 trip changed to a $3 trip. This can be put down to inflation and blamed on the Americans, like everything else.

The largest press conference I ever attended was assembled to meet George Best. Mr Best had been a magical footballer for Manchester United in the 60s but was now past his peak and quite a long way down the other side of it.

The occasion was Mr Best’s recruitment by Fulham Football Club, then in the Second Division (now known as the Championship) and in need of reinforcements.

The only thing I remember about this occasion (it was a long time ago) is that a woman was sitting next to me, and exhibiting unmistakable signs of growing distress. It turned out that she was representing the Daily Mail, no less, but had discovered on her arrival that she had no pen with which to make notes. I was surreptitiously shocked: elite reporter, no pen?

Still, she had come to the right place. I was only present because Fulham had played Nottingham Forest – the team I followed for a Derby newspaper — that afternoon. There was no question of me being expected to write anything about Mr Best and I had time and leisure to come to the rescue of damsels in distress.

Also I had a bag. This was unusual in those days. My bag was marketed as a Reporter’s Bag, though I never met another reporter who had one. It hung from your shoulder and had room for the shorthand notepad which we all used in those days, with plenty of space for other things: spare pens and paper, a paperback book for long waits, a bar of chocolate for long waits which extended into mealtimes, a map of the area in which I might be expected to find interviewees, and so on.

So I was able to lend the unprepared Mail female a pen. This is as close as I ever got to working on Fleet Street: my spare Biro briefly reported for the Mail. I have often wondered since what Ms Mail was doing there. Female football reporters were as rare as hen’s teeth in those days and the Mail certainly had none. Perhaps she was from the celebrite substance abuse desk.

A quick conclusion for Mr Best’s fans of his part in the story. His stay at Fulham did not last long. It did though last long enough to include the reverse fixture in which they visited Nottingham. Mr Best did nothing spectacular and Fulham lost. Nevertheless the entire Nottingham Forest team trooped down the dressing room corridor afterwards to ask for his autograph. He was a legend.

The reason why this bit of distant history popped into my head the other day is that what was then a rather eccentric habit has now become commonplace. Men carry bags.

When I was a reporter this was almost unheard of. People like postmen who needed a bag for their work would of course carry one. Men who took work home, or wished it to be thought that they took work home, might carry a briefcase. The rest of us were expected to manage with our pockets.

These were much more numerous than they are now. As well as four in your trousers – two in the front, two in the back – you had at least two large pockets in the lower part of your jacket and another two – one inside and one outside – at the top. There was also a small pocket at the top of your shirtfront. People with respectable jobs were expected to wear a suit. Less respectable jobs like teaching and journalism might permit a jacket and trousers.

Generally on holidays, days off and such you still wore the jacket, though you might wear a less formal shirt and take the jacket off indoors. Nowadays, walking round Central on a weekday you might think that nothing has changed: hordes of men wear suits.

But walking round other places, where you meet lots of men who are for one reason or another not working, or at least not working in an office, the picture is completely different. Trousers have endured but tops are now routinely pocketless.

This has left men with a problem we did not have before, namely where to put all the stuff which for one reason or another you don’t want to leave home without: wallet, mobile phone, reading glasses, door keys, folding shopping bag, very small umbrella…

A popular solution to this problem is the rucksack. This has ample space, often comes with convenient subdivisions, and hangs on your back out of the way. I carried one for a while… and discovered the drawbacks: it leads to embarrassing collisions on crowded MTR trains, and has to be awkwardly twirled round to the front if you want to take anything out of it. It is also, I suppose, a pickpocket’s delight because you can’t really keep an eye on it.

And so to the increasing popularity of the shoulder bag, to which I recently returned myself. My current shoulder bag is much like the old one except that it has zipped compartments and is in a rather lurid colour, probably because it was not designed with men in mind. Most male users manage to find a black one.

One occasionally sees other kinds of bag on men. A sort of Bat Belt with one or more pouches hanging from it crops up. Some punters go for a bag which hangs diagonally across the chest. Careful examination, though, reveals one boundary which is never breached. No man carries anything which could be mistaken for a handbag. We are all more enlightened about sex differences these days, but there are limits.

According to one of the more suspicious interpretations of China’s intentions for Hong Kong, the future will look like this: decadent Western innovations like democracy, human rights and such will no longer be supplied. But the rule of law will continue as far as business is concerned.

This will preserve the city’s status as a place where foreign money can be sucked in, and the proceeds of success in the mainland can be transported out.

The implication of this is that some parts of the law will atrophy, and some will continue much as before. And that means, you might think, that contracts will continue to be enforced in the old way. Not so.

The government is now wheeling out provisions which make it clear that the sanctity of contract, like other kinds of sanctity, will get no protection if it conflicts with the current passion, which is national security.

Last September Ming Pao reported (in their translation)

Government Logistics Service added new terms and conditions in procurement and services last month, stating that for national security considerations, the government may disqualify individual bidders in procurement, and Terminate the contract during the contract. The project being tendered by the Logistics Department includes the procurement of toilet paper, the production of outlying islands, and the prevention of insect rats. A civil service organization said that the update clause meant that frontline colleagues would check the background of the bidding company in the future, and the Jide government provided clear guidance.

Ming Pao

Having ensured that the supply of toilet paper would be free from subversive influences we then went on to the supply of lands and works:

According to the department website, the new term allows the government to disqualify a bidder if it, its parent firm or the company it acts as an agent for “has engaged, is engaging, or is reasonably believed to have engaged or be engaging in any acts or activities that are likely to cause or constitute the occurrence of offences endangering national security.” The government can also reject bids “in the interest of national security” or for the protection of “the public interest of Hong Kong, public morals, public order or public safety.

HKFP

And on it went, last week, to new guidelines for aided schools entering into contracts for goods or services:

Schools should incorporate clauses into documents relating to quotations or tenders that would allow suppliers to be disqualified and contracts terminated “in the interest of national security,” the guidelines read. According to the clauses, schools may disqualify a supplier if it “has engaged, is engaging, or is reasonably believed to have engaged or be engaging in acts or activities that are likely to cause or constitute the occurrence of offences endangering national security” or to “protect the public interest of Hong Kong, public morals, public order or public safety.”

HKFP

Reactions to all this were understandably mixed. Suppliers of toilet paper and exterminators of insect rats held their counsel. On the other hand the lands and works announcement produced a swift swoon in the relevant stock prices. A legislator representing the education industry thought the new arrangement asked a lot of schools. Surely, he added, if a company or person had breached the law then the police would already have arrested them.

And this is a very good point. In our legal system it used to said that guilt or innocence was a matter to be determined by the courts, and until a finding of guilt came along we were all entitled to be presumed innocent.

Nobody could object to a government department or aided school abrogating a contract with a person or entity who/which had been convicted of endangering national security. But is anyone really going to cancel a contract on the grounds that it is “not in the public interest of Hong Kong” to continue with that supplier?

We must also note that in the long run a miscreant who has paid his debt to society should not be subjected to impediments to his participation in the economy after his release. Those who have been convicted and done their time are entitled to the presumption that they have been rehabilitated. Those who have not been convicted have every right to compete for the right to supply government toilet paper.

Cynical observers may discern in the new arrangements an attempt to create a “black list” of politically unreliable people who will not be able to do business with the government – or a “white list” of patriotic bidders which will have the same effect.

This is probably just a conspiracy theory. The fact is that the government has developed a consuming preoccupation with national security and every department is trying to score points by coming up with new measures to tick this box.

During the 20 years after the handover – and for that matter in the 20 years before it – national security was never mentioned in Hong Kong but seemed to manage just fine. Now our government has turned into the sort of over-protective parent who wants her kid to wear a cycling safety helmet when riding the school bus.

We have an obligation to protect national security. This does not require us to turn it into a paranoid preoccupation which poisons every aspect of life in the SAR.

It is difficult to keep up with the law these days. This is partly due to the occasional attempts to help by Mr Ronnie Tong SC, whose interventions often leave me confused.

For instance, there was his advice about the forthcoming effort to ban performance, writing, or indeed any sort of intercourse with the song which is Not Hong Kong’s National Anthem. Mr Tong thought it would still be OK if you sang the song in the bath.

I presume this was based on the theory that it would be all right if nobody could hear you. This seems to open up the possibility of a whole new legal genre of Zen jurisprudence, involving saffron robes, fishhead drums and the sound of one hand clapping. Sample question from the first Bar exam: if a man goes deep into the forest, where noone can hear him, and plays the March of the Volunteers … badly … on the kazoo, has an offence been committed?

More seriously, the solo in the bathroom suggestion sounds a bit dangerous. What if you are overheard and reported by a neighbour … or, as national security education marches through the local school system, your kid?

Nobody seems to be able to answer the obvious question about the government’s bid for an injunction against subversive sing-alongs: if the song is illegal, what need of an injunction? If it is not illegal, how can it be acceptable to ask a judge to make it so?

Another legal tangle surrounds the June 4 Celebratory Police Swoop on various individuals who were found in Wanchai or Causeway Bay wearing clothes, or carrying items, which suggested a desire to commemorate a historic non-happening.

It is apparently officially agreed that 23 people were “taken away” to police stations. None of them was in fact charged with anything. The police explanation was not helpful: they removed “those persons who were likely to cause a breach of the peace, from the scenes to police stations for enquiry.”

This conflates and confuses two different scenarios. Lawyers seem to agree that the police may legitimately remove people from the scene if their presence is giving rise to an imminent danger of large-scale disorder. A recent precedent, for example, involved a case where the court accepted that the hostile crowd heavily outnumbered the police presence. But if that was the reason here, why the need for enquiry?

Conversely, if the police suspected some crime was imminent, there might be a need for enquiry, but where was the evidence of that? In 2012 the High Court held that a breach of the peace must involve threats of or actual violence. A lady carrying a flower hardly seems to meet that requirement.

In a police letter to the Hong Kong Journalists Association, which complained because a reporter was among those “taken away”, the police line had changed a bit: officers were conducting “stop and search crime prevention work”, in a “high-risk area” where crimes such as disrupting public order and sedition had recently occurred.

The problem with this explanation is that “stop and search crime prevention work” does not usually involve a visit to a police station. My students often reported on their experience of “stop and search” incidents, which came in two categories: searches of the bags or backpacks of male students, or more genial chats with pretty females, often concluding with a polite request for a phone number. Nobody was ever invited to a police station.

Mr Tong’s take on all this was that “legally, if [the police] want to arrest a person they must have reasonable suspicion. The question is whether the police were arresting that person at that time. If they were inviting [the individual] to provide information at a police station and the person being taken away agreed to it, that would not be problematic.”

Mr Tong then prudently declined to go further in the absence of any detailed information. We are left with an interesting question. What is it about Hong Kong police stations that so many dissident politicians and eager commemorators were willing to drop their plans for the day to slot in a visit?

I have occasionally been invited to visit police stations, for press purposes or a drink or both. It was a pleasant experience. On the other hand you have to suspect that at least some of the 23 people were persuaded to agree by a threat of some kind, or indeed were simply bundled into a police vehicle without ceremony.

Not to worry. Mr Tong concluded comfortably that there were “many ways for individuals to complain about dissatisfactory police work”. You what? Was this a joke? The way for individuals to complain about dissatisfactory police work is to contact the Complaints Against Police Office, which is … part of the police force. The only alternative is to sue the Commissioner of Police, which is too expensive for most of us.

The CAPO system has been working for many years and has established a very clear track record. The Secretary for Justice recently noted that the 100 per cent success rate in achieving convictions for national security offences was evidence of the excellence and care of prosecutors. Well … other explanations are possible.

The system for dealing with complaints against police has a similarly stellar record: more than 99 per cent of cases filed end in a finding of “unpursuable”, “unsubstantiated”, or too trivial to attract any remedial action. Citizens afflicted by dissatisfactory police work have low expectations.

All this legal confusion is, I fear, the inevitable result of the police effectively taking over the government. It now looks like the man with a hammer to whom every problem looks like a nail. The cure for every social problem is a new law or higher penalties for infringing existing ones.

Ban that song, censor that film, criminalise failure to report abuse. Are people feeding pigeons? There should be a law against it. There will be. Drafting is already in progress.