tim's experiment

Wandering the web the other day I came across an interesting little controversy about a young lady called Laura Bretan. Miss Bretan, who is now 14, is an American of Rumanian extraction who currently lives in Chicago. She sings very well. She is eligible, it seems, for both Rumania’s Got Talent and America’s Got Talent. She entered both, winning in Rumania and reaching the finals in America. Video of the young lady in action here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PlprXGhTax0

Normally, I suppose, connoisseurs of serious music do not watch talent shows of this kind. Miss Bretan, though, seems to have attracted some interest by describing herself as an “opera singer”, and performing on her first appearance Puccini’s aria Nessu Dorme, albeit in a shortened version.  There ensued a critical article in one of the on-line magazines where people who take these matters extremely seriously hang out. The writer thought Miss Bretan had a deficient technique, was “straining” to get effects which required an adult voice, and might ruin her voice if not subjected to some serious training. This provoked a wide variety of responses. Some people drew unkind conclusions from the fact that the critical author was a well-known voice coach. There was much technical dispute about the finer points of adult and adolescent vocal chords.  Various names were bandied about as examples of young gals (this is apparently not a problem for boys) who had burst onto the scene with a lovely voice but had not in fact become opera singers of any consequence, or at all. Some of the stuffier correspondents complained that in the original opera Nessu Dorme is sung by a man, hardly an impressive point in the context of America’s Got Talent, and complained that Miss Bretan did not pronounce Italian well. Sympathetic but still concerned experts agreed that perhaps this kind of singing was not an ideal preparation for a life on the opera stage. The kinder ones conceded that a quick burst on television was unlikely to do any harm in the long run.

Clearly what really bothered some of these people, and one of them eventually made this point, was that singing one song, however well, does not make you an “opera singer”. Opera singers have to keep it up for two hours. They have to produce a sound which can compete with the output of a small orchestra and fill an auditorium without using a microphone. It is a tough career which is lavishly rewarding only for a lucky few . There are probably easier ways of becoming rich and famous, and doing well on television talent shows is one of them. Watching this happen to a 14-year-old girl is probably a painful experience.

But opera singers are not the only people who are facing this sort of competition. There is a flourishing industry of kiddies who sing like adults. They are particularly conspicuous on TV talent shows, where an age in single digits is perfectly acceptable. Most of them stick to something more in the pop line than opera. The one thing they all have in common is that they use a microphone.  And this, I fear, is what frightens the “real” singers who have practised for years to produce a highly trained and professional voice. You don’t need to do that any more. Your sound man can fix the volume, and much else besides.

This is what happened to the guitar, and turned it into a different instrument. Andres Segovia played classical music on the guitar, and Jimi Hendrix did something completely different on its electric descendant. Really the name is now the only thing they have in common. The Irish frame drum which I play for fun used to be beaten with a substantial piece of wood. The fashion now among celebrated players is to tickle it with something very thin and light. The wooden bit at the back of violin bows is often recycled for this purpose. Without amplification, this would produce the sound of two flies dancing on a newspaper. With a microphone stuck in the back of the drum the effect is, I must admit, very interesting and exciting. But quite different. Well I suppose with instruments this is not something to worry about. Those who wish to do without the sound man’s artful aid can still play the “unplugged” version. Opera also will no doubt survive, if only because in many countries it is lavishly subsidised. What seems to be in danger of disappearing altogether is the unassisted spoken voice.

One of the things about my school career which would now seem odd is that I never encountered a microphone. Teachers were expected to address their classes without artificial aid of any kind. The principal would address the whole school in the gym or school hall, similarly without assistance. Debates were conducted in a similarly unelectric way. I think the first time I had anything to do with a microphone was during a brief appearance on the BBC in connection with a protest against the Cuba missile crisis. At that time I was in Form 6. University lecturers were similarly catered for, or rather not catered for. A few people who lectured in thoroughly unsuitable rooms (mediaeval dining halls) used mikes, with disappointing results. Bad acoustics are bad acoustics. But generally if you wanted to address a crowd you were expected to do so with a clarity and volume which made your words intelligible in their raw state, as it were.

And this is the way it had always been. We may take with a pinch of salt the idea of a sermon on a mountain top, but there are reliable reports of people addressing quite large crowds long before microphones were invented. By the 19th century it was apparently customary in really large occasions to have “repeaters”, people who stood at a distance from the speaker and bellowed out his words so that people out of earshot of the original could still get the message. I have always wondered how this worked. Did the speaker have to pause after each sentence for the repeaters to pass on his message? Or did the repeaters operate in pairs, with one listening while the other yelled? Clearly though they were not used indoors, even in cavernous spaces like the Royal Albert Hall or Westminster Abbey. The ability to speak clearly to large numbers was not an exotic skill found only in a few lucky individuals with lungs of brass. Your local priest preached without amplification, and the local amateur who read the lesson also had no help.

Well we have, as they say, changed all that. In modern Hongkong it is an almost universal expectation that anyone addressing a group will be offered a mike, and he or she will usually accept and use it. Every classroom has a sound system, even if the classroom is so small it is no bigger than my living room.  The teacher will be offered a choice – handheld with cable, handheld but wireless, or a clip-on. Being able to speak is no longer a requirement. More ominously, as the equipment is there, the students expect to use it as well. So they get no practice in naked public speaking.

Some of this can be put down to higher levels of noise in the environment generally. My university used to be more or less under the flightpath to Kai Tak. The air conditioning competes with the speakers’ efforts and sometimes noises from outside seep in as well. Using a microphone in some special situations is perfectly acceptable. Using it all the time has a cost. If the sound is effortlessly overwhelming the students will treat it rather as they treat television at home – as a noise perfectly compatible with the audience chatting among itself. I am quite happy to have a bit of background muttering in my classes, because it consists mostly of people who didn’t understand something asking what the hell he is talking about and other people telling them in Cantonese. But if you turn yourself into a radio then you are asking for a multi-tasking audience. We all know we can do something else while listening to the radio.

The effect is exacerbated if you succumb to the other modern compulsion and use Powerpoint. The problem with Powerpoint is that the students then look at the screen … and the speaker tends to as well. Combined with electric sound this means there is no ear contact and no eye contact. In consequence, I fear, there is probably not much communication. A.J.P. Taylor used to lecture without notes. This is a good trick if you can manage it but probably not worth losing a lot of sleep over. I do though recommend learning how to lecture without a microphone. It is not necessary to be very loud. In fact speaking softly is one of the more subtle ways of persuading your audience to shut up.

As I said last week, there was once a polite convention that people did not discuss matters which were currently or imminently before the courts. However it seems that this has now wilted, if not died completely. Everyone from the Chief Executive down has expressed a view on whether it is lawful for a Returning Officer to disqualify a candidate on the grounds that he would if elected not be able to take the oath required of legislators, or if he took it would not mean it. Well returning officers have been around for a long time. I must admit also to having some dim memories from my student days of historical controversies concerning the taking of the parliamentary oath. So I have had a pleasant nostalgic visit to an old friend of student days, Costin and Watson’s “The Law and Working of the Constitution: Documents 1660-1914” as well as that indispensable aid to modern scholarship – Google.

The earliest relevant case I can find in any detail at all concerns one John Archdale, who was elected to the House of Commons in 1689. He was a Quaker, and consequently had a strong religious objection to oaths of any kind. He asked if he could affirm instead and the House of Commons, after debating the matter, refused. They ordered a new poll. Mr Archdale did not run again, but the law was changed soon afterwards to allow Protestants who had theological objections to oaths to affirm instead. The interesting thing about this from our point of view is that in 1689 Quakers followed a dress code as distinctive as that observed today by people like the Pennsylvania Dutch or ultra-Orthodox Jews. The returning officer must have been perfectly aware of Mr Archdale’s religion and its consequences. He was allowed to run anyway.

It seems – there is very little on this – that a member of the house called Woolaston was expelled in 1699  because he was a tax collector. He ran in the ensuing by-election and was re-elected by his constituents.

More interestingly in 1712 Robert Walpole was convicted of corruption in the matter of government contracts and expelled from the House of Commons. He ran in the ensuing election, won, and was again expelled. This time the Commons declared him ineligible to be a Member but he ran anyway, and lost. Once again it seems that the returning officer was not influenced by the certainty that a candidate would not, if elected, be able to take his seat. The setback did Walpole no harm – he went on to become a long-serving Prime Minister.

These are just the appetizers. We now come to the two main courses. The first concerned John Wilkes, a vociferous controversialist and journalist, who wrote a rude piece about the King’s Speech (which even in those days was written by the Prime Minister, but the King took the attack personally) and was convicted of seditious libel. Nevertheless he ran for the Middlesex constituency in 1768 and was elected. The following year the House of Commons voted to expel him on the grounds that he was a criminal currently serving his sentence, and ordered a new election. This was held the same month and Wilkes was elected again. He was again expelled, and again elected. The House then decided that he “was and is incapable of being elected a Member to serve in this present Parliament.”

There then ensued a major constitutional row. Lawyers conceded that the House had the right to expel members but maintained that it did not have the right to, in effect, order the electors to vote for someone else. The House of Lords was presented with a memorial signed by 42 peers stating that “we deem the power which the House of Commons have assumed to themselves, of creating an incapacity unknown to the law, and thereby depriving, in effect, all the electors of Great Britain of their valuable right of free election … a flagrant usurpation.” Their Lordships, in the end, decided to duck a confrontation with the Commons over the issue. But the 42 peers’ view triumphed in the end because in 1782 the House of Commons came round to the same opinion, and ordered that the records of the case be expunged from the records as “subversive of the rights of the whole body of electors”. The interesting thing about this conclusion is that it does not allow even the House of Commons, never mind the returning officer, to disqualify a candidate. His suitability, or honesty, is a matter for him and the electors alone.

The other historical landmark concerns Charles Bradlaugh, a 19th century dissident and trouble-maker He was an atheist and a republican, which were both more provocative stances then than they are now. A man with a highly developed taste for up-hill battles he also campaigned for women’s votes and the use of contraceptives. Bradlaugh was elected to the House of Commons in 1880 and applied to affirm, instead of taking the usual oath on the Bible. This was a facility already allowed in the courts to people of no religion, but the House of Commons, perhaps glad to find a reason to exclude a potential source of controversy, refused. Bradlaugh then agreed to take the oath. The House then decided that since he did not have the necessary religious belief it would be useless for him to take the oath, and refused to allow that either. Bradlaugh appealed to the courts, who ducked. The judges decided they had no jurisdiction. There was no attempt to disqualify him by anyone and he won four consecutive by-elections, until the House of Commons relented and allowed him to take the oath in 1886. Two years later the law was changed to allow MPs to affirm if they wished to. Three years after that Bradlaugh died. Mohandas Gandhi, then a young lawyer, attended his funeral. It’s a small world. Clearly at this point it was established law that a candidate was entitled to run even if he was demonstrably either unwilling to take the oath or unlikely to be allowed to do so.

The only more recent case which comes to mind is that of Lord Stansgate, later better known as Tony Benn. He was an MP – then going under the name of Anthony Wedgewood Benn – in 1961 when his father died and he inherited the title. There is a long-established rule that members of the House of Lords may not sit in the Commons. Benn complained bitterly that he did not wish to be a peer and did wish to stay in the Commons. The seat was declared vacant. He ran in the ensuing by-election and won. An election court then decided that his candidacy was void and awarded the seat to the runner-up. The government accepted that the situation was unsatisfactory and moved to change the law to allow hereditary peers to unpeer themselves. The “winner” occupying Benn’s seat promised that if the law on this matter was changed he would resign. It was and he did. From our point of view the interesting thing is again the role, or rather the non-role, of the returning officer. Benn was in a category explicitly barred by both statute and tradition from sitting in the House of Commons. He was nevertheless still allowed to run.

And it appears that in most places this is still the rule. It is not the job of the returning officer to consider whether the candidate is qualified or honest. The Electoral Commission which runs these matters in the UK produces a set of rules and requirements for returning officers. The commission does not have the gift of concise speech, but in one brief lurch into lucidity it summarises the duties of returning officers as:

• nominations
• the printing of the ballot papers
• the counting of votes cast in the election
• declaration of the result

Readers will have to take my word for it that in the lengthy section on nominations there is no provision for vetting or excluding candidates. On the contrary the “service expectations” explicitly urge returning officers to help and encourage candidates by, for example, allowing early “informal” submission of nominations so that any deficiencies can be remedied before the deadline.

This is so routine a matter that the similar guidelines issued in Edinburgh provide a summary as follows:

• setting up polling places
• providing staff to work at polling stations
• managing the postal voting process
• counting the votes
• declaring the results

With, you will notice, no mention of nominations at all.

I conclude that the law in England, and in Hong Kong at least until 1997, was that returning officers were not authorised and indeed not allowed to kick a candidate off the hustings for any reason. The right to vote was not to be curtailed by external restrictions on who electors could vote for, however ill-advised some choices might be. This is a very fundamental principle and I imagine judges will be reluctant to disturb it. Whether it has been overthrown by the various bits of Basic or Hong Kong Law now being cited by the government’s supporters is a matter for their Lordships. Do not, however, be deceived by suggestions that it is perfectly normal and natural for returning officers to vet the candidates. Not in our system it isn’t.

Hong Kong independence as an objective we all understand, love it or loath it. But Hong Kong Nationalism is tricky. This is because nationalism itself is an ambiguous concept.

A nation, in ordinary everyday speech, means a country with a flag, anthem, government, armed forces (except Costa Rica), UN seat, team in World Cup, and so on. There will be an adjective which denotes the citizens of that country, who will carry its passport when traveling abroad. We know where we are. In the interests of clarity this is sometimes called a “nation state”, thus implicitly recognising that you can have a nation without a state, or a state without a nation.

The other meaning of “nation” is a group of people united by a common language and culture. This is at once a tighter definition – more than mere administrative convenience is required – and a looser one, since it is a matter of whether the group we are talking about regards themselves as a distinctive community. It is a nuisance having two meanings for the same word, and those of us who grew up with the political definition may feel that this problem arises from the modern habit of allowing groups – especially allegedly oppressed groups – to choose their own labels. So if the Last of the Mohicans want to call themselves a “nation” then the rest of us have to lump it. But this is unfair, because it seems that the cultural meaning of “nation” came first. In fact the idea that a nation should coincide with a state is a fairly modern one. Some interpretations of English history maintain that the English advantage was the early date at which the country became, more or less, a nation state. Consider the famous speech in Shakespeare’s Richard II which (space being no problem on the internet) goes like this:

“This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,–
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.”

This was written in 1595 and could hardly have been written about any other country in Europe at the time. Most people, and not only in Europe, lived in what we would now regard as multi-national, or at least multi-ethnic, empires. Nor was this necessarily a problem. When Finland, for example, was transferred from Sweden to Russia in 1809 many Finns thought this was an improvement. When the Crimean War broke out in 1853 Finland produced hosts of eager volunteers to serve in the Tsar’s armies. Later history shows what can go wrong with this sort of arrangement. In the 1890s there were clumsy attempts to turn the Russian Empire into a nation state by insisting on the use of Russian law and language everywhere. This went down so badly in Finland that by the time the First World War broke out the population was considered too unreliable to be worth conscripting.

Nationalism in the modern sense was really invented in the 19th century and did not really get onto the map until the 20th. Ethnic groups who had happily coexisted in multi-ethnic empires suddenly discovered their differences. Languages which had hitherto been left to the local farmers sprouted dictionaries, literature and ancient history – some of it, like the works of Ossian, owing a great deal to the imagination. So Bohemia, which had for centuries been part of the Holy Roman Empire, became Czech, the Slovenians became South Slavs and so on. Generally this is not a happy story. People used to live in great mixtures. Different ethnic groups specialised in different pursuits – this is why the technical terms in music are all Italian and the technical terms in fencing are all in French. A great deal of movement, much of it compelled, was necessary to sort out the ethnic jigsaw. There have been, and continue to be, endless arguments about whether a group is a nation, and whether in that case they should or should not have a state of their own. Sometimes the answer to the first question is “yes” and the answer to the second is “no”. The Zulu nation, for example, preserves its traditional culture but is politically part of the South Africa. Canada’s “First nations” do not aspire to independent statehood. Neither, at least for now, do the Welsh.

Now, to Hong Kong. Mr C.Y. Leung observed the other day that Hong Kong had been “part of China since ancient times.” Like so much that emerges from that particular mouth, this is a bit deceptive. It is true that Hong Kong became part of an entity which also included what Joseph Needham calls “core China” for the first time in about 200 BC, which is ancient enough for my university, at least, where ancient run up to about 400 AD. On the other hand Mr Leung rather gave the misleading impression that Hong Kong had been part of China ever since ancient times, which is nonsense. Over the years there were whole centuries in which there was no China to be part of, and other centuries in which China was more or less in one piece but part of an empire presided over by a foreigner. Indeed the empire which was bullied in the 19th century was a Manchu empire. The people who did the bullying soon noticed that the local population had no interest in changing to a European or Japanese empire. They also noticed that the only people prepared to fight with any enthusiasm for the empire were Manchu bannermen.

The problem, and it is a China problem, not a Hong Kong problem, is that the ancient China which we all revere was a multi-ethnic empire like the Roman, Russian, French or British ones. This is a structure which has now become unfashionable. Also, since it is hardly compatible with Marxist ideology, the rulers of China since 1949 have had to pretend that China was a nation state in the way that other – much smaller – entities are nation states. In rather the same way the Russians, after the revolution, had to pretend that the USSR was a voluntary union and, later, that its satellites had eagerly signed up for the Warsaw Pact. Multi-ethnic empires do not depend on a uniform culture; they depend on force, but a reasonably effective one will be put up with if it is an honest referee. The problem with pretending that your empire is a nation state is that it leads to clumsy efforts to unify the culture: insistence on one language, one legal system, obedience to the capital’s way of doing things, and so on. And this gets people’s backs up.

Hong Kong has, I would have thought, a good claim to be a nation in the cultural sense. It has its own distinctive history, a language, a popular culture, a sense of itself as different from the rest of China. Clearly if “one country two systems” was given a liberal interpretation the question of nationhood in the political sense would not arise. Hong Kong’s independence movement is not an initiative, it is a reaction – to the constant drumbeat of insistence that we must now do everything their way – from simplified characters to secret police swoops. Those who do not learn from history are compelled to repeat it. The secret of survival for large empires is to let the provinces have their way in things which do not matter too much.

Nothing is more certain to come a cropper than a politician trying to seize the moral high ground. There we had the Chief Secretary, Ms Carrie Lam, attempting a bit of moral education for a group of local kids. Some people, she complained, had been “lying with their eyes open” to get into the Legislative Council.

Readers will I know be shocked – shocked! – at the notion that politicians might bend the truth in an effort to get elected. Whatever next? We may also find it difficult to believe that this has never happened before. But Ms Lam, who leads a sheltered existence in which getting elected does not feature, can perhaps be forgiven for taking an idealistic view of this matter.

However having taken such a puritanical line on this point Ms Lam should have expected that the rest of her speech would be examined closely by people looking for signs of pots calling kettles black. And indeed there were one or two items which strained credulity a bit. For example, Ms Lam gave the impression that the decision to veto the candidacy of some Legco election candidates was taken by the returning officers themselves. Now this gets us into a grey area. Ms Lam said, rather daringly, that only returning officers had the power to reject candidates. This was daring because in some views of the law nobody has the power to reject candidates. The implication was that the returning officers had made the decision without anyone jogging their elbows, as it were. The problem with this is that the returning officers are, after all, fairly junior members of the administration. I am sure nobody did anything so crass as to order them to reject candidates in certain categories, but that would not be necessary. The way these things are done is that the returning officer receives a polite gentlemanly (or possibly ladylike) memo drawing his attention to some important features of his powers and obligations with regard to candidates who may not be passionately in love with the basic law. No further communication would be required. Anyone bright enough to be in the Administrative Officer grade would effortlessly interpret it as indicating that in the Administration’s view there were enough lying Leungs in the corridors of power already.

However this is a rather complex constitutional point, which probably slid by the youthful audience. Another one has reverberated vigorously since. Ms Lam also said, and the veracity of the quote is not disputed, “Take Article 127 as an example. I do not agree with it.” This is the “balanced budget” article and Ms Lam went on to say, as any bright citizen might, that a government with $800 million in reserves should spend some of it. This was interpreted by some reporters as a veiled poke at the Financial Secretary, who would be her rival for the post of Chief Executive if both of them ran for it. Ms Lam then produced an exquisite explanation: “That ‘I’ is not myself as the Chief Secretary for Administration. I was saying if you challenge or disagree with the Basic Law you may think you may not agree. So the ‘I’ was actually another person.”

This is fascinating. It seems that when Ms Lam speaks there are two possible I’s present: the one who is Chief Secretary for Administration and the one who isn’t. This presents some difficulty in interpreting her comments on other matters. “Some people have been thinking that I am ambitious or I have the intention to run in the chief executive election… I want to tell these people that they are just wasting their efforts.” Not a very categorical denial anyway, but rendered even more tricky by the fact that Ms Lam has two I’s. Is the one with no ambition the Chief Secretary or the other one? If she turns up in the chief executive election after all, will we be told that the one who wanted to tell people they were wasting their efforts is not the ‘I’ who subsequently decided to give it a go? Life might be easier for all of us if Ms Lam stuck to the two-eyed double speak used by conventional politicians.

Which ever of Ms Lam’s I’s is speaking, though, it is clearly out of order in offering a legal defence of the actions of returning officers. This matter is the subject of a court case. It is “sub judice”, as the saying has it. It is intolerable that senior government officials should be filling the public sphere with their opinions on matters which the judge will have to decide. The Secretary for Justice, Mr Rimsky Yuen, should be telling the boys and girls to shut up. Starting, alas, with himself.

At last, we have a statement from the Secretary for Justice on the election manipulation machinery. Rimsky Yuen, for it is he, announced last week that the decision to ban a candidate who had signed the requested new declaration had “a legal basis”. A legal basis? Whisky Tango Foxtrot! There was a time, (and if Mr Yuen browses the files he will find a speech from Michael Thomas, a predecesssor, on this very topic) when the Rule of Law was believed to require that any official exercising a power purporting to be legal should identify the law on which he was depending. Mr Yuen is the senior Government law officer. If he can’t explain the “legal basis” on which some candidates fill in the form and are disqualified, while other candidates refuse and are not disqualified, then who can? We are left to wonder what law Mr Yuen and the returning officers acting on his advice might have in mind. Is it the Laws of Cricket, under which the umpire’s decision is final even if it is obviously wrong? Is it the Law of the Jungle, which says that nobody argues with an elephant? Or is it Doctorow’s law, which states (I am not making this up, unbelievers can click on the link) that “Anytime someone puts a lock on something you own, against your wishes, and doesn’t give you the key, they’re not doing it for your benefit.”

This sort of thing will not fly in a Judicial Review hearing, so I suppose Mr Yuen’s crew will have to come up eventually with some relevant extracts from the Basic Law and the Laws of Hong Kong. The absence of any indication what those extracts might be suggests the rather worrying possibility that they haven’t actually been identified yet. Indeed a nasty suspicious person might entertain the theory that Mr Yuen’s people expect to lose. Their highest ambition is to prolong the proceedings until the new Legco is already up and running, and then persuade the judge that it would not be in the public interest to repeat the election, even if some candidates were unlawfully excluded from it.

Still they will have to come up with something, and no doubt they will. I fear this is an example of what a historian of the German legal profession’s relations with the Nazis called the “terrible plasticity of legal reasoning”. If they work hard enough lawyers can justify surprising things, and this sometimes leads them astray, particularly if they are working for a government which is very keen to do something and just wishes to be told that the law allows it. Recent examples of opinions now regretted in retrospect include the lawyers who advised George W. Bush that torture would be legal if called “enhanced interrogation”, and the Attorney General who gave Tony Blair the green light for the invasion of Iraq. A local example would perhaps be the extraordinary intellectual agility which allowed the then Director of Public Prosecutions to convince himself that the public interest did not permit the prosecution of a newspaper proprietor, lest the criminal close her papers and throw honest printers out of work. No doubt this is a client problem as much as a lawyer problem. People do not like being told they can’t do what they want to do.

I feel sorry for the returning officers, though. After all when you sign up for a career in the civil service you expect your relations with the public to follow fairly predictable lines. Applicants fill in the form, pay the fee, supply the necessary documents, and get the service or permit requested. This is what happens when you want an ID card or a marriage licence. The man or woman behind the desk is not supposed to look you in the eye and assess your honesty. Any crook can start a company, license a car or apply for a pension. No doubt many of them have done so. The returning officers alone have to look at an applicant’s declaration and consider whether he or she really means it. This actually makes more sense in legal terms than it does in practical ones. Politicians are prone to saying different things to different audiences. They also often change their minds, like the rest of us. If I was running for the Legco elections I would be quite happy to promise not to talk about independence in Legco, not because I have nothing to say about the matter but because it is unlikely to come up.  Saying that someone is in favour of independence actually does not get us very far. This might mean a lot or might mean very little. In the light of the experience of the last few years, and particularly the last few months, the merits of independence if a way could be found of reaching it are beyond argument. In view of the impracticality of this, though, many people no doubt think the matter not worth discussing, regardless of the attractiveness of the dream. They are more likely to win the Mark Six than see a self-governing Hong Kong.

The interesting thing about the current problem with election candidates is that it illustrates very well why some people think independence worth striving for, however remote the possibility might be. How otherwise are we going to have a government which does not trample on our rights and freedoms at the behest of the Liaison Office?

This is by way of being an open letter to the surprisingly large group of people who will shortly be bidding for my two votes in the upcoming Legislative Council elections. Hello, whoever you are, because now we have official vetting of election lists I am not sure who you are yet. A brief word about this innovation. In English elections the Returning Officer is the senior official of the local government for the area. He is politically neutral by profession and habit because he has to work with whatever councillors the electorate saddles him with. He is not employed by the central government. In Hong Kong the Returning Officer is the local District Officer. He is not employed by the District Council. He is a fully paid-up member of the Administrative Officer grade, whose promotion prospects are subject to the whims of the Civil Service Branch and, for top jobs, the Liaison Office. Clearly such a person will not be trusted by the public to make an objective and impartial judgement on a matter about which his superiors have already announced a policy. Robustly independent spirits do not join the Hong Kong SAR Government these days, I fancy, and if they do the independence has been squashed before they become District Officers, or they never will.

Anyway, to business. My son recently visited the UK. Upon his return he started talking about the possibility of migrating permanently. This is not the sort of temporary infatuation which we all occasionally feel after a successful holiday. He studied in the UK for four years, in one of which he had a horrible accident which engendered a lasting affection for the National Health Service. He knows whereof he speaks. He has seen a south coast seaside resort in winter. There are few more depressing sights. So perhaps the idea is not unrealistic.

My heart says this is a terrible idea. We have been here before: the Loneliness of the Long-distance Parent. See you on Skype next week? Will you come home for the holidays if we pay for the ticket? My head asks: what can you tell a young man in his 20s that will attract him to stay in Hong Kong? And this is where you, if elected, come in. Because I am really struggling to think of a good reason why a young person who has inherited from me a versatile world-wide passport should bet his future on the prospects for Hong Kong. So I hope once you have had the necessary and inevitable argument about the new election mess — sorry, the new election method — you will get round to some policies which will allow parents who would like company in their old age to hold out a more or less rosy prospect to their offspring.

Let us start with housing. Everybody knows what is needed here. A lot more of it, especially at the lower end of the market where people are currently reduced to subdivided flats, illegal factory conversions, spaces under fly-overs or long meals in all-night fast-food palaces. C.Y. Leung has made a start on this, but as he is up to his ears in the relevant industry it has been a half-hearted one. Real progress will only be made by a government which is prepared to annoy developers by requiring them to get on with it instead of sitting on “land banks”, and putting a stop to the latest way of frustrating the government’s good intentions: the 100 per cent plus mortgage. Housing should be constructed in places where people wish to live, not in distant parts of the New Territories with no railway line where all the land (happy coincidence!) belongs to the Heung Yee Kuk. This means tackling the three organisations which have whole hectares going to waste in or near the urban area: the Hong Kong Golf Club, the Hong Kong Jockey Club and the PLA.

Next, wealth gap. Your approach to this question should not be delayed by attempts to achieve “consensus”. Any solution to the wealth gap must involve taking money from rich people and giving it to poor people. This is painful to rich people, who in general do not become rich unless they are very fond of money. The attitude of Hong Kong’s rich people was nicely summed up by the Chamber of Commerce which announced that it was against all the government’s offered options for old age pensions, because all of them implied increased taxation. Once you accept that it will be necessary to upset some people you can move forward on numerous paralyzed projects, including standard working hours, a higher minimum wage, abolition of the MPF offset, and provision of a decent universal pension.

Education. The danger here is of Hong Kong splitting into what in other contexts and places would be called “two nations”. One comprises those who live in private houses, send their kids to private schools, use private hospitals, travel in private (car) transport and relax in private clubs. The other nation lives in public housing or worse, depends on the public provision of schools and hospitals, travels on the MTR or bus and does not get a chance to relax because it is working 12 hours a day.  The gulf between them is wide, and distressing to those on both sides of it if they are sufficiently observant to see it at all.  Education is a good place to start trying to fix this because whatever your feelings about impoverished adults, children do not choose their parents and cannot be blamed for where they find themselves. So let us have a generously funded system, free up to graduation. There is no need to attack the private sector but the shortage of international school places is not caused by a surfeit of foreigners, it is caused by the reluctance of local people to put their kids through the government system if they can afford something better. So improve the government system.

At the university level there is a nettle which has been waiting for someone to grasp it for 20 years. Long ago a report pointed out, quite accurately, that Hong Kong did not need eight publicly funded research universities, and suggested two would be sufficient. Arthur Li then broke a good deal of crockery trying to ensure that Chinese U would be one of them. This nonsense has gone on long enough. Let there be the obvious three. Our other publicly funded universities can then be told to forget the league tables and concentrate on teaching properly. If you really want to see what a henhouse looks like when a fox arrives in it you could suggest that the three chosen ones should no longer teach undergraduates.

Appointments. I know I keep banging on about this but it is totally unacceptable that appointments to all the numerous bodies for which the government supplies names are made on a political basis. Quite apart from the obvious bias and neglect of potential talent, the government’s supporting crowd does not include enough able, intelligent and original people, if indeed it has any. An alternative is needed, which brings us to:

Autonomy. Someone has to get over to our rulers the point that people are not looking at independence because they do not like living in an SAR with a high degree of autonomy, the prospect held out by “one country two systems”. They are looking at independence because we are not living in an SAR with a high degree of autonomy at all. The alternative to independence, it appears, is a puppet government in which no value is too sacred to be mauled by the profane paws of the Liaison Office. The freedoms which we all value — to select our own lives and jobs, to think and speak our own thoughts, to travel, to choose — are usually protected by a democratic structure. It may be that they could as effectively be protected by a high degree of autonomy, even in a region ultimately subordinate to a Marxist dictatorship. But that will only work if there is a heroic level of self-restraint on behalf of the regime’s local office. Somehow our legislators have to get this point across because it will not, I fear, get much air time in the media.

So there it more or less is, vote-seekers. Candidate required who will try for cheap housing, generous social security, high quality free public education, a health service free at the point of delivery, a neutral way of choosing government chair-warmers and a high degree of genuine autonomy like it said on the tin before we opened it. All politics requires compromises so I realise I may have to settle for less than the full list. Comparing offers there are some things which will put me off, so do NOT say in your letter to me:

1. Hong Kong people do not understand the Basic Law. BS.
2. Hong Kong young people do not understand China. More BS
3. Independence is impractical. That’s exactly what they said about Ireland.
4. The “Belt and Road” are a golden opportunity.
5. Pearl River Delta ditto.
6. C.Y. Leung has done a good job of concentrating on livelihood issues.
7. Our policemen are wonderful; tear gas is good for the complexion.
8. You “like” Hong Kong, particularly its shopping and dining. I am not a tourist.

In 1593 Henry IV of France effectively ended the French Wars of Religion by becoming a Catholic. Historians are not sure that he actually said “Paris is well worth a Mass”.  But the quote embodies the general assumption that Henry, who had the best claim to the throne but was opposed by many aristocrats on religious grounds because he was a Protestant, did not change his official faith for theological reasons. However the conversion was not examined too closely and Henry had a successful reign until assassinated by a Catholic terrorist (Muslims are not the only people who take their religion too seriously) in 1610. His contemporary Elizabeth I of England, who also inherited a country divided by religion, soothed anxieties on this score by saying that she had “no desire to make windows into men’s souls”. Returning Officers in Hong Kong, it seems, are expected to be more ambitious.

The defining feature of the Leung administration is not its policies, which in some ways are better than those pursued by previous teams, but the casual way in which it demolishes and discredits pieces of what you might call the civic infrastructure. Institutions like the police and the ICAC are politicised and subverted, councils and consultative bodies are politicised and perverted, ordinary democratic habits are abandoned without notice or regret. Now we are losing the idea that an election is a public event conducted under clearly understood rules in which anyone who follows those rules can play. This started with the announcement, two days before the nomination period, that candidates would be required to sign a declaration indicating their support for three specific clauses of the Basic Law. This was announced in an unusual and interesting government press release. This went through the existing legal requirements for candidates: “has to declare in the nomination form that he/she will uphold the Basic law and pledge allegiance to the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region“, and successfully elected members of Legco: “members of the Legislative Council to swear to uphold the Basic Law when they assume office“. It goes on to say that “We take the view” that candidates who advocate independence may not be eligible for election and this could cause “uncertainties to the solemn Legislative Council election and confusion to electors“. It goes on to say that Returning Officers will ask candidates to sign a “confirmation form” expressing their support for the Basic Law in general and three clauses in particular.

The oddest thing about this effusion is the use of “we”. The HKSAR government does not usually refer to itself a “we”, an affectation generally reserved for newspaper editorial writers and the Queen. Usually we get “a spokesman” and for matters of this importance the spokesman usually has a name. Another oddity is that although “lawful” occurs a couple of times and the new wheeze is supposed to be “in strict accordance with the law” we are supplied with no details about this. Nor in the ensuing week have we heard from the Department of Justice, or indeed from much of anyone else. So who is the father of this bastard? We can, I think, exclude the Electoral Affairs Commissioner, Mr Barnabas Fung. Mr Fung has been floundering entertainingly when explaining the significance of the new measure. It is “administrative”. Candidates who refuse to sign may or may not be disqualified. The Returning Officer may if they do sign it seek “further information”. So it seems that you may be disqualified if you don’t sign and you may still be disqualified if you do. Or you may not. A fine mess for a retired judge to preside over. But this innovation is not Mr Fung’s style. We know this because even as the nomination matter was bubbling along he was asked about possible regulation of internet comments on candidates. His reply: “The EAC is open-minded on this but it is not up to the EAC to change the law.  Fung added that society should reach some broad consensus on the issue before the government may consider how to take it forward.”

Having aquitted Mr Fung, do we look further up the bureaucratic pyramid? One luckless official poked his head over the parapet last week to deny that the new measure was intended to exclude independence-seeking politicians from the election. Why he expected anyone to believe that he did not say. But later, in a rather under-reported speech,  Zhang Xiaoming, the head of the mainland’s Liaison Office in Hong Kong, let the cat out of the bag. Of course no disreputable candidates should be allowed to run in the election, he said, in case they won and used Legco to “demand independence”. And indeed this argument has been rather popular in the columns of the China Daily, our local English-language counterpart of the Global Times. Readers have been assured that politicians who are not happy with the government do not understand the Basic Law. The requirement that they should express allegiance to specific parts of it is desirable, and completely lawful according to mainland legal experts. Well a mainland legal expert is like a Swiss admiral. It’s rather easy to be an expert in mainland law because there isn’t any. I also note an outbreak of that hallmark of China apologia, ill-informed allegations that what is being proposed is in fact perfectly normal. We are told that no country allows people to advocate independence for particular parts of it. This is hogwash. People have been trying for years to separate Quebec from Canada, Catalonia from Spain, Wales from England, Brittany from France and so on. Where people enjoy freedom of speech they enjoy freedom to entertain the idea of independence. And vice versa.

There is no such thing in Common Law systems as a thought crime. In what passes for a legal system in China it is punishable to hold the wrong opinion. This is not the case in Hong Kong. Threatening people with prosecution for making false election statements if they fail to subscribe to the official interpretation of the Basic Law is clearly an attempt to intimidate. We all respect the Basic Law because it is the law. We are still free to see some parts of it as better than others. And since the law itself contains provisions for it to be changed we are implicitly allowed to discuss and advocate changes which we regard as an improvement. Independence would be a drastic change and is certainly not a practical objective in present circumstances. But people are allowed to think about it, talk about it and even campaign about it. Because that is what freedom of speech entails. One of two things will now happen. Someone will challenge the new election requirement. This need not involve any great matters of principle because it appears to be ultra vires. I do not believe the law authorises the government to order Returning Officers to inquire into the personal opinions of candidates. If the challenge succeeds, well and good. Some resignations would then be appropriate. If the challenge fails I can only hope you are reading these words in Canada.

Watching the Leung administration feels increasingly, if I may borrow a metaphor from Michael Lewis, like sitting in a small boat watching the Titanic steam inexorably towards an iceberg. Is there no principle they will defend from mainland interference? If we are going to vet candidates why stop at questionnaires and ferrets through the press cuttings? There is a rich history of witch-finding which may help. Matthew Hopkins, the Witchfinder General and subject of a gloriously bad horror movie, used a pin. Will we see anyone who utters the word “independence” in Legco grabbed by security and hustled out of the chamber, never to be seen again? 1984 was 30 years ago. Animal Farm is now.

When I was aged six it was decided, in accordance with the medical consensus at the time, that my tonsils served no useful purpose and should be removed. This is now regarded as a sort of scientific variation on Female Genital Mutilation, doing nothing for the patient’s health because the tonsils are in fact useful. Never mind. The gentleman who amputated my tonsils in accordance with the prevailing medical wisdom was called an “Ear, Nose and Throat specialist” and the place where he worked was called the Ear Nose and Throat Clinic. But you will not find such a specialist, or such a clinic, in Hong Kong, where the specialists in this area announce their field as “Otorinolaryngology”. Readers who suffered Latin at school will recognise this as being constructed from the Latin words for ear, nose and throat, capped with the word for an area of study. It seems the ear, nose and throat people feel naked unless their professional title is cloaked, like the naughty  bits of Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”, in the “decent obscurity of a learned language”.

No doubt the medical profession is aware of the placebo effect of a bit of mumbo-jumbo, the reassuring rustle of a white coat, the appearance of relaxed omniscience. What is the difference between God and a doctor, goes the old joke. God knows he isn’t a doctor, is the answer. This is all very well, and may even be therapeutic, but it causes problems when doctors as a group emerge in the political arena. Suddenly we have the Legislative Council’s medical representative engaged in a one-man obstruction campaign — no doubt known in the profession as a “filibusterus medicus” — to head off a government proposal to reform, or at least to change, the Medical Council. The council  regulates the profession by vetting qualifications and adjudicating on complaints. Suddenly it seems this profession, largely composed of Mercedes drivers judging by the contents of their reserved spaces in hospital carparks, is having sand kicked in its face by the government. In retaliation Legco is paralyzed. Two other bills (whose importance has no doubt been exaggerated, but still…) will die if legislators do not finish work on them before the summer break.

The government wishes, we are told, to add four lay members to the Medical Council. The council currently has 28 members, 24 of whom are doctors. The idea, or so we are told, is to deal with the public suspicion that the council takes a rather indulgent view of professional misconduct, and that when it does undertake disciplinary proceedings they proceed very slowly. The first point is propelled by a widespread belief that a doctor has very little to fear form the council unless he rapes a patient or sells her kidney to a mainland hospital. The second point was highlighted by a recent case which was decided nine years after the events complained of. This is a long time, even by the standards of the regular courts. The legendary Yacoub Kahn’s unlawful dismissal case took seven years, leading many people to suspect that the government’s lawyers were under instructions not to lose it before he reached retirement age, and consequently could not be reinstated. The quote invariably wheeled out at this point is “justice delayed is justice denied”, which is usually attributed to William Gladstone (19th century prime minister and inventor of the bag) but can be traced back to the 17th century. Well quite. Part of the Council’s disciplinary musings involves a Preliminary Investigation Committee which (I quote its website) “always includes a lay member”. All four of the existing lay members are available for this purpose but no doubt they are busy people. It may be that a larger pool of lay members would enable the committee to meet more often and get a move on. It is difficult to believe, though, that this is the only, or even a major, cause of the leisurely pace which characterises the council’s investigations.

Anyway there we have the case for the prosecution. The Council is dilatory, slow and biassed in favour of doctors. Reading the pamphlet it produces for the information of potential complainants I did detect a certain wistful hope that the number of complaints would be quite small. There is a section on “the nature of medicine”, which starts with the admission that “medicine is not an exact science” and goes on to say that errors of diagnosis or bad outcomes are not necessarily a sign of misconduct. There is a lengthy list of “categories of complaint we are unlikely to take forward” and a daunting section on what may be required of you if your complaint survives: evidence on oath, appearance at public hearing, cross-examination by counsel for the accused… Clearly doctors, like policemen, believe that their work involves special challenges which the lay person does not understand. I sympathise, though it is difficult to accept the council’s claim that it is regarded as anti-doctor by doctors.

The case for the defence is that after all medicine is difficult. With the best intentions and greatest care there will still be cases where the outcome is unfortunate, for which read tragic. A doctor doing his best and following the accepted tenets of the profession may still, say, excise a perfectly healthy set of tonsils. It would be unfair to jeopardise his ability to work in the profession because of a bit of bad luck. Only doctors understand what other doctors go through so it is appropriate and necessary for them to be the overwhelming majority of judges of professional conduct. Cases take a long time because they are complicated and adding lay members will not help.

All this hardly explains the passion which the government’s rather modest proposal has aroused. The problem seems to lie in a harmless-looking phrase, “appointed by the Chief Executive”. This phrase, and its predecessor “appointed by the Governor” used to denote a constitutional ritual. A specialised unit in the Home Affairs Branch kept a register of potential officeholders.  For many years I was regularly asked to update my entry in it, though the only invitation it ever produced was to the committee which vets personal number plates: fun but badly paid. Posts on councils, consultative bodies and such like were filled by the branch after nomination by an outside body, some consultation with the relevant department and maybe the chairman of the body concerned. They were not vetted for political propriety. However it is now widely believed that such appointments are used to reward the government’s supporters, which would be bad enough, and worse to pack the bodies concerned with people who can be depended on to support some government project or objective.

Nor is there an absence of evidence for this view. Come with me to the official list of members of the Legislative Council. This is confusingly presented in “order of precedence”, thereby making it very difficult to find any particular councillor. On the other hand it does mean the councillors are more or less in order of arrival, so that you can see how much legislative toil it takes before honour descends in the form of a Bauhinia Star (BS) of one colour or another or a Justiceship of the Peace. Justices of the Peace in the English system are lay judges who sit in court with a lawyer (the Clerk) to advise them. All they do in Hong Kong is polite inspections of prisons, so this is basically an adornment for your business card.  Looking down the precedence list you have Tsang Yok-sing, who is first becausse he is chairman; he has the BS  and JP. You then come to three very senior and undecorated democrats. Then you meet your first DAB man, who has everything, and next comes another democrat, again undecorated. Then there are two Laus: Wong-fat is lavishly decorated, while Emily is only a JP from pre-Handover times. Next comes a block of government supporters, all of whom have the full BJ except for the FTU’s Wong Kwok-hing, who for some reason is not a JP. Then we come to the undecorated Ronny Tong, and so it goes on. Of course this may not all be CY Leung’s fault. But if you look only at the members who joined the council in 2012 the message is the same. A total of 11 BS have been awarded. Not one to a democrat. The story with JPs is similar. The DAB has 18 per cent of councillors and gets a third of honours. Your work in Legco will only be recognised if it is work on the same side of the fence as the DAB. What used to be a civic honour has become a political reward. Appointments to other bodies may have more obviously toxic results. You have to wonder, for example, why the MTR was in such a tearing hurry to order fleets of trains from a Chinese manufacturer who is the rolling stock equivalent of the people who sold melamine-laced milk powder.  Then there are the university rows…

So what is bothering the doctors is the thought that the four lay people to be appointed by the Chief Executive will be chosen for their willingness to pursue some particular policy beloved of the CE. Recognising the qualifications of mainland doctors would be a hair-raising example. The Chief Secretary, Carrie Lam, will not have soothed these fears by suggesting the other day that the change to the council would help to solve the shortage of doctors in public hospitals. How does that work, one wonders?

Whatever you think of the doctors’ case, this controversy is a symptom of a wider problem. Appointments by the government used to be almost universal. And it was almost universally accepted that the major consideration in such appointments was the interests of the body or activity involved. No doubt some people were black-listed for a variety of reasons but the system was not used as a form of social welfare for grassroots supporters, or as a way of packing councils and consultative bodies with proponents of a particular point or policy. Times have changed. It is now widely accepted that appointments and honours are used to reward, to bribe, and to provide a well-grassed retirement pasture for the Boxers of our local Animal Farm. Whether things changed gradually or CY Leung is entirely to blame is not relevant. Trust, once dispelled, is not easily restored. On the whole we still rely on doctors to do the right thing by us. We cannot, alas, say the same of Mr Leung. His successor will have a lot to live down

The Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong, more conveniently known as the DAB, has a women’s wing. This is known as the Womens Affairs Committee. For most of the year it labours unseen and those of us who are not DAB members, or not women, are undisturbed by its activities, whatever they may be. Do the DAB ladies do the usual Women’s Institute stuff – knitting patterns, recipes, flower arranging?  Do they have guest speakers, film shows, study tours? Do they laboriously pen earnest analyses of policy issues affecting women, to be passed to – and ignored by – their male party comrades? Alas we do not know. The WAC emerges once a year to give a press conference, presided over by its chairwoman, Elizabeth Quat. To the best of my recollection this has been going on for at least five years. The press conference is always about the same topic. The WAC objects to various architectural quirks, usually involving the use of glass as a barrier, which allow observant males to look up the skirts of ladies and, if so minded, to photograph what they see there.

This annual festival is open to a number of objections, and indeed they have been made over the years. Mr Alex Lo is not the first person to point out, as he did in a recent column, that if you are opposed to upskirt peeping and picturing then it is not terribly logical to publish an annual list of the best places to do it. The publication of the annual list continues; Hysan Place’s food court is apparently the current hot spot. It also appears to some women of my acquaintance that there are perhaps more pressing issues to which the DAB ladies could devote their annual 15 minutes of fame, like the virtual slavery of some domestic helpers, the plight of sex workers, the shortage of help and facilities for working mothers, or the glass ceiling which results in Hong Kong’s business leadership being overwhelmingly male. This point has also been made before, in vain. This year there was a small innovation. Miss Quat announced the discovery that as well as places where careless architects had provided opportunities for upskirt photography, there were also places where similar carelessness allowed vertical views more or less downwards. As ladies leaned forward to eat this meant that lubricious male eyes – or presumably, though Ms Quat did not make this point, lubricious Lesbian ones – could behold … well they could behold as much of a scantily dressed bosom as you can see on any public beach.

Clearly it is not what is seen or photographed that is the problem, but the possibility that someone is getting illicit pleasure out of it. Ms Quat conceded that the number of cases recorded by the police was dropping. There were 274 last year. But she said this was only the tip of an iceberg, because most victims did not realise they had been snapped. But if the victim of the fell deed is not aware that it has taken place, where is the harm, one wonders? There are of course good public order reasons for discouraging men from hovering round glass escalators in the hope of taking pictures of underwear, but the possible harm to the victim is not one of them. A personal note here: I am an enthusiastic and regular dancer in the Scottish Country tradition. Mostly we dance in private but occasionally we do public demonstrations. After one of these I discovered an interesting snippet in the video recorded by a member of the audience. I dance, of course, in a kilt, which if you are not Scottish is difficult to distinguish from a skirt. There is a move called a “polite turn” which is basically a twirl on the spot. I noticed that when done quickly this twirl results in the kilt flying up in the air and providing an instant answer to that perennial question: what do you wear under the kilt? The answer in my case is underwear. So I can testify from personal experience that having your knickers snapped has no deleterious effects at all. There is no trauma, no danger of pregnancy or sexually transmitted disease. In fact it appears from the few cases which are actually reported in the newspapers that in the vast majority of indecent photography cases the offence is spotted by a by-stander, not by the star of the picture.

Ms Quat’s annual smutfest does not bring out the best in Hong Kong newspapers. The Standard’s story, written with admirable straight face by a female reporter, was headlined “Perv alert: upskirt black spots”. The SCMP went for “Peeping Tom alert”, which is not much of an improvement. Unconventional sexual tastes are known as paraphilias, and an urge to look at or picture the underwear of unaware ladies is one of them. It used to be thought that there was a list, which would eventually succumb to the usual scientific approach: they all got Latin names, then symptoms would be enumerated, causes discovered and eventually, perhaps, a cure. The arrival of the internet has enormously expanded the list, to the point where this enterprise has more or less been abandoned. The relevant Wikipedia entry quotes an authority as saying that “Like allergies, sexual arousal may occur from anything under the sun, including the sun.” It is at least agreed, though, that these things are not chosen by the person concerned, and also that they cannot be changed by any currently known medical intervention. The help which is offered is concerned with helping the patient to lead a normal life and avoid manifestations of his taste which will lead to trouble with the law. Clearly there is a lot of luck, good and bad, involved here. For some people their kink is merely another float in life’s rich pageant; they enjoy conventional sex as well, they can take or leave a bit of extra interest on the side. Others may have desires which are difficult to fulfill, despite the large industry now catering for what the relevant producers calls “fetishes”. And some would be highly objectionable and illegal if acted out, notably pedophilia but also rape, cannibalism and so on.

A society which has managed to achieve a level of tolerance for homosexuals should be able to manage a similar level of sympathy for other people who did not get the conventional kit when sexual preferences were being handed out. Indeed to be fair, the media (at least in English) were admirably restrained in their reporting of a recent case involving a man who was caught in an advanced state of public sexual excitement over a pair of ladies’ shoes. A person who feels drawn to photographing ladies underwear is a problem. He is also a person with a problem. Jovial headlines about peepers and pervs are not helpful. An annual tirade against glass escalators is also not constructive. Do these people get the help they need?

I do not generally write about British matters here. I have spent the last half of my life in Hong Kong so I don’t really feel qualified. However for the last week anyone who even looks like a Brit has been subjected to a barrage of questions. So here, in case you are wondering, are my answers.

Do you feel British or English? English. British is a passport. On the whole I agree with the old Flanders and Swann song (which can be found in full here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdY1Y5XNJBY) that “The English are moral, the English are good, and clever and modest and misunderstood.”

What do you think of Brexit? It’s a catastrophe. People seem to have forgotten what the first half of the 20th century was like. The primary purpose of the EU is not to make people richer, it is to provide Europe with an international system which does not include regular punch-ups. The alternative is World War Three.

Whose fault is it? My generation, I fear. I notice that support for exit was overwhelmingly concentrated among older voters. Most young people are appalled by the result. So my lot provided most of the Brexit votes. Nor does it stop there. The people who had the pleasure of licking Hitler are now known as the Great Generation. We who came next were the Lucky Generation. We caught the first full flowering of the Welfare State, before it was diluted by the rich people’s backlash and before our elders had forgotten what things were like before. We flourished on National Health orange juice and free milk at school. Cheap school dinners (which would now I suppose be called school lunches) were designed by nutritionists and there was no nonsense about choosing chips with everything. We all grew up much bigger than our parents. Education was free as long as you kept passing the exams and people who had no previous family connection with university could and did reach the third year of a PhD without paying a cent in fees. We came of age in the 60s, which was a fun time to be young. The 70s and 80s were a rough time if you were a miner or factory worker, but the bright and well-organised could continue to fulfill Harold Macmillan’s tactless observation that “many of our people have never had it so good.”

And the result of this was that most of us took very little interest in politics. This left the field clear for ambitious creeps who had never done anything else. I suspect Nigel Farage was taking a wild guess when he accused members of the European parliament of never having had a real job, but he could have said the same thing with complete confidence of the UK parliament. A political career now starts in your 20s with work in a party research department, think tank or NGO. As a result for many politicians the idea of actually doing something useful with the power that comes their way comes second to winning. Standards of conduct have declined, though not perhaps as much as they have declined here. The Brexit campaign was the apotheosis of this approach. Not 24 hours after the result was announced the leaders of the campaign were withdrawing the promises which they had dangled before a gullible electorate. I recommend a stunning piece of writing in the Guardian which you can find here: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/25/boris-johnson-michael-gove-eu-liars.

If you can’t be bothered to read the whole thing, consider at least this wonderful quote from Kipling:

I could not dig; I dared not rob:
Therefore I lied to please the mob.
Now all my lies are proved untrue
And I must face the men I slew.
What tale shall serve me here among
Mine angry and defrauded young?

So my old home is a mess. Looking at the list of places which voted strongly for Brexit I see many familiar names from my time as a journalist reporting industrial decline: places where old ways no longer worked and an indifferent central government had made no serious effort to put anything in their place. Communities have been wrecked. Bitterness is understandable.

Still, some perspective, please. This may be a demonstration of the things that can go wrong in a democracy, but my old home still avoids the things which can go wrong under other systems. The UK does not have a mysterious secret police force that can keep you in solitary confinement for eight months. It does not jail refugees for two years for collecting and selling empty tin cans. No lawyer or politician of any stripe has called for Scottish nationalists to be prosecuted for treason. There are real elections with dramatic consequences, as I suspect we shall shortly see. But not in Hong Kong.