tim's experiment

Another small magazine dies. Cue the usual mourning. I liked HK Magazine as a good read, and also as a place which kindly accommodated generations of journalism students as interns. Survivors in the media business have been a little unsure as to which of the usual stories this might be. Is it “China-linked conglomerate buys up independent voice and stifles it”? Heard that one often enough. Is it “devious SCM Post buys and closes a rival to its own boring lifestyle-and-listings efforts, which do not feature any edgy real news stuff”? Is it “Megabucks Corp buys spunky little outfit and clumsily hugs it to death”? Or is it just the trend of the times: the twilight of the Print Gods?

There is probably something in all these explanations. When it was independent HK Magazine certainly ran the sort of stories which would not have gone down well as part of the Alibaba Empire. I am sure there are some people in the Liaison Office who devoutly wish the SCM Post was the only English-media game in town, and encourage any move in that direction. But we do not need a conspiracy theory to explain this death. It is a commonplace of journalistic life that working for Megabucks Corp is lucrative but working for Precarious Underdog Limited is more fun. As a result the attitudes of the staff are rather different. Reporters for Precarious work crazy hours, will walk through fire to get a story and often forget their expenses. Reporters for Megabucks are not crusaders, they are staff. In the days when the SCM Post was the most lucrative newspaper in the world and the Standard was the number two who tried harder it was a commonplace observation that moving from the Standard to the Post would double your salary. In fact moving almost anywhere from the Standard would double your salary. But the Standard was a meaningful and fun place to work; those who departed often wept at their own leaving parties. The Post did not inspire that sort of feeling.

It is also my experience that Megabucks Corp usually insists on a level of overhead at the freshly-landed Precarious which means that closure is only a matter of time. At Precarious we have a few journalists and one non-journalist who fills the roles of the secretary, accountant, human resources person and general dogsbody. The office is a squalid hole in Western. This will not do for Megabucks, which expects people to specialise. It also expects them to have nice offices, which are not found in Precarious journalism. I remember visiting Asiaweek soon after it was taken over by an American company. The offices were stunning. Very elegant and luxurious. I did not think a small magazine could survive on this basis, and nor did it. I knew HK Business was for the high jump when they introduced me to the office wine-cooler.

This brings us to the twilight theory, and of course there is something in this as well. Whatever your job is these days, the microchip is coming to get you. My first job in journalism was on a newspaper which was still printed by a beautiful piece of machinery which, in its youth, was probably powered by steam. It could only print four pages at a time (two each side of a sheet) so a large crowd of ladies would come in on Tuesday evenings and spend the night folding and collating the paper ready for distribution the next morning. After a few months the management decided to switch to computerised type-setting and a new press which would spit out our 30,000 circulation in a few screaming minutes. Because the print unions were a power in the land in those days the only people actually made redundant by this change were the Tuesday-night ladies’ team. And having survived it I was an easily recruitable candidate for people contemplating the same switch.  I moved often as a sort of roving ambassador for computerised type-setting and web-offset lithography (which is what modern printing is called). Once the unions had been emasculated this became a programme for massive cuts in newspaper production staff. We were always promised that the new technology would bring more editions, later deadlines, more exciting reporting opportunities. And what it brought was massive economies for the proprietors. The qualitative improvements somehow never materialised. This was a tragedy for the men (ladies were not admitted) who had type-set, composed and proof-read newspapers. They had followed the good advice offered to young working class men: learn a trade, lad. The apprenticeship for journalists was three years – two if you had a degree. The apprenticeship for printers was seven years. And this painfully acquired skill became worthless when any teenager could do the same thing on an Apple Macintosh.

The painful collision with the microchip has now reached the journalists. The print model is on its last legs. The on-line model clearly does not need the same large number of people. Just as the 50 people who used to produce the Morecambe Visitor have now been reduced to half a dozen who run the press, so the 50-odd people contributing to a substantial newspaper will, when it goes on-line and drops the print edition, rapidly shrink. This will be resisted vigorously by everyone concerned, but will be enforced eventually by a drastic reduction in income. In this situation the advantages of new news web-sites are elementary. They can take on staff until they have enough, and then stop. Enough is likely to be a quite small number. Unlike their print predecessors, websites do not need to provide visitors with an hour of entertainment to keep them awake on the commute to or from work. This function is now performed by the mobile phone. The dirty secret about news is that there isn’t actually that much of it. The few readers who care about foreign news can read it on foreign websites. The local stuff is sporadic. The BBC is said on one occasion in the 1930s to have opened its evening news bulletin with “There is no news tonight so I am going to play a record.” This was commendably honest but was not repeated.

The curious thing about the decline in demand for editorial personpower is that it has coincided with a huge leap in the number of journalism teaching programmes in Hong Kong. In the days when I used to go to journalism conferences in Australia I often asked how universities could justify producing 2-300 journalism graduates in provincial capitals where the number of vacancies available for would-be journalists averaged about 12 a year. This disparity was a source of continuing embarrassment and led one gentleman at the University of Queensland to suggest that they should drop the idea of a journalism degree as a professional preparation, and treat it as a general education in current affairs and crisp writing. I could complain about these things because at that time Hong Kong had no such imbalance. This was partly because local employers had a business model heavily dependent on fresh graduates, who would be disposed of and replaced when they looked like becoming expensive. Consequently turn-over was brisk. But it was also because there were not that many people offering courses in the area. Shue Yan College, as it then was, turned out large number of diploma holders who filled vacancies in the parsimonious press. Baptist College, as it then was, catered for a more up-market sector. Chinese U aimed for the upper crust. And that was it. Nowadays Shue Yan and Baptist are both universities, and other people have joined in. Hong Kong U recruits geeks, Chu Hai College is handy for rural residents, Hang Seng Management College specialises in business, and all the Associate Degree merchants have an offering in the area. Everyone with University on their nameplate also flogs master’s programmes to mainlanders. I do not know where all the graduates of these programmes are going to work but it will assuredly not be in journalism.

The distressing thing about this plethora is that the ideas being perpetrated in all these courses are wrong. The conventional wisdom among journalism academics is that journalists are like mediaeval priests: they do not have to appeal to an audience because punters will be propelled into the pews by the fear of eternal damnation. Consuming media is a moral obligation and the content should accordingly be serious, informative and uplifting. This theory has now collided painfully with the technology which tells the owners of websites exactly how many people are reading any item at any time. I recognize that this piece would do much better on social media if it was a good cat video. This does not mean serious journalism is a waste of time. But we all need to think again about what people are looking for in media, and how we can combine that usefully with things which people are not looking for, but perhaps ought to know.

Nice of Apple Daily to publish in full the letter it received from C.Y.Leung’s lawyers. Very interesting reading. If you have just come in, what is going on here is that Apple Daily, a racy Hong Kong tabloid with pro-democracy inclinations, published an editorial urging newly elected legislators to investigate a deal under which Mr Leung was paid a large sum of money by an Australian company called UGL. One of the reasons why this was a good idea, the newspaper thought, was because it might avoid the prospect, which many Hong Kong people find appalling, of Mr Leung running for another term in his present post.

As it happens I am something of a connoisseur of threatening letters from lawyers. Many years ago, when I was running an investigative team for the Hong Kong Standard, it was decided that I should deal with all legal matters which came up, on the (as it turned out) pessimistic assumption that our investigative work would be responsible for most of them. There are several peculiar features to Mr Leung’s lawyers’ letter.

The first one is that it comes from Messrs Sit, Fung, Kwok and Shum. I presume they are a respectable firm, though not perhaps very experienced in this line of work. But Mr Leung does not need to resort to private lawyers, respectable or otherwise. Senior government officials who wish to sue for libel have to ask for permission (which in the case of Mr Leung I suppose he can give himself) and having obtained permission get the free services of the Department of Justice. Well we know Mr Leung is not short of a bob or two. But one does wonder why this particular chore was outsourced. Was the DoJ consulted, and discouraging?

The second unusual feature of the letter is that it runs to seven pages. The law of libel is very clear on one point. It is not up to the person defamed to prove that the article complained of is wrong. If the article damages someone’s reputation then it is up to the author/publisher to prove that it was justified (which means true in lawyerspeak), or an expression of opinion protected by freedom of speech. Consequently letters complaining of defamation are commonly quite short. They identify the item complained of, point out that it is defamatory, and ask for a correction, apology, and money according to taste. Now observe the letter re Leung, which masochists can find here: https://www.hongkongfp.com/2016/09/30/legal-letter-full-hk-chief-exec-cy-leung-threatens-sue-apple-daily/

Normally I would expect the writer, having identified the item complained of and the meaning to which he objects, which is taken care of by the bottom of page 1, to proceed directly to the paragraph at the bottom of page 6, which begins “Mr Leung requires you to take the following steps immediately …” Instead we get four pages of argument, buttressed by quotes from newspapers and Carrie Lam, apparently intended to convince the reader of Mr Leung’s transcendent innocence. Admittedly quite a lot of space is accounted for by the need to provide translations of some things, but even so this generosity is puzzling. Mr Leung, as I pointed out above, does not have to prove his innocence. The law assumes that. And printing this much material brings other hazards.

It is, for example, far from surprising that the whole letter is now in the public domain. In the old print days a long letter might have been a deterrent to reproduction, because it would have taken space. But on the internet space is free. Moreover having instructed lawyers to send it on his behalf Mr Leung can hardly complain if the recipient shows it to other people. Unfortunately the way the general public look at these things is often not the way lawyers look at them. Mr Leung’s lawyers may feel they have established his innocence beyond any possible doubt. The lay person may wonder how so much smoke could be generated without a fire somewhere. He may recall Hamlet (“Methinks the lady doth protest too much”) or Mandy Rice Davis (“He would say that, wouldn’t he?”). Even if the layman comes to the undisputably correct conclusion that in the matter of corruption Mr Leung is as pure as the driven snow, his reading may leave him with misgivings about other aspects of Mr Leung’s ethics.

Consider the explanation quoted from Ms Carrie Lam. Ms Lam says that when Mr Leung resigned from the company (then called DTZ) in 2011 there was a “resignation agreement”. The gist of this was that UGL – whkich was buying DTZ – would pay Mr Leung large sums over two years in return for which Mr Leung “would not move to a competitor, set up or promote any business in competition with DTZ, or poach any people from DTZ.” and Ms Lam goes on to say that this was “standard business practice”. Really? You sell someone a business, and then you expect them to pay you extra for a promise not to compete or poach their staff? Well this may be perfectly legal. But is it nice?

Then there is the question of the timing. “Both Mr Leung’s resignation from DTZ and conclusion of the agreement with UGL took place before he was elected as the CE, and at the material time, he had already resigned from Exco,” says Ms Lam. So the full story, it seems, goes like this. Mr Leung resigns from Exco because he wants to run for CE. He then resigns from DTZ. He then extracts a large sum of money from the buyers of DTZ in return for a promise that he will not compete with them. And while this extraction is taking place he is doing his best to get a well-paid full-time job as CE, which will effectively preclude both competition and staff poaching. Did Mr Leung mention, while he was negotiating his resignation agreement, that he was contemplating a full-time career in public administration? Well we can perhaps allow some latitude at that stage. After all the result of the election was not certain. If Henry Tang’s basement had not surfaced I suppose Mr Leung might have had to go back to surveying for a living. But having been elected he was still receiving payments from the resignation deal, even though he was at this stage clearly in no position to either compete or poach. Does this count as honest in business circles?

Then we come to the question of declaring an interest. Ms Lam’s take on this is that “Mr Leung has not provided any service to UGL since signing the resignation agreement.” Ms Lam did not say in so many words that Mr Leung had declared, or not declared an interest, but apparently intended her listeners to infer from the fact that Mr Leung had not performed any service that there was no interest to declare. But this clearly will not do. As the Prevention of Bribery Ordinance makes clear, one may be paid to do something or one may be paid not to do something. It appears that during the first two years of his term Mr Leung was receiving money in consideration of his not competing with UGL or poaching its staff. I do not think anyone would suppose there was any serious danger of this affecting the discharge of his duties. But it was clearly an interest and if the rules really did not require its disclosure then the rules should be changed. In the meantime one must have doubts about Mr Leung’s judgement in the matter. If he had explained the whole thing years ago, before it became journalism fodder, it would have saved us all a lot of trouble.

Finally Mr Leung’s lawyers complain that the intention of the article complained of is to deprive him of “his fundamental right … to stand for the 2017 CE election”. This is an unfortunate inspiration. Mr Leung’s administration does not appear to believe in a fundamental right to stand for election, at least if you have views it disagrees with. Also this is based on a misunderstanding. The election is not an election. It is fixed. Consequently nothing that Apple Daily says about Mr Leung can affect his chances, which appear to be quite good, even though three quarters of the population spit at the mention of his name.

The hot issue of the day is the growing row over a housing project in Wang Chau, which is near Yuen Long in the north western New Territories. We need not go into this in great detail. Indeed anything I say about it will probably be out of date in a matter of days if not hours. But the story goes more or less like this. The government proposed to build a large public housing estate in Wang Chau, on a piece of land it already owns. Before proceeding with this there was a meeting of some kind with village heads, landowners and gangsters (three categories which overlap considerably in this corner of Hong Kong) and the plan was then changed to a small housing estate on a different piece of land which is currently occupied by three villages. Much suspicion, not to say ire, has been aroused by the discovery that one of the assembled heads, landowners and gangsters was illegally occupying a large section of the proposed housing site, on which he was running a lucrative business.

The government account of the crucial meeting is that it was engaged in “soft lobbying” in advance of the project, whose final shape had not been decided. And what, we may well wonder, is soft lobbying? Happily there is an answer available through Google, but it is not a very helpful one in this context. Lobbying we all understand. The word derives from the lobby of the House of Commons, which is the place where Members of Parliament meet visitors who are not members. Hence lobbying is the activity in which non-members try to persuade members to pass or not to pass legislation according to the non-members’ desire or interest. People who lobby are called lobbyists (as well as ruder things) and there are plenty of them. So far so simple – a lobbyist is one who seeks to persuade a legislator to use his power in a way pleasing to the lobbyist or his employer. “Soft lobbying”, at least in the US, apparently refers to an alternative procedure whereby the lobbyist supports and encourages a non-government organisation to exert pressure on his behalf. Lobbyit.com gives the example of a campaign to require food manufacturers to divulge the amount of corn syrup in their products. This was waged by a voluntary organisation called Citizens for Health. But the healthy citizens were heavily subsidised and much encouraged by the sugar industry, which regards corn syrup as a major threat to its prospects.

Clearly this can hardly be what the government spokesman intended when using “soft lobbying” to describe a group of officials trekking off to distant corners of the NT to persuade local bigwigs of the merits of a housing project. I suppose he was looking for a plausible alternative to “public consultation”, which would not do in this case because the public consulted consisted only of the aforementioned village heads, landowners and gangsters. Still the use of “lobbying” in this context is curious. Usually it means people without power, at least without legislative power, beseeching those with power to exercise it in a helpful way. Using it in this context seems to imply that any rural bigwig who is in illegal occupation of a large piece of government land must be cajoled and persuaded into giving it up by an otherwise helpless administration. And if he refuses they have to think of something else.

This is a rather timid posture for our government, and indeed a marked contrast with its attitude to unlawful activities in other contexts. If you unlawfully enter the space in front of the Legco building which was originally designed as a public open space, you may be prosecuted. If you demonstrate peacefully in the road you may be tear-gassed. If you throw rocks at policemen in Mong Kok they are allowed to throw them back. These phenomena demonstrate the government’s firm commitment to the rule of law. So what is demonstrated by allowing rural grandees to occupy government land for years, and then politely asking if they would please, if it’s not too much trouble, give it up for public purposes? And then taking “no” for an answer?

If I may make a practical suggestion, officials need to consider that where there is “soft lobbying” there should also be “hard lobbying”, and if the soft version fails it is their duty to move on to the more serious stuff. What would hard lobbying look like? Well, faced with an obdurate squatter on government land we could start by pointing out the legal ease with which we can not only throw him off it but also require payment of several years of unpaid rent. If that fails we could further point out to the recalcitrant individual that while the incidence of government inspections is random there are occasional coincidences, and he may find in the coming week that the Buildings Ordinance Office wishes to check his house for illegal alterations, the Food and Hygiene people would like a look at his kitchen, the Transport Department wishes to make sure his car has not been tweaked and the Agriculture and Fisheries Department wants to see his dog licence. And if that fails we can point out that in view of the complete frustration of government efforts to use land in the NT there will be an immediate comprehensive review of the law and regulations on the matter, and pending the results of this the Small House Policy will be suspended with immediate effect. His role in bringing this about will be emphasised.

This might solve the practical problem. It still leaves the question what they are going to put in future dictionaries. Presumably the American meaning will come first. Then will come “2: (in Hong Kong only) politely persuading criminals not to oppose government housing projects.”

Many years ago I read a science fiction story which for some reason stuck in my head. This did not happen often with science fiction stories and I have read very few of them for a long time. The story concerns an old man, running a small farm by himself, and painfully lonely since the death of his beloved wife. One day a small spaceship crashes on his plot. In it he finds a small furry alien creature. He takes it home, binds up its wounds, experiments until he finds something it will eat, and nurses it back to health. The alien then mimes an interest in the space craft, and he brings the wreckage in from an outhouse. The alien settles down to repairs, and eventually gets stuck. A particular material is needed. After many offerings it turns out to be gold. The old fellow, with some misgivings, digs out his life savings and melts them down. The repairs are a success. The alien prepares to leave. As a parting gift it gives the old man a small odd-shaped piece of metal. The effect of this is strange. When he holds it in his hand he no longer feels the aching loneliness to which he was used before his furry friend arrived. He feels instead a warm and companionable happiness. In the last paragraph the author, who has previously described everything from the point of view of the man, suddenly gets inside the alien’s head and produces a quote which (from memory) goes something like this: “It would be lonely in the wastes of inter-stellar space without the Comforter. But the earthling had been very kind, and those who travel far must travel light. There had been nothing else to give.”

Now when this story was written, which I suppose was in the 60s, the idea of the small odd-shaped piece of metal which you held in your hand to stave off loneliness was as outlandish as the spaceship. Nowadays I am not so sure. When you travel on public transport these days it seems that nine tenths of your fellow passengers are clutching a piece of metal. It is called a mobile phone, but this is a misleading convention because most of them are clearly not making phone calls. Nor do I believe that many of them are fielding peremptory emails from some distant boss. They play games, read messages, look at Facebook, or engage in other on-line pursuits, to avoid being left alone with themselves. Or so the current theory goes.

A recent book commented on the fact, not perhaps an original thought, that people currently in their middle age or later are a unique generation. They are part of the wired world, but they can remember what it was like before. “Digital natives” who got their first iPad before they could read have everything – except the memory of how people managed when a phone was just a piece of black plastic tethered to the wall over which you could have short conversations. There are certainly young people about who make no bones of the fact that they feel extremely uncomfortable, even depressed, if not connected. I am not convinced by the theory that this is rewiring brains, so that the victims are no longer capable of undertaking long demanding tasks which require concentrati0n. After all people still get degrees, still master difficult skills like playing an instrument really well, still read War and Peace – an achievement which has eluded me. I get fed up with that Russian arrangement under which everyone has three names and give up.

On behalf of us pre-digitals I must also admit that though I rarely look at my mobile phone when travelling, I do not sit there staring at the wall either. I either provide a treat for nostalgic fellow-travellers by reading a book, or baffle most of them by playing an electric bagpipe. This is not as anti-social as it sounds because it has earphones. I do not feel as if my brain has been rewired by looking at Youtube, and I never could finish Russian novels, which seems to be the accomplishment most in danger, according to writers like Nicholas Carr (“The Shallows”) or Neil Swidey (“The end of alone”). I also note that phone addiction is much less conspicuous in London, because the local counterpart of the MTR does not have Wi-Fi, and travellers do not look any less happy than they do in Hong Kong, where everyone has his own small screen.

Still some caution is in order. Steven Pinker, in his book The Better Angels of our Nature, suggests that the invention of printing changed human nature radically, and in particular the reading of novels led to a great increase in the willingness and ability to consider and sympathize with the feelings of other people. This is a major historic switch and suggests that we may be playing with fire here. If reading Moll Flanders could awake your inner angel, what is Facebook doing for you?

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.