tim's experiment

Our police force is a prickly force. Officers, particularly junior officers, are quick to take offence at any perceived slight. The dignity of the force, at least for some of its members, requires that it should be beyond criticism.

When the Secretary for Security offered an apology for deficiencies in the response to the Yuen Long white shirt riot, some officers promptly took to social media to disown the apology.

Ours is also a paramilitary force, eager at parades to decorate itself with swords, bayonets and other accessories of no immediate relevance (we hope) to police activity.

This enthusiasm for matters military might, or might not, be accompanied by a willingness to recognise that, as Clausewitz put it, warfare is conducted in an environment of uncertainty, danger and exertion, and to endure these privations accordingly.

Well, in law-abiding places with functioning police forces people do not expect to find mobs of men storming tube trains and beating their occupants indiscriminately. So let us, without getting into the politics of the matter, look at the events of July 21 and ask ourselves whether the taxpayers have a right to be disappointed.

As it happens this particular happening has already given birth to a Wikipedia page, from which I have taken the following account:

“At around 10:30 pm, about a hundred white-shirted assailants appeared at Yuen Long railway station and attacked commuters in the concourse indiscriminately, on the platform and inside train compartments. Two police officers arrived at 10:52 pm. However, they left the station as they judged that they were outnumbered by the assailants and did not have sufficient gear, according to the police. Thirty police officers arrived at the station at 11:20 pm, but the assailants had left.”

I have removed from that account five footnotes indicating that it relies on media reports, citing items from the BBC, Economic Journal and SCMP. We shall also for the purposes of this exercise disregard the fact that the “white-shirted assailants” had been reported attacking people in the street at about 10.00, so the Yuen Long cops should have been aware by 10.30 that their services were likely to be required.

First of all we may be surprised by the timing. First attacks at “around 10.30”, two officers arrive at 10.52, reinforcements at 11.20.

This may be compared with the response time for 999 calls enunciated by the police force’s Operations Wing on the police website. The performance pledge is, in the urban area, that genuine 999 calls will produce a police person at the scene in nine minutes in Hong Kong and Kowloon, 15 minutes in the New Territories.

Yuen Long is in the New Territories, but there is no reason to concede the rural rate for things which happen in Yuen Long itself. It is a large town with its own police station. Clearly the relevant standard here is nine minutes so those victims of the assailants who thought they were ill-served by the arrival of two officers at 10.52 may have had a point.

In practice, however, few victims will have been aware of this distressing result because having come and seen the officers did not conquer. They retired to a safe distance, radioed for reinforcements, and waited in a safe place.

The arrival of said reinforcements took a further 28 minutes. And by the time they arrived the assailants, having had the run of the station for about 50 minutes, had left.

This is, I think an outcome which we are entitled to find disappointing. If you have a fire in a built-up area (which includes Yuen Long) the Fire Brigade aims to be with you in six minutes, and achieves this in more than 90 percent of cases, it says on its web page. The ambulance people aim for a slightly more modest 12 minutes, and have a similar success rate.

In the light of this it could be considered a bit shocking that if you are attacked by a mob of gangsters in a Hong Kong town centre you should apparently expect to be left to your own devices for nearly an hour.

This brings us to a question which I approach with some reluctance, which is whether it was really an adequate response to the situation for the first two officers who arrived to call for help and retire from the scene to await its arrival.

I do not share the suspicion that they were happy to leave their friends in the local underworld to get on with it. Clearly the situation was intimidating. One might, rationalising what might unkindly be characterised as flight, say that there was nothing two officers on their own could do against a crowd.

Our police do not, alas, enjoy the sort of relationship with the public which famously allowed one policeman on a white horse to clear thousands of people from the Wembley pitch before the 1923 FA Cup final.

If we were talking about a couple of lay people who walked into the station, saw what was happening and walked out again we would say that they used their heads and had no conflicting duty to help anyone.

On the other hand one might also say that the victims were in serious danger and needed help. Police people face situations of this kind with some advantages: they are fit young adults, trained in relevant martial arts and armed with guns.

Under the circumstances there was it seems to me clearly a duty to do something more constructive than mere self-preservation. An organisation which aspires to military airs and graces needs to aspire also to the military virtues, which include a willingness for self-sacrifice, to volunteer for danger and hardship in defence of the helpless and innocent.

Without this saving grace the soldier is difficult to distinguish from a bully.

I have never been a subscriber to the “Asia’s finest” notion, because this is a mislaid metaphor. The label of “New York’s finest” was short for “New York’s finest men”. The comparison was with civilians, not with other police forces. No doubt the “men” bit became an embarrassment when lady cops appeared.

I also feel a twitch of unease over the “finest” part because for people of my vintage it recalls the days long ago when the Hong Kong police were known as “the finest force that money can buy”.

The convenient thing about “Hong Kong’s finest” is that it leaves us room for another noun. Hong Kong’s finest gazelles?

Perhaps the most pathetic story of the year so far was the news, widely reported including here, that the Legislative Council is not going to meet again until October, in response to the damage to its usual chamber caused by protesters on July 1.

What a shower of wimps! I mean do they think that what they do is important or not?

Explaining the decision, legal sector lawmaker Dennis Kwok said that the Legislative Council Commission, a committee which decides housekeeping matters, had unanimously agreed that the council would not meet again before October, when the next session is due to start.

Democrats, he said, were unable to agree that meetings could be held outside the building. This is an example of an elementary confusion which readers may already have encountered in “Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance”. The building in which a body meets is a convenience.

What counts is what happens there. In Persig’s book the building is a redundant church, whose new owner proposes to use it as a bar. Parishioners complain to the Bishop, who explains that what makes a building a church is what goes on inside it, not the pointy windows and bell tower.

Similarly there is no earthly reason why Legco should not meet in some other premises. I can understand, of course, that having been bullied mercilessly by the government poodles through most of the present session, the democrats would be quite happy to see Legco closed for as long as possible.

But in any case the democrats cannot be blamed for this problem. The pro-government group has a comfortable majority. If they were willing to push the extradition bill down democrats’ reluctant throats why be squeamish about a little procedural matter like a change of venue?

Mr Kwok went on to say that to hold a meeting, more than 1,000 staff were required for back-end support. That may be true. But they do not all have to attend the meeting in the chamber, and nor do they.

Actually when I was reporting Legco – admittedly in the days before interpretation was provided – the number of people in the room who were neither members nor the Governor did not reach double figures.

There has been a Parkinsonian increase in the number of bodies routinely required since then, but it is still nowhere near 1,000. Paring things down as much as possible the council could get by with a team of – say – five interpreters, a similar number of clerks to take care of the record-keeping, an altar boy to keep the chairman on script and hand him the communion wafers at appropriate intervals, maybe a couple of security “flowers” to add gravitas to the proceedings and one or two technicians to keep the gadgets working.

Of course a temporary meeting place is not going to offer some of the amenities to which members are accustomed. It may be difficult to provide the members’ lounge, free tea and coffee etc. Members will not be able to lurk in their offices until summoned by a bell to determine the result of a debate they have not listened to. People who wish to vote may have to raise their hands instead of pushing a button.

These differences are bearable, if members really want to meet.

Mr Kwok went on to ask rhetorically “Which building in Hong Kong can be completely rented out to us for meetings, and which can ensure meetings will not be disturbed?”

Just a cotton-picking moment. You don’t need a whole building. You need a big enough space to hold a meeting of 70 people, with the necessary flunkies. The other 900 or so people whose participation is essential can work elsewhere as they do now.

Let us start close to the existing council chamber. The PLA headquarters used to be the British forces headquarters and in those days I occasionally got inside it. There is a huge high-ceilinged room near the top of the high-rise building (great views of the harbour) which used to be used for Officers Mess events. There are also some very nice smaller meeting rooms nearby. I think we can assume that security will not be a problem.

Too militaristic for you? Then why not try another huge waste of space, the Jockey Club? Racing finished on July 1 and will not resume until late September. Some of the rooms used for this purpose are enormous. I remember visiting a “box” at the Shatin course which was the size of a restaurant. There is also an actual restaurant which is humungeous. Or if you really want a big space the pre-race parade ring is vast and has a retractable roof.

The horse casino architecture is quite security-conscious for obvious reasons. They want people to pay for admission. And in fact the Shatin course is quite difficult to reach at all on non-racedays when the bus services are not provided and the trains do not stop there.

Also taking the summer off are the local universities. I am sure most of them have rooms which would be suitable, and indeed may already be fitted out with a sound system, headphones for interpretation and other amenities. Alternatively you could borrow a really big space and build a temporary meeting structure inside it, rather along the lines of the Manchester Corn Exchange Theatre.

The rest of the education industry is also now taking a break for holidays – or research as we university people used to call it – and offers other possibilities. Many international schools have very nice meetings rooms and are in out-of-the-way spots which would be a difficult target for mass protests.

The walls which are intended to keep the inmates in will also keep intruders out. Talking of inmates brings us to another possibility which might be worth exploring: prisons. I am not sure what our correctional establishments offer in the way of meeting rooms but at least security would hardly be a problem.

It might be a useful educational experience if you had the prison food for lunch first.

Notice that we have not yet reached the relevant industry: hotels and convention centres offer as a matter of professional practice spaces for a variety of purposes, including much bigger meetings than our legislative council. Did anyone ask for a quote?

I do not doubt that some of these ideas would turn out to have problems, especially if problems were what you were looking for. But there are surely enough unexplored possibilities for us to conclude that the reason why Legco is not going to meet before October is that legislators – offered what they think is a cast-iron excuse for idleness – are happy to skive off and blame any resulting inconvenience on the people who trashed their chamber.

I think this is not good enough. Being a legislator is usually a rather easy job but the disproportionate respect and deference which it attracts ought to impose some obligation to try harder when difficulties arise.

There are matters which ought to be dealt with before October. Some members are understandably not keen to explore the possibility of approving things by email without a meeting. Never mind the blame game. Get on with it.

There is a distressing contrast here, between our protesters, willing to brave the weather, congestion and the police force’s bracing notions of crowd control, and our legislators, a bunch of idle bastards eagerly looking for the chance to make an early start on their summer holidays.

Shame on the lot of you.

They seek her here, they seek her there, they seek her everywhere, but where is the new-look, caring, sharing, new leaf turned over Carrie Lam?

The apology was nice. The promise to listen more was encouraging, and what have we seen since? Not much. The lady has disappeared into the Fuhrer bunker, meeting only groups of her presumably disgruntled supporters, police unions, and other implausible sources of information on what the people are singing.

I do not approve of people vandalising public buildings, but what was she expecting? Those who turn a deaf ear to polite requests should expect rude requests. Having made it impossible for young radicals to enter Legco as elected members the government should not be surprised that some of them are instead entering as burglars. This is what happens when you sabotage the electoral process.

I realise there is a matter of face involved here. The government does not wish to admit defeat. But we have to be realistic about these things. The extradition bill was a resounding mistake and resounding mistakes have consequences.

No doubt those concerned are now genuinely sorry, but sorrow, as Baloo points out in the Jungle Book, stays not punishment.

It is no good saying that you now want to put this divisive stuff behind us and get on with economic and livelihood issues. This put you in the position of the guest who kicks the dog, gropes your daughter, insults your wife and stubs a cigarette out on your sideboard, and then as you prepare to throw him out asks “what’s for dinner?”

In one respect the government has been lucky. Unlike the Umbrella movement, the protestors have generally only asked for things which are in the government’s gift. The problem with the CE election method was in Beijing. Current discontents concern matters which are clearly for our government to decide if it wishes to do so.

Under the circumstances it is a good idea, having identified a feasible concession, to make it in a generous way which allows everyone concerned to tick it off their lists. Instead we get grudging inch-by-inch concessions which annoy the government’s poodles without satisfying its critics.

Let us take the bill itself. The official line is now that this has been suspended. It will not be unsuspended and the government accepts that it will die when the Legco session ends next year.

Protestors, meanwhile, want the bill withdrawn. Unnecessary, say the officials. Well yes, but if the bill is unofficially dead why not have it officially dead rather than have the corpse lying around stinking the place up?

Then there is the matter of whether June 12 should be described as a riot. This is another issue where words are more of a problem than substance. Actually from a legal point of view it does not matter whether the Chief Executive or the Police Commissioner describe the event as a riot.

In the old days, back in the UK, this was different. When a public disorder took place a Justice of the Peace would turn up. In those days being a JP was a real – though part-time – job, not a cheap ornament bestowed on the government’s supporters.

The attending magistrate would then read out a picturesque paragraph specified in the Riot Act: “Our sovereign Lord the King chargeth and commandeth all persons, being assembled, immediately to disperse themselves, and peaceably to depart to their habitations, or to their lawful business, upon the pains contained in the act made in the first year of King George, for preventing tumults and riotous assemblies. God save the King.”

After an hour had passed the disorder then legally became a riot, and anyone still present could be charged and convicted whatever he or she was actually doing. The maximum penalty was three years in jail, or two with hard labour.

But this was not the system in the colonies. Hong Kong’s law in the matter is much simpler. Any assembly without police approval is an unlawful assembly. If violence occurs it is a riot and all those present are rioters whether they are personally violent or not. And the maximum penalty is ten years.

This is a bad law and the general reluctance to use it over the years is quite understandable. The suggestion that only those who have been violent will be prosecuted for rioting suggests a way out of the impasse. This would be to say that nobody would be charged with rioting; those who have been violent will be charged with the appropriate variation on assault and those who have not been violent will not be charged at all.

At this point we come to an interesting obstacle in the shape of former prosecutor Grenville Cross, who has informed everyone who would listen that any concession along these lines would be a gross infringement of the rule of law, which requires that prosecutions should be decided purely on the basis of whether a crime has been committed and whether there is a reasonable prospect of conviction.

But wait a minute! Is this not the Grenville Cross who explained at great length, many moons ago, why it was perfectly consistent with the rule of law for his boss the then Secretary for Justice to decide not to prosecute Sally Aw Sian, even though a crime had apparently been committed, and two of her underlings were eventually convicted of it?

Those of us who thought this was a little odd were told that we were being naïve and simplistic. Prosecutors had to consider not only whether a crime had been committed and a conviction was likely, but also whether a prosecution would be in the public interest.

It was perfectly proper, Mr Cross then thought, for a prosecutor to exercise his or her discretion on this point.

But according to Messrs Robertson and Nichols, whose book on media law has the useful quality of covering what you can do as well as what you can’t, when an official has a discretion whether to prosecute it is perfectly acceptable to express an opinion on how that discretion should be exercised.

So there would be no objection to some senior person expressing the view that it would not be in the public interest for the colonial antique to be used to prosecute protestors, and for the Secretary for Justice to agree. If that is what is wished for…

Then there is the matter of the inquiry into police conduct on June . First this elicited a flat no. Existing system perfectly satisfactory. Then the Independent Police Complaints people said they would set up a little task force to look at assaults and other misunderstandings involving the media.

Last week it emerged that the police complaints people were going to do a look at the whole thing. Carrie, while maintaining that this was entirely the complaints people’s idea, promptly endorsed it and set a deadline.

So we have another half-hearted concession which will satisfy nobody. The resulting inquiry will not have the powers of a proper commission, it will be undertaken by people who do not command instant trust, and it will be done in a tearing hurry.

This is an important omission because there is an important topic which calls for a proper inquiry.

During the protests in Hong Kong over the Tienanmen Massacre huge numbers of people turned out. If anyone carried an umbrella it was to keep the sun off. Protests against proposed national security legislation in 2003 were also huge and peaceful.

In 2005 the World Trade Organisation met in Hong Kong and a visiting group of Korean rice farmers introduced a rather different protest culture. Hong Kong people watched the ensuing tussles and admired the general restraint shown by the forces of order. Pepper spray in those days came in a little aerosol like the ones some ladies carry for self-defence.

There was some tear gas use on the last evening but it seemed that was more or less what the Korean farmers wanted.

After that things started to go downhill. Quite small protests attracted generous use of pepper spray. Protestors started taking an interest in goggles and face masks. On the first night of Occupy there was a barrage of tear gas. Umbrellas became a practical necessity because pepper now came in a sort of giant water pistol with which policemen could pick off people yards way.

The level of violence has steadily increased. It seems nowadays that two groups of young men turn up on these occasions, both dressed and equipped for their role in the proceedings, ready to rumble and united only in their contempt and indifference for the poor pacifists shuttling between the two sides trying to calm them down.

An ominous recent development is the appearance of chemical weapons on the protest side. This is worrying because the police chemical weapons have been tested and used elsewhere. They are known to be non-lethal, at least if the user follows the instructions on the can.

Something some oft-peppered protestor cooks up in his kitchen from household chemicals offers no such comfortable assurance, and may be much more dangerous.

It is, I fear, going to be very difficult to undo this long-term escalation in levels of violence. As Clausewitz put it, it is difficult to reinstate limits which depended largely on people not realising what was possible.

In the meantime our leaders could usefully try to be more soothing, instead of seeking every opportunity to make partisan points. It is, for example, manifest nonsense to say that Legco must now be paralysed because its spiffy new chamber is unusable.

When the British House of Commons was bombed during the Blitz, members simply moved to a nearby chapel. Our universities, now subsiding for the summer, all have nice big meeting rooms with microphones and translation booths. In the 80s Legco used to meet in a rather unimpressive and very low tech hall which looked rather like a small suburban cinema.

Those who wish to work can work. Those who wish to blame the government’s critics for unrepaired hospitals, unraised wages or unfinanced projects need to remember what we are supposed to be doing: heel rifts, resolve conflicts, all that stuff. Or has that line been abandoned already?

Here’s an interesting quiz, though it gets a mite depressing later. I briefly summarise five recent cases from the criminal courts:

1. A man tried to strangle a nurse. She was a tough cookie and fought him off.
2. Another man, aged 31, molested a boy for four years, starting when the victim was aged ten. Most of the offences were filmed.
3. A domestic helper tried to poison her employer by peeing in her drinking water.
4. A 15-year-old girl was caught carrying a small suitcase full of cocaine across the border.
5. A woman had a row with her 83-year-old father and inflicted multiple injuries on his head with a meat cleaver.

Now, using your skill and observation, as we used to say on the flagrantly gambling “spot the ball” competitions in English evening newspapers, which defendant do you think was sentenced to 17 and a half years in prison?

Was it the Wicked Uncle Ernie, who fiddled about for years with an unsuspecting infant? Was it one of the three people who tried, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, to kill people who had annoyed them? No. That’s trivial stuff.  The decade and a half of porridge was served on the kid, one Hui Ching-yi.

In fairness to the judge concerned, Mr Justice Lee Wan-tang – who seems to be following in the footsteps of Lord Goddard, if not of George Jeffreys – the law’s delays had taken their usual toll by the time of the trial, so the girl was 17 when sentenced.

That is of course still too young to drive, vote, marry without your parents’ consent or buy a beer. But it is not too young to feel the effects of Hong Kong’s barbaric and ineffective approach to the proverbial war on drugs, on which more detail here: https://timhamlett.com/2018/06/28/on-drugs-cases-and-throwing-away-the-key/

Whatever the merits of passing inordinately long sentences on adults, there can surely be no justification for treating a child like this.

Most of us did things which were stupid, or illegal, or both, when we were 15. I understand the point that judges are not allowed to consider probation for a drugs offence. Something custodial may be unavoidable.

This hardly justifies sending a young person to prison for longer than she has been on this earth. I note also that she had pleaded guilty and cooperated with police inquiries. So the 17.5 years came after a discount.

As is often the case in matters of this kind the girl had an appalling family background.

Here: https://www.timeout.com/hong-kong/blog/hong-kongs-top-10-infamous-criminals-051316 you will find a list of Hong Kong’s “most infamous criminals”. Most of them are serial killers. The two who were not are former Chief Superintendant Peter Godber (four years for corruption) and Carson Yeung (six years for money laundering).

There is something missing in Hong Kong’s sentencing practices, and it seems to be a sense of proportion. One can, I suppose, hope that the young lady can appeal. I suspect, though, that Mr Lee was following some deplorable guideline from the Court of Appeal.

Well it is nice to have an independent judiciary. One could wish they were a little less independent of common humanity. Don’t tell me you’re just doing your jobs. Nobody forced you to become a judge. Inflicting punishments like this on erring teenagers is just legalised child abuse.

She doesn’t get it, does she? The problem of our embattled Chief Executive Carrie Lam, epitomised in the quote lovingly plucked from her tearless apology by the Standard’s sub editors, is that she thinks this is just a little skid on the road to paradise, easily corrected by a twitch of the wheel and a lifting of the brake foot.

Here we go: “I want another chance to deliver the many initiatives that will help Hong Kong’s economy and improve the livelihood of Hong Kong people.”

This divides policy decisions into two crisp categories: economy and livelihood stuff, which she thinks she’s good at, and the political/legal stuff, which we shall carefully avoid in future.

This is a false division. The extradition bill is an economic issue. If businesspeople think that they cannot live and work in Hong Kong without the risk of a few months in gaol fighting extradition, followed by an appearance on Confessiontube and a few years in a mainland prison, then they will live and work in Singapore, and take their money and their business down there.

People have a variety of views about the merits of living in Singapore, but we can all agree that it’s an improvement on a mainland prison.

Similarly, extradition is a livelihood issue for anyone who thinks he might be on a shitlist north of the boundary. The standard of living in mainland gaols is low, and opportunities for gainful employment non-existent. You cannot even sell your own organs when you die. They are already spoken for.

And even if the safety precautions work, and your legal ordeal in Hong Kong ends with extradition being refused, you will generally spend the intervening period in custody. This is not a prospect to be taken lightly. Let me quote from an (alas) anonymous English barrister on the perils of a remand in custody:

Everything you have built over the course of a lifetime – your relationships, your family, your employment, your home – is suddenly without notice snatched away and placed on a high shelf beyond your reach…

And every day that passes is another day that your life is continuing without you in it. Your partner going about her business. Your job still needing to be done. Your children hitting their developmental milestones. Rent accumulating and bills piling up, and the consequences of their neglect – dismissal, eviction, repossession, disconnection – awaiting you upon your release or, more painfully, exacted upon your loved ones as you watch their suffering helplessly through the prison bars.”

A leader who was lining that up for some of us has no claim to confidence in her ability to improve livelihoods, and it seems to have taken her a long time to spot the economy angle.

Indeed a lot of people in the government camp seem to be having difficulty getting their heads round what has happened in the last couple of weeks. How many people have parroted that line about “the Complaints against Police Office and Independent Police Complaints Council have always been effective in handling complaints”?

This is beyond a joke. The CAPO gets about 130 complaints a month. This is what happened to them in the last period I can find detailed figures for: “In 2006 to 2008, 325 police officers were disciplined on substantiation of the complaints against them. Of these, 292 were given advice, 12 given warnings, 12 cautioned, two reprimanded, six severely reprimanded and one dismissed subsequent to criminal conviction.”

In other words, of about 3,000 complaints, more than 2,500 produced no result at all. They were “unsubstantiated,” or classified as “not pursuable”, which is the committee’s tactful way of saying that all the witnesses present were policemen who saw nothing.

Nearly 300 of the remaining complaints resulted in a police person being given “advice”. Ouch! The only person dismissed had been convicted of a criminal offence. There is no reason to suppose that the recent performance of the system has been any different.

No doubt complaints about recent events will be handled in the same “effective” way.

Another massively inappropriate response was produced by Ronnie Tong, who suggested that anyone who turned up at a protest wearing a hard hat could be charged with intention to riot. Actually a shortage of pretexts for putting people in prison is not the government’s most pressing problem at the moment, but even if it was, Mr Tong’s suggestion has the drawbacks of being illogical (do we suppose that the driver who puts on a safety belt intends to ram a bus?) and illegal. What, no presumption of innocence?

Actually the only person among the government troops who appears to realise the seriousness of what has happened is Alice Mak, who sits in Legco for the NT West constituency, where she ran on behalf the Federation of Trade Unions. Reportedly Ms Mak’s opinion of Ms Lam, as expressed in a closed-door meeting for the government’s poodles, went on for five minutes, was highly critical and included some of the Cantonese words which when translated into English contain four letters.

This is unnecessary. The traditional resort on these occasions is to reach for your Browning – the poet, not the pistol – who produced this gem for a “Lost Leader”:

Life’s night begins: let him never come back to us!
There would be doubt, hesitation, and pain,
Forced praise on our part—the glimmer of twilight,
Never glad confident morning again!

What Ms Mak realises, and Ms Lam apparently doesn’t, is that the last couple of weeks have not been a minor hiccup in the smooth flow of public administration. They have been a political earthquake. Tsunami to follow in coming elections.

Hong Kong people traditionally divided into three roughly equal groups. There were those who welcomed the handover, and liked, or for a variety of reasons pretended to like, the idea of ever-closer unification with China.

There were those, on the other hand, who thought that the preservation of the rights and freedoms to which Hongkongers were accustomed was far from certain, and could only be ensured by allowing residents of the city a greater say in their own government.

And there was a middle group, who took things from day to day, had other things to worry about, and hoped that if they did not bother politics then politics would not bother them. This group has, effectively, been kicked off the fence. Few of them are landing on Ms Lam’s side of it.

So it’s the end of the line for the happy-clappy “The more we are together the happier we shall be”, “Xi is our Dada and Carrie is our Mama”, “You don’t love Hong Kong if you don’t love China”, and all the associated rubbish which has been played ad nauseam since the Handover. Nobody is singing that stuff any more.

The government needs a new selling point, something fresh that will appeal to the disillusioned and disenchanted. May I suggest “a high degree of autonomy” and “Hong Kong people ruling Hong Kong”?

Carrie Lam is notoriously impervious to advice. So this letter is just a sort of thought experiment.

Dear Ms Lam,

Sorry to read that you had shed tears on television last week. I did a lot of television interviewing in my time and the interviewees all emerged from the experience dry-eyed. Weeping on the tube isn’t a good look for someone who was once described as an “iron lady with a will of steel.”

Still, looking on the bright side, it was perhaps a better look than the equivalent performance in English, in which you came across like one of the robot receptionists they are reportedly deploying in Japanese capsule hotels these days.

This is not a complaint. Interesting piece in the Guardian the other day about the fact that people feel emotions less strongly when using second languages. I suggest you aim for a happy medium next time.

I am afraid there is a certain cynicism in media circles about your lachrymose melt-down. The naïve viewer watching television may erroneously suppose that he or she and you are more or less face-to-face, having a friendly chat. But of course we, and you, know better.

The interview is preceded by a negotiation phase about times and places. The interviewing organisation will give an idea of the topics to be covered.

The team arrives, or you arrive in the studio, and you are introduced to a wide range of people whose names you will instantly forget. Nothing to feel guilty about – they expect this. Then you will chat with the interviewer, who will give you a rather more specific idea of what questions to expect.

There is then a long pause, in which you can contemplate your answers. During this time the cameraman in fiddling with his camera, the lighting man is fiddling with his lights, and the sound man will interrupt your cogitations with a polite request for you to run the microphone wire down the inside front of your blouse so that he doesn’t have to put his hand in a place where it does not usually belong.

Various people will conduct tests to see if their machinery is working, and you will be asked to say a few words to check sound levels. May I recommend “manacles, barnacles, follicles, testing?” It cheers up the crew.

The point of all this is that being interviewed is at the best of times a long-winded experience, preceded by a lot of time to prepare for what is to come. It involves sitting in a highly artificial situation surrounded by strangers. An emotional reaction to a question looks fishy.

Having said which, some people still do it. According to legend the late great Australian prime minister Bob Hawke actually announced in advance that he was going to make a tearful apology on national television and got away with it. But he was popular. You, alas…

Leaving aside the tears, though, I would really like to have a word on the matter which got you going, which was the question whether you had “betrayed Hong Kong”, and your answer, which was that you had made “great sacrifices” for the city.

Logically, I fear, your answer does not really settle the matter. It is perfectly possible that both the betrayal and sacrifices are perpetrated by the same person. As Oscar Wilde put it:

“Yet each man kills the thing he loves
By each let this be heard.
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word.
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!”

This is a verse from the “Ballad of Reading Gaol”. You could usefully read the rest of it, available here. It might make your government less eager to find legal pretexts for jailing its critics.

Let us consider first the sacrifices. My problem with this argument is that your position is in many ways an enviable one, even from the position of fully paid up members of the middle classes like me.

You work in a large office. It has a private loo and a changing room. In the vicinity, but in smaller offices, is a fleet of underlings ready to undertake the parts of your job which are boring, repetitive or difficult. Your personal office space comfortably exceeds the acreage which your government considers adequate for the housing of a four-person family, or indeed for a larger one.

Your salary is not only larger than that of the president of the United States or the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. It is actually larger than both of them put together. You are income-wise a global star, second only to the Prime Minister of Singapore. And this does not take into account the fact that you can also collect a generous government pension, an amenity which your government adamantly refuses to supply for the rest of us.

When it is time to go home you go down to the ground floor (is there a personal lift, I wonder?) where your chariot awaits. The driver is on overtime, but that does not matter. You are not paying him. We are.

He whisks you to Government House, where a further fleet of cooks, cleaners, bottlewashers etc. waits to do your bidding. They are also on the taxpayer. Government House itself is a spacious palace. Frederick the Great thought 12 rooms was enough for his palace at Sans Souci. But that is not enough for you.

You have a tennis court in the garden, an unimaginable luxury even for people like Lufsig with two houses on the Peak. And if it is raining you can play tennis in your ballroom. It’s big enough.

Money and housing and servants are, I realise, not everything. Sacrifices may take other forms, like forgoing privacy, leisure, the long-awaited chance to pursue time-consuming hobbies, or to join family members in some hospitable English-speaking country with no extradition treaty with China.

Still, you are left rather in the position of the man who asked the court for a lenient sentence because, having murdered his parents, he was now an orphan. Your situation is the result of your choices.

This cannot be said of the Hongkongers who sleep in MacDonalds because they can’t afford air-conditioning, or the men who sleep under fly-overs because they can’t find a hospitable cage, or the old ladies I used to see collecting empty beer cans on Repulse Bay beach at 4 am because they had no other source of income.

Your ‘sacrifices’ have to be measured against those you imposed on other people … without, I fear, even thinking about it.

As for the matter of betrayal, how many people have to walk down Hennessy Road before you get the message?

The attraction of ‘one country, two systems’, and the reason why the handover in 1997 was not marked by a wave of emigration or suicide, was that it offered continuity. As Deng Xiaoping put it in 1984: “Hong Kong’s current social and economic systems will remain unchanged, its legal system will remain basically unchanged, its way of life and its status as a free port and an international trade and financial centre will remain unchanged…”

To put it less tactfully, the boundary between the Hong Kong SAR and the mainland is supposed to ensure that we are not subjected to mainland habits in the matters of politics, economics and law, which are respectively despotic, dirigiste and non-existent. And this happy state of affairs is supposed to persist for 50 years.

The year 2047 is not, as some of the People’s puppets repeatedly assert, the point at which we are supposed to be happily engulfed in the motherland’s caring bosom. It is the end of the period in which we were promised that important things would not change.

“Treason” is a strong word. But how else are we to characterise your importation of such habits as jailing dissidents, banning parties, deporting journalists, directing investment, and dispensing with the rule of law? If the Chief Executive of the Hong Kong SAR wants to dismantle our defences what chance do we stand?

Integration with the mainland may offer many advantages but it should not have escaped your notice that most of us do not want it. It is not your job to force it down our reluctant throats.

Bad enough to be raped, without having the person who is supposed to protect you advising “Lie back and enjoy it.”

The CPPCC needs you. Enjoy your retirement.

smooches

Tim

History always seems to repeat itself if you wait long enough, and this now seems to have happened to the hair business.

The latest thing, pioneered by a Japanese company called QB House, is a high-tech quick version. You go in, pay (Octopus is not just accepted – it is insisted on) and unless you have to wait on the bench supplied you will be done and dusted in ten minutes.

The business model excludes all the usual frills. They do not do perms, they do not do colouring, hair transplants or even shampoos. They just cut. The ten minute duration is guaranteed.

There are some ingenious innovations, like a sort of tame vacuum cleaner to make sure your hair debris doesn’t accompany you out of the shop. There is the promise that the implements are disinfected between clients, which is nice though I wouldn’t have missed it if it wasn’t there. And just so you know nobody else has used your comb they encourage the customer to keep it at the end of the performance.

I felt a bit guilty the first time. I have been going to the same, more traditional, place for a long time. They do a good job. But they do like to wash it, which I am personally happy to do myself, they take at least twice as long and charge at least twice as much.

So I have had the quicky a couple of times now. I was sitting on the bench waiting for my turn when I suddenly realised why the whole scene seemed, despite the modern design and equipment, eerily familiar.

Back in the 50s – that’s the 1950s, children – hair care was organised on gender lines. Ladies made appointments and went to hairdressers, where they spent a lot of time with chemicals, curlers and those monstrous driers which look like they’re trying to eat your head.

Men, on the other hand, went to barbers, so called because before the invention of the safety razor shaving yourself was a tricky matter and there was a lively market for shaving men, which of course had to be done far more often than haircutting.

When you went to the barber you did not make an appointment, and there was no nonsense about choosing a “stylist” either. You sat on a bench and took your turn with whoever was vacant, although in most shops there was only one practitioner, so this was not a problem.

The barber only cut your hair. He – it was always a he – had nothing to do with its colour, shape or cleanliness. And in most cases I suspect it only took about ten minutes.

The loss of the shaving business was to some extent compensated by the sex segregation. As a sideline many barbers sold items which you might not wish to discuss in mixed company, like surgical trusses and – ahem – contraceptives. The more up-market ones lurked in smart hotels or men’s clothing shops, where they could charge premium prices and did not need to sell … other things.

Now it seems the quick, cutting only, places are going to be as common as rice shops. QB House is proposing to open 100 of them in Hong Kong, and local imitations have already appeared.

The question which then arises is whether segregation by gender will return. I suspect, and I say this with the deepest respect for all concerned, that a lot of ladies rather enjoy having a long hair session, starting with a detailed discussion of how their hair should be done.

Men, on the other hand, are more likely to be happy with a ten-minute shearing starting with a choice from the QB menu, which offers short, long or medium.

My wife watched my first visit from the safety of a nearby café, and while she appeared quite happy with the results as applied to me, did not seem tempted. In fact I have never seen a woman customer in one of these places, though many of the styling artistes are ladies.

QB House is, according to reports, anxious to increase its proportion of female customers. I take this to mean that the present number is quite low.

And I fear it will stay that way. There will no doubt be some Hong Kong ladies who will be happy to have a quick no-frills cut in ten minutes, and probably some more who will go for it in emergencies when they haven’t got time for the usual marathon. Likewise some of the more exotic hairstyles you see on men these days are clearly not the products of a mere ten minutes work.

But on the whole there is a difference here between male and female views of the matter. For many ladies, having your hair done is a social ritual as much as a practical necessity. It is an enjoyable experience so cutting it short (sorry) is not a benefit.

Men, on the other hand, just want quick gratification. It is tempting to draw an analogy to matters of sex here, with ladies preferring a longer session and men annoying them with a preference for instant relief, but I shall resist the temptation.

Suffice to say that the quick barber version was fine for me and I would happily recommend it for anyone. But probably you won’t see your wife in there.

It is nice to see the pro-government press displaying such solicitude for Hong Kong’s reputation. Germany got a lot of stick last week when it emerged that two fugitives from what we officially still call Hong Kong justice had been allowed refugee status there.

This, according to the People’s poodles, was doing untold harm to Hong Kong’s reputation as a haven of the rule of law and other platitudes.

An important matter, no doubt. As Shakespeare said, “Good name in man or woman, dear my Lord, is the immediate jewel of their souls. Who steals my purse steals trash; ’tis something, nothing; ’twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands; but he that filches from me my good name robs me of that which not enriches him, and makes me poor indeed.”

But the complaint is surely getting the flow of causation in the wrong direction. It is not that the disreputable pair have been accommodated and therefor Hong Kong’s reputation has been damaged. Why, after all, would the relevant German ministry wish to damage Hong Kong’s reputation?

A better explanation is that the two alleged rioters were afforded shelter because Hong Kong’s reputation had already been damaged… by other people. As a recent article in Foreign Policy put it (I must acknowledge a useful link from Hemlock here):

“Within the last three years, the Hong Kong government, which is appointed by Beijing, has taken many unprecedentedly repressive steps. It has disqualified elected lawmakers, banned young activists from running for office, prohibited a political party, jailed pro-democracy protest leaders (including a sitting lawmaker and two respected professors), expelled a senior foreign journalist, and looked the other way when Beijing kidnapped its adversaries in Hong Kong.”

This gloomy summary omits some developments which cannot be attributed directly to the government, but which reflect the atmosphere it has fostered, like the restrictions on freedom of speech in local universities, or the physical attacks on journalists from critical news outlets.

Where else in the world would a school principal, upon hearing that his pupils had organised a petition on a matter of public interest, call the police?

The upshot of all this is that Hong Kong’s reputation is not what it was. It is all very well for officials to say that on a day-to-day basis, at least on most days, we are as free as we ever were. Perhaps this is true.

But human beings, as Kahneman points out, do not judge by averages; they judge by stereotypes. The careful observer of news about Hong Kong gets the impression that it is at present somewhere between the Hungarian and Turkish phases of democratic decay, and moving in the Turkish direction.

We still get starring roles in some surveys of economic freedom, or competitiveness as it is known in business circles. But this is not the freedom which you and I would wish to enjoy. Surveys of this kind are aimed at international business and consider the freedoms which international business values: to exploit workers, fleece consumers and con investors.

We can all agree that the Hong Kong government’s efforts to preserve these economic freedoms have been exemplary. Similar solicitude would be welcome for the more traditional rights to free speech, a fair trial, fair elections, and free media.

If you believe that these have not been eroded in the past three years I have an Eiffel Tower I would like to sell you. Hong Kong’s reputation has suffered, and rightly so. Even the independent judiciary line has wilted since the Court of Appeal trod in several legal puddles in its effort to jail Joshua Wong.

Still to come there is the outcome of the Ted Hui phone-snatching case, an interesting example of using a legal sledge hammer to crush a nut. Mr Hui snatched the phone which a minor official was using to track legislators around their own building, withdrew to a gentlemen’s toilet and spent a few minutes exploring whether he was one of the models photographed. He then returned the phone.

Now consider. If you were a teacher and a pupil came up to you and claimed that one of the kids had taken her phone and kept it for 20 minutes before returning it intact, you would no doubt scold the miscreant, perhaps even send him to see the headmaster. But would you call the police? If the outcome of Mr Hui’s case is another Legco mini-purge do not expect observers elsewhere to regard this as a pristine example of the rule of law in operation.

Never mind. Aggrieved Beijing loyalists may derive some consolation from another offering from Shakespeare, who also said,  “Reputation is an idle and most false imposition; oft got without merit, and lost without deserving.”

This matter of extradition is getting very complicated, and I am not sure that mixing it up with the rule of law helps.

My last piece on the controversy contained an error. So many of the People’s poodles had said that Lord Patton was being inconsistent by opposing an extradition arrangement with China when the UK already had one, that I assumed this was true. It isn’t, as a kind reader gently pointed out.

The official Foreign Office line is that individual requests for extradition to China are treated on their merits. There is no extradition treaty.

This brings us to another point, which is that whether there is a treaty or not does not by itself decide whether extradition takes place or not. I am indebted on this topic to a light-hearted piece in The Guardian about which country to take refuge in if you are a wanted person in your home country.

Some countries which have extradition treaties with the UK are in practice very reluctant to extradite anyone. Some which do not have a treaty are happy to cooperate. Some have restrictions of their own which take precedence over the extradition treaty.

The best-known example of this, to people of my generation, involved Mr Ronnie Biggs, now deceased. Mr Biggs participated in the Great Train Robbery, was caught, convicted and sentenced to a long prison term.

He escaped from prison, and found his way to Brazil, where he married a local lady. This made him a Brazilian citizen and Brazilian law does not permit the extradition of its own citizens. So he lived free in Brazil for many years until he succumbed to home-sickness and shortage of money in 2001 and went home voluntarily.

The relevance of this is that it shines an unflattering light on the latest offering from Ronnie Tong, which included the complaint that the UK has extradition treaties with “many countries” with worse scores than China on the Rule of Law Index.

This index is produced by a non-government organisation called the World Justice Project, which is like the World Series – more American than you would think. Every year it produces a league table in which countries are ranked according to their adherence to the rule of law.

The immediate objection to Mr Tong’s argument flows from this. The Rule of Law Index is updated every year. Extradition treaties, on the other hand, go on for ever. The proper question is not whether the UK has extradition treaties with countries which score lower than China, but whether it would sign an extradition treaty with a country which, at that time, had a lower score than China, which is quite a different matter.

Still, let us have a look. There are according to the UN 195 countries in the world. The UN does not count the Pope or Palestine, or for that matter Taiwan. Actually it doesn’t count Hong Kong either, but the Rule of Law Index does.

The Rule of Law Index covers 113 countries. Hong Kong comes in at number 16; China at number 82. The index ignores about 80 countries. Some of them are very small (Andorra, San Marino), some may present practical difficulties (Iraq, Libya) and some might be politically tricky (Israel). On behalf of my ancestors I would like to protest at the omission of Ireland. Switzerland seems an odd one to miss, too.

The strangest thing about the Index, though, is that if you look at the map version it is very obvious that in the Caribbean no island is too small, corrupt or rum-sodden to appear in the index, while there is no Pacific island at all between New Zealand and the Americas. Maybe there is an expenses problem.

To get to Mr Tong’s point, according to the British Foreign Office the UK has extradition arrangements with 121 countries. List here. Not all of these involve separate treaties. Importantly for our purposes, former colonies were covered on a blanket basis by the Fugitive Offenders Act 1967.

Of those 121 countries with which the UK has “arrangements”, 19 have lower scores in the Rule of Law Index than China does. Moldova has the same score but comes after China in the alphabet. Tough luck. Of those 19, nine are former colonies whose “arrangement”, dates back to the 1967 Act. There are only 33 countries below China in the index. Whether ten, or 19, qualifies as “many” in this context I leave up to you.

The UK does, though seem to have a preference for countries at the top of the rule of law list. It has arrangements with 27 of the top 30, and number 11 is the UK itself.

Looking at the list of miscreants in the bottom 30, though, inspires some concerns about the index as a whole. I realise that there are serious criticisms to be made of the way government is conducted in places like Mexico, Russia, the Phillipines and Turkey. But are they really more lawless than China?

The standards being applied here, according to the World Justice Project website, go like this:

1. Accountability: The government as well as private actors are accountable under the law.
2. Just Laws: The laws are clear, publicized, stable, and just; are applied evenly; and protect fundamental rights, including the security of persons and property and certain core human rights.
3. Open Government: The processes by which the laws are enacted, administered, and enforced are accessible, fair, and efficient.
4. Accessible & Impartial Dispute Resolution: Justice is delivered timely by competent, ethical, and independent representatives and neutrals who are accessible, have adequate resources, and reflect the makeup of the communities they serve.

Reading this you wonder how on earth China got any points at all. The clue, I think, is in the methodology. The WJP is anxious to propound the view that any country can have the rule of law, no matter how undemocratic its government, or as they put it, “The Index has been designed to be applied in countries with vastly different social, cultural, economic, and political systems.”

In pursuit of this laudable objective the index is compiled by quizzing large numbers of people, and particularly people in the legal system, in the country concerned.

You can see that this might, in places like Mexico or the Phillipines, produce some pretty critical responses. Citizens of such countries have access to international news and media. They can travel. They know what the rule of law looks like. They can discuss it among themselves and read about it in local publications.

In countries where the citizens are denied access to the outside world either by visit or information, the situation is rather different. The rule of law is like a pedestal toilet – it’s very nice but if you’ve never had one you don’t really know what you’re missing. Indeed in a closed society you may be bombarded with the message that you are not missing anything. Squatting is healthier.

For many years I used to teach Hong Kong students about media law. This was easy enough, They already knew what a law was and roughly how the system worked. You just had to teach the specific media stuff.

Teaching the same subject to mainland students involved a depressing discovery. You had to spend weeks explaining what the law was and how it worked, and even then some of them didn’t get it. People were gob-smacked by the discovery that in criminal trials under Common Law systems the accused was sometimes acquitted. The conviction rate in China’s criminal “courts” is something over 99 per cent.

I don’t know what the solution to this problem is for the Rule of Law Index. Perhaps they should keep the index but change its name, or prune countries which really don’t have a rule of law worth speaking of at all, but are good at keeping their citizens on side.

The index itself rather subverts the notion that the rule of law is a national characteristic unconnected to other characteristics like the system of government, presence or absence of civil society, free speech and such like.

The fact is that all the top 30 index countries are ostensibly democracies. There are two disputable entries in this happy band: Singapore and Hong Kong. The United Arab Emirates at 32 is the highest scoring autocracy. I do wonder whether tolerance for “vastly different … systems” is going too far when it results in a good score for a country with Sharia courts and stoning as a punishment.

Still, it appears that if you want to feature in the upper reaches of the index democracy is a necessary condition, if perhaps not a sufficient one.

This leaves me wondering about Hong Kong. We are constantly told that we can still have the rule of law as a core value, even while our government is a marionette whose strings are pulled by people in Beijing who neither know nor like the idea that the law should apply to them.

This may be possible in the short term, perhaps. But for how long?