tim's experiment

I would normally be disposed to deal gently with Mr Tung Chee-hwa, who has reached a venerable age and long since left the centre of the local political stage. But Mr Tung wants to continue to be a player, and in that case he must expect to be tackled occasionally. This brings us to a recent speech in which Mr Tung opined that the job of the Chief Executive was impossible because he did not have a dependable majority in Legco. The implication of this, eagerly picked up by the regime’s local running dogs, is that there should be a ruling party, of which the CE is a member. Or, in a less dramatic version of the same prescription, the Liberal Party should be persuaded to join the ranks of dependable lobby fodder currently filled by the DAB and its trade union alter ego.

The unkind thought which springs to mind at this point is that Mr Tung’s view of the matter may be explained by his personal history. If you have made a frog’s breakfast of a job it is a comforting thought that the job was impossible in the first place so nobody could have done any better. The kinder thought is that Mr Tung has misunderstood the whole purpose and tenor of the Basic Law. Clearly having a leader with a following in the legislature works, more or less, in countries where the ruling party is periodically dumped on the pavement and replaced with the former opposition. But it was never intended that Hong Kong should have a system of this kind. A permanent ruling party, on the other hand, is a recipe for corruption, stagnation and autocracy.  We do not need a local version of Robert Mugabe. The Basic Law involves an attempt at an intermediate model, in which there is no ruling party, but the government is subjected to checks and balances. That is to say it is subordinate to the law and courts, and it depends for its finances on a legislature whose composition it does not control.

The closest analogy, perhaps, is with the US system, where the president depends for money and legislation on a Congress in which his party may not, and often does not, enjoy control. The government has to build coalitions to support its requirements. A majority for one proposal may not be the same people as the majority assembled for another proposal. This is hard work but it meets the requirement dear to the framers of the US constitution, which was to ensure that power was divided and diffused, so that tyranny would be prevented.

Returning to Hong Kong, perhaps it was a pity that Mr Tung was put on Exco for the term of the last governor. This suggested to observant citizens that the first election of a Chief Executive for the SAR was fixed, and known to be fixed by both governments years before it took place. Also it exposed Mr Tung to the way colonial Hong Kong worked, and gave the misleading impression that this was the way it would continue to work after the handover. In the colonial arrangement most legislators – indeed for many years all legislators – owed their positions to appointment and felt a corresponding duty to support the Governor who had appointed them. This did not entirely stifle dissent. There was an Office of Unofficial Members of the Executive and Legislative Councils (Umelco for short) in which the appointees mixed and mingled, so that a lot of issues were discussed informally. The actual Legco proceedings were a public ritual. Serious discussions took place in private.

The framers of the Basic Law tried very hard to ensure that the government would have a tame majority but clearly in a system in which all members were produced by some sort of election this could not be guaranteed. This, however, has not stopped SAR governments from taking Legco for granted, and supposing that whatever they wanted to do would sail through eventually.

The problem which Mr Tung has overlooked is that the governments produced by this system made bad choices. The visceral impression that the system was not working for most people was eventually substantiated by two thoughtful books: one which showed that the Hong Kong SAR government was colluding with a small group of rich families, and one which showed that the government had at the same time surreptitiously dismantled the rudimentary welfare state reluctantly erected by colonial-era civil servants. The routine rebuttals were not convincing.  Often the government added insult to injury by announcing a bad policy, holding a grossly fixed “consultation” about its merits, and then claiming that it was doing what we all wanted.

There is also a problem with political pollution wafted down over our northern boundary. China’s representatives in Hong Kong are often correct in supposing that things are not going well. They erroneously suppose that the solution to this problem is more input from them. Mr Tung might usefully use his position in the corridors of power to point out to Beijing’s local representatives that the problem for Chief Executives of the Hong Kong SAR is not that they have little control over Legco, but that they have little control over themselves. It would be surprising if Mr C.Y. Leung was a popular success: he has no talent for politics and is hampered by a propensity for weasel words and sleazy friends. But his fatal flaw in the eyes of most Hong Kong people is the perception that he is a ventriloquist’s dummy sitting in the lap of the Liaison Office.

The environment has become a sort of reverse epidemic. Helping it is a handy prop for any proposal, from windfarming to bans on shark fin soup. And there is a serious point here. The globe is in fact warming; large parts of it could become uninhabitable as a result. Species are disappearing, concrete is covering landscape, air and water are polluted. That does not mean that every exercise which claims the environmental label is actually praiseworthy, or worthwhile, or successful. This is a good point to bear in mind when contemplating the activities of our government, whose relationship with the environment is often opportunistic or bumbling. Actually our government was a quite late convert to the existence of the problem. People in the department of that name often complain privately that their colleagues know little and care less of the environment. Moreover the existence of an Environmental Protection Department evokes a well-established bureaucratic reflex: all the other departments try to keep it off their patches.

So initiatives in this area should be examined carefully. Consider, for example, the compulsory charge for plastic bags. The official defence of this scheme is now that it has “changed shopping culture”, and this is true. Even fossils like me now carry a bag, just in case, or stagger out of Page One with an unruly armful of books rather than pay for a new sack. On the other hand this was not the reason originally given for the plastic bag charge at all. Indeed I do not doubt that if the relevant official had stood up in Legco and invited honorary members to support an elaborate and expensive scheme to “change shopping culture” he would have been laughed out of the building. The original justification was that the ban on free bags would help the environment by reducing the amount of plastic used to produce bags, and the amount of space taken up in local landfills when said bags were discarded. In these respects the scheme has been a total failure. If you look at the amount of plastic in the new, durable, non-throw-away plastic bags, and the average number of shopping trips you can get out of one, it is easy to calculate that the amount of plastic used, and eventually landfilled, has increased by a factor of ten. This does not, it is true, take account of the fact that the new bags are a bit bigger. But then it doesn’t consider either that the old flimsy bags were biodegradable, while the new ones will be here until Stephen Hawkings pulls the plug on the universe. Readers who take an interest in these things will also have noticed that a whole new market has opened up for the vendors of plastic bags for lining bins, carrying garbage, hiding dog droppings and other purposes, which in the old days were usually met by reusing supermarket bags. The conclusion I draw from this is that attempts to modify behaviour to help the environment can have unintended and unforeseen consequences. Officials should be careful what they wish for.

Which brings me to the latest looming catastrophe, the proposal to charge for solid waste disposal. In other words, what you put in your dustbin. A charge for what goes down the sewer (a turd tax?) is being left for later. I must admit to having some misgivings about the solid waste charge since it was first announced. People who pay taxes (and we all pay taxes one way or another – you cannot eat or sleep without encountering the consequences of the high land prices to which our government is addicted) are entitled to get something in return. Collecting rubbish is an important public service. Not all public services are charged for. There also seems to be an important difference between this wheeze and the plastic bag one. The plastic bag charge faces you, as the individual shopper, at the point of delivery, as it were. When tempted to ask for a bag you are also deterred by the compulsory charge, which will be added to your bill immediately. This is not going to work with the waste thing, though. There will be nobody in your dustbin to point out that the particular item you are about to deposit in it will cost you 50 cents. An occasional bill will come in. No doubt you will be as mystified by it as we commonly are by the others. Why, when oil prices are at record lows, does my electricity bill feature an upward “fuel cost adjustment”? Anyway, the point is that the deterrent effect will be delayed and diffused, for which read ineffective.

Actually it may even be perverse. On my estate, as on many others, all the rubbish goes into communal dustbins which are emptied every morning. The charge will presumably be levied on the whole collection and shared out between all of us. This means the more rubbish you put in the more your neighbours will subsidise your profligacy. Conversely if you reduce your rubbish output most of the savings will go to them also.

Well these are the obvious problems, with which some well-intentioned official is now no doubt wrestling.  A new side-effect surfaced last week. Officials have, it seems, spotted a danger that unscrupulous producers of solid waste may deposit it in the nearest litter bin, and so avoid paying the charge. The solution to this problem has two aspects. A lot of litter bins will simply be removed from the street. Apparently more than 1,000 have gone already. The government has also unveiled a new model litter bin with a smaller hole through which the litter must be put, the idea being that a full garbage bag will no longer fit. They have ordered 800 of the new small-orifice model. No doubt more will follow.

I am reminded of the old saying that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. Those of us who have been here for a few decades remember that public littering used to be a major problem. People who had no further use for a bit of “solid waste” would simply drop it on the pavement, or if at home throw it out of the window. A great deal of money and effort – not to mention a flood of awful APIs – was devoted to persuading people to change their behaviour. And to a considerable extent, this has succeeded. People do look round for a litter bin rather than just dropping things. But what will they do if, having looked, they cannot find one? I find it difficult to believe that the average Hongkonger – or, for that matter, me – will simply shrug his shoulders and pocket the unwanted item so that he can take it home and pay the charge to have it disposed of in the officially approved manner. The new tight-lipped litter bins have already evoked one well-established habit: people who find they cannot get their item inside a litter bin leave it leaning against the bottom of the bin, in the hope that the collector will take the hint. And the charge hasn’t been introduced yet.

I think environmental enthusiasts under-estimate the fragility of the progress made towards a cleaner Hong Kong. Round the corner from my house is a car park popular with nocturnal couples. It has two regular litter bins and a set of three “separate your garbage” ones. Even so it is quite obvious from the little heaps of litter a car’s width apart that some of the courting couples cannot be bothered to interrupt their canoodling for a quick visit to the nearest receptacle. No doubt the fact that all this activity is taking place in the dark helps to sanction unsocial behaviour. But this is the point. Keeping clean streets depends on the voluntary cooperation of citizens, encouraged by their wish to appear socially responsible to their peers. At the moment there is a fragile consensus that the thing to do with litter is to put it in the nearest bin. In the new regime of missing, or tight-lipped, bins, that consensus may well be replaced by a widespread view that only suckers pay more garbage tax than they have to. No doubt this will draw bitter condemnations from the plutocrats who have run their businesses on a similar basis for years, but there it is.

So we have an interesting paradox here: a scheme to “protect the environment” which will result in us all walking pavements ankle-deep in rubbish. We will have a cleaner environment and filthy streets. But culture will have changed…

Following last week’s visit to the alarming gap between what I need to live on and what our government thinks sufficient for the aged or disabled, I have been browsing in the works of Joseph Stiglitz. The interesting thing about Mr Stiglitz is that he is a Nobel prize-winner (albeit in Economics, a variation about which some of us are a bit dubious) so he can say things which would be instantly dismissed as extreme ideology if they came from, say, Noam Chomski, Long Hair, or me. Like if the government consists of rich people it will govern in the interests of rich people.

Mr Stiglitz’s speciality is inequality and its economic consequences. Those consequences, as equality increases, are dire. A flourishing economy depends on purchasing power and the rich, though big spenders on a per capita basis, are not numerous enough to supply it. There are also social consequences. If society is very unequal then it is not working for the large number of people at the bottom of the distribution. They are likely to withdraw their support for the existing way of doing things. Is this beginning to sound familiar?

Mr Stiglitz’s third point, which is particularly relevant here, is that inequality is not necessary or inevitable. There are policies which are conducive and there are policies which are not. And contrary to the bleating about “competitiveness” which greets any suggestion that the status of workers or poor people should be improved, there is no evidence that societies which go out of their way to reduce inequality suffer in consequence. If anything the contrary is true.

In this context there was an interesting piece a few weeks ago in (I think) the New Yorker. This was written by a Finnish person living in New York, who complained that he (or possibly she) was fed up with Americans saying that Scandinavian social security systems depended on a high level of social solidarity found only in highly homogeneous communities and would consequently never work in America. This was based on the idea that Nordic social welfare arrangements involved a lot of people paying to rescue a few from poverty, unemployment, sickness and other social ills. This was not the case, said our Finn. Actually middle class people in Scandinavian countries supported social welfare systems because they benefited most people. Middle class families liked knowing that an illness would not bankrupt them, they liked knowing that they did not have to save for ten years to send their kids to university, they liked knowing that if they resigned, or were fired, from their current job their income would not immediately plummet to zero. People, in short, were willing to pay for a social welfare system because it was good value for them, as well as other people.

The conclusion from all this is that Hong Kong’s nearly unique combination of extreme wealth and poverty is not inevitable. It is not something like the weather which we just have to put up with. It is a choice. We, or our government, could pursue options which reduce inequality, or at least stop pursuing options which increase it. This is a livelihood issue, and we have a government which claims to concentrate on livelihood issues. Yet we see no progress.

One reason is that our leaders seem to have achieved a state of learned helplessness. No doubt some of them would blame this on the near-deadlock in Legco, and some of us would blame it on too much waiting to be told what to do by the Liaison Office. But there it is. In a recent speech Carrie Lam announced that the government’s current ambition was to tackle “three peaks”: MTR fares, the misbehaviour of the Link REIT, and reform of the MPF. She claimed that all of these presented great difficulties and success could not be guaranteed. This is pathetic. The government is after all the government. It can change the law if necessary. The problem with the MPF is that the needed reforms will annoy some of the government’s friends. The problem with the MTR is that it is neither fish nor fowl, public or private. Either would be more acceptable. The problem with the Link REIT is that it was a stupid idea in the first place, but unwinding it would be embarrassing. These are all problems which resulted from previous government actions: the part privatisation of the MTR, the setting up of the MPF with bad rules, the sale of items previously owned by the Housing Authority to the international greed industry. What governments do they can undo.

Unfortunately this requires first that they should learn to accept responsibility for their own mistakes. Ms Lam seems to have problems in this area, as evidenced by her performance on the topic of lead in water supplies. Nobody will be held responsible were were told, because the problem was in the system and not in the actions of individuals. That may be true, but it does not settle the matter at all. The “system” is not something for which nobody is responsible. Some part of the government is responsible for ensuring that public housing tenants have a supply of drinkable water. The higher reaches of that department or branch are populated by people who are not plumbers, and do not personally carry water. Their job is to ensure that there is a working system for delivering clean water and if the water has lead in it then they have failed. It appears that the Water Supplies Department has a successful system for delivering water to buildings and estates. The lead appeared in the local piping. The local piping was built at the behest of the government and it was the government’s duty to ensure that “the system” produced non-poisonous water in the resulting taps. I suppose that this duty rested with someone under the Development Bureau.

This suggests that under the “accountability” theory the buck would have stopped at the door of the Secretary for Development, Mr Paul Chan Mo-po.  So we can now credit Mr Chan with surviving his fourth resignation-worthy scandal, which is probably a record. Has the man no shame?

Having passed another of life’s lugubrious milestones, my 70th birthday, I spent a good deal of time wondering whether I should collect that controversial little gift to us dinosaurs, the Fruit Money. This is a small monthly sum, officially the Old Age Allowance, which you can collect from the Social Welfare Department. The only requirement is that you live in Hong Kong and are aged over 70. The points against: I don’t really need it, in the sense of being in any danger of deprivation from want of savings or property. I am one of the people Carrie Lam does not wish to give a pension to. I have also lost the habit of being comfortable living on public money since my student days, when the provision in the UK was rather generous. The points in favour: my more pragmatic friends say that if you have been paying income tax for the last 30-odd years you have earned a few bucks from the public coffers, especially as said coffers are overflowing with money which our government is mysteriously reluctant to spend. Also a dependable income stream is a great thing in retirement, because the problem with living off your savings is that you don’t know how long they will have to last. The Fruit Money is a trivial amount, but it will go on as long as I do.

Thinking about this kept me off the welfare rolls for a few months, until I decided that I should stop teaching before my lesson content consisted entirely of things that happened before my students were born. So although I have quite a lot of winnings of one kind or another stashed away I no longer have an earned income, however trivial. Finally I fired up Google, and found that one is expected to present oneself at a convenient Social Welfare Field Office. The “field office” terminology threw me for a bit. Where are there fields in urban Hong Kong? I suppose the designation indicates those outposts where the SWD actually communicates with lay people, as opposed to the “real” offices where civil servants exchange paper with each other. Anyway there is a field office near the end of our minibus line so off I went.

The field office (Shatin South) turned out to be rather intimidating. It was very quiet. There were none of those helpful uniformed types you find in the Transport Department downstairs, making sure you have found the right form and the right queue.  In fact there was no queue. And although I went round the whole room twice looking at a great many leaflets and forms, very little in English, there was no application form either. Eventually I worked out that a mysterious piece of digital equipment was one of those gadgets you find in the Crown Motors service department which spits out a little piece of paper with a number on it. On the wall was a lower number. So it seemed I was at least in a digital queue. It was still very quiet. One SWD person, or so I supposed, was having a murmured conversation in a corner with two clients. There was a row of interviewing booths, partly screened so you could not tell if anything was actually happening inside them. A bit of background music would have lightened the atmosphere. I was haunted by the memory of the scene in one of the “Doctor in the House” books where the hero goes to Moss Brothers to rent a dinner jacket and is reminded of the atmosphere in the VD clinic of his hospital.

Then my number was called and things looked up. The SWD person who screens initial inquiries turned out to be both pretty and helpful. She could, she said, give me the relevant form but because I live in Fotan I would have to take it to the Shatin North field office. The form is large. This is because the government uses one form for two different old age benefits and two different disabled ones. I suppose nobody actually has to fill in the whole thing. In fact if you just want Fruit Money you only have to do four bits of the form. My helpful lady indicated these, put an “x” where I should sign, and gave me a booklet with the address of the Shatin North field office in it.

So to the Shatin North field office, which is unlike its southern counterpart in several respects. The South office is in a building full of government departments and consequently is easy to find. The North one is on a sort of mezzanine of its own in a shopping mall near the Prince of Wales Hospital and it is not easy to find at all. Despite this, however, it seemed to be much busier. This may be partly because it also caters, for the time being, for Ma On Shan. Still it was not so busy that you had to wait for long. The initial receiver of inquiries passed me to an SWD form receiver, who accepted the form, photocopied the business end of my passport, accepted the copy of my ID card which I knew they wanted, and asked me to wait. I presume that the SWD is like the Bank — if your request involves the bank giving you, or anyone else, money then the paperwork has to be approved by some senior person you do not actually meet. It seems the senior person was happy, because I was told to expect some good news, which would be backdated to the day of my application.

On the whole I must say that as visits to government departments go a trip to the SWD is quite pleasant. The staff are helpful and if anyone thought it a bit odd that a foreigner was applying for Hong Kong welfare they did not show it. Clearly there are limits to how generous you can be in dishing out public money but the arrangements seem to be as painless as possible. Maybe the unified form could be reconsidered, as it looks a bit intimidating until you realise that most of it is not for you.

On the other hand if the giving is easy the amounts could be considered scandalously low. I reproduce this table from the relevant government web page:

The first one of these is the Fruit Money. The second one is the government’s Big New Thing, which starts at age 65 but is means tested. I know nothing of the distinction between normal disability and higher disability. But I find it extremely disturbing that people are apparently expected to be able to live on these paltry sums if they have no other means of support. Hong Kong is a developed affluent society. The government has money coming out of its ears. Surely to God we can do better than this?

Lovers of linguistic confusion have had a pleasing little side show to Mr Zhang Dejiang’s visit: a controversy over whether the trip has been or should be described as an “inspection”.  Readers had to be careful in their choice of newspapers to enjoy this. Some newspapers refused to describe it as an inspection as a matter of principle. Some, on the other hand, notably the English version of the China Daily, insisted on describing at as an inspection as a matter of editorial policy.

Clearly this is to some extent a translation problem. There is a Chinese phrase which is conventionally translated as “inspection”. But this does not settle the matter because in translation there is always the possibility that the conventional does not fit particular circumstances.

One of the dumber local columnists, for example, pointed out that the last time the Queen of England visited Hong Kong, then a colony, this was also described as an “inspection”. Well it may have been in the Chinese press, but no English publication would refer to a Royal visit as an “inspection”. The Queen is a constitutional monarch. It is not her job to inspect anything but the occasional guard of honour.

And this, of course, is the root of the problem. In English, at least, the idea of “inspection” covers a wide range of possibilities.

During the brief pause in the Napoleonic wars following the Peace of Amiens tourists flocked to Paris, and one of the attractions was the chance to see Napoleon himself reviewing his personal horse guards, which he did every Sunday. The historian of horse matters notes that this “was no mere ceremony, but a serious inspection in which questions were asked and answered, and noted by the accompanying Chief of Staff in a green pocketbook.” This may be regarded as one extreme – a visit by well-informed superior with questions and follow-up action. Military inspections are frequent, detailed, and directed at the important question whether the inspected troops are looking after their equipment properly.

At the other extreme? Well in my musical capacity I can occasionally be found warbling encouragingly at the back of passing out parades staged by various uniformed groups. As part of the proceedings the presiding “officer” is invited to inspect the troops, and tours the parade ground for this purpose. He or she occasionally stops to chat, to the dismay of the perspiring musicians who are expected to keep up a continuous background barrage of slow music. The presiding person then usually finishes by inspecting us. He or she floats towards the band. Our leader advances, salutes, and says “Thank you for your inspection, Sir”. Or madam as the case may be. The sir or madam then walks slowly past our front row. No comments are offered, and as we do not share the uniform of the people on parade we could get away with anything – Dutch bicycle troops, Italian bersaglieri – as long as we all look the same.

This is inspection as a polite gesture, and it is a common feature of state visits. The visitor is greeted by the commander of the guard of honour, traditionally carrying a drawn sword in a vertical position, and said visitor is conducted along the front row, followed by the civilian and military subordinates of both parties. The guard of honour have been preparing for weeks. They have been carefully inspected in advance by the local equivalent of a terrifying Regimental Sergeant Major. Compliments are traditional and usually justified. In the unlikely event that you spotted an unpolished button it would be churlish to say so.

I think in the context of official visits the important difference is between inspections without warning, however friendly, and those in which the victims are told in advance that the visitor is coming. Clearly in the latter case the “inspector” is rarely going to see anything but what the inspectees wish him to see. What should be white has been freshly painted, what should be clean is freshly cleaned, what should not be seen has been freshly hidden. That does not mean that the inspection is valueless. The preparations probably involve a lot of useful painting, cleaning, etc. Also the perceptive inspector will be able to derive some information from whether the preparations have been done well or badly. He will not discover what the inspected unit looks like on an ordinary working day. But the question whether they can put up a good show is worth an answer.

The downside to this, we must note, is that the effort to impress a visitor may lead to a great deal of trouble and expense, some of which may have no useful purpose. I notice for example that Mr Zhang was shown a three-dimensional model at least as big as a King-sized double bed of Lantau Island after further planned vandalism in the name of “development”. This had apparently not featured in the recent public consultation exercise on when and where such development should take place, the conclusions of which have at least in theory not yet been decided. The relevant policy secretary denied that any guns were being jumped. The version in the model was “not final”, he told the media. Readers may be tempted to take this with a pinch of salt. Supposing it is true, though, this means that the model, cost so far unspecified, had absolutely no useful role in life except – hopefully – to impress one visitor who, one must suspect, is as capable of reading a map as the next man.

So where does this leave us with Mr Zhang’s inspection or visit? It does not appear that Mr Zhang wanted, or needed, to look at Hong Kong. Nor did his programme include any events which suggested that a staff officer with a green pocketbook would have been useful. Banquets, cocktails, visits to science park, ordinary people, CE. Actually it looked rather like a Royal visit used to. Only the opening of a Zhang Dejiang Hospital was missing. I do not think Royal visits have ever been described as inspections in English and I do not think Mr Zhang’s visit should be either. But the Chinese word may be more versatile.

Wow, visitor numbers are down. For some of us, this might come as a relief. There is a limit to how much tourism you can get in a crowded city without making it intolerable for residents. The thing that puzzles me about the people responsible for this is that they go to so much trouble to arrange things which do not appeal to me at all. Cable car to giant Buddha? Disney? Shopping? No thanks. This suggests that the problem with tourism in Hong Kong is that it does not consist in providing things which locals can also enjoy. If you live in London or New York many of the things which attract tourists are attractions for you too. You may indeed be grateful for the international patronage which keeps some of the more rarefied cultural attractions afloat. In Hong Kong, on the other hand, the government only encourages industries in ways which help the 11 or so families who own most of the place to get even richer. So local interests do not get a look in. Can the real estate barons make megabucks by attracting mainlanders to expensive handbag shops? Bring it on.

Under these circumstances the tourism industry seems not so much a part of society as a burden on it. A few people get rich and the rest of us have to run the gauntlet of all those wheeled suitcases full of baby powder. So I have been trying to think of tourist attractions which would be unique, more or less, costless, also more or less, and welcome to people who live here as well as the potential visiting hordes across the boundary. So let me see…

Monkeys. If you go to Gibraltar the standard tour (which pretty much everyone does because Gibraltar is a small place) includes a visit to the apes. The apes live wild on the top of the rock. Your guide will take some snacks (raw pasta is acceptable) to ensure that a few apes will turn up. I have never heard of a tourist being molested in any way by an ape but no doubt it happens occasionally. There is a legend (probably copied from the one about the Tower of London’s ravens) that something terrible will happen if the apes disappear. Well the visitors will be disappointed, at least. In Hong Kong we have a substantial population of wild monkeys and they are treated as an embarrassment. Go to the places where they hang out and you will see only notices begging you not to feed them. One gentleman who had had a bad time with the monkeys actually wrote to a local paper the other week suggesting that they were vermin and should be officially exterminated. Now I realize that some population control is probably required. People in my part of the New Territories occasionally have to shoo monkeys out of their kitchens, which is closer to nature than most of us want to get. But can we not have some sort of monkey/human interaction experience which can be flogged as a humane alternative to those mainland zoos where you can throw a live chicken into the tiger pen?

Water sports. If you walk along the edge of Tolo Harbour — and our town planners have been generous in providing places where you can do this — you may notice one thing is missing. There are mountains, there is water in large quantities. But even on public holidays there are no boats. This is extraordinary. Go to European cities with lakes or rivers and these are regarded as important recreational resources. In England, where many people are perhaps a bit nutty about boating, I have rowed on industrial canals. Swiss lakes have beautiful antiquated paddle steamers. Even the ornamental lakes at the Palace of Versailles have rowing boats. Sussex villages where the sea is only navigable for a few hours round high tide have public slipways for boat launches. And we have Tolo Harbour, a huge sheltered enclosure with nice scenery and no commercial traffic. And we do practically nothing with it. Hong Kong could be the must visit for small boat enthusiasts all over Asia. Of course we don’t want lots of amateurs floating around Victoria Harbour, which is a busy commercial port. But the only serious boats in Tolo Harbour are resting at anchor between engagements. When I complained about this before a reader wrote in to say that, while he agreed with the complaint, there was actually a Taipo Boat Club. I hope there still is. But it is not in Taipo. It is miles away in Taimeituk. And all that shoreline is being wasted.

History. Now that it’s 15 years since the handover can we perhaps acknowledge that one of the cool and interesting things about Hong Kong for visitors is that it used to be a colony? I am not suggesting a wholesale wallowing in nostalgia, or indeed that the past was better than the future. But we have nothing to be ashamed of, and we would be more interesting if we had more mementoes. To start with, now that the idiot who perpetrated this idea has retired, can we go back to having red postboxes? The colour has nothing to do with politics — it was widely adopted in the 19th century for things which needed to stand out. That is why it is used for fire engines and stop signs. Then there is the matter of rickshaws. I realize that some people are a bit twitchy about being towed by another person, but they have them in Tokyo and they don’t seem to be regarded as a human rights violation. They used to have a bad name in Hong Kong because all the rickshaw men looked as if they were the sort of people the DAB digs out of old folks’ homes on polling day. But this was a result of the government’s refusal to issue new licences.

Could we perhaps also have formal dinners for visitors? I have in mind a regimental atmosphere, with the presiding “colonel” piped in and the junior officer present giving the loyal toast. Quite who the toast should be loyal to can be decided later. There should be no political objection to this kind of dinner as an entertainment, because our local police force is still doing it. The toast is “to the Hong Kong Police Force”. While we are with the Force, perhaps we could do something with that ceremonial flag-raising at Gold Bauhinia Square. This is like the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace: a military charade to amuse the tourists. Unlike the changing of the guard, though, it suffers from serious deficiencies in the wardrobe department. We can not, of course, change to bearskins. But pith helmets would look better than those boring peaked caps. Dare we suggest that they would look even better with red coats? It would also be nice to have the Scottish part of the police orchestra in kilts. I know those tartan trousers are acceptable in some Scottish circles but they always remind me of Rupert Bear.

There are times when the line emanating from the Liaison Office becomes crystal clear because every toady and sycophant in Hong Kong is parroting it. This is one of those occasions. The line is that some means should be found swiftly which will land the prophets of independence in court and preferably behind bars. Quite how this is to be achieved has been entertainingly variable. Different left-wing lawyers (how did these people pass their exams?) have trekked through the legal undergrowth in the hope that there is a trap hidden there somewhere. At various time these experts, and their lay followers, have pounced with cries of triumph on the Preamble to the Basic Law, on Article 1, on sundry other articles, on the parts of the Crimes Ordinance which deal with treason, and the parts which deal with sedition. The rather desperate suggestion was made that the independence advocates could be prosecuted under the Societies Ordinance because the police have apparently so far refused to register them. Still to come, no doubt, is the possibility of a prosecution for dishonest access to a computer.

Now look, dimwits, one of the things we were promised would remain the same after the handover was that Hong Kong people would continue to enjoy freedom of speech. Freedom of speech does not comprise just the freedom to say what everyone else agrees with. It must also include the right to be unusual, or indeed outrageous. Freedom of opinion, as a judge once put it, must include the freedom of opinions which we despise. The Basic Law has a variety of interesting things in it, but they do not include a commitment to eternity. There is, in fact a mechanism for changing it. We must therefore suppose that there is an implicit right for people to discuss the sort of changes which they would like. Independence may not be a very practical suggestion but it is not in itself so dangerous that merely uttering it should be a criminal offence. The answer to erroneous speech is more speech. Nobody can object to people saying in public that independence is impractical and undesirable. Attempting to put the word on a par with pornography or libel is outrageously repressive. It has been suggested that the mere existence of an independence party in Hong Kong would impair China’s security. Nonsense. “Security” is one of those words like “discourse” and “inappropriate” that have my bullshit detector ringing merrily. It is not an expression of thought but a substitute for it. No doubt the existence of such a party would be rather embarrassing. Tough.

Actually it would be a great help if people could abandon the idea that this is a legal problem. It isn’t. People who have been reading my ramblings for a while will recall the observation that the SAR government should not regard the end of Occupy as a problem solved. People who found that non-violent protest on a large scale was ignored would explore other avenues, which the powers-that-be might find even less welcome than a tented village outside the Legco palace. Some of them are exploring the possibilities of conventional politics, some are exploring the possibilities of violence, and some are exploring the possibilities of drastic constitutional change. The answer to these explorations is to show not that our paramilitary police are wonderful, but that the system can deliver what people want. If our government is determined to stay in a dream world of its own devising, then jailing a few dissidents is not going to help. In fact if I were trying to found an independence party I would be hoping very much that I would be arrested. The person who is prosecuted for the cause will become an instant hero. The church, as they used to say, is fertilized by the blood of its martyrs.

It is time the government put a stop to the bureaucratic guerrilla warfare with independence seekers which just encourages them and inspires their supporters. If it is obvious that independence is a “dead end” then there is no need for such dubious skullduggery as censoring people’s election leaflets, refusing to register their societies or dreaming up pretexts for nakedly political prosecutions.  Another good idea would be to stop expanding the “independence” movement by putting people in it who don’t belong there. Asking for self-determination is not the same thing as asking for independence. People may self-determine that they do not wish to be independent. Asking for freedom of choice is not the same thing as advocating a particular outcome. People who oppose bans on smoking are not advocating smoking, they are advocating choice. Likewise with self-determination.

The hysterical reaction to independence parties is an interesting example of failing to get the point. The point is that we were promised that Hong Kong would as a Special Administrative Region be allowed to decide by itself about matters other than defence and foreign affairs. Maybe that was sincerely intended at the time, but it is not what is being delivered now.  If we had a government which could credibly claim to put local interests first there would be no problem. People who now advocate independence have given up hope in the present arrangements and drawn an unusually rigorous conclusion. Do not assume that nobody shares their despair, even if they draw other conclusions from it.

Let me get my retaliation in first. Property prices are now falling. Even real estate professionals, for whom optimism is an endemic disease and a professional necessity, are resigned to a “correction”. They are now murmuring that prices might float down in a vague way over the next two years. This seems to me rather unlikely. Bubbles do not deflate gently over two years. They pop. That is why they are called bubbles. Anyway, with the first signs of the bubble deflating, or bursting, as you will, we also get the first bleats about “negative equity”.

This opaque phrase describes a simple situation: the home you bought becomes worth less than the loan you took out from the bank to pay for it. Let us say you pay $10 million for a flat. You borrow $9 million of this from the bank. Prices then fall. You find that your flat is worth $8.5 million. The value of the flat has now become minus half a million dollars. In theory at this point you might give up, stop your repayments and move to your nearest Macdonalds. But why should you? In theory your bank may ask you to put up extra security for the loan, but in practice for reasons we will come to in a minute that will not happen either. So why should you worry?

This is actually a good question. Your flat is still doing for you all the things it was doing before. You can live in it, raise kids, entertain guests or whatever takes your fancy. The bank is not going to kick you out as long as you keep up the mortgage payments. This is because they will then end up with a flat worth $8.5 million which is on their books as $9 million. They will immediately have to acknowledge losing half a million bucks. So as long as you keep up your payments you don’t have to worry about the bank. This is, of course, not a good time to sell your flat. But you are neither homeless nor out of pocket as long as you continue to live in it.

So why does the doleful chorus about negative equity rise every time property prices go down? Well the news is not so good if you bought a second flat as an investment, an almost universal hobby among Legco members, business people, professionals and what have you. Your investment has turned into a lemon. Instead of making money for you, it has landed you with long term payments which exceed what you are getting from rent and do not exceed the income you could have got from some alternative gamble like the stock market. If you bought a flat to live in, then “negative equity” is a theoretical concept, at least until you want to move. If you bought it as an investment, on the other hand, then “negative equity” is a painful reminder that real estate, like other investments, can go down as well as up.

It is interesting to see people who usually subscribe to the idea of general self-reliance and small government, calling for rescue from the consequences of their own folly. If the government proposes to provide pensions, public housing, relief for the poor or protection for the underpaid that is a deplorable interference with the beneficial operation of market forces, and an invitation to idleness and welfare dependency among the lower classes. If, on the other hand, the already rich are losing money on their property investments the government has a duty to rescue them from the toils of negative equity by manipulating prices upwards.

There are two other funny things about negative equity. One is that in the illustration quoted above I omitted the small detail that while the value of your flat was declining from $10 million to $8.5 million you were presumably paying off the loan. So the amount you still owe the bank should have declined accordingly. In fact the only way you could fall into this illustration is if you got a 90 per cent mortgage, which is actually rather unusual. So to fall into negative equity you must either have bought the flat quite recently or have succeeded in assembling loans worth a very large proportion of the price. This is not uncommon with investments, but much rarer with people buying a home for themselves.

The second oddity worth noting at this point is that the financial authorities are perfectly aware of the risks of buying an item with a volatile price – like property – on credit. So there are limits on the proportion of your price which you can borrow from the bank as a mortgage. Currently I believe the limit is 70 per cent. However this limit is routinely circumvented by real estate developers in their efforts to sell flats: they will put you in touch with people who will lend you the rest of the price, or most of it. So the people who are now complaining actually caused the problem.

It is difficult to rejoice in falling property prices. But it is only difficult if you own property yourself. The unavoidable fact is that if the price of any good falls there will be winners and losers. The winners will be those who need it and don’t have it, while the losers will be those who need a continuous supply, plus those who bought it as an investment. Since the vast majority of people in Hong Kong can only dream of owning their own home – let alone owning an extra home as an investment – we must suppose that a general fall in property prices is good news. Bleating about “negative equity” is merely a way of asking the government to over-rule this in the interests of people who made bad investments.

Apologies for the long break in appearances, which was due to a technical problem. The right side of my keyboard developed a mysterious ailment, which meant that when I pressed one button I got two letters l;uijke thuis. My IT consultant (my son, who really does work in IT) diagnosed a case of digital dinosaurism. My keyboard was disintegrating because I hit it too hard.

No doubt this is a result of learning to type on a typewriter – which, my children, involved pressing a key which was connected to a series of levers which eventually stamped a letter on a sheet of paper through an artfully arranged strip of inky ribbon.

One of my regular editors suggested that I was pressing too hard for a proper modern keyboard because of suppressed hatred of someone, possibly CY Leung. I am sure this is not the case. I do not hate Mr Leung. I just wish he had more respect for the truth.

Let us take his latest outburst, which started with the claim that calls for independence from a few would damage the whole of Hong Kong. This is, it seems to me, highly questionable. In places where freedom of speech is offered, many nutty things will be said. There is no reason why visitors or potential investors should be put off by this, any more than they have been by the continuing effort to inform Hong Kong people, and visitors, about the sufferings of mainland Falun Gong believers.

But Mr Leung now offered an interesting manoeuvre, which when practiced in Tsimshatsui camera shops is known as “bait and switch”. No central government, he said, would support a city which called for independence. Well that also seems a bit dubious. It is a recurring habit of pro-China commentators to make sweeping generalisations about the rest of the world which are wrong. We have, for example, been told at various times that nobody allows non-nationals to vote, that no country would put up with having an occupation in its business district, that no country allows its citizens to talk about independence. All wrong.

But even if you subscribe to Mr Leung’s theory about the way a central government would react to calls for independence, note the not too subtle change which has been worked here. We have gone from a few people calling for independence to “a city that calls for independence”. But this is an impossibility. No mechanism exists through which Hong Kong can call for independence, or indeed anything else. We are saddled with a political system which cannot even call for universal pensions, popular though these would certainly be.

Indeed it will be interesting to see how candidates present themselves in the upcoming Legco elections, because it has become increasingly clear that there is a wide range of measures which the city does “call for” but which our political system is not prepared to deliver. There is nothing mysterious about this. Most of us would happily sign up for a decent pension, standard working hours, a generous minimum wage, reform of the MPF, a health service more or less free at the point of delivery and generous arrangements for education up to the age of about 21. Yet all of these things have been shunted over the last five years into the “too hard” basket, leaving the government struggling to square a circle by making homes cheaper without depressing property prices.

Now that people have worked out who is making the real decisions about such matters, and that these decisions are not being made by the Hong Kong government, calls for independence are understandable, if perhaps not very realistic. Our leaders are helpless puppets who do not care what we think. Independence would cut the strings. For that reason, of course, it will not be allowed.

Still, calls for independence have had one useful effect. People who have been complaining for 19 years that Hong Kong needed to legislate against sedition have now discovered the Crimes Ordinance, and in particular the sections of it which deal with sedition. I do not personally believe that they could be used against peaceful advocates of independence but at least the Liaison Office groupies now know that they are there.

I must, though, sadly pour water on the suggestion that the section dealing with Treason, suitably interpreted, could be used to suppress independence talk. This belief rests on the shaky foundation that the wording in the ordinance, which refers to “the Queen” could be reinterpreted in the light of post-handover blanket changes in terminology to apply to the Central government. There is a problem here in the rest of the ordinance. Treason consists of various acts which do not concern us here (taking up arms … aiding enemies) and more relevantly “denying the title”. This is a technical term which cannot be extended to cover any suggestion that some part of Her Majesty’s realm, or Mr Xi’s, would be happier if allowed to go its own way.

Denying the title refers to a quite specific verbal act, which is suggesting that the Queen or her ancestors at some point usurped the legitimate succession which, in the more obsequious history books, connects her with William the Conqueror. It would cover those nostalgics who seek to revive the claims of the House of Stuart (deposed in legally murky circumstances in 1688) and those gluttons for lost causes who look back with regret to the demise of the House of York (last serious claimant killed in battle in 1485). Over the years there have been occasions when the orderly succession was – shall we say nudged? – by prejudices against juveniles, women or Catholics.

However no such ambiguity attends the enthronement of Mr Leung, who emerged from a legally ordained process intended to produce a result satisfactory to our external rulers. The suggestion that his successors would fare better if chosen without outside interference is not seditious. It’s common sense.

The offence of gaining access to a computer with dishonest intent is fast becoming a textbook example of how the rule of law can morph into the abuse of law to get prosecutors whatever they want. The latest case involved a man who put a camera in his bathroom to produce pictures of a lady using it. Where does accessing a computer come into this? He looked at the resulting video on his cell phone. When we last visited this topic a High Court judge had just decided that a cell phone was a computer. Fans of judicial lawmaking may clap here, if they wish. The almost infinite possibilities of this offence have not been lost on other people. The other day a DAB stalwart suggested that people who organised protests on their mobile phones could be prosecuted for “dishonest access” as well.

Indeed, why stop at cell phones. Many household appliances now have more computer power than a computer did a few years ago. Your car has more microchips than wheels. My new steam oven has enough computer power to baffle me. We also have one of those Japanese toilets which provides a variety of extra services and packs plenty of electronic ingenuity. Are you keeping your drugs stash in the washing machine? Could be a big mistake.

Now for the root of the problem. The relevant part of the Crimes Ordinance goes like this:

“(1) Any person who obtains access to a computer-

(a) with intent to commit an offence;
(b) with a dishonest intent to deceive;
(c) with a view to dishonest gain for himself or another; or
(d) with a dishonest intent to cause loss to another, whether on the same occasion as he obtains such access or on any future occasion, commits an offence and is liable on conviction upon indictment to imprisonment for 5 years.

Now I do not think you need to be a mindreader to work out what was going on in the collective head of the legislature when this item was passed. The intention was to criminalise the act of obtaining access to a computer which you were not entitled to access. The idea that an otherwise boring or trivial crime might be transformed into a passport to five years of enforced leisure if you did it over an iPhone would have struck the people who voted for this as absurd.

As of course it is. Our man with the camera in his bathroom is clearly a pig. No gentleman would do such a thing. Still, he is I think entitled to wonder what is going on here. If he was committing an offence, why was he not charged with it? If he was not committing an offence, then how does this provision apply to him? I see the “intent” bit is necessary to deal with cases where the posited crime was not consummated. But that is no reason to use it when the miscreant has achieved his fell purpose, whatever it was. Is it the legal view that a video of your maid in the shower is a “dishonest gain”?

It is distressing that the misuse of this provision has been allowed to continue for years, albeit with most of the victims being small potatoes who were not lavishly lawyered. Do judges never look at the laws they are applying? Is this a symptom of the idleness and complacency which are the hazards (I will not say the hallmarks) of prolonged judicial office? The late Lord Bingham devoted much of his retirement to examining what the rule of law required. One of the items he came up with was that “the law must be accessible, and as far as possible intelligible, clear and predictable”. Another standard worth a few moments thought in the Department of Justice is “public officials at all levels must exercise the powers conferred on them in good faith, fairly, for the purpose for which the powers were conferred”.

Perhaps we need to lower our standards these days. We can take comfort in the thought that abuse of the law is, so far, still done only by properly qualified lawyers. The Liaison Office’s hilarious variations on “treason” are a treat to come later.