tim's experiment

Jetstar Hong Kong is a local company which wishes to run a low-cost, no-frills airline of the kind which everyone in Europe uses on shorthaul routes. If you are wondering why it has taken more than two years — with no end in sight — to achieve this modest objective, an interesting light is shed by a piece on the back page of this morning’s Business Post.

This is misleadingly headlined “Why is Jetstar so keen to become a Hong Kong airline?”. Jetstar is already a Hong Kong airline. It is a Hong Kong airline not allowed to operate. The reason for this is historic. When Hong Kong was returned to the bosom of the Motherland the rules about airlines were of necessity rewritten. Normally this would have involved the sort of local ownership rules imposed on television stations. But this would have had the unwanted effect of kicking both of the two incumbents out of business, because Hong Kong Airlines was owned on the mainland and Cathay Pacific in the UK. So the drafters came up with a new phrase. You could be a local airline if your “principal place of business” was Hong Kong. This is not a criterion used in other places. So when Jetstar applied to be a Hong Kong airline there was an opportunity for a long and expensive legal argument. This was eagerly taken up by the two incumbent airlines, who have the usual aversion to low-cost competition. Hence the two years and counting. Meanwhile Jetstar is, ironically, the only participant in the process which is Hong Kong-owned, mostly by Shun Tak.

The piece lurking under the headline offers an interesting conspiracy theory. The author, David Dodwell, asserts that no low-cost airline can hope to make a profit in Hong Kong, because of the “ferocious competition” here. So there must be some other reason for the project. It is, Mr Dodwell suggests, because a “local airline” will be represented in negotiations over landing rights and such matters between Hong Kong and other places. So they will know what is going on. Qantas, from which Jetstar rents its trade name, is a “troubled airline” so this does not matter too much, but Singapore Airlines is taking a stake in Hong Kong Airlines, so the Hong Kong government now has two “Trojan horses” to worry about.

This is a bit of a scare story. One part of it struck me as a bit odd. Mr Dodwell says he “sat through the tedium of the ATLA arbitration drama”. And you have to wonder why a sane person with no stake in the matter beyond a lingering suspicion of Trojan horse manure would do such a thing. Mr Dodwell, the newspaper informs us, is the “executive director of the Hong Kong Apec Trade Policy Group”. But this is not a full-time job. Mr Dodwell is also (where would we be without Google?) a senior counsellor for Vriens and Partners, and chief executive of Strategic Access Limited, “a Hong Kong-based strategic advisory and government relations firm.”  We are on the trail of something here. Never mind the strategic advice – Mr Dodwell earned an honest crust as a journalist for many years. What we are dealing with here is public relations for companies which do not have to worry about what the public thinks of them. They can work directly on the government.

And which of the local industrial behemoths does Mr Dodwell ply his pen for, which might involve him turning up for the tedium of the the ATLA hearings? No doubt this is a commercial secret, and there is more than one, and Mr Dodwell likes being bored in a public spirited sort of way. Still, in 2005 it appears that “David is account director for the Swire Group, Hong Kong Air Cargo Terminal (Hactl), Ocean Park, Hongkong Electric, Bechtel, Jardine Matheson, Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group and a number of Government clients”. The Swire Group includes Cathay Pacific.

Clearly Mr Dodwell is doing a good job for his clients, whoever they are. Whether the South China Morning Post is doing a good job for its readers is another matter. Articles like this should be clearly labelled as press releases from one of the parties concerned.

Wow, what a lead story on Post Page 3 — the one they call “leading the news” — this morning. Only a corner left for a brawl in the cockpit of an airliner between two pilots. Similar squeeze for 17 people arrested in Malaysia for plotting “terror attacks”. Down the page goes a Xinhua-like piece on plans for “urban clusters” in Central China. Never mind that stuff. Lead dish of the day with the distinctive 60 point all caps headline is “10 pan-democrats indicate they may sign reform petition”. Exciting stuff. Some people might have preferred this as a front page lead, as the only thing the Post could find for that purpose was a story about the increasing use of robots in Guangdong factories. But there was something weird about the 10 pan-democrats story. Total absence of evidence.

Earlier the Post had a story indicating that a nameless individual had decided to collect signatures on a petition urging the pan-dems to vote for the goverment’s election package. Why this person was so shy was not explained. Not did the Post explain why it was willing to run a story on a completely unattributed and uncheckable basis. The latest update shamelessly depended on the same source, variously described as “the person who conceived and drafted the petition”, or “the instigator”. The Instigator, whoever it is, now claims that the petition has had a positive reaction. About 10 “public figures from the pan-Democratic camp” have “indicated their interest in signing” the thing. They also remain nameless. Indeed one must fear that in the end they will remain signatureless as well, since “indicating their interest” sounds suspiciously like a euphemism for “did not say no”.

The reporter, who was not, thank God, one of my students, devoted four paragraphs to the spooky organiser and his anonymous possible supporters, concluding that the split in the pan-democrats had deepened, because Nelson Wong and Alan Leong had expressed different views on the Great Matter when they met on a radio programme. Mr Wong’s reported reasons for wanting to “pocket” what was on offer were not quite the sort of thing advanced by officials. Apparently he said that “Leung has been telling lies every day and he might have a chance of re-election if the reform  is vetoed.” But Wong is in the Democrat Party, Leong in the Civic Party. Why should they be expected to agree?

“The pan-democrats” is a useful label for a group of politicians who have some things in common. But the pan-democrats are not a party or a church. Being shunted into that group by political correspondents does not oblige you to agree with all the other people in the group about everything, or indeed about anything. If someone in the DAB starts agitating for the reform proposals to be rejected, then that will be news. Pan-democrats can think what they like. Of course those who are members of parties may feel obliged or pressured to toe the party line. As our fictional DAB person will. But it is pointless to report that the pan-democrats are split. They are supposed to be split. If they wanted to be a party they would form one.

What really gets my goat is the anonymous signature collector. I realise there are times, especially on the mainland, when a person might wish to express a view anonymously out of concern for his or her personal safety, prospects of staying in work and out of prison, etc. But agitating in Hong Kong for people to support the government line does not come in that category. I also realise that in political plotting there is sometimes a stage in which one does not wish to publicise the preparations. Fair enough. But you cannot have it both ways. If you’re interested in publicity you should show yourself. It is time for this nameless collector of nameless signatures to stand up for what he or her believes in. Otherwise we are free to conclude that the Instigator is a coward, and probably a liar as well. This is politics. They don’t call it “public life” for nothing.

Two similar stories in Tuesday’s English-language newsrags, from which I think we can infer that somebody held a press conference. Amalgamating the information provided in both stories we can produce a list of dramatis personae who were present. For the Council On Smoking and Health: Executive Director Vienna Lai Wai-yin and chairman Antonio Kwong Cho-shing. For the Hong Kong University School of Public Health: Professor Lam Tai-hing and Associate Professor Daniel Ho-Sai-yin. The ostensible purpose of the proceedings was to announce the results of a survey, commissioned by COSH and conducted by the SPH, into the public’s use and knowledge about vaporisers, or e-cigarettes. The basic principle of these gadgets is that a little wire heats water, which you inhale. The water can according to taste be given a variety of flavours, or a drop of nicotine if you happen to be addicted to the stuff. Basically you are inhaling steam, which is harmless enough as long as it is not too hot, and in my youth was a popular folk remedy for a blocked nose.

However this is not the way COSH sees it. In the view of single-issue fanatics who have been persecuting smokers for years anything with cigarette in its name must be the work of the devil. So the purpose of the survey was to put some wind into the sails of the COSH effort (incorporated in newspaper ads the next day) to persuade the government to ban the gadget outright. Actually the survey did not amount to much. In fact it amounted to so little that the Post’s reporter ignored it altogether, regaling his readers instead with the old statistic that an earlier survey had found 1.8 per cent of respondents were using the things. I shall refrain, although nobody else did, from describing the activity as “smoking” because this is flagrantly misleading: there is no smoke, and no tobacco. The resemblance to smoking is in the fevered imagination.

For the ostensible purpose of the press conference we had to turn to the Standard, which reported that the survey was conducted last year, and that 809 respondents were interviewed, of whom 74.5 per cent were “aware” of vapeing (as fans call it).  The survey also found that 4.4 per cent of the people aged 15-29 had vaped at least experimentally, compared with only 1 per cent of those aged over 30. At this point readers with highly-tuned statistical antennae will smell a rat. How many of the respondents, they will wonder, were in each age group? This is an important matter because if the size of the sample is too small then the conclusion is worthless, and it is no good having a sample of 800 if a question is only addressed to some of them. Happily this small detail was revealed. There were only 248 people in the 15-29 age group. That is not enough. To meet academic standards, which are not particularly exacting, you need what is known technically as a 95 per cent confidence level, and to reach that you need a sample size somewhere in excess of 400. So the survey result which we were being invited to share, in horror, was garbage.

Of course there was plenty of other stuff to write about. This consisted of what the lawyers call obiter dicta, which is the polite legal term for judges rabbiting on about matters on which they have heard no evidence. So Prof Lam was worried that there were harmful chemicals in e-cigarettes, which is disputable, and expressed fears that young people would get “hooked” on them. Come of it, Prof: no nicotine, no addiction. Prof Ho thought that new harmful ingredients “kept emerging”, which is nonsense, and cited two substances which have to be found to be carcinogenic at high temperatures. This is a well-known piece of research, and the temperatures required are much higher than those supplied by vapeing. If you tried to inhale steam at such temperatures you would cook your tongue. Prof Ho also recalled as a triumph that the government had banned mouth snuff in the 80s, “so that’s why today we don’t see any cases of people with cancer because they chewed…” Dear me. This has the logical structure of the lady in New York who used to go outside her house every morning and bang a gong. A neighbour asked her why she did it. “To keep the tigers away,” she said. “But there are no tigers round here,” said the neighbour. “You see. It works!” Prof Ho also, we were told “rebutted the claim” that e-cigarettes were safe, saying that there was no evidence to prove this.

The COSH gloss on all this was interesting. They thought the government should follow the WHO advice that e-cigarettes should be regulated in the same way as traditional products. By which they mean totally banned. But traditional products are not totally banned, so there seems to be a piece missing in this argument somewhere.

Both newspapers managed to get a quote from the Sec for Food and Health, Ko Wing-man, who told the Standard that the government would “carefully study” the call for legislation and told the Post that the government was “inclined to agree with it”. Mr Ko thought there was a “proven risk” that youngsters would graduate from vapeing to smoking.

Now let us make a few things clear. The hysterical opposition to vapeing has no scientific basis. Here is the comment by Marcus Munafo, professor of biological psychiatry at Bristol University, on a rather similar attempt to present the issue as a youth epidemic in the UK: “To describe electronic cigarette use as ‘a new drug use option’ and part of ‘at-risk teenagers’ substance using repertoires’ is unnecessarily alarmist, given the evidence that regular use among never smokers is negligible, the lack of evidence that electronic cigarette use acts as a gateway to tobacco use, and the likely low level of harm associated with electronic cigarette use.” The evidence from places where vapeing has been common for some time is overwhelming: the vast majority of users are people who want to stop smoking cigarettes. It is also widely known that many of them succeed. Some of those who switch to vapeing because it doesn’t require them to forgo their nicotine fix do actually find that they can gradually reduce the nicotine content to zero. The addiction, it seems, is as much to having something to fiddle with, put in your mouth and suck as it is to the actual nicotine content. Switching to vapour is the most successful way yet invented for hard-core smokers to avoid the substantial known hazards of real cigarettes. So if vapour is banned the consequences will be that large numbers of people who might have lived longer healthier lives will stick to their cancer sticks and die young. This is a curious way to improve public health.

I would also like to urge the School of Public Health at HKU to consider whether it is really appropriate and desirable for it to put out junk results in support of public agitation which it approves of. The purpose of such a school is to elucidate the scientific facts on which policy should be based, not to squirt propaganda into the public prints.

If the profs wish to continue as a political force then they need to get their heads round a few general public policy principles which are relevant here:

1. It is not acceptable to ban activities for adults because they would be dangerous for children. There are many things which would be dangerous for children, ranging from smoking, drinking and driving to getting married and signing contracts. The solution is to put minimum age limits on the activity, not to rule it out for people who are old enough to make their own decisions.

2. An activity should not be banned merely because it is dangerous for the person who chooses to do it. People in Hong Kong are free to hang-glide, Scuba dive, ride bicycles in busy roads, free-fall parachute, or join the French Foreign Legion if they wish. Restrictions on freedom are justified to prevent harm to others.

3. It is not up to people who invent or choose a new activity to prove it is safe or see it banned if they cannot do so. Those who wish to use the coercive power of the state to impose restrictions have the burden of proving that they are necessary. You cannot “rebut” the argument that something has no known hazards so far by pointing to the possibility that some will be discovered in the future. I realise that where the issue concerns chemicals and the human body this will sometimes mean that hazards are discovered the hard way. But if things are to be banned on the basis of scientific speculation we shall never make any progress. When the first railway trains appeared it was seriously predicted that if they travelled at 40 miles an hour the passengers would be unable to breathe.

4. People who want proposed prohibitions taken seriously would do well to avoid the argument that the controversial item has already been banned in Singapore.

I don’t like to rain on anyone’s funeral parade, but am I the only person in Hong Kong who thinks the posthumous adulation of Lee Kwan Yew is grossly excessive?

We are, since great antiquity, urged to say of the dead nihil nisi bonum. A pleasing convention. Also the passage of time lends a certain patina to the great figures of our youth, even if they were not particularly popular at the time. Most English people now look back in sorrow rather than anger at Harold Wilson, for example. Aged rabble rousers like Tony Benn are treated as national monuments as they enter their dotage, and earn praise from surprising quarters when they finally pop their clogs.  Longevity itself commands respect, so that people who have never liked a Cliff Richard song still concede that the lad has had an extraordinary career.

Having said which, I do not recall Mr Lee as one of the great figures of my youth. In fact from a safe distance, and seen through the sort of independent media he did not allow in Singapore, he appeared as an obnoxious little despot, bullying those he could bully and fawning on those he could not. Appreciation of his successive electoral successes was diminished by the amount of cheating and fixing going on. A slightly loony air was added to the story by warnings about chewing gum, tourists being refused admission if their hairstyles were unconventional, and scientifically illiterate concerns that the stupid were breeding more quickly than the intelligent. I do not know if it was ever true that you could be jailed for failing to flush the loo in Singapore, but it is significant that this was widely believed.

It is interesting that Mr Lee inspired so much praise, even when he was alive, from other political leaders, but this is a symptom of a phenomenom first identified, I think, by Conor Cruise O’Brien. He observed that over every gathering of international leaders hovers the odour of an Orwellian pigsty, and that the pigs have an instinctive fellow feeling for each other based on their shared love of power, however obtained. Mr Lee was, of course, not much more than a puffed-up Mayor by international standards, but he made up for this by virtually achieving power for life.

In some ways he reminds of those Renaissance princes who ruled Italian cities and followed the principle enunciated by Machiavelli that it is better for a prince to be feared than to be loved. Success is getting safely into your grave without being overthrown or invaded, with bonus marks for passing the job on to your eldest son.  Mr Lee would perhaps not mind being compared to Lorenzo the Magnificent. But where are the artistic masterpieces?

Mr Lee’s economic achievements seem a bit oversold. Other Asian entities managed to combine dramatic growth with a measure of civilisation and even democracy. He can be credited, perhaps, as an early observer of the fact that if you want foreign investment the easiest way is to provide international business with what it likes in a foreign country: a functioning phone system and a workforce with no rights.

The idea that Singapore is now a first-world country holds up if you look at per capita GDP. If you look at living standards it doesn’t. I read an interesting piece of research the other day by a Singaporean writer comparing his country with Norway, which happens to be similar in population, GDP, and the size of its sovereign wealth fund. He found that 80 per cent of Singapore’s population earned less than a cleaner on the statutory minimum wage in Norway. The Singapore people paid more in tax and compulsory savings than the Norwegian street sweeper, and got less for it. In Norway, to start with, education and health care are free.

Singapore does, on the other hand, have a surprisingly large number of millionaires. It’s a paradise if you’re rich, but most of the population isn’t. The fact that the Lee family is on the up-market side of the distribution makes it less acceptable, in my view.

I realise that some of the adulation now being bestowed on Mr Lee’s ghost comes from people who would like to recruit him as an early supporter of the view that Chinese people were so traumatized by four centuries of being ruled by foreign emperors that they have neither the ability nor the wish to rule themselves. If a Western person said this it would be an example of prejudice and discrimination. If a Chinese person says it then it’s a legitimate yearning for strong government. This is the political counterpart of those sexual tastes which run to leather straps, chains and whips. And in both instances, the enthusiast envisages himself as the one with the whip.

I find these days that the only part of the SCMPost with thoughtful and provocative writing on it is the back page of the Business section. But this week has seen a little epidemic of writers shooting themselves in the foot. First we had the former banker explaining that there was no need to worry about banks employing the offspring of their rich customers, because these rich kids did not have the pathological levels of greed necessary to succeed in the industry.  Consequently they would not reach positions of power. Very reassuring.

Then there was the lady who complained of the “parasites” who bought into index or tracker funds because they were too cheapskate to pay for the “research and analysis” needed to run a proper investment trust. Leaving aside the oddity of anyone in the financial industry accusing other people of parasitism, this seemed a perverse interpretation of what people were doing. After all someone who decides to invest in a tracker fund may not be a cheapskate at all. He may just be an alert investor who has read “A random walk down Wall Street,” “The Black Swan” and the relevant works of Michael Lewis. He is aware of the copious amount of research indicating that the “research and analysis” does not produce any worthwhile information on the future movement of prices, and that actively traded funds regularly and predictably produce worse returns than the simple index-following ones. Oddly enough the Post’s leader writer was making exactly this point on Thursday.

These offerings were just the warm-up for Wednesday’s effort, alluringly leadlined “Parallels with the Klan”, and decorated with an ancient picture of a Ku Klux Klan meeting. This piece started with eight reasonable paragraphs about the problems presented by mainland shoppers, parallel traders etc. and the possible solutions. At this point we are more than half way through the article and the Klan has not yet been mentioned. In the ninth paragraph we are told that parallel trading has had another “local impact”. Some members of radical groups “behave as hooligans under the guise of populist politics to protest against the traders.”  Well hooligans is a bit strong for what is after all verbal abuse, however obnoxious that may be, but let us continue. “Some features of their behaviour bear resemblance to other organisations in history that were motivated by political ideology. The best researched in modern times is the Ku Klux Klan, which was examined by economist Steven Levitt in Freakonomics.”

Now this is hogwash. The Klan is not the best researched organisation in history motivated by political ideology, a questionable honour which probably belongs to the Communist movement in its various manifestations, with the Nazi party and its off-shoots a close second. Freakonomics is a good book, but it covers a variety of topics; only one chapter is on the Klan. Our author summarises this chapter in his next five paragraphs but it is clearly dishonest to claim that he picked the Klan because of its international historic status. He picked it because it was handy and disreputable: a good stick with which to beat a group he disapproves of. And are we told what are the features which the Klan has in common with the unnamed hooligans opposed to parallel trading? No we are not. All we get is the limp conclusion that “the Hong Kong public should also be better informed about the myths and truths behind … local groups that advocate extremist ideologies.” No details are supplied of the extremist ideologies involved in protesting against crowds of tourists. No group is named, no ideology outlined, nobody is quoted. Prejudice floats free from any contact with evidence or reality.

After reading this offering one can only weep for the trees which were sacrificed to put this poisonous piece of propaganda on local breakfast tables. After all no local political organisation is in the same class as the Klan, which used to be anonymous and homicidal. They used to lynch people, for heaven’s sake. Odious comparisons can be offered about anyone if no evidence is required. Is the Voice of Loving Hong Kong like the SA? Is the Special Branch like the NKVD? Is the government information coordinator like Dr Goebbels? This sort of thing does not get us anywhere.

The only comfort I can draw from this sorry mess is that it was not perpetrated by a journalist. The author was one Richard Wong, who is described in the usual endnote as “Philip Wong Kennedy Wong Professor in Political Economy at the University of Hong Kong”.  He’s a teacher? Words fail me.

Well it happens to all of us at one time or another. We say something stupid, and when this is pointed out we say we that was not what we meant at all. The first symptom of foot in mouth disease is the “I didn’t really say that” line.

Which brings us to Michael Chugani’s piece in the Post this morning. Mr Chugani says he “chuckled at the feeble attempts to make me out as a fan of the world’s dictators just because I said Hong Kong needed firm leadership.” Well it is always nice to find that one has given a reader pleasure. I am always entertained when a columnist in the Post (circulation in the hundreds of thousands) decides to waste his precious space commenting on my blog (read by 50 people on a good day). But Mr Chugani is not inhibited by irrrelevant shibboleths like accuracy, because he did in fact not just say that Hong Kong needed firm leadership. Indeed if that were all he had said there would have been no reaction from anyone. He said we needed a dose of dictatorship, which is not the same thing at all. We can most economically see the difference by considering who might be considered suitable examples. Leadership: Lincoln, Kennedy, Churchill, Mandela, Gandhi. Dictatorship: Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Galtieri, Mao. Got it, Michael?

Now let us dispose of a fringe matter which is bothering Mr Chugani, which is that people commented on his possession of an American passport, “as if a Hong Kong-born Indian naturalised as a US citizen has no right to speak his mind”. Nobody is suggesting that anyone has no right to speak his mind. Freedom of speech involves not only the right to speak one’s mind, but the right of other people to respond with the contents of their minds. Where Mr Chugani was born or the ethnic origins of his ancestors are not relevant. The fact that he has a US passport is, because it means that if we follow his advice and it all ends in tears he does not have to share the consequences. He is a surrender monkey with a “get-out-of-Colditz-free card. He is inviting us to a Titanic tour on which he has a lifeboat but many people do not. This is not a reason for rejecting an argument but it is certainly a relevant consideration. If your aeroplane fills with smoke and a voice on the speaker says there is “no cause for alarm” you would be interested to know whether the author of this reassurance was in the cockpit or on the ground.

Nestling in the fourth paragraph of the predictable diatribe against democrats and other usual suspects we have Mr Chugani’s defence in a nut-shell: “I said we needed a dose of dictatorship – read that as firm leadership – to get things done.” What Mr Chugani does not explain is why anyone should read “a dose of dictatorship” as “firm leadership”. After all the “dose of dictatorship” was not just an oratorical flourish or an elegant variation. It appeared twice, once at the beginning and once at the end. It looked as if the writer was pleased with it and the headline person took the hint and used it in the title. As the Law Lords put it in a long-ago libel case: “The rule is well settled that the true intention of any writer of a document … is that which is apparent in the ordinary and natural meaning of the written words.”  Most of us know what dictatorship means and if offered it as a political prescription we have a perfect right to ask which of the current dictators the author regards as a suitable model.

Well it is easy for prolific writers working in haste to slip in an ill-chosen word. No doubt Mr Chugani did not really mean he wanted a dictatorship. But that is what he said. Under these circumstances one does not expect an apology. But complaining that “anyone who wanted to understand would have known that,” as Mr Chugani does, is blaming the reader for not being a mind-reader. Next time silence might be a better option.

And be careful with those big words. Dictatorship is like war: the more you talk about it the more likely it is to happen.

The Chinese New Year is my favourite Hong Kong festival. There is fun, a week off, pleasant social occasions, agreeable rituals and none of that nonsense about buying people presents you hope they will like. Of late, though, I find myself wondering if it will still be this much fun in a year or two’s time. There are freedoms without which self-fulfilment and true happiness are impossible. They continue to wilt.

It was reported without comment, and even in some places with approval, that the attempt to sell toilet rolls with C.Y. Leung’s face on them had been prevented because the disrespectful bumf had been confiscated on the Mainland. Now as an exercise in freedom of speech having CY’s face on your bogroll probably counts as some sort of pinnacle of bad taste. But an exercise in free speech it is. No self respecting court in a free country would fail to recognise this as an infringement on the citizen’s right to express his opinion, favourable or otherwise, on his local leader. Yet here it passed without comment, even from the usual  “trouble-makers”. We have become inured to attempts by the national authorities to curb the rights guaranteed to us by the Basic Law, the Bill of Rights, and (giggle) the Constitution of the PRC. Apparently it is no longer worth complaining.

Then there was a story this week saying that the police had “taken down” some messages on the Internet. Once again the worrying thing about this was the points which were not explored. Since when did the police monitor the internet, and what for? Do they really have the power to “take down” items, and if so from what legislation? Is there a right to be notified, a right to appeal? Many years ago the right to censor stage performances was moved from the police to the Commissioner for Television and Entertainment Licensing. Censoring films has always been a matter for a separate body and broadcasters are answerable to an authority of their own. So what is going on here?

I wonder if this was what it was like in Germany in the 30s, or in Italy in the 20s. In more primitive societies you know when the tanks appear on the lawn of the Presidential Palace that you are going back to the middle ages. But in more sophisticated ones that does not work. What happens is that a regime appears which sells the idea that it will concentrate on livelihood matters, from which bourgeois notions of rights and freedoms are an unwelcome distraction. Some citizens overlook the resulting deficiencies in the matter of human rights in the hope that the concentration on “livelihood matters” will enrich them. Some overlook these deficiencies because they are dumb, because they are doing well out of the system, because they are sycophants or because they are easily scared. Anyone who complains is branded a miscreant and trouble-maker, and told to shut up even by his friends. Until one day we all look round and discover that rights and freedoms we took for granted have been spirited away. And the livelihood problems still have not been solved.

The media freedom frog is, it seems clear, now pretty well cooked. Will other freedoms now have their turn in the pot?

I do not mind the presence in Hong Kong of people who sincerely believe that since the Communist government of China is the only government they’ve got, they might as well get along with, or maybe even have a patriotic duty to support it. Nor do I criticise those who, having nowhere else to go, feel that it is not in their interests to be critical. What never fails to annoy is people whose passports and nationality come from places where human rights are taken for granted, but who nevertheless feel the urge to tell people here that such things are not for them. Which brings me to Michael Chugani, who told us in a column on Saturday that “What Hong Kong now needs is a sharp dose of dictatorship.”

Mr Chugani apparently believes this is the only antidote to the symptoms of social decay which he sees all around him: motorists stopping in yellow boxes, travellers being allowed to take large suitcases on the MTR or buses, and distilled water companies leaving their wares on the pavement. Mr Chugani elucidates the signs of a civilization on its last legs: taxi drivers negotiating over fares, construction sites ignoring noise laws, and a restaurant in Arbuthnot Road which plays loud music in the evenings. Possibly sensing that by this point in the proceedings readers may suspect the whole exercise to be satirical, we are now offered hospital waiting times and the abuse of public housing, which are at least serious public issues.

It’s all apparently the fault of legislators, who “clash daily over what exactly true democracy is,” while not being equally concerned about “polluted air, rampant illegal parking, overcrowded MTR trains, subdivided slum flats and the growing number of elderly poor.” Well unaccustomed though I am to defending legislators, this is clearly a bum rap. The majority of legislators are docile supporters of the government, with no interest in finding out what democracy might be, exact, true or otherwise. Mr Chugani, however, is by now busy with other discontents. “Surely leadership decisions can replace consultations on issues such as electronic road pricing … and expanding landfills.” And so we come to the triumphant conclusion that “A dose of dictatorship is what we need to get things done.”

Now we should not argue ad hominem and indeed Mr Chugani’s views would be horse manure whoever voiced them. But Mr Chugani is sensitive (and rightly so) in spotting signs of prejudice against Hong Kong’s ethnic minorities. It is sad to see him succumb to the prejudice so common in Western countries — that Asian people do not appreciate or need the rights which are taken for granted in Europe and North America. Mr Chugani presumably does not think the US needs a “dose of dictatorship”. After all to get his US passport he swore to “support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic”.  Anyway, enough of these particularities.

The problems with “a dose of dictatorship” start with the fact that you don’t get just a dose. History teaches us that the first thing dictators dispense with is any time limit on their own powers. They rarely leave office alive. You cannot turn dictatorship on and off like a tap. Freedoms once lost are rarely regained quickly or without a struggle.  The next problem is that dictators do not have a particularly good record when it comes to making decisions for the societies under their rule. It is, for example, not true that Mussolini made the trains run on time or that Stalin industrialized Russia. Hitler did build good roads. You want him back? The death toll caused by Chairman Mao’s loopy ideas is currently estimated at about 60 million. History does not record any dictator who was good at solving air pollution, overcrowded public transport, housing shortages or elderly poverty. Social improvement is not their forte. Dictators do not do prosperity. They do concentration camps, secret police, torture, assassination, lies, wars and famines.

No doubt it is frustrating that our rule-bound, consultation-happy system cannot guarantee the nocturnal tranquility of Arbuthnot Road. But there are worse problems than noisy music. Be careful what you wish for.

The nice thing about the print edition of the Post, as I fear I have said before, is that when really infuriated you can fling it on the ground and jump up and down on it. You can’t do that with an iPad. My ire yesterday was aroused by a piece on the housing crisis, which advanced the daringly contrarian view that no crisis existed. This will be news to people living in crowded and sordid places. One expects to find that it has been written by someone who does not himself live in a crowded and sordid place. Sure enough the author is one Ian Brownlee, who is the managing director of a firm of “planning consultants”. Not written from a squatter hut, then.

Mr Brownlee takes the official figure of 105,600 households “inadequately housed” and maintains that it is too large. It is interesting to see how this trick is performed.

Firstly Mr Brownlee accepts as beyond dispute that all residents in public housing are “adequately housed”. This is an ambiguous concept, of course. Does adequately mean safely sheltered from rain or wind, with access to a toilet somewhere. Or does it mean the sort of place in which we can imagine Mr Brownlee himself feeling comfortable? Look at it this way. If you take the footbridge from the Lucky Plaza podium roughly Northeast you will get a good look at Lek Yuen Estate, and in particular at a few units which have been left empty because they are unacceptably close to the flow of passing pedestrians. So you can see the amount of space which our local housing chiefs think is “adequate” as a family home. It is about the size of my car port. Public housing dwellers in North Lancashire might allocate this much space to their whippets. The public housing in which I spent my youth was built in the early 50s in a period of post-war austerity. It was, nevertheless, a house, with living and dining rooms downstairs, along with kitchen, small toilet and space outside for the dustbin and coal store. Upstairs there were three bedrooms and a bathroom. This was not luxurious. Heating was provided only by an open fire in the living room and there were no arrangements for a car at all. The history of Hong Kong public housing is a story of ferocious parsimony, reflected in tiny flats, lifts which stop only on selected floors, no gardens, no dogs … The oddities resulting include the fact that most Hong Kong people never entertain at home (the flat is already full) and many schoolchildren do their homework in public places (the flat is effectively one room). Hong Kong public housing flats rarely feature in Hong Kong films, because by the time you get the producer, director, cameraman, sound man, continuity person, lighting wizard and prop wrangler into the flat … there is no room for actors.

The point I am trying to make is that whether a public housing dweller is “adequately” housed depends on how many people are living in the same flat. As well as the well-publicized cases of “rich tenants” there are also less well-publicized cases of desperate overcrowding. It is misleading to imply that anyone in public housing must ipso facto be considered to have no unmet housing needs.

Now we get to private housing. Mr Brownlee notes that the official line is rather confusing: “not all people in inadequate housing are necessarily inadequately housed,” according to the Long Term Housing Strategy. Confusing indeed. But Mr Brownlee is not exactly a model of clarity himself. He starts going through the official list of the “inadequately housed”. The first is those living in “temporary structures, huts or illegal rooftops”. Wait, says Mr Brownlee. These are made of wood and tin sheet. But these are acceptable building materials in Canada and New Zealand. Therefor these people are not necessarily inadequately housed. Note the interesting logical structure here. You may feel that an igloo in Hong Kong is a poor long-term housing investment but packed snow is an acceptable building material in Canada so you can stop complaining.

Then we come to people living in converted industrial buildings. Again in other cities “loft-style” accommodation is common and accepted so we should accept it here. Indeed Mr Brownlee claims to know of many “unauthorised” high-end loft apartments in Hong Kong. I find this difficult to believe. I am sure many people would be happy to convert part of a factory building into a luxurious “loft-style” apartment. I would quite like to have a go myself. But the idea that large number of people have undertaken this expensive process on an “unauthorised” basis, meaning they can be thrown out at the drop of a Land Office pen, is a bit difficult to swallow. Mr Brownlee notes that such conversions would be feasible in Hong Kong “if fire safety requirements could be met” but the reason why these dwellings are automatically classified as “inadequate” is because the fire safety requirements are not met. People are living in death traps.

Then we come to people living in shared accommodation. The line will now be becoming familiar: in other countries shared accommodation is accepted for “people at a certain stage of their lives” so we should not classify such people as inadequately housed. But we are not comparing like with like here. Shared accommodation is acceptable for people like students, who want something cheap and temporary which is not a home, but as a permanent arrangement for a family it is questionable. If it is affordable the space is going to be tight. If people are desperate they are not going to pick their flatmates. It’s a recipe for misery.

Mr Brownlee now turns to subdivided flats. Curiously we are not offered any international comparisons on this topic, and he concedes that there are “situations in which the physical conditions in these units are not acceptable”. But there are also, mirabile dictu, “good standard subdivided flats that accommodate people who prefer this form of affordable housing to other options”. I think this is hogwash. Mr Brownlee should have been required to provide a few examples before his piece was printed. The majority, the vast majority of subdivided flats are dangerous, squalid and overcrowded. People who prefer them to “other options” are the people whose other options comprise the local fly-overs.

Mr Brownlee notes with approval the government’s line that all other people in private housing are “adequately housed” and notes triumphantly that even the government’s figures (which he disputes as too pessimistic) show that 95 per cent of the population is “adequately housed”. Therefor there is no housing crisis. Actually I rather agree with Mr Brownlee’s further conclusion, which is that the government should not panic and should not reallocate land properly reserved for other uses, but should build properly planned new towns. But there is no reason why proper planning should not be done urgently and attempts to stir up complacency are a public disservice.

What people think is adequate housing will of course change over time. What was an accceptable alternative to a squatter village in the 1950s will be regarded as an insulting suggestion now. Many Hong Kong people have traveled overseas and have seen for themselves that houses in Canada and New Zealand may be built with the same materials as temporary structures here but they are built on a much more spacious scale. It is no longer regarded as a privilege to have three generations of the family sharing 600 square feet. Hong Kong housing is by international standards indecently crowded and outrageously over-priced. Quibbling over definitions to magic the problem away is not going to help.