tim's experiment

Please believe me I am not a Luddite.

True, I was watching the check-out ritual at Taste the other day, which seemed to consist of a multiplicity of cards, coupons and receipts going back and forth. And I thought, wouldn’t it be nice if there was one piece of paper which was accepted in all shops. And then I realised I was reinventing money.

But seriously, I may be old enough to remember when London telephone exchanges had names, and your school desks had a hole in it where you would keep your ink pot. But I have moved with the times.

I had a long stint on a borrowed Apple II in 1980, met my first newspaper production computer in 1982 and had my own computer at home – a real IBM – in 1984. Like everyone else I fell for the fax machine, the pager and the mobile phone as they got cheaper. I acknowledge the importance of the microchip. But there should be limits.

Lately I have noticed restaurants are dispensing with the services of the attendant who used to take your order. In one place, which I like, they have a tablet computer fixed to each table and you order through that. Some of the food arrives on a sort of conveyor belt. Japanese restaurants seem to like this sort of thing.

The Hong Kong idea, now that you can’t enter a restaurant without your phone for COVID purposes, is to have a QR code on the table with which you can get on the restaurant’s web site, and the menu, with your mobile.

But, you may think, someone still has to show you to your seat and deliver your food. Not any more they don’t.

Last week I visited a restaurant which had taken automation to new heights. The entrance screening was on the “honour” system. There was the official QR code and a mobile phone (securely fixed to the furniture) to which you could show your vaccine pass and get a “ding dong” of approval.

You were then left to find your own seat which, of course, had another QR code in front of it. Your order disappeared into the system and was delivered by a mobile gadget which looked like a sophisticated variation on the Hong Kong litter bin, or if you have a long memory like a small Dalek with two shelves where the “exterminate” gadget used to be.

There were several of these machines floating about, politely making way for each other and stopping whenever they thought they might collide with a human. On the shelves would be your food. You were then supposed to press a little button to tell your robot to go home. I did wonder how long it would stand there if you missed this point.

We were invited to pay by phone, and that concluded your meal, consumed with no contact with a human at all. Actually this did not quite work for us, because we needed a paper receipt to qualify for free parking. But they are trying.

And the question which now arises is of course whether the depersonalised dining experience is a Good Thing.

I note with dismay that this is presumably going to destroy a large number of fairly unskilled but usefully flexible-hours jobs. No doubt the management will announce as the first robot comes in through the door that this will enable the team to provide a whole new dimension of excellent service. Do not believe this.

During my early years as a journalist the microchip was gradually taking over newspaper production. On every occasion we were told that the new technology would make lives easier and the output better. There would be later deadlines and more special editions.

This is not what happened at all. Newspaper proprietors were able to make enormous savings by sacking a lot of typesetters and compositors. The deadlines remained the same and so did the number of editions. Profits increased.

So if you are a waiter you need to face the possibility that you are going to be replaced by a wired litter bin on wheels.

From the diner’s point of view I suppose it depends. In cafeteria-style places, where you order, collect and pay at different places, there isn’t much human contact anyway. Teahouses may be reluctant to go in for service robots, if only because they will require wide aisles and step-free dining spaces.

In more up-market establishments … we shall see. In my experience a friendly and well-briefed server adds pleasure and value to the experience. This is particularly the case if you are a regular customer and your restaurant is a place where people know you by name.

I suppose it is only a matter of time before artificial intelligence advances to the point where your waiter Dalek can slide up to you and say “Hi Tim! Are you having the usual?” But it won’t be the same.

In the meantime this will undoubtably enchant your kids, at least the first time. If you can’t find fully automated service near you try Oliver’s in New Town Plaza Phase 3, Shatin. Don’t tell the robot I sent you. I don’t trust them.

Freedom of the Press? Our government not only does not care for it; it does not know the meaning of the words.

Consider the current prosecution of two journalists and the production company of Stand News. We must not, while the case is ongoing, explore the legal peculiarities of the case. We can, though, deduce a great deal from the policing techniques.

As soon as Apple Daily had been killed, a policeman was assigned the task of collecting items from Stand News’s website. He collected more than 300. Of these 17 were selected as a basis for prosecution, and a further 13 were disclosed to the defence. The existence of the other 270 only emerged during the trial.

None of the 17 articles selected was prosecuted as subversive in itself. The selection is supposed to show the subversive intentions of the two editors on trial.

And this really will not do. It is an important function of a news outlet to report the existence of a wide range of points of view, including many with which it may not agree. If you are allowed to take half a per cent of a website’s output and construct a “line” with it then you can show that it agrees with almost anything.

I would not be surprised to hear that Stand News was broadly sympathetic to the democratic cause, but this cannot be shown by picking out 17 articles. What was in all the other stuff?

It would be interesting to know if one of the national security cops is now working on a similarly selective approach to Ming Pao, which has been getting some stick from the Security Bureau lately.

The latest spat concerns CBD (cannabidiol for scientists), on which the government intends to impose a total ban. Imports and possession will be treated as drugs offences and will attract accordingly draconian sentences.

The bureau was offended, apparently, by a commentary written by Lun Chi-wai, former chairman of the Hong Kong Social Workers General Union. Brevity is not among the bureau’s virtues but the heart of its complaint goes like this:

“When commenting on the publication of a gazette notice for bringing CBD under the control of the First Schedule to the Dangerous Drugs Ordinance, the article seriously distorts the intent of safeguarding public health by controlling CBD through legislation, and purposely misinterprets such legislation as relating to the policy of the Mainland, which may sow discord between the Mainland and the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. The Government has repeatedly explained the hazards of CBD and its scientific justifications for controlling the substance as a dangerous drugs to the Legislative Council, members of public and the sectors concerned. The welfare sector has also voiced its support. The article turns a blind eye to these facts, downplays the harmful effects caused by drug abuse and irrationally associates our legislation with the Mainland. The content may cause dissention between the two places, and may confuse the public as well as affect their vigilance against drugs. We are deeply regret over it.”

Now it may be true that the government has repeatedly explained the hazards of CBD and the alleged scientific justifications for treating it as a dangerous drug, but that does not – in places which enjoy press freedom — require op ed writers to assume uncritically that the hazards are real and the scientific justifications can be substantiated by a look at the evidence.

The government’s view of the matter may be compared with that of the World Health Organisation, which is that “In humans, CBD exhibits no effects indicative of any abuse or dependence potential…. To date, there is no evidence of public health related problems associated with the use of pure CBD.”

The nameless enthusiast who compiled CBD’s very substantial Wikipedia entry has this: “In 2022, the HKSAR Government proposed a ban on any use of cannabidiol (including for academic research and by medical professionals) within the Hong Kong territory, making Hong Kong the first jurisdiction in the world to have complete prohibition of cannabidiol, starting from Feb 1, 2023, in part due to the possible presence of THC which is illegal in Hong Kong..” THC is the active ingredient in the cannabis fun leaves.

We’re unique. This suggests that there may be something eccentric about the official local view of the matter. This is tough luck for some people. A CBD drug called Epidiolex has been approved in both the US and Europe for the treatment of some rare forms of epilepsy found in young children.

Studies continue on the use of CBD for adults to treat anxiety, insomnia, chronic pain and addiction to booze and tobacco. In Canada there is a committee on cannabis products, which “unanimously agrees CBD is safe and tolerable for short-term use (up to 30 days) at doses from 20 milligrams per day to … 200 mg/day via oral administration for healthy adults, provided they discuss the use of all other medications and substances used with their pharmacist.”

In 2020 the Therapeutic Drugs Administration of Australia decided to “allow TGA approved low-dose CBD containing products, up to a maximum of 150 mg/day, for use in adults, to be supplied over-the-counter by a pharmacist, without a prescription.”

Back in Canada a subcommittee also agreed that “there was sufficient evidence regarding the efficacy of CBD for the treatment of pain associated with osteoarthritis in dogs.”

All these careful musings concerned the use of CBD as an internal medicine. Adding a bit of it to face creams and such like seems to be entirely uncontroversial in most places.

Under the circumstances it seems at least arguable that Hong Kong’s proposed blanket ban is a hysterical over-reaction to the fact that CBD comes from the evil cannabis plant, although it is well established that you can’t have illlicit fun with it.

What really puzzles me, though, is the bureau’s indignant denial that the legal situation on the mainland had anything to do with the decision. This is odd. Surely any responsible government would consider the problems which have emerged when things obtainable in Hong Kong were not available on the mainland – from racy books to dependable supplies of baby formula.

Anyway, whatever you think of CBD there is an intimidating conclusion to the Security Bureau’s diatribe, which goes like this:  “The SB expressed grave concern about the misleading articles published by Ming Pao recently, including the commentary on the Immigration Department’s handling of screening of Trafficking in Persons cases and the newspaper cartoon about the police officer’s handling of requests for assistance by schools.”

Big Brother really is watching you. Me too, probably. Can’t say I feel as free as I used to.

We are often told that national security judges are just like the other judges – same oath, same impartiality and all that. In the light of recent performances we must fervently hope that this is not the case.

Consider, for example, the latest outing by Judge Kwok Wai-kin. Judge Kwok is a generous source of material for writers of observations on the local legal scene, for which we are duly grateful.

His latest spot in the limelight involved four kids charged with conspiracy to commit subversion, an offence under the national security law. Their real offence seems to have been to be office-bearers or spokespeople for Student Politicism, a dissident group.

The prosecution complained of street booths in favour of causes like supporting the 12-man speedboat crew who were caught fleeing to Taiwan, and “resisting anti-COVID measures”, but we shall not explore this part of the case further because the four pleaded guilty, as one does these days if one wants to be tried before 2024.

Pleading guilty did not produce a great acceleration in this case, however. They pleaded guilty in July, sentencing in October. So it goes.

Judge Kwok’s first task was to classify the offence. National Security offences come in three sizes, like MacDonalds fried potato portions: small, medium and large, with prescribed sentence ranges accordingly. This case was, the learned judge decided, in the minor category.

So far so good. He then went on to explain why, as seems to be the norm in Nat Sec cases, he was declining to be influenced by the points made in mitigation by the defendants’ lawyers. At this point the case involved “very serious crimes”.

And this, it seems to me, leaves Judge Kwok with a problem. Having used “very serious crimes”, for a minor offence what is he going to use for a major one? This is a mere linguistic difficulty which I shall leave with him but it could be very confusing for defendants. What bothers me is what came next. The defendants, Judge Kwok complained, had been promoting the concept of a “Hong Kong nation”.

“Since ancient times, Hong Kong has been a part of China, and Hongkongers belong to the Chinese nationality. ‘Hong Kong nation’ is only a concept constructed by those promoting Hong Kong independence, it has no historical or legal basis,” Kwok said.

This is a dip into a tricky area which judges do not need to enter and would be well advised to avoid. To start with it is manifest nonsense to say that Hong Kong has been part of China since ancient times, if only because for parts of that long historical period there was no China to be part of. Either there were multiple Chinas in what we now consider China or China itself was part of someone else’s empire, as it was between 1644 and 1911.

There is also more sophistication in the idea of a “Hong Kong nation” than your average judge may be well up with. “Nation” in modern parlance may mean “nation state”, a political entity with a flag, anthem, government, army, UN seat, World Cup team and so on. Without the “state” bit it is commonly used for groups which cherish a distinctive history, language, culture and perhaps religion, but have not acquired the political structure, or in some cases sought it.

Some “nations” have never translated themselves into states, like the Kurds. Some have had a patchy history, like the Armenians, currently a small state. Some are more or less happy parts of a bigger state but still regard themselves as nations, like the Scots.

The idea that a state should also contain a nation, rather than being the personal property of a hereditary monarch, really dates as an idea only to the 18^th century, as a popular aspiration to the 19^th and as a widespread arrangement only to the 20^th.

It is hopelessly anachronistic to transfer the idea of the nation state, or citizens’ nationality, back to ancient times. Judges should beware of sounding like Vladimir Putin’s line on Ukraine.

This brings us to Mr Peter Law, Principal Magistrate, National Security choice, and presiding genius in the trial of members of the organisation which used to run the Tiananmen Massacre commemoration in Victoria Park.

Mr Law had to adjudicate on a little procedural hiccup. Defendant Chow Hang-tung, who is defending herself but is a barrister so that’s OK, was cross-examining a witness from the Nat Sec Police when she used the phrase “Tiananmen Massacre”. Prosecuting counsel objected to the wording and suggested “June 4^th Incident” instead. Mr Law decided that “massacre” was too political for use in court and forbad its use.

He proceeded later to proscribe the use of “killings” as well.

This will be good news for some people. Fans of Herod the Great can rehabilitate the old tyrant as he only perpetrated the “Incident of the Innocents”. Members of the Clan MacDonald need no longer resent or avenge the “Glencoe Incident”. There may even be some hope for Adolf Hitler; shall we say 6 million involuntary suicides?

Observers who suspect that Mr Law’s procedural puritanism has its own political patina will wonder if he would also have objected to “Nanjing Massacre”.

Judges who have succeeded in not sounding like Mr Putin also need to avoid the example of the president of Turkey, Mr Recep (Armenian genocide? Never happened!) Erdogan. Stick to the law and do not dabble in history.

Well, President Xi Jinping’s report to the National People’s Congress clearly ticks one important box: it has given pleasure to a lot of people.

Some of the responses in Hong Kong bordered on ecstatic: Secretary for Culture, Sports and Tourism Kevin Yeung was “thrilled” that the speech had pointed out the need for the country to “adhere to the development path of socialist culture with Chinese characteristics.” DAB chair Starry Lee saw the Congress as a “historic milestone”. Chief Executive John Lee thought “We should learn from the spirit of the 20th National Congress. We should unite in our fights and struggles to better integrate into the country’s development and contribute to the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation!”

Reports of the actual speech suggest that there was nothing new. Xi’s reference to Hong Kong was in Partyspeak, a language which wraps reality in illusion: “In the face of turbulent developments in Hong Kong, the central government exercised overall jurisdiction over the special administrative region as prescribed by China’s constitution and the Basic Law of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, and ensured Hong Kong is administered by patriots,” he said, adding that Hong Kong had gone from “chaos to governance.”

We know what the “turbulent developments” were. The next bit is a long-winded but polite way of saying “you thought you were getting a high degree of autonomy? Welcome to reality, suckers.” Ensuring Hong Kong is administered by patriots means replacing more or less genuine elections with more or less fixed ones.

The official narrative, which Mr Lee also trotted out, is that Hong Kong was rescued from perdition by the benevolent intervention of Mother, and the imposition of the National Security Law took us from, as Mr Xi put it, “chaos to governance”.

This is an abuse of history. “Chaos” was ended partly by frustration and exhaustion, but mainly by the arrival of the COVID virus, which enabled the government to ban, on public health grounds, any public gathering of more than four people.

The vast majority of those arrested during the “chaos” were charged under existing laws with existing offences and dealt with in the regular courts. The contribution of the National Security Law to the proceedings was to destroy Hong Kong’s flourishing civil society, before the ensuing changes to the election system destroyed its political life.

Mother’s contribution to “governance” was to put Hong Kong affairs into the hands of two seasoned apparatchiks who were experienced and comfortable with the idea of suppressing inconvenient opinions by imprisoning anyone expressing them, preferably without the prior formality of a trial.

Mr Xi hailed the “strong vitality” of the One Country Two Systems concept – “a great innovation of socialism with Chinese characteristics”. But it is still not entirely clear whether this great innovation means anything more than Deng Xiaoping’s reassuring observation that we could “still have dancing and horseracing.”

It is difficult to reconcile with the way the Hong Kong government is behaving, which seems to involve reducing any differences between the SAR and the mainland as quickly as possible. If that is what they want it seems to be working, in a way. International comparisons of human rights and press freedom have Hong Kong converging rapidly with China, down at the bottom of the table with paradises like Belarus and Cuba.

Consider, for example, recent changes to the junior secondary school curriculum. Out go such trivia as “the values and attitudes that underpin the local society, including rights and responsibilities, freedom, rule of law, social justice, democracy.” In comes “China’s constitution, the meaning of national security and the importance of the national security law, as well as developing a sense of national identity.”

What is going on here? The highest objective of education used to be to help students to identify and pursue goodness, truth and beauty. This is replaced by the objective of spreading lies about an ugly and brutal system. Many local teachers have already had second thoughts about their career choices. They will not be the last.

If political integration is a questionable pleasure, what of the economic kind, or, as Mr Lee puts it, better integrating with the country’s development? The potential problem with this is that, as with the new political arrangements, it makes Hong Kong’s future entirely dependent on decisions made in Beijing.

And the decision made in Beijing these days seems to be that the Party knows best about everything and will accordingly run the economy by issuing instructions on whatever takes its fancy. But we have seen this movie before.

If the history of the 20^th century teaches us anything it is that unbridled capitalism produces great wealth and great inequality, and unbridled economic dictatorship by party or person produces great equality … and poverty, usually with a side dish of stagnation and corruption.

There is a danger that we shall be dragged into a doomed replication of an experiment which has already been tried elsewhere with catastrophic results. The message of the 20^th congress seems to be that “we have done wealth; now we can do socialism.” That is not, I fear, the way these things work.

Some time ago a Hong Kong judge threatened to install closed circuit TV cameras in his courtroom, so that he could keep an eye on what happened in his absence.

At the time I wrote that this was an unnecessary and legally unjustified proposition, and had the reprehensible feature that it might discourage members of the public from attending court cases, which they are perfectly entitled to do.

However it seems that this judge’s remark was merely the tip of an iceberg of judicial paranoia, which has now blossomed (if an iceberg can blossom) in plans for whole court buildings to be subject to electronic surveillance, a pre-trial recording warning court-goers of the powers which judges can wield over them, and screening for court visitors.

This is all rather implausibly justified as necessary for “security”, although there has been no sign that security as such might be a problem.

Judges are strange creatures. Some of them are sweet and nice people. But the job can go to their heads. Judges bullying the inhabitants of their courtrooms have now become such a problem in England and Wales that a hotline has been set up on which people can report abuse anonymously.

Some of our new measures will no doubt be justified on the basis of experience elsewhere. I understand that people arriving at UK courts these days are routinely asked to open their bags. This did not happen when I was a reporter and it did not happen in colonial Hong Kong either. Times have, no doubt, changed.

It is reported, on the other hand, that people will no longer be allowed to carry water. Why on earth not? The Wanchai District Court is not an aeroplane which can be destroyed by a cunning mixture of liquids detonated in a toilet. Water is harmless.

There appears to be a general failure to appreciate the danger of appearing like one of those paranoid despotic regimes which sees a subversive behind every bush. Every citizen is a suspect and every bag a potential bomb.

Video cameras in courtrooms bring other perils. To start with there is the danger that judges will inflate their powers to an unjustified and indeed unlawful degree. The powers they exercise over events in their own courtrooms extend as far as is necessary to permit the orderly conduct of court proceedings. And no further.

If the judge is not in the room then no proceedings are in progress and the judge has no more powers over the waiting audience than any other citizen. Similarly once the case is over the law reverts to its everyday form, as a judge in Liverpool discovered when, after discharging a prisoner who had been acquitted, he told the miscreant he had been lucky in his jury. This was not part of the proceedings, the defendant threatened to sue, and the judge was constrained to make a grovelling apology in open court.

The purpose of the cameras is apparently to curb disorderly behaviour in the public gallery. This is an extremely expensive solution to a minor problem. Most cases attract no public interest at all. During the three years when I was a regular court reporter I do not remember the number of people in the gallery ever exceeding five. Usually there was nobody.

A tiny number of recent cases in Hong Kong have attracted much larger numbers. People whose friends are enduring long periods of imprisonment without trial for nakedly political offences do tend to turn up and offer moral support.

Occasionally this take the form of waving, or even talking, during pauses in the progress of the legal juggernaut. On other occasions speeches of explanation or mitigation have been greeted with applause, which is improper but hardly a major disruption of the proceedings.

Most of the interaction between public and prisoner takes place during the interval – commonly quite long – between the time when everyone is ready for the kick-off and the time when the judge arrives and takes the field. There is another obvious opportunity at the end when his or her lordship disappears and there is a pause while the correctional van is lined up.

So when Big Brother is watching he is, I fear, going to see a lot of conduct of which he disapproves but to which there is strictly speaking no legal objection. Why then, are we pursuing a “deterrent effect”? Well of course it depends what you wish to deter.

It is painfully offensive to some people in the national security industry that people charged with national security offences do, during their long periods of imprisonment without trial, receive the moral support of their friends and sympathisers. One of the ways in which this support is provided is by turning up for court appearances.

We cannot ban this, alas. Court hearings are supposed to be public. We can however discourage it by assuring said supporters that their attendance and activity are being recorded and the resulting evidence may be used against them in another court later.

An interesting legal milestone was passed recently when two people were charged with “sedition” on the basis of their behaviour in a courtroom public gallery. Be careful what you clap for.

We do not enjoy the rule of law; we enjoy the rule of selected laws. Consider the District Councils Ordinance. This is an admirably clear effort. The relevant parts go like this:

If a vacancy arises in the office of an elected member, the Designated Officer must, by notice published in the Gazette, declare the existence of the vacancy within 21 days after becoming aware of the vacancy. S32 (1)

District Councils Ordinance S32 (1)

Following this:

The Electoral Affairs Commission must, in accordance with regulations in force under the Electoral Affairs Commission Ordinance (Cap. 541), arrange for a by-election to be held in the following circumstances… (a) on the making of a declaration as to the existence of a vacancy in the membership of a District Council under section 32.

Same Ordinance S33 (2)

Notice that, unlike regular District Council elections, there is no role for the Chief Executive in the timing of this process, which is entirely automatic. However since July 2021 there have been some 200 vacancies on District Councils, none of which have been filled.

The government, dissatisfied with the results of the elections the previous year, persuaded most of the winners to resign by circulating baseless threats that anyone who was disqualified for a dearth of patriotic enthusiasm would be presented with a bill for $1million.

At that time we were provided with an entirely unsatisfactory and unlawful explanation for the absence of by-elections by the then Chief Executive, Carrie Lam: the government was too busy. She cited the then upcoming elections to the election committee, the Legislative Council and for her replacement.

These turned out to be less strenuous than expected. Most of the electorate did not bother with the Legco election and there was only one candidate for Chief Executive. This did not, however, produce a return to the paths of by-election righteousness. We were left only with Ms Lam’s last word on the subject, which was that “We do not feel there is sufficient room and time for another set of by-elections, especially of this magnitude, because of the number of seats involved. So I could say that it will be almost impossible for us to mount a by-election of any district council vacancies between now and the end of this term – that is the Government’s term between now and June.”

That was, of course, the following June, which was June 2022. Which was three months ago. The new regime has not had to run any election of any kind. Yet still, no sign of by-elections.

What has the Electoral Affairs Commission to say about all this? Nothing. It is apparently happy to follow orders. It is frustrating to find an organisation headed by a retired judge which is happy to ignore the laws which are supposed to govern its activities, which ironically include:

The Commission shall not be regarded as a servant or agent of the Government.

Electoral Affairs Ordinance S 15

All this is not just a matter of legal pedantry, although it must surely take a certain gall for a government to preach about the rule of law while ignoring its own constitution. District Councils have functions and those functions are not being performed. They used to advise District administrators and government departments about what people wanted and did not want.

Government departments are now free to improvise and I do not doubt that in many places they are doing this is ways which do not go down well with the people they are supposed to serve.

We have a very fine example just down the road from my home.

A bit of background: Sui Wo Road is a long snake-like affair which climbs up the hills north of Shatin in a series of long bends. The Home Ownership estate of the same name is near the bottom and has a bus station. The rest of us – six housing estates, two schools (Caritas for special needs, ESF for prosperous parents) a few very expensive solo houses and the HKBU staff quarters – depend on green minibuses.

It is a curious feature of the arrangements for bus stops that as you get towards the top of the road there are no bus shelters for people queueing to go down, but shelters are provided for people waiting to go up, of whom there will in the normal way of things be very few.

This tide in the affairs of bus stops recently arrived at Greenwood Terrace, the last of the large estates and very near the end of the road. There is one more estate, the very small one (40 odd terraced houses) where I live. We have neither a bus stop nor a shelter but the minibuses stop outside the gate anyway.

Arrangements at Greenwood Terrace have been roughly the same for 30 years. The minibuses going up stop across the road from the entrance to the estate. Those going down stop at the entrance, or just before it so as not to obstruct the drive.

However there is no end to traffic titivation in Sui Wo Road. A few weeks ago work finished on a bus shelter opposite the drive entrance. This is the stop for minibuses going up and it is safe to say that nobody will ever wait for a minibus there, because it is only about 200 metres from the end of the road, and there is nowhere to go except chez moi.

After some cogitation a popular theory is that this shelter is provided for Greenwood residents who find it raining unexpectedly. They can shelter from the rain while they summon a servant with an umbrella to take them home.

The opposite side of the road has an informal rain shelter provided not by the government but by the estate management, which a few years ago hit on the idea of planting one of those big garden umbrellas just inside the entrance to the estate, so that it shelters the bus stop queue.

This arrangement has now been sabotaged by the people who decide where bus stops should be put. They have moved the Greenwood Terrace downhill stop 30 yards up the road so there is no longer any shelter next to it.

This is very inconvenient. Regular users are up in arms. A petition has been raised. Protests will be voiced. This is the sort of thing which was avoided when we had functional district councils. People were asked if they wanted something and if you said “no” loud enough you didn’t get it.

The District Councils now have no role in the election of the Chief Executive or anyone else. But that was not their main purpose anyway. They were there to give people a voice in the local matters which affected them. We are now back to the old colonial system as practised in 1980. You get what you are given.

Do not expect gratitude.

Dr Chuang Shuk-kwan, who for more than two years was the Government’s leading voice on daily COVID matters, has achieved the extraordinary feat of combining the roles of official government spokesperson and popular public figure.

This has no doubt made some people jealous, and not only colleagues. Her last press conference (the daily ritual has been abandoned, thank goodness, as the disease subsides) was greeted by an astonishingly ungenerous and carping editorial in the Hong Kong Standard, over the name of Mary Ma.

Ms Ma (we will come to the question of who she is later) wrote that it was “most unfortunate that Dr Chuang … has become a COVID icon.” Noting that Dr Chuang had said she hoped it would be the last time she met the press the writer continued “And so do I.”

There follows a long burst of bitching: there was not enough on the science, there was not enough of a “human touch”, there were too many details of individual patients, there were not enough details about officials who had caught COVID, the media were “unable to obtain additional information…”

There seems to be a fundamental confusion at work here. An official press conference is an opportunity to get the official line on the situation and the actions which the government is taking to deal with it. It is not supposed to provide a complete kit for daily COVID coverage; media organisations which wish to provide scientific background or human interest stories have to do their own digging. A press conference is an opportunity to be informed, not spoonfed.

I cheerfully admit that when the epidemic was still a growing and largely mysterious threat Dr Chuang’s daily performances were faithfully watched in the Hamlett household. Even if you didn’t understand a lot of the proceedings it was reassuring.

Dr Chuang has a soft and melodious voice which makes even plain statements of fact in Cantonese sound like a song in the making. She also has the valuable medical habit of transmitting in a wordless way the idea that the situation is serious but under control, your physician understands what is ailing you and is going to fix it.

This is no doubt sometimes a bit optimistic. But hope is a helpful medicine.

Having sat through plenty of press conferences I was impressed by the way she also navigated skillfully round the pitfalls. If the didn’t have an answer to a particular point she said so. If the question should have been addressed to another department she politely declined to trespass. If the information was available but not to hand she promised to produce it.

When the question answered in Cantonese was repeated in English she answered without complaining, as a press spokesman should. The English media want your words in your voice. Repeating your answer in English is a way of avoiding the hazards of translation, subtitles or reportorial paraphrasing.

If the question seemed to be a criticism or a preparation for one, she answered it in the same calm way, and did not take it personally – a trick which some of our leaders have yet to master.

Press conference performers need to grasp the fact that reporters will seek their reaction to criticisms and comments made by other people, whether the reporter agrees with them or not. This is not an attempt to embarrass you, it is an attempt to be fair by giving you the right to reply to the things other people are saying to reporters.

Actually for a long time it seemed to many of us that Dr Chuang’s press conference performances were the only part of the government’s COVID campaign which was going well. By now she has racked up more than 700 of them – which would be two years if there were no days off.

Sometimes there were in fact very few days off. At one point she had notched up 72 continuous days. A reporter suggested she could consider a holiday, which she found amusing.

This formidable workload was borne under a burden of private grief. Her husband died at the end of 2020 after a long illness.

In short for many of us Dr Chuang is an authentic Hong Kong heroine. She is a shining exception to a generally unloved leadership. She has a Facebook fan page with more than 20,000 followers. The government could do a lot worse than make her an official role model for press handlers.

Now as to Mary Ma, Mary does not exist. The column is written by different people on different occasions and is supposed to replace the editorial. This would be a perfectly acceptable arrangement on one condition: that the writers used the pronoun “we” to describe themselves. Using “I” is dishonest and deceptive.

Personally I think the particular “I” who penned this piece needs to give some serious consideration to what he is doing. Writing editorials for newspapers is an honourable pursuit. I used to do it myself. It is an opportunity to write thoughtfully about the issues of the day. It is not an opportunity to publish snarky put-downs of popular public figures anonymously.

While the world was watching the Royal funeral and the Hong Kong police were advancing the fight against subversive harmonica music, one comment caught my attention. The author wondered why the media were paying so much attention to the death of Queen Elizabeth and so little to the pending death of the planet, which was announced at roughly the same time.

Well there was a whiff of republicanism about this – the author was Australian – and I am not sure that the coverage of the expired Queen was excessive. If you are going to have a King or Queen – which I certainly accept is optional and possibly not a good idea – you might as well recognise an outstanding performance in the role.

Also the funeral may have seemed a bit over the top, but it was a mere vestige of the ceremonies with which hereditary monarchs used to buttress their authority when they really had some.

Hapsburg Emperors, for example, had very elaborate funerary rites because they were buried in three different Vienna churches: the body in the crypt of the Capuchin church on New Market Square, the heart in the Augustinian Church next to the Hofburg Palace, and their guts in copper canisters under Saint Stephens Cathedral, where visitors of a ghoulish disposition can still see them.

So I do not begrudge the dear lady her parade. The point about the planet, though, is a good one.

It seems we are approaching, with no signs of serious braking, several points at which current climate problems – floods, fires, droughts – will be joined by much more serious manifestations of planetary indisposition.

Any day now, for example, the Greenland ice cap may slither bodily off the top of Greenland into the North Atlantic, producing an instant and drastic reduction in the amount of dry land available. Good news for some, bad for others. Residents in first floor Tsim Sha Tsui flats will be able to step directly from their windows into their Uber gondolas. The shops below will be submerged.

This sort of thing ought to be occupying a lot of media space and it is worth wondering why it isn’t.

Clearly part of the problem is the way the news business works. Thoughtful journalists have known for a long time that there is a bias in favour of stories which fit the “news treatment”, which meant in the old days that they could be boiled down to 12 crisp paragraphs and now means that they will make the sort of splash on the internet usually reserved for appealing cat videos.

It is a commonplace these days that the news consumer is a fickle creature, who if not grabbed firmly by the first five seconds of your report/stream/video will wander elsewhere in search of more excitement. But it was always thus. The disproportionate attention lavished on the headline and the first paragraph of the printed news story was motivated by the fear that the reader who had not been hooked by them would swim away.

In search of things which work when presented in this breathless way the news business prefers events over processes, single events over developing ones, named individuals – preferably already known to our consumers – over abstract crowds like “mankind” or “the future”.

Climate change was not put on most people’s mental map by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – a voice crying in the wilderness for decades – but by Greta Thunberg. And yet most of us still sit paralysed: rabbits in the headlights of an oncoming catastrophe.

Of course we make changes. We fiddle with thermostats, switch on the “Eco” option which most cars seem to offer these days, experiment with meatless meat and fishless fish, recycle what can be recycled and reuse what can be reused … and then we blow the savings by flying to Europe.

But I think the key to public apathy is that the danger is too big for individual efforts, heartwarming though they may be to those who make them. If scientists discover that onions are bad for you we can give up onions and look forward to longer, healthier lives. Giving up beef because it is climatically catastrophic seems like an empty gesture: the cow industry is a juggernaut which will roll on whatever an individual consumer does.

Saving the planet, in short, is a collective problem which requires collective action. So the important question we have to ask is: what is Hong Kong as a territory with some control over its environmental impact doing to reduce it?

And the short answer, alas, is not very much, or at least not very much in proportion to the magnitude of the threat, which could in a decade or two make Hong Kong uninhabitable, at least in the summer, even if most of it has not been submerged.

Climate change did not feature conspicuously in the Chief Executive’s election campaign and it doesn’t seem to have been much on his mind since. Legco seems to be drifting towards a bigger plastic bag levy. We are going to be charged for rubbish collection, but that owes more to a shortage of landfill than to a desire to reduce waste.

Hong Kong Electric has had a toy windmill on its building in Wanchai for years, and seems to have concluded from the experience that Hong Kong wind is not suitable for power generation.

Every year or two we get another story about an electric bus which a bus company is experimenting with. Somehow these buses all come … and go. Electric taxis? Don’t hold your breath.

Or do hold your breath – the air pollution was so bad last week that on some days you could not see Ma On Shan from Fotan.

Our priorities do not seem to fit the circumstances. What is required, I submit, is some variation on panic. “Security” is all very well. But if your house is on fire then the danger of burglary should not be your first concern.

The case of Kwok Wai-yin was a tragic one. The wife he had been married to for more than 30 years fell prey to a fatal and painful form of cancer. Eventually, with her consent, Mr Kwok helped her end the struggle by burning charcoal in the bedroom.

Two and a half years of remand in custody ensued before he finally came before a judge for sentencing last week. He then became the first person – and the way things are going he will not be the last – to spend a long time in prison on remand, only to receive a non-custodial sentence.

The judge did say, in sentencing Mr Kwok to probation, that he took into consideration the fact that the defendant had already in effect served two and a half years. Which might have been a reasonable sentence, I suppose, for manslaughter with extenuating circumstances.

Media coverage of this tragedy concentrated, quite understandably, on the mercy killing aspect. Judge Albert Wong solved a difficult problem with dignity and humanity. Other defendants may not be so lucky. We must also wait to see whether Mr Justice Wong’s solution will provoke an appeal from the part of the Department of Justice which mass produces appeals against lenient sentences.

But the delay is also noteworthy. Obviously we cannot know what would have happened if Mr Kwok’s case had come up within a reasonable time, which in many Common Law jurisdictions would be something less than six months.

The despair-inducing thing about this case is that none of the usual excuses – detective work, assembly of evidence, sharing it with defence, need to timetable a long trial – is operable at all. On the same day he helped his wife into the afterlife Mr Kwok walked into a police station and told the officers therein what he had done.

Preparation? The prosecution barely even needed a lawyer. And yet the legal machinery still managed to keep Mr Kwok waiting for two and a half years. A spell in prison this long can ruin a person’s life.

The right to a speedy trial is recognised in all the international human rights instruments. It also features in the Department of Justice’s guidelines for prosecutors. Yet even when the defendant flings himself unresisting into the gaping maw of the legal system it still can’t manage a decently swift process.

No doubt there are excuses – the backlog of riot cases, the epidemic – but these will not wash. If the system is under strain for some reason then there must be priorities. And the first of these should be to resolve the cases of people who are in prison awaiting trial.

Oddly enough Mr Kwok appeared in court on the same day as the speech therapists convicted of publishing seditious children’s books which, according to Judge Kwok Wai-kin, led young readers to “not to trust the administration of justice in Hong Kong.”

We’re supposed to trust the administration of justice in Hong Kong, are we? Also on the same day Judge Kwok Kai-on (as far as I know none of the Kwoks in this piece are related) convicted a 46-year-old woman of rioting (nearly three years ago, normal service) because “a first aider can also be a rioter and cannot rule out the possibility that she participated in the riot.”

Cannot rule out the possibility? Can also be a rioter? Could one of those mysterious “workshops” at which judges are told what is expected of them perhaps be devoted to the implications of this quote from a famous lawyer:

The possibility of guilt is not enough. Suspicion is not enough. Probability is not enough; likelihood is not. A criminal matter is not a matter of balancing probabilities and deciding in favour of a probability. If the accusation is not proved beyond reasonable doubt against the man accused in the dock then by law he is entitled to be acquitted, because that is the way our rules work. It is not a concession to give him the benefit of the doubt. He is entitled by law to a verdict of not guilty.

Trust cannot be enforced. It must be earned.

The Hong Kong government’s rather complicated relationship with the rule of law rarely provides amusing moments, so we must make the most of what comes along.

Readers of the Standard (everyone else appears to have missed it) were treated the other day to a story headed “Mooncake raid at Democratic Party workshop”. This concerned a raid by representatives of three government departments on what seems to have been a mooncake shop in Tai Wai.

Actually the place is not a Democratic Party workshop. It is owned by a former Shatin district councillor, Kodama Ng Ting-lam, who was disqualified during the government purge of district councils last year.

It was being used by an organisation called Staymunity, whose main current activity is to raise funds to support Lam Cheuk-ting, formerly one of the more frisky pro-dem lawmakers and now a remand prisoner awaiting trial, along with almost every democratic politician you have heard of, and a few you probably haven’t. They have all been in jail for 18 months. I infer that both Ms Ng and Mr Lam can safely be regarded as politically hors de combat.

Accordingly the shop, or workshop, is neither owned nor run by the Democratic Party and it would be interesting to know who stuck this label on it. I am uneasily aware that it may have been a sub editor. But being labelled “democratic” these days is dangerous, as we shall shortly see.

The government departments concerned managed to be a bit confused about what had actually happened. The only thing that they agreed on was that it was not a “joint operation”. Perhaps someone was embarrassed.

According to the police they received reports of illegal employment at the workshop, and sent a team to investigate. Reports? I am getting a bit sceptical about these mysterious complaints that trigger police descents on places or people labelled “democratic”. Is someone churning out politically motivated “reports”. Or do some of them exist only in the Force’s fertile imagination?

Anyway officers did not, according to the Force, find illegal employment activities. Did the story then proceed in the usual way: “Sorry to have troubled you, Miss, it seems we were fed a bum lead”? Not at all.

Readers who were surprised at the police interest in illegal employment – usually a matter for Immigration or Labour, depending on the violation suspected – can prepare for another surprise. The case was “referred to other departments given the workshop was suspected to be used as a food manufacturing plant”.

Enter the Food and Environmental Hygiene troops, who know the food regulations. To the disappointment of all concerned, I fear, this also failed to disclose anything illegal. The moooncakes are made perfectly legally in properly licensed premises elsewhere, and all that happens in the workshop is the addition of a wrapper, presumably with a picture of Mr Lam on it.

Or perhaps not. These days, support for Mr Lam may not be something you want to advertise.

The Government’s uniformed minions had not run out of inspiration yet, though. “Officers from the Customs Department later arrived to see if there was any violation of the Trades Descriptions Ordinance.” The Standard’s intrepid reporters did not establish exactly whose idea that was.

Anyway the mooncake workshop finally achieved a complete legal triumph. “No one was arrested and no evidence was seized,” as the Standard put it delicately. What, did nobody think of inviting the Buildings Ordinance people to check for illegal extensions?

I would like to believe that politics had nothing to do with this story, but I am not that stupid. Do you think, if I made a spurious report that cocaine was being smoked in a local DAB office, there would be such a diligent search for something – anything – which could be used to give the operator a hard time?

This story has its bright side. We can relish the thought of the one female worker who was present when the troops arrived greeting a succession of official requests and questions, eventually to see the bloodhounds depart with tails between legs. No less than ten officials turned up. It’s not quite the Captain of Kopenick; we mustn’t be greedy.

But there is also an important principle involved here. The rule of law requires more than just a legal system and a police force. It requires, if I may quote the late Lord Bingham’s work on the subject, that “public officials at all levels must exercise the powers conferred on them in good faith, fairly, for the purpose for which the powers were conferred.”

Instead, we see a system where the government selects a target and then throws at it anything which might stick, so crowd-funding becomes money-laundering, a breach of lease conditions becomes fraud, clapping in court becomes sedition, and so on. Laws which have been dead letters for decades are exhumed and if that fails there is always the national security law, which can mean whatever you like.

Is it any wonder that low-level functionaries visiting vaguely democratic premises think their job is to find something the Director of Public Prosecutions can work with, even if their original inspiration turns out to be a duff one.

There may well be some nasty subversives out there somewhere who would really like to discredit the legal system. It is difficult to see how they could out-do those who are supposed to be guarding it.