Feeds:
Posts
Comments

On music, memory and history

February 17, 2025 by timhamlett

Now for something completely different. We start with a bit of distant history. In 1971 the student union (remember those?) at the University of Lancaster decided to change the system under which entertainments were organised by student volunteers.

Instead the union appointed the most promising of the recent volunteers, Barry Lucas, as a professional manager. Over the ensuing 15 years this produced a remarkable flourishing of pop culture in the university’s largest hall. Almost everyone who was anyone performed there, despite its backwater geographical location and modest size

This has now been decribed in a book, “When rock went to college”, co-authored by Mr Lucas. You have to be at least 50 years old to have any personal memories of all this, but the book has sold well in North Lancashire and is now in its third edition.

Most of it consists of an annotated list of the people who performed. This is so long it is easier to count the omissions. Everyone you have heard of from that era is there except Mack Jagger (desired date conflicted with exams) Elton John (mysterious last-minute no-show) and ABBA (Mr Lucas admits a mistake).

It all looks a bit magical. True, Lancaster is geographically convenient for a group doing a national tour, next to the motorway connecting Manchester and Glasgow. The hall (now rather misleadingly called the Great Hall) fits 1,600 people, not a lot by pop standards. Its acoustics are excellent and the audience was enthusiastic. The management was professional, experienced and understood musicians’ needs. Financially Mr Lucas did not have to pay for the hall or show a profit, though he was expected to make enough to pay his own salary, initially very small.

Readers who supposed that the popular music industry was entirely ruled by greed and ambition will be interested to hear that singers who could fill a football stadium urged other similarly popular performers to do an underpaid gig in Lancaster because it would be an enjoyable evening which they would remember for the rest of their lives.

In its day the Lancaster shows seem to have become widely known. A survey of students conducted by the Business School discovered that conventional reasons for choosing the university (course, department, proximity to home or the Lake District) were heavily outpolled. No less than 60 percent of respondents said they had chosen Lancaster because it had top-class concerts.

I imagine the university was not overjoyed by this discovery. Perhaps it should have been. New institutions need to be known for something. I am sure Baptist U benefitted in its early days from the widespread but erroneous belief that most of Hong Kong’s reporters came from the old Department of Communication.

Anyway, memory is a funny thing. Chugging through the book about the Lancaster pop scene I got to page 332, where it names the student union president who started all this, who was … me.

I wouldn’t say I had completely forgotten the whole thing, but the reminder came as a big surprise. Well it was 50 years ago. And I left the country before it really took off. But like, I suspect, most people my age I sometimes find myself in that half-asleep stage before getting up in the morning, going through long-ago events which I would like to repeat because they were fun, or would like to repeat to have a chance to do something differently.

My presidential memories tend to run to clashes with that small minority of students who wished not only to see the Revolution – a popular ambition in student circles – but wished to start it right now by burning down the university.

Like the less thoughtful historians I remember the flashy public bits and have quite overlooked important administrative changes. Most of these would have been made sooner or later as the university grew in size and the student union grew with it. But still… Improving the concerts remained a one-off, imitated half-heartedly only by the student union in Leeds.

Enoch Powell famously said that all political careers end in failure. Well mine seemed to. Within weeks of the end my successor – a would-be revolutionary – announced the consignment of the Hamlett regime to “the dustbin of history”.

You only get a year in student politics. So the fact that something lasted 14 years is interesting. Which of our current leaders will be able to look back at something more heart-warming than keeping the show on the road and obeying orders?

History is full of ironies about who or what gets remembered. Consider Leslie Hore Belisha, a reforming war minister in the Appeasement era, later scandalously sacked at the behest of senior generals, probably because he was a Jew. In an earlier posting as Transport Minister he introduced the zebra crossing. The orange ball on top of a striped pole which marks such a crossing is still known as a belisha beacon.

Updated version in Kwai Chung

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

Pandas are pretty, but do not expect them to solve our financial problems

February 7, 2025 by timhamlett

It appears, though the numbers published vary a bit, that our government is bleeding money on such a scale that the reserves will be run down in five or six years, placing us in the same boat as all those debt-addicted governments we have been looking down on.

Of course this will not happen. Economies will be made, new sources of income discovered, the real estate racket revived. Or something.

A quick perusal of the pro-government papers suggests that thinking among supporters runs along some ominous lines: tinkering with the $2 travel concession, selling parts of public housing, the MTR and the airport, a new sales tax, automatic car parking penalties administered by artificial intelligence…

Some odd omissions: nobody wants to increase salaries or company tax; few takers for blanket reductions in civil service salaries.

No interest in my two favourites: first abolish the whole “Political appointment” nonsense. There is nothing policy secretaries have to do these days which could not be done by the permanent secretaries of their bureaus, and in most cases done better. Second, put up parking penalties to the same level as those for such trivial offences as spitting on the pavement or travelling in First Class without beeping your Octopus. This would involve multiplying the present parking fine by a factor of three, or six, depending on which current Mickey Mouse offence you were catching up with.

Well these are hard times for a Financial Secretary. Obviously the public coffers would benefit if the economy was prospering, but this is difficult to arrange.

Let me, though, help in the discussions now taking place behind the scenes by eliminating one alleged possibility: the “panda economy”. Some people are putting an awful lot of hope in our rising panda population. One writer said that Hong Kong was enjoying “pandamania”. This sounds suspiciously like pandemonium.

I have nothing against animal tourism. Indeed when travelling I am a sucker for animal experiences of all kinds. I have petted dolphins in San Diego, fed deer in Nara, cuddled koalas and fed kangaroos in Brisbane, charmed a pigeon in Perth and enjoyed a whole flock of sociable doves in Dalian. My most memorable experience in Canada was when I was selected, as the guest who had come furthest, to feed a bear as big as me. This was safer than it sounds: you do it by poking a hose through a chain link fence.

This enthusiasm for animal experiences is probably a result of being brought up in an age when attitudes to such things were different. When I was a kid feeding the pigeons in Trafalgar Square was a regular treat and vendors had stalls selling split peas for the purpose. This is no longer allowed so Admiral Nelson is no longer up to his knees in pigeon poop.

In those days London zoo offered rides on camels and elephants. Nowadays they only offer donkeys. Other zoos were quite happy to have visitors getting up close to harmless herbivores, which only happened if you had something to offer. Dried pasta was a popular choice. So I fed giraffes, elephants and a variety of variations on the antelope. This sort of thing is no longer allowed.

Certainly you will not be allowed any meaningful interaction with the panda population. Corporate Hong Kong seems to be doing its best to make up for this. My petrol station has provided panda tissues and a panda camping light (?). The local supermarket is offering panda buns – white with black spots. But these efforts are likely to wilt when the public discovers that pandas do not really perform. They sit and chew a bit of bamboo. If you’re lucky. If you’re unlucky they just sit.

So I fear having pandas is not going to inspire any great improvement in local productivity. Judging by their notorious lack of interest in sex it is not going to do much for our distressing reproduction rate either. And the idea that people will come to Hong Kong from miles away to look at a pretty but rather boring bear seems a bit of a stretch.

Also our leaders should be careful what they wish for. The panda may not do much for tourism but it is a potential gift to political satirists. Fat, lethargic and confused about sex: could that be the Hong Kong government?

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , | Leave a Comment »

Coffee should be more than a warm drink

January 30, 2025 by timhamlett

How, I wonder, did Hong Kong catch the coffee bug? The other day I was in the Wai, the MTR’s downmarket mall for Tai Wai inhabitants (no international brands, no wheeled suitcases) and pondered this mystery: while there are no brands or suitcases there are outlets of Starbucks and Pacific Coffee, together with two serious coffee shops, and one of them offers a menu of exotic beans which you can watch being transformed into nectar at considerable expense.

My favourite cafe in Shatin – five floors up, and so well away from the brands and suitcases – claims that its coffee chef has some international qualification in the matter. Certainly he does a very fine flat white.

Yet Hong Kong is supposed to be a tea place, like the UK of my youth. I really didn’t encounter coffee of any kind until I reached university. Students in those days were not offered any cooking equipment more advanced than a kettle – we did make toast by hanging slices of bread on the bars of the electric fire – and no refrigerator. So the only hot drink was coffee made with instant powder and dried milk. And a lot of sugar.

By the time I reached the world of work there were, I believe, proper coffee shops in London with Italian machinery, but in the North we drank tea.

As Hong Kong people did when I arrived here. Western-style hotels had “coffee shops” but there was nothing particularly sophisticated about the coffee offered there, which traditionally was made by the filter method on an industrial scale, and then sat about on a hotplate slowly becoming undrinkable.

Whether your cup was nice depended on the luck of the draw. If it was recent it might be good, and if not… A local magazine decided to do a comparative review of hotel coffee. The unhappy recipient of the brickbat for the worst local hotel brew responded in an interesting way: they fired their PR person.

On a study visit to Australia in the early 90s my students, and I, were impressed to discover that quite humble street sandwich bars offered a menu of coffee styles – cappucino, latte and so on – which had not really arrived in Hong Kong yet.

Well it duely arrived with multiple openings of the usual suspects: Starbucks and Pac Coffee. But although the menu arrived, generally the lifestyle did not.

Coffee shops, in the Viennese or 18th century London model, were supposed to be sociable establishments. Newspapers and magazines were provided. They were places for long leisurely chats or reading, catering to a population of regulars. It was a place where “everybody knows your name”.

This did briefly appear when the Baptist University, rightly concluding that academics – as many learned establishments have discovered – have no talent for running catering, invited Pacific Coffee to take over a small space at the south end of our long thin campus which had clearly been designed as some sort of snack bar.

This featured a rather easy-going financial arrangement which did not require either rapid turnover or packing lots of people in, so the space was furnished in a comfortable domestic style featuring soft furniture and even some plump armchairs. It swiftly became the hang-out for occupants of the nearby fine art and communication building. Small meetings could be held there. Early pioneers of remote working used laptops. Antiquated preservers of print read newspapers or books. Random encounters sparked interesting cross-disciplinary conversations.

This did not last. Alerted to the possibility that profits might be appearing the university introduced some form or tendering, and Pacific Coffee were replaced by the other lot. I have nothing against Starbucks, but this was a disaster. Pursuing the theory of profitable coffee shop management Starbucks filled the place with uncomfortable wooden furniture clearly designed to move people on and milk the space.

The complaints which ensued were so loud and bitter that the university eventually offered PC another space on the campus. But this illustrates a problem. Opening a coffee shop is supposed to be about much more than offering a particular kind of hot drink. A coffee shop should aspire to the status of an important social space, a community asset like the English pub or the French estaminet.

But this in turn requires a willingness to forgo that process known in business circles as “sweating the assets.” A traditional coffee shop meets needs outside the simple matter of warm fluid which are difficult to monetise. Efforts to impose or encourage a “minimum spend” or a “maximum stay” are not compatible with the desired ambience.

The situation is not hopeless. Perhaps the present turbulence in the commercial property market will lead to more tolerance for experiments. Perhaps corporate greed will wilt in the face of alert and discriminating consumers. Or perhaps not.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Leave a Comment »

There are too many Trump supporters on my desktop

January 21, 2025 by timhamlett

Having sworn off Hong Kong politics I am certainly not going to start writing about American ones.

Besides, what American electors get up to is really none of our business. If citizens of the Land of the Free wish to be represented on the international stage by a convicted criminal, serial sex pest and compulsive liar, that is their choice.

I am, though, concerned about reports that the titans of US tech have been lining up not only to make the usual polite noises about a new president, but to throw money at his inauguration and express admiration and allegiance to the Orange Catastrophe.

Press people are not much better, I admit. Six months ago Mr Trump was being written about in the sort of condescending tones usually reserved for unsuccessful stand-up comics. Now we are treated to thoughtful analysis of Mr Trump’s possible policies.

In their innermost thoughts most of these writers are well aware that Mr Trump does not have policies. To have a policy you must first read and think about the issues involved. Mr Trump notoriously does neither. Where other people have policies he has prejudices and impulses.

The prejudices are unchanging and unchangeable. The impulses come and go from day to day, under the unhelpful influence of Fox News. Neither the prejudices nor the impulses are hampered by any close examination of the real world.

Still, none of the press people has been adopted as courtiers. Whereas at the Inauguration on Monday the tech tycoons were lined up for the cameras. The nobodies in the background are members of the new Cabinet, who are apparently going to get the same respectful attention as Mrs Thatcher’s Cabinet got from her.

The problem this poses is nicely exemplified by the flourishing market in bumper stickers for embarrassed Tesla owners to put on their cars. These run to variations on “I bought this car before we knew that Elon was mad”. An entertaining option: “I bought this car before Elon became First Lady.”

Fortunately I had not got round to buying a Tesla of any kind. Also, having never been a Twitterer I have effortlessly avoided X. As I have no ambitions to move to Mars I suppose I am pretty Muskproof. Which is just as well, because I know what a Nazi salute looks like and I am looking at one now.

However my computer is an iMac. It is a very fine computer and it is a recent purchase. I can hardly give it up. But I understand the big Apple man has made his bow although he doesn’t seem to have attended the inauguration.

Definitely in the picture, though, are the billionaires responsible for my two favourite pieces of time-wasting software, Youtube and Facebook, as well as the modern journalist’s essential tool, Google.

This integration of digital imperialism with the political kind must be a worry in a good many places. There is mounting evidence that indulging in extensive internet use is toxic for children and young people. And if there is no attempt to stem the torrent of lies it can be pretty disturbing for adults, too.

It will be a source of much justified resentment if attempts to deal with these problems in Europe or South America are opposed by the US in the name of “free speech”.

We all like free speech and we all recognise, as our local government occasionally reminds us, that it has limits. Steven Pinker asserts (in “The better angels of our nature”) that humanity was elevated to a new level of sympathy and gentleness by the invention of the novel, and the resulting invitation to put yourself in other people’s place and imagine what they must be thinking and feeling.

According to Mr Pinker this was a slow but dramatic change, leading to a great reduction in violence generally. This raises the question: what is five hours a day of web browsing doing to people? I am not sure what the answer to this question might be but it seems increasingly likely that the answer is “nothing good”.

So the titans of tech are poisoning our minds. And if we use their stuff I suppose we are in danger of complicity. They invite you in, but only so that they can sell you to advertisers. It seems under the circumstances the least you can do is install a good ad blocker. This also has the important benefit of making Youtube much more enjoyable.

I cannot unfortunately recommend the further step of urging our government to restrict nasty internet content. This is because our leaders have a track record of using laws intended for other purposes to harass or punish activities they disapprove of, like fund-raising for unliked causes, playing unliked tunes in public, running independent bookshops or dubiously loyal restaurants, and so on. They’re doing quite enough censorship already.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment »

Dear policy secretaries: People with luxurious jobs shouldn’t be complaining about the workload

January 9, 2025 by timhamlett

A word of advice for policy secretaries: do not, in your laudable efforts to communicate with the general public over social media, tell us all how tough your job is.

This thought was first prompted by an end-of-the-year Facebook contribution from Chris Tang, the Secretary for Security, in which he recalled a year full of challenges, loss of sleep and “inflammation in my eyes and shoulders, and my gout came back.”

Mr Tang is in a sense in a class of his own. As the Secretary for Security he is in charge of the prison-filling machinery. Numerous people who have friends enjoying the unwanted hospitality of the correctional industry will have been tempted to rather uncharitable responses to reports of his medical problems. Like “Gout? Pity it wasn’t ebola.”

Let us, though, avoid personal specifics and concentrate on the situation of policy secretaries generally. There are plenty of things which they all have in common, which make them rather unlikely recipients for public sympathy.

We know from the budget that you all enjoy salaries exceeding those enjoyed in other countries by prime ministers, presidents and even in some modest cases kings. We know from the reported details of the Political Appointments scheme that you have the services of a secretary, a deputy, a personal assistant and a driver.

Where there is a driver we must also suppose there is a free car.

We know from a little glitch in the sewage system of the freshly-opened Central Government complex that your office also has a private toilet, a dream for many Hong Kong people living in subdivided flats or bedspaces.

We know from the difficulties Ms Carrie Lam experienced when thrust out into the real world that these generous provisions lead to helplessness when forced to use public transport, and complete lack of familiarity with the concept of buying your own toilet paper.

Your work may feel challenging and strenuous but it is also clean, safe and prestigeous. Hong Kong’s working population is (latest census figure) 3.83 million. At least 3.8 million of those people would happily swap jobs with you. Many of them are completely unqualified for the work, but would tell themselves that even if they were fired after a month they would still have earned more than they usually get in a year.

But being unable to do anything useful has not historically been a bar to a lengthy period in office as a policy secretary. The rice bowl is not iron but it is not exactly fragile either.

Under the circumstances complaining about your work makes you look like, to coin a phrase, a bit of a wuss. Getting landmark legislation through Legco may be a source of pride. But how hard can it be to get a law passed in a legislature containing 89 government supporters and one independent?

I would also recommend not going on about possibly work-related medical problems. You are all about 60 years old, give or take a few years. You are reaching a stage in life when the biological machinery which you have taken for granted for half a century starts to throw up the odd problem and needs some care and maintenance.

Sooner or later all of you will encounter one or more of arthritis, tinnitis, varicose veins, deteriorating eyesight, cataracts, mysterious muscular twinges, and occasional inability to remember where you put something down five minutes ago. Your doctor will develop a desire to push cameras into places where you do not normally welcome foreign bodies – happily this is done while you are asleep – and subject you to mysterious but expensive scans.

After a few years of this you will find that conversations with other people in your age group often involve comparisons of medical histories. This is all part of life’s rich pageant and nothing to worry about. But people who are already enjoying it will not be impressed by complaints about the first small symptoms.

A final word for fellow gout victims. This problem is not caused by hard work; it is caused by high uric acid levels in your blood. The solution is a cheap pill called allopurinol. I have been taking it for 40 years.

Looking on the bright side, this used to be known as “the disease of kings” because it was erroneously associated with rich food. Famous victims have included Isaac Newton, Christopher Columbus, Benjamin Franklin, Beethoven and George W. Bush’s vice president Dick Cheney. Doesn’t that feel better?

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Leave a Comment »

Substandard flats are ‘targeted for eradication’ … and their occupants?

January 8, 2025 by timhamlett

The government has put out some details about its plan to eliminate substandard miniflats. But a question remains.

According to a newspaper contribution by the relevant minister there are believed to be 110,000 sub-divided flats – where an already miniature flat is further split up for multiple occupation – in Hong Kong.

It is estimated that 220,000 people live in them. This is a suspiciously round number. It appears that it is the consequence of a finding (wild guess?) that the number of people living in each tiny flatlet is on average two.

No doubt this is a difficult area and two seems a plausible number for a very small space. On the other hand before the public housing system really got under way there were similar estimates for the number of people per squatter hut. And they turned out to be much too low.

Never mind. Let us go along with the official numbers. There are 110,000 miniflats accommodating 220,000 people. It is further supposed that about 80,000 of these little homes will be able, with some work, to conform to official standards in the matter of space, windows, plumbing and such like.

The other 30,000 or so will, in the Housing Secretary’s rather chilling phrase, be “targeted for eradication.” She supposes that this will leave 77,000 units still on the market after mandated improvements.

This also seems a bit optimistic. If you are the owner of a sub-divided flat facing a large bill to bring your sub-units up to official standards, there are alternatives. One obvious one is to dismantle the subdivisions and sell or rent the flat in its original intended form. Or you can unload the whole arrangement to some hardened criminal who will regard the remote possibility of a large fine with equanimity.

Still, again, let us go along with the official figures. We now come to the unanswered question. There are 30,000 flats to be “eradicated”. They will be home to 60,000 people. Where are all these people supposed to go?

We have already been told that they will not be going to public housing, unless they arrive at the front of the queue just in time. Officials are apparently worried that there may be a rush to occupy really squalid spaces in the hope that inhabitants will be wafted swiftly into public housing.

Well whatever the merits of that theory, only 40 percent of miniflat dwellers have even applied for public housing. So we have 36,000 people for whom the government apparently has no plans at all.

There is an ironic history here. During the 1980s and 90s the government took a great pride in the number of overseas housing people who came to Hong Kong to look at local public housing efforts and learn from them.

But the big attraction was not the multi-story tower blocks which were then growing like mushrooms all over the New Territories. Lots of places had experimented with public housing in tower blocks, with mixed results.

The big attraction was an innovation called a Temporary Housing Area. The idea behind these places (pic here) was that the government provided a floor and roof for a single-story structure and the occupants put in the walls. Water, showers and toilets were provided centrally and residents cooked on bottled gas.

This was an outstandingly cheap solution and had obvious attractions for places which had more space than we do. Hong Kong being Hong Kong there were recurring reports of local bandits monopolising the wall-building, but apart from that the only drawback was that the area was always only temporarily available. The government had other plans for it, usually but not always for housing.

This was nobody’s idea of paradise but it met a need. The nearest thing to it now seems to be what officials call “transitional housing”. Web site here. It is usually run by NGOs apparently. However only 3,000 units are currently under construction so those 36,000 people will have to wait.

I am sure the government’s intentions in sorting out the sub-divided flat situation are good. It would be nice, though, if the people running housing policy tried harder to look as if they recognised that the occupants are people, whose happiness is the objective of the exercise.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , | Leave a Comment »

A constitutional innovation: Never mind the Basic Law, consider the context

December 27, 2024 by timhamlett

Well I don’t suppose that it has anything to do with me, but we now have a response to the idea that planning to veto the government’s budget was not a crime, but a legitimate constitutional recourse outlined in the Basic Law.
This comes in a China Daily piece by one Richard Cullen, an adjunct professor (part-time – don’t call us, we’ll call you) in the HKU Faculty of Law.
Mr Cullen concedes that the idea that articles 50-52 authorise refusal to pass the budget as a way to secure the resignation of the Chief Executive is “accurate, as far as it goes.” But, he goes on to say, this ignores the “wider contextual considerations”. It is “methodically literal”, and seeks to establish a “legalistic, rarified zone” for interpretation of the law.
In my experience “legalistic” is a word used for legal arguments which lead to destinations the user does not like. A “rarified zone”? The law is often described as an artificial system of reasoning intended for the particular purpose of resolving disputes between citizens and between citizens and the state, in which the pursuit of fairness and justice has to compete with the need for predictability and consistency. The interpretation of statutes is a suburb of legal reasoning and has its own rules, in which the “wider contextual considerations” do not feature very much.
We must, though, note that Mr Cullen seems to spend more time writing for the China Daily than he does teaching law, and he clearly has no problem avoiding legalistic formal language in his usual output, which comprises rousing denunciations of American foreign policy.
His exploration of the context leads to some strange places. Lawyers in the common law system have, he says, often ignored context, with sad results. We then explore the history of labour and factory legislation in the US and UK.
This was often, Mr Cullen says, and I agree, drafted with scant realistic consideration of the context. Legislators tended to treat labour relations as a voluntary contract between two equal parties, and ignored the reality that the employer’s need for another worker was usually less pressing than the applicant’s need for a job. Bad law and injustice resulted.
But this does not help Mr Cullen’s case with regard to interpretation of the Basic Law at all. The ignorance of context was in the original labour legislation. Judges interpreted it as it came to them. Historically judges have often lamented that the effect of the legislation they were enforcing was unjust in some, or even most cases. But changing it was a matter for parliament, not something to be done in court in the name of “context”.
Mr Cullen observes, correctly, that the Basic Law does not authorise the full “Laam gau” programme, and also – less relevantly – that Yash Ghai, writing in 1999, thought the budget veto procedure might be used to resolve disputes over taxation or public spending, not to seek major changes in government policy.
This last prediction betrays a curious lack of imagination. After all the budget veto procedure would be a major step into unknowable territory, involving serious hazards for both sides. Legislators first have to risk their seats; the risks to the Chief Executive come later but are as serious. The spectacle of a legislature and executive at loggerheads would be unbecoming. This is the nuclear option of political conflict. It would be surprising if it were used for anything other than major disputes over policy.
Mr Cullen thinks that the procedure was not intended to allow a “very powerful indirect means of coercing radical policy changes.” What else could it be for?
We then move on to the context in detail, and here I have to say that I begin to wonder if Mr Cullen is a person from whom I would wish to buy a used car. Because he says, “the LegCo was rendered inoperable because of massive, riot-driven vandalism for about three months from July 1, 2019”. And that is not true.
In the first place, a legislature cannot be rendered “inoperable” just because its usual meeting place is closed, for whatever reason. A council meeting is not like a heart transplant or a Catholic wedding, which can only take place in a building designed and dedicated for the purpose.
In 1789 the French National Assembly famously responded to a Royal eviction by meeting in a tennis court. In 1941 the British House of Commons had its usual home vandalised by the Luftwaffe. Politics continued in alternative venues until the building had been restored, which took until 1950.
In the second place, the Legco was not rendered inoperable for three months because it customarily takes a long break in the summer whether its chamber is usable or not. After July 1 the chairman simply cancelled the last meeting of the session and everyone went on holiday.
If Mr Cullen is unreliable on the fiddly detail he is not much better on the big picture. The events of 2019 were an “insurrection”, he says, and adds with approval a quote from Henry Litton dubbing it an “insurgency”. This is a gross abuse of language and also rather insensitive.
Insurrections and insurgencies involve the use of lethal force to overthrow the regime. It is not a happy experience and usually involves the shedding of much blood, most of it innocent. It is the sort of thing now being endured in Sudan, Burma and San Salvador. Highjacking the word to describe our street scuffles is an insult to the sufferings of people in such places.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment »

Political appointments have become a failed effort to meet discarded objectives

December 21, 2024 by timhamlett

Did you notice the odd thing about the two latest appointments to the upper ranks of the government? Both the two women appointed to secretarial posts were career civil servants, who were recruited to the Administrative Officer ranks in (coincidentally) 1989.

This is not quite the way these things were supposed to work. Before 2002 all secretaries (that is, heads of bureaus, not word processors) were career civil servants who had worked their way up the bureaucratic pyramid.

In that year the then Chief Executive, Tung Chee-hwa, introduced what was then called the Principal Officials Accountability System, under which heads of bureaus would be appointed, not by the existing promotion mechanism from within the civil service, but instead by him, from outside it.

These people would fill Exco (which roughly corresponds to the Cabinet, in the US system), and would be answerable to the CE who appointed them. They would not be on civil service terms and their appointments would expire at the end of the CE’s term of office.

There was little public discussion before this brainwave was launched on us, so there remains a good deal of ambiguity about what it was intended to achieve. What you might call the “realist” interpretation was that Mr Tung believed the traditional civil service was not responding to his wishes and instructions as enthusiastically as he might wish.

There may have been something in this. Mr Tung’s background as the patriarch of a family shipping company was perhaps a poor preparation for dealing with civil servants who were used to being given a task and then being left to sort out the implementation by themselves.

The “idealist” interpretation was that the new system would subject the administration of Hong Kong to more critical appraisal and monitoring. The new secretaries would be ostensibly political creatures who could deal with Legco, explain the policies they were pursuing in public, and could be dismissed if they erred.

Even in its earliest incarnation this system did not live up to expectations, whether realist or idealistic. Having an obedient Exco did not help Mr Tung’s problems in government, and three years later he resigned with diplomatic health problems.

The new secretaries proved not unlike their predecessors. Even in the first batch there were five civil servants. The government’s relations with Legco became more contentious as it aligned itself explicitly with the DAB and Civic Party against the others.

“Accountability” did not ensue. The CE was reluctant to admit an appointment was a mistake and appointees were reluctant to resign. Secretaries who had committed egregious blunders were hounded from office by public opinion, more or less as they always had been.

In 2008 the system was renamed and extended by the next Chief Executive, Donald Tsang. Under the new “Political Appointments System” the existing secretaries were reinforced with undersecretaries and assistants. Launching the innovation the then Secretary for Constitutional and Mainland stuff said the existing secretaries would continue to study and design government policies in conjunction with the Permanent Secretary (senior mainstream civil servant) of their bureaus. The new deputies would liaise with legislators and provide policy input. The assistants would help bureau chiefs to reach out to the community.

Officials also said the new system would preserve a “permanent, professional and politically neutral civil service”, while nurturing talent which would be needed for the introduction of universal suffrage, then considered a likely future prospect.

The two new layers of appointees, with the associated fleets of drivers and personal secretaries, would cost $60 million a year.

Which brings us to the outstanding question. Now that this scheme has demonstrably failed, and many of the objectives which motivated it have been abandoned, would it not be a good idea to save a lot of money by abandoning the whole thing?

The system has not succeeded in introducing a wave of talented outsiders to the top of the administration. There are now 15 secretaries, of whom nine are career civil servants. Three of the others came from government-funded hospital or school backgrounds and one is an apparatchik of the FTU, the pro-government simulated trade union. There are only two genuine outsiders.

Since we no longer aspire to political pluralism the idea of a politically neutral civil service has become meaningless, and indeed civil servants are no longer expected, according to the latest version of their code, to be impartial and objective. Chief Executives have many problems, but passive resistance from the civil service is clearly not one of them.

The system has not nurtured any conspicuous political talents, and indeed the selectors now appear to prefer to seek candidates for office in the upper ranks of the police. There is no need for an extensive herd of specialists to liaise with Legco, which is expected to do as it is told, as indeed is the general public.

In these straitened times the Political Appointment System is, at best, an unaffordable luxury. At worst, an expensive attempt to put lipstick on a political pig?

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Leave a Comment »

Please Ms Law, stay out of show business

December 13, 2024 by timhamlett

What, I wonder, is a mega event? This question arises from a Legco answer provided by our newly minted Secretary for Culture, Sports and Tourism, Ms Rosanna Law.

Ms Law gave a glowing report on her branch’s efforts to boost tourism. You might even wonder, reading her update on the situation, what her predecessor did wrong.

According to Ms Law, as reported in the China Daily, there were 110 mega events in the first half of this year. I do not remember hearing or reading about 110 events worthy of the “mega” label, which according to the Cambridge Dictionary means “very good or very big”.

And the fact that these events are allegedly happening at a rate of about 18 a month, or roughly one every two days, suggests that the adjective has been devalued by overuse. This suspicion was not dispelled by the China Daily, which illustrated the happy news with a picture of the Hong Kong Sevens, and in the article mentioned only the Art Basel culture fest. Both these events have been staged annually for many years. They may be well be “mega”, but giving the credit to the current Culture, Sports and Tourism bureaucracy seems a bit of a stretch.

Ms Law said the mega events had attracted 550,000 tourists who spent $2.4 billion, and also contributed a “value add” of $1.4 billion, a mysterious extra benefit which she did not explain. These are big numbers, at least until you look at the official Tourism Board visitor figures for the same period, which run to about 3.5 million per month.

Well the show goes on. Ms Law said $100 million had been earmarked for the Mega Events Coordination Group’s work over the next three years. It is difficult to know what is happening here. We do not know which of these events are a result of official inspiration, and which are items which were going on anyway, but were happy to sport the “mega event” label in return for a chance to bid for some cash and get free publicity when the Tourism Board, in Ms Law’s mellifluous phrase, “leveraged its global network to carry out publicity in the Chinese mainland and overseas.”

Doubts arise. As a product of the post-war baby boom I witnessed years of arguments in the UK about which activities should be undertaken by government and which by the private sector. But even avid seekers of public control of the “commanding heights of the economy” recognised that arts and culture were best left to voluntary and commercial effort. If subsidies were provided this should be done in a way insulated from official control, like the money given to universities.

The reason for this is the general experience that officially devised entertainments will be either uninspiring, loss-making or both.

There is, to put it politely, no evidence that Hong Kong is exceptional in this matter. Money effortlessly disappears in the Magic Kingdom, Ocean Park and Water World. The West Kowloon Cultural District is looking for a life boat, probably involving the fine art of selling expensive flats.

I seem to have caused some confusion last week by mentioning the Capital Works Fund in the same column as the third runway, which was not financed that way. Besides milking passing passengers the airport took on $110 trillion of debt – which whatever the fine print says is effectively backed by the Hong Kong government.

My point was that having a huge pile of money which could only be spent on building encouraged a mindset in which any pyramid, sphinx or ziggurat could be erected free from financial concerns because the supply of money was apparently unlimited. This led to extravagant choices, of which the third runway was one.

The idea that events should be supported by an all-purpose body selecting items on the basis of their prospects as tourist attractions is another. How are meaningful comparisons to be made between – say – a golf tournament, a performance of Aida and a chance to be bored in a conference centre by the CEOs of several international companies?

Money will be spent, certainly, but much of it will be wasted on events which would have happened anyway, or events to which the “mega” label is a polite joke. What is to be done?

In the long run we need perhaps to consider that erecting a pyramid without considering the running costs is a recipe for unhappiness. Museums and theatres are not supposed to make money. They are supposed to be provided as a service to the public and this implies a willingness to provide continuing support.

We also need to consider that what is happening today is not always a reliable guide to what will happen tomorrow. Shit, as they say, happens. Since the handover Hong Kong has had to deal with an Asian financial crisis, two political upheavals, and two epidemics. Technologies and tastes have changed rapidly. The rosy scenario is not always the one we get.

More immediately, as the government is wallowing in a financial crisis, perhaps they could start by cancelling the Mega Events Coordination Group and saving $100 million. The government’s role in fostering mega events should be confined to ensuring there are suitable venues for them. Left to themselves, the relevant industries will produce a steady flow of conferences, festivals, shows, opportunities to buy expensive items or to watch Lionel Messi watch a football match. The SAR government can stay out of show business.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Leave a Comment »

Taking off with three runways … to go where?

December 6, 2024 by timhamlett

The third runway system, the latest expensive adornment to Hong Kong’s international airport, came into full-time operation this month. This should be distinguished from the third runway itself, which opened in 2022.

During the ensuing two years one of the older runways was closed for “maintenance”, which might arouse suspicions that the extra runway was perhaps not urgently needed.

Nevertheless the opening of the new system was greeted with unrestrained joy. “The three-runway system has been hailed as a ‘game-changer’ for the city to enhance its status as an international aviation hub,” reported the Post from the official opening.

A China Daily writer described the new system as “more than a runway; it’s a bridge to new economic vistas that will invigorate the city’s future.”

Certainly it’s more than a runway. It could be regarded as a suitable commemoration for the Capital Works Fund, a curious financial arrangement inherited from the colonial era.

The basic idea was that income from land sales could not be depended on, and should accordingly not be relied on to cover the government’s running costs. Instead it should be put in a special pot, to be drawn on only for infrastructure projects which would be one-off bursts of expenditure.

This bit of fiscal puritanism may be compared with the present arrangement under which the proceeds of the sale of bonds (which will have to be repaid some day) are treated as income. But let us leave the financial technicalities aside. Basically we were presented with a government looking at a large pile of money which could only be spent on infrastructure projects.

Call me a cynic if you will, but I would expect that to produce a growing enthusiasm for expensive and elaborate projects, with an increasing likelihood of white elephant production. Bridges, railway lines, reclamation of whole islands … Is this starting to look familiar?

All of these projects will be defended as contributing to Hong Kong’s future prosperity and status as some kind of hub. Let me dispose of two points before we get to the airport itself.

Firstly, as Kuper and Symanski point out, economists firmly believe that people respond to incentives, and economists certainly do. No plan for a sports facility or festival ever comes without a glowing prediction from an economist of the future wealth it will generate for the hapless taxpayers who are invited to pay for it. So it goes also for infrastructure projects.

The third runway can probably claim some sort of record in this area, as it was justified by a prediction of $455 billion in economic benefits … spread over the next 50 years. You can see that far ahead? J.K. Galbraith said, “The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.”

Secondly let us be wary of a promised “boost for tourism”. If you are a tourist-attractive island which can only be reached by the use of a small and uncomfortable ferry (as the Isle of Sky once was) then building a bridge will attract a lot of the formerly discouraged and will boost tourism (as it did).

If you are a coastal European city with the usual kit – city walls, cathedral, town hall, famous man’s birthplace – and cruise lines are by-passing your pathetic port, then constructing a cruise terminal may bring a new flood of people who used to miss you.

On the other hand if you are getting a million tourists a year, and your airport can handle two million, then upgrading it to a capacity of three million is not going to make the slightest difference. People are not going to visit specially to see the new airport. It is a means to an end.

And this brings us to the impact, or lack of impact, of the new runway. In 2015 an assessment of the situation was produced for planners and legislators. Keeping the airport as it was (Option A) implied a maximum annual capacity of 57 million passengers and 4.4 million tonnes of cargo. Making improvements but not extending them to a third runway (B) could raise this to 77 million passengers and 6.1 million tonnes. Option C – the third runway – would increase capacity to 102 million passengers and 8.9 million tonnes.

How much capacity did we actually use in 2023, the last full year? Ah, 43 million passengers and 4.2 million tonnes. In other words, comfortably within Option A.

The Airport Authority asserts that usage was depressed during COVID and will eventually recover. But is this inevitable, or even likely? Views differ. Since 2015 rival international airports have expanded in Shenzhen and Zhuhai. Passengers on shorter routes from Chinese cities can also consider the express rail link, which opened in 2018.

Spokespeople for the authority say that the airport is already busy again in rush hours. But these are not like land-based rush hours, caused by lots of people going to and from work at the same time. They are caused by airlines, for reasons of their own, all wanting to land and take off at the same time.

Catering to this urge is wasteful. Another way of looking at airport capacity is the number of movements it can handle. Because aircraft, once up, have to be kept two minutes apart there is a fixed ceiling of about 30 movements an hour per runway. Clearly with three runways you can hope to handle 90 movements an hour, which is an improvement.

But here again we seem to be meeting a non-existent need. In 2018, the last year before various interruptions culminating in COVID, the airport handled 427,000 movements. In 2023 it handled 276,000. This year so far we have 298,000. Clearly the figure is still rising, but has a long way to go before it catches up with the number achieved with two runways alone.

Given that the government is now running a huge deficit and is no doubt contemplating something painful in the way of increased taxes and lower benefits, it is quite understandable that the “line to take” is not that they blew $140 billion to provide some extra convenience to airlines.

So roll up for the new epoch, which will either feature massive financial losses or mass tourism. Are we having fun yet?

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments »

« Newer Posts - Older Posts »