tim's experiment

I am fed up with people saying and writing that the CE’s lack of popularity is not his fault; it is the result of a faulty system which would not work whoever was in charge of it. This is rubbish.

It is of course true that the system does not help. Hong Kong people want the CE to be someone they like, trust and admire. Beijing, which in practice is in a position to fix the election, wants someone which it likes and trusts. Unfortunately someone who is popular with Hong Kong people will for that reason be distrusted in Beijing, and similarly a CE who makes frequent visits to Beijing will not be trusted in Hong Kong, even if actually he gets his orders from the local Liaison Office. The trips are a treat.

Clearly this means that being the CE is a demanding job which requires considerable agility and in which universal acclaim is an unlikely fringe benefit. That does not mean it has to be the catastrophe which we now behold. It is not just that CY Leung is widely regarded as a slippery customer who lied his way into office, or that he has shamelessly used the public appointments system to pack his cabinet, and many other places, with obsequious mediocrities. Though both those things are true. It was sad last week to see the press coverage of the newly appointed President of Lingnan University. The lucky gentleman concerned is widely known as a friendly soul and a proficient academic administrator with an excellent record in his previous job as a Dean. That cut no ice with the political commentariat, who zeroed in as one man on the fact that the gentleman concerned had been a Leung supporter in the CE election. A spokesman for the appointing committee pointed out that they had not asked any of the candidates about their political affiliations. No doubt this is true. Unfortunately some people’s political affiliations are widely known. And jobs for the boys and girls has become a government theme song.

But it is also worse. Mr Leung has an uncanny knack for saying the wrong thing. On Sunday, for example, he announced that the plans of the Occupy Central movement were clearly illegal and would be treated as such. In our system it is not for the executive, or the Chief Executive, to decide what is legal and what is not. That is a matter for the courts. Maybe Mr Leung has been licking the nearest available jackboot for so long that he thinks all legal systems work the mainland way, in which the political leadership decides who should be jailed for ten years and the courts merely follow their instructions. In any case, Mr Leung’s own legal record hardly suggests a strong commitment to the rule of law. The unfortunate fact is that we are saddled with a CE who cannot urge people to obey the law without a good many of us getting an irresistible urge to giggle.

Actually we don’t know what form Occupy Central will take yet. Protests, even those including civil disobedience, can take a variety of forms, ranging from a short sit-down in an already pedestrianised Sunday street to an attempt to storm the Stock Exchange in trading hours. It is by no means certain that the best response to the methods eventually selected will be a violent one and it is no means certain that the end result of it all will be disorder, tear gas, pepper spray, street battles etc. Given the current levels of distrust, though, it is not a good idea for the government to make pessimistic predictions.  If Mr Leung predicts blood in the streets now there will be a suspicion, should it materialise, that this is because the forces of order were following bloodthirsty orders from him, and not because of over-enthusiasm on the part of the protesters. Mr Leung may feel that his reputation could get no worse. This is not the case. Tanks in Statue Square, anyone?

I have been reading a lot lately, possible as a form of escape from the frustrations of Hong Kong politics, which seem to revolve endlessly round the same unanswerable question – how can you ensure freedom in a region of an unfree country.

So to books: this involved the pleasant task of revisiting Qiu Xiaolong. I first discovered Mr Qiu quite by accident in the Baptist University bookshop. Seeing a paperback with a colourful cover lurking amid all the solemn academic stuff I picked it up to ask what a nice girl like you was doing in a place like this. It turned out to be a mystery novel, Mr Qiu’s first. Now I am a bit picky about mysteries. When I was a kid I learned to read very early (my mother taught me, as was customary in respectable working class households in those days) and I developed a ferocious appetite for books. My parents desperately bombarded me with paperbacks in an effort to keep up and being pretty indiscriminate I read most of them. So at various times I read Sherlock Holmes, of course, Agatha Christie, who I thought over-rated, Chandler, Ellery Queen, whoever wrote the Saint books, Mickey Spillane, Ed McBain, and so on and on. Generally this did not survive adulthood, though I will read a Dalziell and Pascoe instalment any time I find one, And Mr Larsson’s trilogy is wonderful. Anyway I was interested enough to rescue Mr Qiu from academic exile and take him home.

The test of success for a mystery novel is whether, besides the mystery, it works as a novel. Are there interesting characters, are you drawn into an imagined world? Mr Qiu passes this test with flying colours. His novels (there are now six – I have them all) all concern a Shanghai cop, Chief Inspector Chen. He has a sidekick, of course, one Detective Yu, whose wife – a resourceful lady – is the only consistent female character. Inspector Chen has various romances but something always comes along to preserve his bachelor status. Generally in each book there is a murder, sometimes more than one. Inspector Chen has to navigate between police work and politics. Surprisingly often he is helped by his hobby – he is a poet and a serious student of Chinese literature. Mr Qiu lectures in this subject at an American university. He left China in 1989, which may or may not be significant, but he is clearly allowed to return because Shanghai is updated as the books go by. The books are highly recommended. They remind me of the work of H. H. Kirst, a German author who seems to have dropped out of favour lately, but whose books, at their best, explore the problems of a good man living in bad times — in his case Nazi Germany — and how to reconcile the desire to serve, the desire to see justice, and the desire to do the right thing in a politically poisonous environment.

One of the curious things about Mr Qiu’s books is the fixation with food. Meals are described with care and in detail. Frequently we are told about the preparation and the ingredients. This is not a plot device, except for one memorable scene in which Inspector Chen tries to get a serial killer to confess by bombarding him with “cruel dishes” in which animals are boiled alive, or otherwise abused. Generally though, this food thing is a part of the background. People are preoccupied with food. Every man his own Michelin guide. Meals, even street snacks, are described and relished in exquisite detail. I thought this was just a personal quirk – an attempt, perhaps. to achieve credibility by bombarding the reader with details.

Well perhaps not. This summer my wife and I are planning a cruise down the Danube. This is a luxurious and leisurely affair suitable to elderly retirees (thank you Alex) with the emphasis on culture and history. In preparation for this one of our friends loaned me a copy of Danube, a highly praised though now somewhat dated book by Claudio Magris (translated from the original Italian) recording a journey down the river and exploring the “tumult of history, literature and mythology” to be encountered on the way. Actually this is not the same as our trip – Magris is a land traveller and we will be on a boat. Also some of his descriptions are now hopelessly out of date because the book was written in the early 80s when many of the Danube countries were still in the Warsaw Pact, or if you prefer the Russian empire. This gives the book a poignant feel, because the author constantly comes across traces of that vibrant Middle European community through which the Iron Curtain had plonked itself.

Now, when we get to Bulgaria Magris wonders why his guide, a young lady called Kitanka, is so cheerful dspite the distressing circumstances of her country. And he considers a theory advanced by Vasov (I have no idea who Vasov is but apparently he wrote about life in Bulgaria when it was ruled by the Turks). “Oppression, he writes in his novel-epic of Bulgaria, has the privilege of making people’s happy; for when the political arena is closed, society seeks consolation in the immediate good things of life, in wine drunk under the trees, in love …”  I suppose good food would come into this category. So perhaps Mr Qiu is being observant rather then creative when he gives intelligent and moderately prosperous Shanghainese people an inordinate interest in the good things of the table.

And perhaps I shouldn’t be so rude about Hong Kong politics. At least we still have politics. And we have good food as well.

An interesting little storm has been stirred up – by Jasper Tsang of all people – about the problems of Exco. The basic problem of Exco is that nobody cares what it thinks any more. The fact that a proposal has been approved by Exco falls with a soundless plop into the well of public indifference. Even Legco members are not impressed.

The standard explanation for this, at least in the circles in which Jasper moves, is that it is much harder to impress Legco now that it has been politicised. They look back to a golden age before 1997 when Legco was more biddable, and hence approval by Exco was effectively the last hurdle which most policy proposals had to surmount. The fault is not in Exco, but in the circumstances which now surround it.

This is much too easy. Legco was not the only thing which changed in 1997. The change in Exco was more subtle. Under the colonial system Exco contained two groups. One was the government’s senior apparatchiks – the Chief Secretary and so on. The other was a group of people who were effectively (though not officially) ex officio — that is to say they were appointed because of the jobs they held. In some cases (the Commander British Forces, for example) this was quite explicit. In others (the Hong Kong Bank Chairman of the day) it was fairly shameless. In yet others it was more subtle (the representative of local millionaires). These people had certain characteristics in common. They did not owe their positions to the grace and favour of the Governor of the day.  They were eminent in their own fields and did not particularly need his praise and approval. Consequently their advice – though no doubt not disinterested – was at least free from fear. Membership of Exco was not a career pinnacle for this group. Many of them no doubt regarded it as a chore.

I do not suggest that the resulting advice was excellent. Sometimes it was abysmal. When the UK legalised homosexuality Hong Kong would normally have followed suit. This desirable reform was delayed for decades because the then representative of the local millionaires claimed that Chinese people “did not do that sort of thing.” Nor do I suggest that this willingness to entertain outsiders is a tribute to the open-mindedness of Governors. As they were imported outsiders it was simply not possible for them to fill Exco with friends and supporters. But at least Exco’s view was independent. It was a fresh look which did not duplicate either the civil service consensus or whatever bee was currently buzzing in the Governor’s bonnet. Exco’s powers to oppose were very limited. Requiring the Governor to give reasons in writing for overruling them sounds like a rather trivial obstacle, though no doubt the news that the Governor was at odds with the locals would have gone down very badly with his employers in London. Still, Exco approval meant something. It meant that a group of mature and reasonably intelligent people from a wide range of backgrounds had looked at a proposal and found it good, or at least not bad enough to make a fuss about. What does approval from Exco signify now?

Well the short answer is nothing. Chief Executives still have the apparatchiks to rely on. The other group now comprises the CE’s assorted sidekicks, supporters, sycophants and small horses. Many of them are career politicians or would like to be. Being on Exco is a huge social step up for them (and a business boost for some) so continued membership is highly desired. It also appears that at least some of them are vetted by the PRC Liaison Office in Hong Kong. There was an intriguing little story the other day relating that Mr Alan Lee had been asked by a Mainland official if he could suggest any new Exco members. He duly offered a name. Weeks later he heard that the individual concerned was regarded as unsuitable. Now Mr Lee has been around for a while. He knows how official minds work and we can I think take it that he did not nominate a conspicuous member of the Martin Lee Fan Club. So one wonders what the problem with his nominee was.

Tracing Exco’s problems back to 1997 obscures the fact that some of them are of recent vintage. The various friends and supporters recruited by Messrs Tung and Tsang may not have been inspiring, but at least they were more or less honest. It appears that many of Mr C.Y. Leung’s most enthusiastic supporters backed him because they were, or expected to be, in trouble with the law. No doubt in such circumstances membership of Exco helps. It hardly increases public respect for the administration, though, and leaves you wondering about Mr Leung. Has the poor man no real friends?

A nasty little accident befell Mr Alex Lo the other day. Mr Lo has often provided provocation for a piece here, because the poor man has to write every day. This is a lot. Bernard Levin used to write three days a week. In my prime I could manage seven columns a month. Mr Lo has to do his thing on Page 2 five days a week, so thought is sometimes a touch hasty. Anyway on Monday he did a piece on the international story which announced that Hong Kong people were global leaders in racism. It then transpired that there was a mathematical error in the original information. So Hong Kong people are not racist after all. On Tuesday Mr Lo apologised and will, perhaps, be more sceptical about social science in future. Still, this is the sort of accident which could happen to anyone. As a columnist you comment on what appears in the news. If that turns out to be wrong then you comment may turn out to be unjustified. It’s a normal hazard.

However on the tail of his musings on racism Mr Lo wandered into another matter. Hong Kong people, he said, like to “direct their animus towards the mainland Chinese”. This was not racism by the dictionary, but “just as shameful”. And he went on “we think we are just morally, politically and culturally superior, mostly because we know little or nothing about what’s really happening on the mainland beyond cliched narratives found in the mass media.” I cannot resist the thought at this point that the last sentence qualifies as a cliched narrative in itself.

I am not sure which part of this to disagree with first. Let us start with the cliched narratives. Turning to the China pages on the same day we find stories on pollution in Beijing, graduate unemployment, the suspected hijacking of a fishing boat by the North Korean navy, local governments cracking down on environmental protests, an academic suggestion that the Chinese Communist Party would be healthier if there was an official way to leave it, a graft scandal, and a long story about a security equipment exhibition which notes among other things that China spends more on internal security than it does (officially) on defence. This is a normal day’s crop, I suppose. And it would, perhaps, lead Hong Kong people to suppose that in some ways we are superior, because we have the rule of law, fair elections and freedom to protest, and in other ways we are not. That does not look like a particularly misleading picture to me. China is a police state. That is not a cliched narrative; it is a fact.

In any case, why should we suppose that Hong Kong people get most of their ideas about the mainland from the mass media? Most Hong Kong people are free to visit the mainland any time. Many of them do so at least once a year. Some of them go much more often. Mainland friends, relatives, fellow students and recent immigrants are all over the place. It seems to me extremely unlikely that “we know little or nothing” except what we can glean from the media. In fact most people have no difficulty in detecting that the picture of the mainland presented in, say, the China Daily is missing some important features.

Trudging on through the errors we come to the claim that having a jaundiced view of mainlanders is not quite racism but just as bad. No it isn’t. Racism is a poison which leads to prejudice, discrimination and oppression. Having a derogatory stereotype about people from some parts of your own country is a minor sin as long as you can keep a sense of humour about it. Flanders and Swann’s satirical song about the superiority of the English over the other inhabitants of the British Isles can be found here:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdY1Y5XNJBY&list=PLDF3C913CACF01915

Hong Kong people do, I agree, have a somewhat derogatory stereotype about mainlanders who turn up in Hong Kong. This has nothing to do wtih ignorance of the mainland. It is because of the spectacle of whole blocks of flats sitting empty while the mainland moneylaunderers who own them wait for prices to go higher, of whole streets devoted to selling overpriced luxury goods, and people behaving badly on public transport. Like all stereotypes this is unfair, and like most stereotypes it contains a grain of truth. Most of us have been elbowed aside by a pushy PTH-speaker on the MTR by now. But this sort of friction is an almost universal consequence of mass tourism. When I worked in Blackpool they had a thing about Glaswegians. The Glaswegian reputation for excessive drinking and ensuing violence was not entirely unjustified. During the relevant fortnight the Glasgow police used to send a deputation down to the Blackpool railway station so that those of their regular customers who were already fighting drunk when they got off the train could be sent straight back home. But on the whole people did not take this too seriously and sober Scots were treated just like anyone else.  The situation is more delicate if the visitors are conspicuously well off. As a student my favourite holiday playground was Yugoslavia, as it then was. It was important when visiting there to establish that you were not German. The Germans visited in large quantities and they were all much better off than the average local citizen. This does not go down well.

So in some ways it may be convenient that Hong Kong people are not too impressed by mainland visitors. At least we are not jealous. We love our locusts.

The last piece on indecent exposure produced a burst of visits and comments rarely seen in this tranquil corner of the internet. So I can add some further details to the story.

In the first place, my suspicion that the use of “binding over” instead of prosecution would be misinterpreted was swiftly born out. A lawyer friend emailed the helpful suggestion that perhaps the case was shaky (the touching was arguably inadvertent or accidental) or it was a case of one person’s word against another’s. This was an entirely understandably inference, as the prosecution should perhaps have expected.

However in this case it was not justified. The perpetrator did not suggest at the time that the offence was inadvertent. On the contrary he defended it vociferously as a predictable response to the victim’s dress and appearance. The word “slut” floated through the conversation at this point. Readers will be able to fill in the rest. Also there was a willing witness. I was informed of these small details by the victim, who also sent me a couple of emails, and this brings us to a further interesting snippet.

Before the court case, she was telephoned by Mr Kevin Zervos. What, you wonder, not THE Kevin Zervos, titan of the letters page, Scourge of the Money Launderers, and Director of Public Prosecutions? Yes, the very same. Both of us found this rather surprising. After all if your case is so trivial it is not worth prosecuting why would the DPP be handling it personally? It is like rolling up to the Park n’ Shop check-out and finding Mr Li Ka-shing working the till.

It seems that Mr Zervos wished to explain what was going on, which is that a little-known legal procedure was being used. I have complained about this before. What happens is that when you know you are going to be charged with an offence you go to an extremely expensive lawyer. Only an extremely famous and expensive firm of solicitors will do. You get them to write a letter which is the literary equivalent of that scene in Chinese imperial court soap operas in which an errant eunuch slaps his own face several times. Grovelling abjectly on your behalf the expensive lawyer asks the prosecutor to consider several matters which should properly be decided by the presiding magistrate, like did you mean it, was it really that serious, and are you a good boy the rest of the time, and to decide these in your favour. The letter then expresses your anguish, shame and contrition, and suggests that these should be regarded as a condign punishment in themselves, and it is therefore unnecessary in the public interest to proceed with the prosecution. And, surprisingly often, the Department of Justice falls for this one-sided barrage of flannel and decides to let you off. As it did in this case.

Another gift in my mail box came from a regular supporter who thought that the case I had discussed made an interesting contrast with one which occurred in the same week. This involved a gentleman who had been caught taking up-skirt pictures with his iPhone. The Department of Justice (as we have to call it) had prosecuted him for obtaining access to a computer for an illegal or dishonest purpose. The magistrate had very sensibly dismissed the charge on the grounds that a mobile phone was not a computer. In the latest instalment of this case the prosecution appealed to a High Court judge and persuaded him that a telephone is a computer so the charge should have led to a conviction. It seems that the judge did not have the assistance of any arguments for the defence, because there was no mention of some other flaws in the prosecution’s line of argument. Defence counsel, had there been one, might have pointed out that the relevant part of the Crimes Ordinance penalises dishonest access, not dishonest use, and there is nothing dishonest about accessing your own iPhone. He might have gone on to point out that up-skirt photography, while no doubt unsavoury, is not in itself either illegal or dishonest. But there we are. It’s easy to score when there’s no goalkeeper.

Well this is all very interesting, and taking it all together we can draw some conclusions about the way the law works in Hong Kong. According to a reccent article Mr Zervos, a notorious workaholic, likes to address gatherings of citizens and schoolchildren about the finer points of his work. ” ‘It is part of my job to educate the community to make the public more aware of how the criminal justice system works,’ Zervos said. ‘When they [the public] know it and are more informed about it, they will become more understanding and supportive of the system.’ ” Well I don’t know what this little episode is going to do for the system, which it seems works like this. If you are a local gent who is caught taking upskirt pictures the Department of Justice will spend considerable sums of money and bend the law into a pretzel to make sure you are convicted under a law never intended for the purpose, whose main attraction is that the maximum penalty is five years jail. If on the other hand you are a prosperous expat with a good lawyer who drunkenly subjects a lady to unsolicited simulated canine sex in broad daylight … then you will not be prosecuted at all. We are all equal before the law. But some of us are more equal than others.

Update: Zervos speaks – http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1256732/chief-prosecutor-kevin-zervos-urges-compassion-first-time-sex

I do not often feel the need to write about excessive leniency in the Hong Kong judicial system, where the quality of mercy is often strained to the point of disappearance. But what on earth was going on in the indecent assault case reported in this (Wednesday) morning’s newspapers?

This was, as the magistrate herself observed, “quite a serious case”. The defendant had admitted “bumping a woman from behind with his pelvis” while waiting at the entrance of the Hong Kong Stadium. I take it that “bumping her with his pelvis” doesn’t quite capture the full flavour of the physical contact but we won’t go into that. Readers who are alert to dates (the incident happened on March 23) and places will infer a bit of Sevens fall-out. And yes, the defendant was, as they say in legal circles, “under the influence of alcohol” or as we Cockneys used to say “Brahms and Liszt”. Rhyming slang, dears. Pissed.

OK so here we have a defendant admitting a quite serious offence and not much in the way of mitigation. Many of us have done things while drunk on which we look back in embarrassment if not shame,  but booze is not really an excuse. So what happens? The charge was withdrawn and he was “bound over” in the sum of $1,000 for a year. This is not so much a slap on the wrist as a pat on the head. If he manages to avoid drunken depravity at next year’s Sevens he gets his money back. One is tempted at this point to write something rather scathing about the magistrate, but this surprising outcome may not be her fault.

Being bound over is a curious and antiquated procedure. The magistrate in effect imposes a conditional fine to be paid only if you repeat the offence. It is not necessary for you to be convicted first, but you do have to consent to the arrangement. The usual reason for consenting is that the prosecution offers to withdraw the charge if you agree to be bound over instead. This used to be a popular little number for dealing with people who had been unruly in a minor way at demonstrations, or had gone a bit over the top in a personal dispute in which neither side was entirely in the right. You will note that the prosecution has to cooperate. And one does wonder why they chose to do so in this case.

After all local prosecutors have been engaging in all sorts of legal contortionism to throw the book at people guilty of the basically victimless crime of taking surreptitious photos of ladies’ underwear. Here we have a defendant who made real physical contact of a thoroughly upsetting kind with the victim, and he gets the kid glove treatment. I would like to believe that this unexpected outcome had nothing to do with the fact that he is an expat teacher in an ESF primary school. Would the system have been so forgiving of, say, a striking crane driver?

The problem with this sort of case is that it is thoroughly discouraging for potential complainants. It is, of course, not the purpose of the law to gratify aggrieved victims, but victims will not come forward at all if they believe that their complaint will not lead to any worthwhile consequences. It is widely believed that a lot of indecent assaults go unreported. This sort of case does not help.

Among the consequences of this way of dealing the matter is that it allows, indeed it may even require, the offender’s employer to ignore the whole thing. The ESF said that “as the case had been withdrawn” it was now a personal matter and nothing to do with them. This is a legally elegant solution but may leave some parents feeling nostalgic about the old days when teachers were supposed to be role models as well as instructors in the finer points of reading and writing. And if this gentleman’s employers feel they have to let the indecent assault go perhaps they could have a word about his drinking. One expects people to get drunk at the Sevens. But only serious addicts will be out of control while waiting to get in.

I am glad to see that somebody besides me (column by Albert Cheng in the Post the other day) is puzzled by the legal ongoings consquent on the fatal collision during the last National Day fireworks.
The skippers of both the boats concerned have been charged with manslaughter. On the face of it this is very odd. The Rules for the Prevention of Collisions at Sea are quite simple, of great antiquity and known to all professional seafarers. If you are overtaking another vessel it is up to you to keep clear. If you are on converging courses it is up to the helmsman with the other boat on his right to keep out of its way. If you are actually heading straight for each other then both should turn right. It appears from the evidence given at the Commission of Inquiry that one of the captains followed the rules and one did not. Actually this is not a great forensic feat because it was quite obvious from the location of the damage. It follows that the other captain did what he was supposed to do. So one wonders why he is also in the dock.

This is not the only questionable feature of the whole case. It seemed to me that the Commission wasted a great deal of time on rather irrelevant matters. No doubt this owed much to the legal talent for exploiting any opportunity to expend billable hours on a client’s behalf. Much attention was given, for example, to the fact that the chairs on the boat which sank were not securely screwed to the deck. But why should they be? This was a ferry, not a roller coaster. Fixing the chairs to the floor is just a convenience to increase the seating capacity. More luxurious boats of the same size have the furniture entirely free, as it is on land. Then there was the matter of the missing watertight door. Watertight doors are important and useful on warships, where one generally knows when someone is going to try to blow a hole in the hull. The doors can be closed when you go to Action Stations. They are useful also in large ocean liners like the Titanic, on which they can be closed remotely from the bridge in moments of crisis. On a small boat the door, if it leads anywhere useful, will probably be wedged open anyway.

It seems from the evidence produced that the Marine Department’s ship inspections are as effective and serious as the rather similar exercises inflicted on local universities. But the fact that some plates were a bit thinner than they were on the plans did not seem terribly relevant. They are not designed to stand up to being rammed anyway.

It may be that the Commission’s report will correct some of these deficiencies. I hope so. Because so far a great deal of attention has been given to what happened or should have happened after the collision, but nobody seems to have considered that perhaps we should try to make collisions less likely. It is strange for the Marine Department to issue notices before firework displays urging boat owners to check their lifejacket supplies and make a list of their passengers. People do not float any better if they are on a passenger list. Wearing life jackets makes sense on yachts and racing boats, whereon occasional accidents are part of the game. Ferry passengers do not sign up for swimming lessons. If the department really thinks that collisions are more likely on firework nights why does it not consider methods to make the traffic safer?

They might start by considering the speed limit. On old charts of Victoria Harbour a speed limit is marked, but this it seems is no longer enforced. Whenever I get on a catamaran ferry the driver whips it up to cruising speed within a minute of leaving the pier. This may be perfectly safe on a normal day, but this means rules framed in the days when most ships puttered about at 8 knots are now being applied by ferries doing more than 20. On nights when the harbour is going to be very crowded we could perhaps insist that drivers give the battle cruiser speeds a break. No doubt the department has experts who can suggest other possibilities. They should start from the point of view that we wish to eliminate collisions, not just make it easier to count the casualties afterwards.

So what, after all the words and demonstrations … and the song … are we to make of Mrs Thatcher? I must confess that like most English people of my age I do not approach this question with an open mind undisturbed by any previous thoughts or feelings.

Actually I thought Mrs Thatcher was the worst Education Minister who ever held the job and one of the reasons I moved to Hong Kong in 1980 was because I did not wish to be present during her Prime Ministership, which I thought would not be a happy period. As indeed it wasn’t, for a good many people. I bristled at the suggestion by a local columnist that her decision to abolish the supply of free milk to schoolchildren was an example of fearless and creative administration. It was a short-term political fix with distressing long-term consequences.

The history of “school milk” goes back to the Second World War, when large numbers of children were evacuated from London for their own safety and billeted with foster families elsewhere in the country. Most of the children provided with this service were from working class families. Most of the foster families were prosperous enough to have a spare bedroom or two. As a result of this coincidence it became widely known for the first time that rickets (a bone deformity caused by insufficient calcium in the diet) was endemic among the children of the poor. The solution adopted by the first post-war government was to issue to all schoolchildren a small bottle of milk every school day. In primary schools the teachers made sure that you drank it. In secondary schools it was optional. I did not personally like it. But as a piece of social policy this was a complete success. Rickets disappeared. Mrs Thatcher’s decision to stop the milk supply was an instant political success with calamitous long-term consequences. Rickets returned. Of course if you believe, as devout Thatcherists tend to, that the feeding of children is entirely up to their parents then the reappearance of child malnutrition will not bother you.

And this is what a good many people hate about the “Thatcher revolution”. It depended heavily on ignoring the consequences — particularly for the vulnerable — of politically tempting options. The argument that this was necessary — that her willingness to grasp nettles and tread on toes rescued the economy from the doldrums and led it to the sunny uplands of sustained growth — is not born out by the facts. The British economy grew no faster in the 80s and 90s than it had done in the 70s. None of these three decades matched the record of the 60s, when the policies which she despised were in their full flower.

Still if you expect prime ministers to solve the UK’s economic problems you are probably over-estimating the power which goes with the job. What bothered me about Mrs T was that she made all sorts of toxic ideas respectable, at least for a while. Her admirers describe her as “principled”, but her principles eerily coincided with the prejudices which had been for years the staple of conversation in Home Counties golf club bars and Conservative Association tea meetings. She did not like trade unions. She did not like nationalised industries. She did not like council housing programmes. She did not like welfare. She did not like foreigners who could not speak English. Especially if they spoke German. And like the Roman administrators of Britain she thought the territory north of a line between the Wash and the Severn Estuary was a barbaric country which needed only firm policing. If you manage to become prime minister than of course academics will queue up to dress your prejudices in the verbiage of political theory. And mandarins who share them will then translate the theories into policies.

If great unhappiness then results then you must not, I fear, complain if people sing happy songs at your funeral. The tragedy of Mrs Thatcher’s political life was that she was a good war Prime Minister. But unlike Winston Churchill she only had one small war in which to display this quality. Like Churchill she was no good at the peacetime stuff but she didn’t get his opportunities for heroics. In some ways she leaves a harder, crueller world.

Let us return briefly to education policy. When I was a student — as indeed when she was a student — everyone who won admission to university had his or her fees paid by the government. You also got a maintenance grant, which was inversely proportionate to your parents’ income. There were similar arrangements for post graduates. Many universities also offered scholarships. If you were a geeky type who was good at exams you could pay your way. When I describe these arrangements to students from the UK now they think I grew up on another planet.

I do not dance on people’s graves. A charitable epitaph might be: She made a lot of things happen. Not all of them good.

Well it’s nice to know that our local papers know what is important. No less than two columns in Wednesday’s SCMP were devoted to the fact that a Caucasian man in a rugby shirt had been seen urinating publicly during the Sevens. The results of this odd journalistic exercise were not encouraging. Alex Lo, who had seen the outrage, basically declined to comment on the grounds that journalists are hardly in a position to criticise public drunkenness. On this point I must entirely agree. Those of us who have been around the business for a while will mostly have personal histories which make this matter rather, well, personal. On the other hand Mr Lo rather lets the side down by not being terribly specific about what exactly he saw. The “young white male” was “in full view of dozens of commuters, pedestrians and patrons of a popular sushi bar…” But this does not really tell us where we are on the horror spectrum, because we do not know whether it was a front view or a rear one. Did the sushi consumers see more raw prawn than they were expecting, or are we just talking about a growing puddle here?
This did not trammel the muse of Mr Peter Kammerer, also uninhibited by the undisputed fact that he had not seen the incident. What seemed to be bothering Mr Kammerer was that Hong Kong racism was being directed unfairly at misbehaving mainlanders. His preferred remedy for this is that racism should be directed at errant foreign rugby fans as well.
In his eager pursuit of this curious quarry Mr Kammerer jumped eagerly to some unwarranted conclusions. He pointed out that the internet has an ample supply of clips of mainlanders peeing, or allowing their children to do so, in public places, and these often attract critical comments. Yet it seemed that the waiting bus queue treated to expat urination “although shocked, did not become outraged as they may have done had it been someone of another ethnic persuasion”. So the emotional reaction of the bus queue, as related by Mr Lo, did not reach the reaction which Mr Kammerer, who was not there, might have expected if the perpetrator had been peeing in Putonghua. This is a pretty fragile peg on which to hang several hundred words on history, culture, language and colonialism.
Let us put it this way. The fact that some people like to film mainlanders doing things which HK people do not do does not mean that any randomly selected group of Hongkongers will be moved to vocal protests if they see such a thing themselves. People who write internet comments on videos represent nobody but themselves. They are a self-selected minority of a minority. Probably none of them was present. A boring and rather deflating explanation but there it is.  Mr Kammerer also seems to suppose that drunken misbehaviour is some kind of Western speciality.  Lockhart Road regulars will know better.

The curious thing about attitudes to democracy in Hong Kong is the number of butters it attracts. Butters are the people who say “of course I believe in democracy but…” They are closely related — indeed in some cases they are the same people — as the freedom of expression butters, who believe in “freedom of the press but…” It then turns out that freedom of the press is not an absolute right (platitudes, platitudes) and the butter throughly approves of whatever new restriction is now being proposed. Things are a bit easier for the freedom of expression butters because every reputable modern Bill of Rights notes that there are some restrictions necessary for the protection of other rights, like the right to a fair trial or the right to an unblemished reputation. Interestingly, though the relevant international covenants have no similar exceptions to the right to have elections.

So the democracy butters do not come up with some conflicting right. They chide the pan-democrats for disunity and including some disreputable banana-throwers, and then they announce that democracy is an unreasonable ambition because the central government “will never allow it”. This is, you will notice, pretty much what they used to say about democracy in Czechoslovakia and Hungary, with the Russians filling in for the central government. For a while it was true, and then it wasn’t. I do not know what the central government will like or dislike in 2017. Most of the time you can get pretty accurate predictions by saying tomorrow will be the same as today. But history does not flow smoothly. It lurches. All we can know with certainty about the future of democracy in Hong Kong is that we won’t get it unless we ask for it.

There are some weird things about the democracy butters. One is that so many of them have US passports. You would think this might be a problem. Urging surrender if we are all in this together is one thing. Urging a policy which you can avoid by leaving is another. It would be nice to have some local Henry V to sort this out: “He that hath no stomach for this fight, let him depart … We would not die in that man’s company which fears his fellowship to die in ours.”

Then there is the curious addiction for phrasing their comments in the form of advice to the democrats. Nobody offers advice to the DAB. But everyone has an opinion on what the democrats should be doing. This is a harmless rhetorical trope when it is used by people like Nau Lai-keung. No sane democrat will suppose that advice from such a source is intended to help. Butters need to consider that the first requirement for successful advice is a shared objective. People who want democracy at any cost and people who want it only if it is cheap do not have a shared objective. One wants democracy; the other wants a quiet life.

The butters are also rather naive. What is wrong, they wonder, with the Chinese government wishing to ensure that the next Chief Executive does not want to “confront the central government”. This displays a distressing failure to understand the way these things work. First we are told we must have a CE who loves Hong Kong and loves China. This is a nice thought, but totally impractical. How do you know what a politician loves? Or to put it another way, of how many of them can you say confidently that they love their wives? But having admitted one requirement, we are then entertained with another. The CE must not confront the central government. In other words the democratic process must produce someone who either warmly admires or is prepared to grovel to a regime dependent on a million secret policemen to keep it in power. The hard fact is that if there is a selection mechanism then we will finish up with what we have now: a creep chosen by the Liaison Office. The objection is not to having no chance to elect a CE who confronts. Few people would vote for such a programme. The objection is to having a vetting mechanism, however justified, because it will be abused to fix the whole election.

I wonder if they are also naive in believing that this whole matter will be decided by public discussion. According to today’s papers 30 pro-government thugs turned up at a democracy forum in City U and forced its abandonment by shouting at the speakers. Whether the disruptors were wearing brown shirts was not specified. Police refused to take action on the grounds that the event was on university premises. I must remember that next time I am tempted to murder a student. Acting in a disorderly manner to disrupt a public gathering is an offence under the Public Order Ordinance. I suppose all gatherings are equal, but some are more equal than others.