tim's experiment

It is said that people who hear that a loved one has a terminal illness go through five stages of grief, starting with denial – the assertion that this is not happening.

Something similar seems to be going on in the heads of those people who are inflicting terminal injuries on Hong Kong’s reputation as a haven of human rights in an otherwise dictatorial China.

Consider the government representative – as usual A. Spokesman – who put out a long comment on the disqualification of Mr Eddie Chu from a village representative election.

Much of this was technical stuff about the justification provided by the Returning Officer who did the deed. This was of no interest and nobody believes it anyway.

At the end, though, we lurched into Wonderland, with this sentence: “There is no question of any political censorship, restriction of the freedom of speech or deprivation of the right to stand for elections as alleged by some members of the community.”

The reference to political censorship is a red herring. No member of the community has claimed political censorship was involved, and any who did so would be wrong. Political censorship is the prevention of the publication of disapproved views, and we are not there yet.

To claim there is “no restriction on free speech” involved, on the other hand, is to perpetrate a manifest untruth.

In the light of Mr Chu’s case it is clear that if you express a certain opinion – in favour of independence – then you will suffer certain disadvantages: disqualification from running in any election, even a pipsqueak one for a rural minicommittee.

Indeed it appears that in his case disqualification followed not from advocating independence (which he had prudently avoided) but from expressing the belief that people who wished to advocate independence should be allowed to do so.

This is clearly a restriction on free speech. The expression of a particular view is discouraged by imposing unwelcome consequences on those who express it. There is no room for argument here. If “restriction on free speech” means what it says then it is present here.

A. Spokesman could have argued, if he or she wished, that the restriction is a trivial one. Independence is not a practical prospect for Hong Kong so preventing people from advocating it constitutes a minor contraction in the sphere of what can be discussed in public.

Or he might have argued that the restriction is a justified one, on the grounds that the advocacy of independence is inconsistent with the Basic Law. This would not cut much ice with constitutional lawyers but it would at least be coherent.

Instead we get flat denial. The fact is that freedom of speech in Hong Kong is now curtailed. You can call for the confiscation of wealth, capital punishment for homosexuals, the expulsion of Jews, the legalisation of paedophilia or the installation of pictures of CY Leung in the lower parts of all public urinals to aid accuracy. But you are not free to advocate independence because such advocacy earns a life ban from politics. Free speech is to that extent restricted.

Clearly we are in the same delusionary territory when we consider the spokesman’s claim that “there is no question of deprivation of the right to stand for election.”

Of course there is. How dumb can you get? Mr Chu wished to run for election. He is not allowed to do so.

Once again we might have been offered the argument that some restriction of the right to run for election was justified, or even legally compulsory. This is a matter about which people could argue endlessly, particularly if they were paid by the hour, as senior lawyers often are.

But telling us that the right to run for election is not affected at all is a simple refusal to face reality. It is like saying black is white, up is down, death is life. The temptation to quote Orwell on “Newspeak” is almost irresistible. In fact it is totally irresistible.

According to the Ministry of Truth in “1984” Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength, and the aim of newspeak is to “make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it”.

Coming soon to a government press release near you: “A. Spokesman said that the recent Black Thunderstorm Warning from the Observatory had nothing to do with water falling from the sky, or loud noises and flashes of light being encountered, as alleged by some members of the community. The government remained committed to providing bright sunny weather at all times. And especially at night.”

It would be funny if it wasn’t so tragic. Last week a Chinese citizen was suddenly arrested. Spokespeople for her company complained that her human rights had been infringed, she had been handcuffed, and was not getting the medical treatment she needed.

Well, you might think, this happens to Chinese people all the time: human rights lawyers, Uighurs, Tibetans, protestant pastors, labour agitators, young women who splash paint on pictures of President Xi…

But this case was different. Because it happened in Canada, and the complaining spokespeople were in fact speaking for the Chinese government.

We must applaud the self-control of the Canadian diplomats who refrained from the obvious retort that if China wished other countries to protect the human rights of its citizens it should respect those rights itself.

The lady concerned, Meng Wanzhou, is variously described as the daughter of the founder of Chinese tech company Huawei, and the company’s Chief Financial Officer. Neither of these are government posts, Huawei is a private company. So quite how this qualifies an an international incident is a bit of a puzzle.

It seems that nothing will dissuade the People’s Daily from the view that no Canadian or American court does anything without the knowledge, approval and indeed instructions of their respective governments.

Chinese officials not only disapprove of autonomous legal systems, they cannot recognise one when they see one. Curiously they seem to share this affliction with President Trump.

Well Ms Meng is now confined to a luxurious Vancouver property, while legal proceedings continue and China arrests a few Canadian citizens with a view, perhaps, to a future exchange.

The only part of this schemozzle which really concerns Hong Kong was the discovery that Ms Meng was the proud owner of no less than three SAR passports. The later two are described as “replacements” for the first one. It seems the Hong Kong government does not require “replaced” passports to be returned, or to be mutilated in a way which would preserve visas but make it clear that the passport is not current.

Well we can leave that to the usual people. I note only that the reproductions of the passports for public view had some numbers blacked out but left the lady’s date of birth visible, which seems ungalant.

The other local offering came from legislator Regina Ip, who expressed dismay at the turn of events and said that in protest at the victimisation of the lady she was going to switch her phone purchases to Huawei.

This is the same Regina Ip who assured us recently that an appeal panel consisting of three Exco members would give a “faIr and impartial” hearing to the Hong Kong National Party’s attempt to remain a registered society. Does she think Ms Meng will not get a “fair and impartial hearing” in a Canadian court?

Then came the sequel, in which Ms Meng soon featured in a procedure unknown to Chinese jurisprudence: she appeared before an impartial judge, in a courtroom open to the press and public, with the lawyer of her choice to speak on her behalf.

If I was a Canadian I would be rather offended by the assumption that the whole incident was engineered in Canada for political purposes. Countries have extradition treaties and these impose obligations.

It would be nice if Chinese officials could get their heads round the idea that other countries’ legal systems differ from theirs. And the “we have been offended; arrest a Canadian or two to teach them a lesson” move is a bad look.

Also, complaints about human rights violations elsewhere from a regime which tramples them daily will not be taken very seriously. Except perhaps by Beijing’s supporters in Hong Kong.

Curious piece in the Standard the other day about drinking, or, as the paper cheerfully put it, “boozing”. This reported the results of a large survey conducted in October and November into local drinking habits.

This has the unfortunate result that the information contained is already outdated, because the legislature has just passed a ban on selling alcoholic drinks to people under the age of 18. We do not know what effect this ban will have, but presumably it will produce some change in local drinking habits.

The survey was conducted by the Hong Kong Anti-Cancer Society, which is interested in the matter because alcohol is a “known carcinogen”. One rather got the impression that they would like to see it banned completely.

The chairman of the society’s cancer education committee, one Rico Lu King-yin, from asserted flatly that “there is no safe level of alcohol consumption”, which was well ahead of the evidence the society was offering.

As so often happens with crusades of this kind, righteousness triumphed over accuracy. I presume the society was responsible for the catchy line in the first paragraph of the story saying that “more than a third of people in the SAR binge drink”.

Further down the story we were told that almost 70 per cent of respondents had “been drinking” in the past three months. Of these, 45 per cent were binge drinkers. I take the “almost 70 per cent” to be a euphemism for 69 per cent. Then 45 per cent of that will get us to 31 per cent of the population as a whole, which is not more than a third. It is less than a third.

Still 30 per cent of the population binge drinking seems an awful lot. You would expect on most evenings to find the streets littered with comatose alcoholics, the gutters running with blood and vomit.

But the society’s definition of binge drinking explains why it is so popular. A binge, apparently, consists of drinking “five cans of beer, five glasses of wine or five shots of liquor in one session”.

You cannot be serious. Five cans of beer is not a binge, it’s an aperitif. The ancient university which I attended was often the scene of formal dinners in the traditional style. This involved a glass or two of sherry beforehand, white wine with the fish, red wine with the meat, Madeira with dessert and brandy with the coffee. Oblivious of the fact that everyone present was now a binge drinker, we passed on to the port. And some of us were only 18.

Looking back at my lifestyle in England I suspect there were long periods when I had a “binge” every night. I doubt if I ever went down to the pub and had less than three pints of bitter, which would be more than equivalent to five of the “sex in a canoe” stuff which comes in cans around here.

I am sure the Anti-cancer Society intends well, but there is something to be said for treading lightly when condemning other peoples’ pleasures for which you have no taste.

Drinking is a certainly potentially dangerous. In excess it can lead to a variety of diseases and also to hazardous behaviour. People need to control themselves.

On the other hand human beings have been drinking alcoholic drinks for as long as historians can remember. Some of the oldest writings are lists of wine jars. Yet we are not extinct.

The question about risky activities is not just are they risky, but is the risk worth it? People like to drink. It brings pleasure to hard lives. As the old Irish song puts it “It makes me feel content and happy.”

So drinking is dangerous. Crossing the road is dangerous, Living is dangerous.

As an old German poem put it (translation by Bernard Levin)

If you smoke and if you drink

Life is shorter than you think.

If such things are not your game

You will snuff it just the same.

People vary greatly in their enthusiasm, and ability to digest, alcohol. They also vary in their appetite for risks. More information is always a good thing, as long as it’s accurate. But lay off the propaganda please.

The finer points of journalistic ethics are rarely discussed in Hong Kong media, so it was nice to see one surface the other week.

The spark was provided by a piece by Steve Vines in the Hong Kong Free Press, stating that he had, after some trivial dispute to which we were not introduced, decided not to write any more for the South China Morning Post.

He went on to say that he should have made this decision in February, when the Post published an interview with Gui Minhai, the Hong Kong bookseller who was abducted by Chinese agents from Thailand, and has been in prison ever since.

The interview was conducted in what we may politely call a custodial setting. Mr Vines thought this was simply a print version of those coerced televised confessions which have become a feature of the People’s Secret Police at work in recent years; he spent the rest of his column denouncing the practice and arguing that media organisations should refuse invitations to participate in it.

The following day brought a response in the South China Morning Post, written by Alex Lo.

Mr Lo was ill-served by his editors. The headline “Some people mistake egoism for bravery” captured the venomous tone of Mr Lo’s opinion of Mr Vines quite well, but there was nothing in either article about bravery.

Mr Vines did not claim to be brave – he is a big cheese in the food business so giving up Post work is neither a financial sacrifice nor a professional risk for him – and Mr Lo did not accuse him of cowardice. The headline was, as we put it in sub-editing circles, crap.

A second deck of headline “Long-time columnist Stephen Vines has decided to stop writing for the Post, but not before discomforting those of us he left behind,” contained the sort of error which convinces former Post sub-editors like me that the paper has gone downhill.

(Note to subs: “Discomfort” is the noun. The verb you wanted is “discomfiting”.)

A couple of generalisations to warm up, then Mr Lo spends four paragraphs attacking Mr Vines, before the bookseller interview comes into view. Mr Lo’s take on this is “It could have been handled better and I hope everyone has learned a lesson”, which looks suspiciously like a way of translating “I didn’t agree with it but I want to keep my job.”

Mr Lo then says that Mr Vines’s timing leaves a puzzle. If the interview was objectionable, why not say so at the time? This is a valid point. Should Mr Vines perhaps have entitled his piece “What I thought about the Gui interview but didn’t say at the time”?

On the other hand Mr Lo’s work also leaves us with a question. If you are writing an article denouncing egotism, would it perhaps be a good idea not to use the word “I“ five times in 11 paragraphs, one of which starts “In my 20 years at the Post”?

Well, the interesting point in all this for me is not the Gui Interview, which presents no ethical dilemma at all – it shouldn’t have been done – but the question whether a columnist should hold him- or herself responsible in any way for what appears in the rest of the newspaper.

This is a point which is neglected in most media ethics writing, which tends to look at the problems of individual stories as they present themselves to individual editors, or less often to individual reporters.

The only exception I could find when I was teaching this stuff was a gentleman called John Merrill, who seemed to be engaged in a single-handed attempt to persuade the journalism profession, or at least journalism teachers, to take up existentialism as a philosophical key to ethical questions.

Mr Merrill wanted journalists to be aware of and responsive to the doings of their media organisation, as well as their role in those doings. Indeed this view has a great deal to commend it. Media production is usually a team game (blogs and columns excepted), and if there is guilt, it should be shared.

However it is not a widely-shared view among  journalists, most of whom are willing to work for anyone who is willing to pay them, provided they are not asked to transgress ethical limits, which are drawn quite broadly.

Freelance reporters will regard their responsibility as being limited to the story they are working on. Editors generally regard themselves as neutral technicians, administering a process which makes material publishable without changing it. Window or Whippet News: the skills are the same.

Whether this is applicable to opinion writing does not, for most of us, come up. If you stick to news the facts should be the facts.

Editorial writers, who are accustomed to writing down opinions expressed by someone else – the editor, proprietor, or perhaps a committee – have sometimes taken a pride in their versatility.

One man wrote, according to legend, for two New York newspapers with diametrically opposed political views. Sometimes he would write a piece for one denouncing as unmitigated bilge the opinion he had expressed in the other the previous day.

But that is not really relevant here. The question is what are the rules for the columnist who is allowed, and expected, to express his own opinion, and what he should do if the rest of the newspaper does not agree with him?

Personally I have always looked at this in a backwards sort of way. News media should be encouraged to provide platforms for the widest possible range of views. An outlet which only puts out stuff it agrees with is failing its readers.

But a wide range of opinions is only possible if a wide range of opinion writers are willing to see their work on the same page as things they thoroughly disagree with. The more odd or unpredictable your views the more you need to find an editor who believes that diversity is a virtue.

When Alan Castro was editor of The Standard this belief was implemented with enthusiasm. Although Mr Castro was an early pioneer of the “Beijing is beautiful” school of thought he made a conscious effort to include pro-Taiwan columnists, and happily tolerated loose cannons like me.

I still remember his horrified reaction to a piece I wrote urging the decriminalisation of homosexuality, which at that time was still illegal in Hong Kong. But he printed it.

Unfortunately this view of media obligations was not universal in those days, and is almost extinct in Hong Kong now.

This is not a personal complaint. As a columnist or reviewer you find that opportunities come and go. Different page editors want to implement their own ideas, which may or may not include you. Individual pieces may hit a nerve somewhere and you read to your surprise in your usual slot that “Tim Hamlett is on holiday”. Best not to ask what went wrong. You never know whether the reason given is the real one.

I try to remember that your departure is the last thing people are going to recall about you. Better to go quietly into that good night than to go whingeing. A thought which Mr Frederick Fung might usefully have considered a few months ago.

Anyway I no longer need the money. But it does seem that Hong Kong media are becoming increasingly separated by ideology. And if you try to create a space where a variety of views are expressed you find that the holders of those views are not prepared to participate.

Pro-government people will not write for independent publications, and independent people will not write for pro-government ones, which indeed do not want their output. The historic practice of Ta Kung Pao and Wen Wei, which only print stuff which they – and the Liaison Office – agree with, is spreading.

People in one camp will raise eyebrows if they just agree to be interviewed by publications in the other. Where is the marketplace of ideas where different opinions can contend, can be compared and contrasted? RTHK is still trying, bless ‘em, but it’s a government department.

So I am sorry Mr Vines is absenting himself from the pages of the Post, though not very sorry, because I stopped reading it years ago. Mr Lo says “none of us has noticed”, without saying who “us” is in this context. Did he go round the office asking or is it him and his dog?

I fear a lot of other people will not have noticed either, because they no longer expect to see a wide range of views in the Post. This is not a criticism of the Post, which is in this respect much like most of the other Hong Kong media.

They really should do something about the headlines, though.

If you live anywhere near Shatin you have seen his face. A young man, wearing glasses, apparently going for the Harry Potter look. Sometimes he shares the poster, or minibus ad, with another gentleman, who is our District Board representative. Also present, the DAB logo.

The young man is not a District Board member. What is going on here?  Well basically the DAB is cheating, though without breaking the law. The same thing happened in the last Legco election.

Posters and publicity for people appeared long before the campaigning period began. There were no explicitly political slogans attached to them, but in due course it turned out that the person whose picture you had been seeing every day was in fact the pro-government candidate in your constituency.

This is an expensive way of getting some extra name recognition. It is, though, perfectly legal. The limit on election expenses starts when you are nominated. Before that you are merely a “prospective candidate” and if you like seeing your face on the side of a minibus that is OK as long as you don’t describe yourself as a “candidate”.

In the old days when the list of candidates was not censored by government officials you could say there was nothing unfair about this. Pro-government candidates, or prospective candidates, were only doing what any other candidate could do.

Of course less well-heeled candidates might struggle to afford large public displays, but there are cheaper options. However times have changed. Potential candidates who do not enjoy the support of the government do not know whether they are candidates or not until the Returning Officer has pruned the list.

Pro-government candidates do not have to worry about this. They are in no danger of disqualification. Candidates who are not pro-government, on the other hand, may find that they are also not candidates. So efforts made before the nomination period will be wasted.

This is unfair. No doubt people who like the arrangement will say that it makes no difference, because the advertising is all removed when campaigning starts.

But this is not true. It is true of posters, hoardings and such like, because when you stop paying for them the owner of the space takes them down. The owners of minibuses are not so quick. If you plaster your picture on a minibus it stays there until someone else pays for the space.

One of our local minibuses is still advertising the Liberal losers from the last Legco election. On a minibus there is a good chance that the ad you paid for will stay long after the period you booked.

This is only one of the ways in which Hong Kong’s elections look increasingly bent.

The trouble with fixing the elections is that if people cannot express their views legitimately through elections then they will resort to other means. I recall warning after the end of the Umbrella thing that the young people who had discovered that street protests were ignored might turn to other measures which the government would find even less acceptable.

In fact, being a non-violent and generally respectable group, most of the former leading Umbrella-wavers turned to electoral politics. Indeed this was a course urged on them by many older commentators, who wrote that street protests were mere playing at politics; those who wished to change society should engage in the real thing and get elected, which they did.

Many of them have now been unelected. Now, to official horror, people are asking the US Senate to reconsider its recognition of Hong Kong as a separate entity from China. This is a desperate measure, but you cshouldn’t complain if you have frustrated the non-desperate measures.

Can you hear the people sing? Not if your ears are glued to the liaison office keyhole.

Well well. No less than 38 academic economists were reported last week as having signed a petition in support of the government’s “Lantau Tomorrow Vision”, which might be more honestly labelled as “Carrie Lam’s plan to dump a lot of dirt in the Western Anchorage for some future government to build housing on.”

The petition described the dream archipelago as “affordable and an ideal investment”. The economists also attacked opponents of the plan as “emotional slogans with pre-supposed stance, and even political manipulation of populism by inciting public anger.”

The Standard said this was the “first time academics have come forward in support of the government”, which I found difficult to swallow. Individual academics have often supported the government. If this was supposed to mean academics as a group supporting the government it was over-stated.

Actually the signatories of the petition are quite a small portion, even of academic economists. The academic populations of the departments teaching economics in five publicly-funded universities are: City U 21, UST 24, HKU 35, BU 18, Ling Nan 20.

The PolyU certainly has academic economists but their website does not disclose names or numbers, at least to me. The new Hang Seng Business University has at least 24 economists, Shue Yan 11 and the OpenU five.

I infer that making a reasonable allowance for the reticent PolyU and for economists who are plying their trade in departments under other labels, like business or finance, there must be something in excess of 200 people who could be called academic economists in Hong Kong.

This means there are about 160 economists who either do not share their colleagues’ rosy view of the proposed dirt dump, or think that academic economists are not as well qualified as some of them think they are to assess the financial merits of investments which reach 30 years into the future.

This last belief is quite widely shared. Economics, it now appears, is not a science but a narrative discipline like history. Economists do a good job of telling convincing stories about the past, but this does not equip them to make accurate predictions.

Or as a Canadian academic put it: “An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn’t happen today.”

Rupert Murdoch has said that the purpose of economics is to make weather forecasting look respectable. This looks like a rip-off of the economic historian John Kenneth Galbraith, who said that the purpose was to make astrology look respectable.

For a more scientific view we can look at the work of Philip Tetlock, who interviewed 284 assorted commentators and pundits, including economists, and collected from them more than 80,000 predictions. The results were not impressive. Tetlock concluded that overall they would have scored better results by throwing dice.

More qualifications and experience did not produce more accurate predictions. It just increased the subjective confidence of the person making them.

Nissam (“The Black Swan”) Taleb lumps economists into a larger group of people whose predictions are worthless because they suffer no penalty if the prediction turns out wrong.

Danny Kahneman (“Thinking fast and slow”) takes the more charitable view that “It is wrong to blame anyone for failing to forecast accurately in an unpredictable world. However it seems fair to blame professionals for believing they can succeed in an impossible task.”

So I think on general principles we are entitled to some misgivings when confronted with a gaggle of economists touting an “affordable and ideal investment.” Better than “my uncle in Nigeria needs to hide a million bucks under your mattress.” But not much.

There are also some question marks over the way this particular recommendation emerged. The petition, apparently, had two more or less memorable names. One was Professor Richard Wong, a leading light in the Our Hong Kong Foundation, which is Tung Chee-hwa’s contribution to public cogitation. Prof Wong may be regarded as a recent convert to the cause of avoiding “political manipulation … by arousing public anger.” It is not so long ago that he wrote a piece comparing people protesting at increased tourism in Sheung Shui to the Ku Klux Klan.

The other is Prof Sung Yun-wing, also a think-tanker, who swims in the private thoughtful pool of Ronny Tong, the interesting political chameleon who now sits in the Executive Council.

So a lot of political connections here. One wonders, naturally, whose idea this was, a point on which the local media did not enlighten us.

Well I suppose we should not be too discouraging. It is nice of academics to share their investment advice with us, even if the cautious among us do not take it.

What seems to me a bit out of academic economists’ territory is the opinions and motivations of those who disagree with them.

Economics concerns the economy. Whether slogans are emotional, stances pre-supposed (whatever that means) populism is manipulated or the public angered is not a matter on which academic economists speak with any particular authority. If you guys think the numbers add up, fine. Criticism of people who have other concerns about the project should be left to other authors.

In any case, my personal suspicion is that all this is beside the point. The purpose of the Lantau Vision is not to build anything. When accused of slighting the work of the working party looking at land supply matters, Ms Lam said that Hong Kong people would have been disappointed if there had been nothing in the policy speech about housing.

To avoid this disappointment we have a visionary project which will remain pie in the sky for decades. Or will it? The Vision has performed its function of preserving us from a policy speech let-down. It will now spawn some studies, at modest cost. And then at some point in the future, when property prices are at last falling and Ms Lam has retired, I expect it will quietly disappear into the mist.

Mike Rowse has offered the hilarious suggestion that the project needs a more sexy name, and suggested “Freedom Island”. I think Freedom might object to that in view of what is happening to her in Hong Kong. May I suggest “Lantau Tomorrow Mirage”? Now you see it. Later … who knows?

Mr Grenville Cross was at one time our Director of Public Prosecutions. He is still a law professor and a senior counsel. After his retirement from the government service he campaigned, for a while, for the introduction of a prosecutions system insulated from the political considerations which properly engage the attention of the Secretary for Justice.

He seems to have concluded after some time that this proposal was no more appealing to our current colonial authorities than it had been to their predecessors.

More recently his writings have tended to demonstrate to the general public why some recent official decision was legally right, and even inevitable, although in one or two cases this view of the matter was not shared by the Court of Final Appeal.

This is all well and good. But his latest effort in this vein is quite outlandish.

This is a piece in the China Daily explaining why it was perfectly acceptable for the Returning Officer to reject the nomination of Ms Lau Siu-lai to the current by-election, without giving her the opportunity to make representations on the matter.

Mr Cross starts with the resoundingly platitudinous observation that the right to run for election is not unqualified, and recites the legal requirements, which as well as age, residence and such like include a “declaration of willingness to uphold the Basic Law and pledge allegiance to the Hong Kong SAR”.

He then states that in the interests of the integrity of the system “false declarations need to be weeded out”. This is an interesting point, but I would have thought the need, if any, was met by the law which allows prosecution of anyone who makes a false declaration.

This would no doubt bring the disqualification of the candidate concerned in its train, but with this procedure the disqualification would be preceded by a proper trial in which the government had to prove its case and the alleged falsifier would be able to make such defence as she or he had available.

The current arrangement, in which the Returning Officer (who in our system, unlike the UK one, has no claims to impartiality) decides the matter on his own, was, Mr Cross notes, approved by Mr Justice Au in the High Court, on two conditions: that the evidence of falsity was “cogent, clear and compelling”, and that the affected person was given a “reasonable opportunity” to respond to it.

Mr Cross then goes through the evidence adduced by the Returning Officer, and loves it. We thus arrive at the point that Ms Lau has complained about not being given a chance to respond, and in a most unlawyerly way Mr Cross says that “as a matter of common sense Au’s guidance should be seen as directory, rather than mandatory. If Kwok [the Returning Officer] was satisfied on all the material before him that the case for exclusion was overwhelming, there would have been little point in inviting Lau’s comments.”

Dear me. The opportunity to respond is not just a matter of Mr Justice Au offering a little fatherly advice to Returning Officers. It is an application of the part of the Common Law known confusingly as ”natural justice”. What this states is that if a person or body is making a decision of a vaguely judge-like nature than he or it should observe some minimal judge-like standards.

What those standards are varies. For some purposes courts have held that the accused should have the right to see the evidence, cross-examine witnesses and call his own. In less fraught circumstances you may be entitled to a hearing and a lawyer, or a friend who is not a lawyer, or just a hearing, or just a chance to write in your defence.

The right to respond conferred by Mr Justice Au could be considered in this light as a bare minimum. Generations of Common Law practitioners would twirl in their graves if they could hear a senior counsel dismissing it on the grounds of “common sense”.

Let me at this point turn the microphone over to Mr Justice Robert Megarry, giving his view of the matter in John v Rees. If you wish to read the whole thing, it can be found at [1996] All ER 274,309.

It may be that there are some who would decry the importance which the courts attach to the idea of natural justice. ‘When something is obvious,’ they may say, ’why force everyone to go through the tiresome waste of time involved in framing charges and giving an opportunity to be heard? The result is obvious from the start.’

Those who take this view do not, I think, do themselves justice. As everyone who has anything to do with the law well knows, the path of the law is strewn with examples of open and shut cases which, somehow, were not; of unanswerable charges which, in the event, were completely answered; of inexplicable conduct which was fully explained; of fixed and unalterable determination that, by discussion, suffered a change.

Nor are those with any knowledge of human nature who pause to think for a moment likely to underestimate the feeling of resentment of those who feel that a decision against them has been made without their being given any opportunity to influence the course of events.

A briefer statement of a similar point from US Supreme Court judge Felix Frankfurter:

No better instrument has been devised for arriving at truth than to give a person in jeopardy of serious loss notice of the case against him and opportunity to meet it. Nor has a better way been found of generating the feeling, so important to a popular government, that justice has been done.

So, Ms Lau was entitled to be heard. She was not. This was wrong. Mr Cross is wrong. I am also cross.

When I was at school we were all encouraged to read a book by Arthur Koestler called “Darkness at Noon.” This was an attempt to answer, in a novel, a question on many minds at the time: how were veteran revolutionaries caught up in Stalin’s purges persuaded to confess to capital crimes at their show trials?

Koestler had a highly intelligent and persuasive interrogator convincing his victims by argument that they really were guilty of treason. This was something of an intellectual game. The book carefully avoided mentioning any names – it was set in a dictatorship ruled by “The Party”, which was headed by “Number One” – and one has to suspect that in real life Stalin’s methods were somewhat cruder.

Many of his victims, one imagines, were offered the sort of deal which the Nazis later imposed on Erwin Rommel: if you jump then you jump alone; if we have to push you then your family goes too.

For many years this matter slumbered in the back of my memory as being entirely irrelevant to daily life in England, or Hong Kong. But with the increasing mainlandisation of Hong Kong the question of how people can be persuaded to produce voluntary-looking confessions looks increasingly relevant.

There are two schools of thought on this topic. One, identified with Donald Rumsfleld and the writers of “24 Hours”, maintains that the best results are obtained by torturing the prisoners until they confess in order to end the ordeal. There is a victim’s diary here: http://issuu.com/canongatebooks/docs/slahi_unclassified_manuscript_scan?e=11163753/13005384

This idea has traditionally been popular with police, army and clerical interrogators, but it is open to several criticisms. One is that it is a violation of the UN Declaration of Human Rights, so if your country is caught at it some embarrassment will follow. It is also, in most nice countries, against the law.

There is also the practical objection that the quality of the resulting information is poor. You cannot torture someone into telling the truth. In the end you can only torture him into telling you what you wish to hear.

The other school of thought maintains that better results can be obtained without violence or duress, by an interrogator who forms a relationship with the victim. There is a victim’s eye view of how this works here: https://www.hongkongfp.com/2018/05/13/son-everything-china-forced-lawyer-wang-yu-denounce-human-rights-award/

On the face of it, it is difficult to see why a prisoner would form a relationship with a jailer. A certain amount of manipulation is necessary. From a practical point of view, if you are caught up in the system the process goes something like this:

In phase one they will be rough. You will be deprived of sleep, disorientated, and physically abused. This is done for two reasons: there is a hope that at this stage the victim is shocked and confused. Being captured or arrested is alarming and frightening in itself. He or she may, if pushed a bit, collapse completely and comply with his interrogators’ wishes.

Indeed you should seriously consider doing this, if they are not asking for too much. Signing a written confession has been much devalued. Many alert Hongkongers warn their friends before visiting the mainland that any confession they may sign should be disregarded.

For foreign correspondents, the police station visit and confession signing has become a sort of rite of passage. If you haven’t done it after a year or two in the job people will suspect that you are not trying hard enough.

The second reason for giving you a hard time is that this sets a low standard which will allow later interrogators to appear humane and friendly, even though they are, as you know, still your jailers.

The second stage is a bit different. After all your Chinese police people do not have to worry about the UN Declaration of Human Rights, or indeed about the law. They can do what they like with you. On the other hand they can’t do much with a written confession these days. News has to be digital. A video report of a confession by a quivering heap of human wreckage is not going to work.  Visible willingness is required.

So after the rough phase you will be moved. This is done in a disorientating way. You will be masked or hooded. Nobody will tell you where you are going and if some hint is dropped you will not know whether to believe it. At the end of the trip you will not know if you have moved hundreds of miles or just driven round the block a few times and returned to the cell next door to your old one.

You will have a cell to yourself. It will be padded. These things are not for your benefit. Solitary confinement is stressful and debilitating. The padded walls are to prevent suicide.

Here you will be left to stew for a bit. When interrogations resume you will meet Mr Nice Guy.

Mr NG is friendly, sympathetic. He can secure small improvements in your living conditions, and supply snippets of news from the outside world. Your encounters serve two objectives: he needs to establish himself as your only accessible friend in the world, and he needs to discover the hook with which he will draw you into compliance with his wishes.

So some discussion will be devoted to what you miss, or who you worry about. Your anxiety will be subtly encouraged. “Your father was taken to hospital last week but he is fine,,,” “I expect your son misses you…”

And then Mr NG makes his play. “I can make this go away and get you out of here, but you will have to help me. My boss wants you to make a video…” Of course, he says, nobody else will ever see it. This seems from the outside rather implausible but you desperately want to believe that Mr NG is a truthful person with your interests at heart. So maybe you make the video.

This gets you out of prison but when they play the video on national television it will horrify your friends and associates, which is of course the object of the exercise.

It should be clear by now that no blame attaches to people who succumb to this treatment and make the video. Indeed it could be considered a tribute to the effectiveness of this method that China uses it, despite a long tradition of torture and the complete absence of any safeguards against it. People do what works because it works. I expect it would work on me.

This comparatively non-violent part of the Gulag Archipelago is, however, still an abuse of human rights. Innocence is no protection. Nor is having a foreign passport. Staying in Hong Kong works for most of us. For now.

Let us hail one unheralded record broken by the Express Rail Link: it has surely spawned more official mis-statements per kilometre than any previous railway project.

We are now expected to nurture the delusion that the new line may someday make a “profit”. This is a gross abuse of language. It will never make a profit in the normal sense of the word because in order to do so it would first have to repay the cost of construction. This is what making a profit means.

The Express Rail’s chances of making a profit are on a par with Carrie Lam’s chances of being elected the next Pope.

The financial indicator which is now being watched with bated breath by fans of the new line is not whether it makes a profit or loss, but whether it covers its running costs. In other words will the MTR, which is operating the thing, actually take in enough in fares to cover the expenses involved in doing this, while the railway, stations etc. are donated free of charge by the taxpayers.

If this does not happen, then the line will have to be subsidised. Under the circumstances it is perhaps a pity that the Express Rail Terminus, unlike other MTR erections, is not surmounted by a luxurious housing estate.

Instead it has a flamboyant and quite unnecessary roof. Nineteenth century railway termini had huge roofs – considerable engineering achievements in their day – because the locomotives all contained a raging coal fire. The resulting smoke and steam had to go somewhere.

The Express Rail terminus has no such requirements. The trains are electric, and in any case are five floors down, separated from the surface by three layers of immigration desks, customs halls, ticketing counters, shops, shops and – this being a Hong Kong project – more shops. The conspicuous roof has no purpose except to remind us that our expensive toy is under it somewhere.

So with no subsidy from property, will it break even?

Reading earlier predictions of how the railway would work does not inspire confidence.

In 2008 the “key project parameters” were that it would have 99,000 daily passengers, and cost $39 billion.

In 2009 we had the first appearance of the claim that the building of the station would create 10,000 jobs, which was repeated frequently over the ensuing nine years. The Legislative Council was also told that owing to changes in policy on the mainland “there will be a significant increase in the patronage”.

At the same time the “economic benefits” of the railway over 30 years were valued at $87 billion. Curious that a government which consistently fails to predict its own fortunes in the coming 12 months expects to be taken seriously when it offers a prediction for the next 30 years.

No doubt the figure is conservative. Still it became an alarming one as the cost of constructing the railway approached it, and then overtook it.

In 2009 the construction cost took its first upward leap, to $66 billion. At this point the figure was massaged back down by taking out $11 billion worth of “non-railway works” and treating them as an entirely separate item. So the official prediction became $53.7 billion.

In 2010 members of the Public Works Sub-committee were entertained with the notion that daily patronage “could go up to 116,000”, while a “less optimistic figure” would be 89,000.

Work started on this optimistic basis, and produced a stream of cheerful reports until 2014. By this time much work had been done. Cancellation was inconceivable. The cost to completion was revised up to $85 billion. At roughly the same time the “non-railway” items went up from $11 billion to $16 billion.

This leads us to the conclusion that the honestly stated cost of the whole project was $100 billion, which rather puts the estimated economic benefits in the shade. At the same time the expected daily traffic was increased to 109,200. Why the person responsible for this forecast thought it was accurate enough to be worth including the extra 200 remains a mystery.

The latest “best guess” of the daily traffic is 80,000. That could increase so we can wait and see on that one.

But now that the Great White Elephant is finished we can come to a solid conclusion about the repeated claim that the actual construction would create 10,000 jobs. This was a gross exaggeration.

Every six months the government provided a report for the railways sub-committee of the Legislative Council on the progress of the project. And each report included the number of people currently employed on it.

In December 2010 this was about 3,000. By June of the following year it had crept up to 3,600.

By June 2012 it was up to 6,000. The report was still predicting a peak of 10,000 to come later. But come it did not. At the end of June 2013 the daily average was about 8,500. And that was as high as it got. The figure for June the following year was 6,400; in December it was up to 7,700. By the end of 2015 it was still 7,712, by the end of 2016 it was 7,637 and at the end of last year it was down to 6,349.

Readers may also recall that when cancellation of the project was proposed in 2016, MTR boss Frederick Ma complained that this was a threat to “7,000 jobs”. Another 4,000 or so had never materialised

Were any of the early predictions worth the paper they were written on? Well, the railway is still the same length.