tim's experiment

Much attention has been bestowed – well it has been wasted – on analysing the composition of the new Executive Council. This is based on a serious misunderstanding of the way committees work..

It is axiomatic among anthropologists who have taken an interest in this area that the most important decision you have to take about a committee is its size. The number of people who can talk together in an informal way round a table with some minimum guidance from a chairman to keep things on topic and orderly is about ten. You can creep a little above this number if some of the people present are in effect non-participants – secretaries or nodders (a nodder is a yes-man who is too frightened to speak), but soon after passing ten an inexorable change takes place. People stop talking and start making speeches. They identify with the body they represent on the committee rather than with the work of the committee as a whole. People write scripts which they read out, rather than responding to what other people have said. In discussions, intrigue and interest replace more constructive motives. Undser these circumstances the committee is a ritual, not a decision-making body. This process can be observed over a majestic historic scale in British history as the Great Council, which sufficed for Saxon Kings, was surmounted by the Council, then by the Privy Council, and then by the Cabinet, as each body grew too large to carry on any real work. The British Cabinet is now, of course, well over the limit and it is commonly observed that all the real work is done in its committees, which are smaller.

The Executive Council, actually, is not even (as commonly described) the Chief Executive’s Cabinet. It has no real power except to give advice. A British Prime Minister who cannot carry his Cabinet with him is in serious danger of compulsory resignation; Mr C.Y. Leung, on the other hand, can ignore any advice he doesn’t like, and people who work at City U tell me that this is not inconsistent with his personal management style.

The thing which should be a cause for some concern here is that if the Executive Council is too big to wield its own powers, such as they are, then these powers will have migrated elsewhere. Somewhere in the government machinery will be a small group or groups who hold a meeting before the Exco meeting at which there is real lively discussion and real decision-making. And we do not know what this is or who sits on it. Of course the arrangements for this vary. In government consultative committees there is usually a pre-meeting between the secretary (who is a government official) and the chairman (an appointed non-official sycophant). The secretary explains the items to be discussed and the government’s suggestions for what should be decided. I was bemused by the little dust-up over whether the chairman of the Antiquities Advisory Board had “colluded with the government”. What do people expect?  In other places there are more formal arrangements. When I was a member of the Senate of the University of Lancaster it had a Senate Steering Committee comprising about eight people including representative of all the obvious interest groups, including the students. The Steering Committee, whose minutes were public, met before each Senate meeting to decide which items should be held over, which might be offered for passage en bloc because they were uncontentious, and which should be debated. It occasionally asked for more information to be provided or for some named expert to attend. The point is not that there is one right way of doing this sort of thing, but that it must be done by someone. If we do not know who that someone is then it is probably the chairman and secretary putting their heads together. The material over which they ponder will come from the people doing the real work. My experience of University Senates is that attempts to improve it in a large deliberative body are rarely successful, though occasionally necessary. Executive Concillors will no doubt, as is traditional, agonise over small bus fare increases and pass gazillion-dollar railway schemes on the nod. So it goes.

Anyway the upshot of all this is that it does not matter who sits on the Exsecutive Council. This is perhaps just as well because the list recently published did not inspire a great deal of confidence. Mr Leung’s plan to have his Secretaries grouped with a Deputy Secretary for something else in charge of each group is much more interesting. It may solve the problem presented by government departments which ignore each other except when they are looking for someone to pass a buck to. But it has not been approved yet. Which pretty much goes for the Leung set-up as a whole.

The Chief Executive scene has taken a curious turn, and a rather embarassing one for those of us who firmly kicked Henry Tang into touch because of his illegal structure problems. It seems something strange was going on. Somewhere in the bowels of the Central Government Liaison Office is a little man who really chooses our Chief Executive, and he imposes some odd requirements. To be a serious candidate you must be a rich prat living in at least two houses in one of the most expensive areas of Hong Kong, said houses to feature a large collection of illegal structures. Both the serious candidates met these requirements. What are the odds against this sort of coincidence happening by chance?

I do not blame Mr Leung for moving into his house without checking the legality of various adornments. When one buys a house one tends, as I did, to assume that what is there is legal, or at least tolerated. Indeed I imagine a lot of minor embellishments of the kind which Mr Leung is now hastily removing probably are tolerated. Illegal additions to high-rise buildings are a safety hazard. Subdivided flats are firetraps. Small amendments to low-rise detached houses are only going to fall onto the owner, which could be considered poetic justice. In any case I expect someone who has shelled out millions of dollars for a house on the Peak is not going to skimp on the structural safety of his vine trellis, illegal though it may be.  Of course you can say that when unauthorised building works became an election issue it would have been prudent of Mr Leung to check his plans before pronouncing himself legal.

What bothers me is not the additional structures but the revelation that Mr Leung lives in two houses which set him back a combined $66 million. Mr Leung habitually describes himself as a “surveyor”. I realise that surveyors come in a variety of shapes and sizes hut it has not hitherto been regarded as a profession which produces large numbers of millionaires. I suppose “real estate speculator” doesn’t have quite the right political tang to it and “company director” is a bit vague. But it doesn’t really matter too much now. We can all see that Mr Leung’s very praiseworthy sympathy for the poor and oppressed is not based on recent personal experience.

This is a serious deficiency shared by many of our political appointees. I am tempted to suggest that all potential Secretaries should be exiled to Tin Shui Wai for a week with $1000 in cash and no plastic, there to live in a public housing flat and to be required to travel by public transport to and from the new Central Government Offices every day. Then they will make an interesting discovery. Being rich feels like hard work, but it is not nearly as hard work as being poor.

This brings me to the interesting case of Mr David Li, who has decided (according to some sources it was decided for him) to give up his post as the functionally elected representative of Hong Kong banks in Legco. Mr Li announced his retirement with the interesting further comment that looking back on his 20-odd years in politics it had all been “a waste of time”. Of course the short answer to this is that, as Tom Lehrer put it, life is like a sewer: what you get out of it depends on what you put into it. Mr Li did not put much into politics. For many years he was the member of Legco with the worst attendance record. When he was present he often left early. He eventually lost the title, not because he became more energetic, but because Timothy Fok is even worse.

Having said that, Mr Li has a point. People in legislatures everywhere struggle to make sense of the way in which they spend much of their time. Many speeches are made for the benefit of an outside audience. They are of no interest to anybody in the chamber, sometimes including the speaker himself. Much of the “action” is either meaningless or ineffective. The government wants tame votes, not trouble. If you are not supernaturally loyal then office is out of the question. The choice is between self-emasculation and obscurity. There are solutions to this problem for people who went into politics because they wanted to make a difference. Unfortunately Legco has far too many members who just want free parking in Central and something nice to put on their business card. Even turning up seem to be too much for them these days. Members were tired, we were told after the latest quorum catastrophe. They had been working five days a week for a change, like the rest of us.

Anyway for members who wish to avoid Mr Li’s ennui and disillusionment, the solution goes like this. First, if you are elected by a contituency, hold surgeries. I suppose if you are representing the city’s bankers these will be rather upmarket affairs called something else, but the principle is the same. Your constituents have problems. They will not bring them to you unless you reach out to them. I used to assist in a minor clerical way at a surgery of this kind. Many of the cases were very interesting. You will need to develop some expertise in where people can get help and which government department does what. This is educational and will help you to ask Legco questions without looking stupid.

Second, find an issue which needs a voice in Legco. Avoid topics which are routine bones of contention between the parties. Find something worthy, neglected and non-political like special education, animal welfare, the plight of cage-dwellers or the way the arts are taught – or not taught – in local schools. Then become an expert. Read the reports and the books, if any. Talk to the people. Talk to the academics. Talk to the officials (yawn). Get in touch with the NGOs and go to some of their events. Then you will find you have something to say to your fellow members. Some of them may even find it interesting. This will of course keep you quite busy, but the choice is yours. You can try to make yourself useful or do nothing for 20 years and then complain that you were wasting your time.

I did not start this blog so that I could chronicle the Decline and Fall of the South China Morning Post. But the demise of our once fabled English-language newspaper is turning into a saga with all the ingredients of Greek tragedy, including a growing sense of terror and pity among the audience.  I do not propose to bore you with my thoughts on the internal row over why the death of Li Wangyang only merited two paragraphs. Every newspaper in town except the Post has wallowed in this story.

What bothers me is the collapse of quality control on the op ed page where long thoughtful pieces entertain readers who have finished the letters. I have noted with mounting dismay the frequency of long dimwitted diatribes from some Shanghai businessman who thinks everything up there is wonderful. I do not expect to get any political sense out of businessmen.  But on Tuesday we plumbed new depths. The article was called “Leung’s election a vote of confidence in Beijing” and it was written, we were told, by a Prof at the Peking (sic)University’s Centre for Hong Kong and Macau Studies. Jiang Shigong, the author of the piece, is apparently the deputy director of the centre. Careful readers of the biographical details will have noted that he was for four years a researcher at the Central Government’s Liaison Office in Hong Kong. A card-carrying apparatchik put out to grass then.

This article was the sort of thing which gives Social Science a bad name. A modest array of well-known facts was adorned with a monstrous inverted pyramid of implausible interpretation. Prof Jiang’s thesis is that since the handover Hong Kong people were “full of fear, distrust or even hostility towards the Central Government’s exercise of sovereignty in Hong Kong”. This is a startling departure from the usual official left-wing line, which has historically been that Hong Kong people were beside themselves with joy at the handover. I know this was the official line because when I disputed it in a column one of the Legco comrades tried to get me fired. Prof Jiang now says that this fear,  distrust etc., have dissipated, because Hong Kong people generally preferred CY Leung as a candidate for CE to the owner of Hong Kong’s largest illegal basement.

On the strength of this rather feeble preference for the least toxic of the two serious candidates Prof Jiang “feels the heartfelt acceptance of Chinese sovereignty in Hong Kong”. Or as he put it in a paragraph which suggests academia rather than journalism as a future career, “the 2012 popular election was … undoubtedly a popular endorsement for the central government’s exercise of sovereignty in Hong Kong. It symbolised that Hong Kongers had officially and psycho-culturally acknowledged the central government’s sovereignty, so that Hong Kong was not only reunified with mainland China in the legal aspect but also in the hearts of the people.”  This is unmitigated hogwash, as anyone who lives in Hong Kong ought to know.

In case you deo not want to take my word for this, on Wednesday’s City pages there was a bulletin from the real world where you find out what people think by asking them. This was headlined “Mistrust of Beijing at post-1997 high”. It had been written by a real journalst, and reported that according to the latest research by the usual people at Hong Kong U, 37 percent of the people polled said they distrusted Beijing. This was 3 percent up since last March, before the CE election. Researcher Robert Chung cited several recent incidents (Bo Xilai, Chen Guangcheng, Li Wangyang) as accounting for the decline in trust. Dixon Sing, a political scientist (they’re all over the place) at the HKUST, said that “The results show that Hong Kong people have an impression that the communist party is intolerant of dissent and is willing to resort to high-handed repression. The intolerance and repression are a world apart from Hong Kong’s core values.”

So there you are. Political Science seems to produce different results when it is done in Beijing and when it is done in Hong Kong. Journalism on the other hand, as practised at the South China Morning Post, is rapidly becoming less ambiguous.

An unfortunate coincidence, but it couldn’t happen to a more deserving victim. Mr Tony Blair (yes, that one – the former UK Prime Minister) is in town just as we are all getting the details of his warm support for the late unlamented Libyan despot Muammar Ghaddafi.

Mr Blair is a slimy duplicitous creep with a strong line in self-deception. But that is normal for professional politicians. His role as jackal to Mr George W. Bush’s tiger in the waging of unprovoked aggressive war on fictional pretexts is now old history. But we are still finding out other things about Mr Blair. Tony now considers himself a man of faith. Indeed it seems he considered himself a man of faith for quite a long time before revealing the fact, because it would have been politically inexpedient. Faith is apparently now his thing, anyway, and Mr Blair’s idea of a contructive use for his status as an elder statesman is a thing called the Tony Blair Faith Foundation. In pursuit of this he was billed to give a speech about faith at the University of Hong Kong today (Thursday). Readers who feel as queasy about this as I do may be reassured to know that the term has finished so Mr Blair’s thoughts on the matter will not be dripped on unsuspecting students.

According to the SCMPost Mr Blair’s speech was to be followed by a 30-minute question and answer session. Anyone who was short of an interesting question could turn to the front of the City Section, where we were given a detailed update on the case of Mr Sami al-Saadi, who was – with his wife and four children – lured to Hong Kong, arrested, bundled onto a plane and sent to Libya, where the whole family wound up in the Tajoura prison, Mr Saadi’s home for the next three years. Mr al-Saadi, who was then a dissident or a terrorist but is now regarded as a heroic resister of despotism,  is suing everyone involved in this nefarious undertaking, which seems to have been illegal from beginning to end.  Mr Blair appears in the timeline provided by the Post’s editors: March 23: CIA fax sent to Tripoli … March 25: British Prime Minister Tony Blair meets Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi. March 28: Saadi and his family deported to Tripoli. What did the prime minister and the lethal Libyan nutcase talk about, one wonders. Faith?

Actually I think the greatest service Mr Blair could do for faith would be to keep his filthy fingerprints off it. You should not buy a used religion from this man.  He is living proof of the difference between religiosity and righteousness.  If you see him around the place, please give him a kick for me.

I gatrher that readers are agog to hear what happened to Mr Turner, the cyclist who “collided” with a car while he was stopped at a traffic light. First day of the hearing was yesterday. The case was then adjourned until Friday. Seems the law is working at its usual speed: the actual accident occurred last August. Further news when it arrives.

The legal status of cyclists in Hong Kong is interesting. In theory they are subject to the same rules as the rest of us. In practice they can be seen every day flouting traffic signals and rules, riding without lights at night, occupying more of their share of the road – or in other places the pavement – without any consequences.

Happily, though, an exception has occurred. According to today’s papers tomorrow will see a cyclist hauled into court and prosecuted … for not having a bell. It appears that I was quite wrong in supposing that cyclists were above the law. You can do all the things outlined in the first paragraph. But you must have a bell.

I must in the interest of completeness add that the cyclist concerned is not being prosecuted for said absence of bell alone. He is also being prosecuted for careless cycling. This is, in my experience, another first. What on earth is going on? Well the defendant is 50-year-old cycling fanatic Martin Turner. Apparently Mr Turner was on his bike, as he often is, when he stopped at a traffic light in Central. He then collided, as legally careful copy puts it, with a car which was coming up behind him. The bike was mangled and Mr Turner also needed some running repairs at Queen Mary Hospital.  The car was driven by a retired Assistant Commissioner of Police, a feature of the case which certainly sets the mind running down interesting channels but on which I dare not comment.

Suffice to say that I hope the magistrate in Kwun Tong Court tomorrow is awake, because his disposition of the case will certainly attract close scrutiny. Without trespassing on the matters which will be in dispute before the court I can I think say with some confidence that this case is going to be really interesting.

We do seem to get a lot of apologies these days. Up last week was Mr Donald Tsang apologising — again — for his expensive taste in publicly-funded hotel accomodation. Well OK, we probably ought to let that one go. There is no point in him resigning with a few weeks left. Mr Tsang should be allowed to shuffle quietly towards the scrapheap, apology accepted, sins (if there is nothing else in the closet) forgiven.

He should, though, tell his underlings to stop providing defensive bulletins on his behalf. Hot on the heels of the apology came an offering from the private office of the Chief Executive, to the effect that Mr Tsang was not really to blame because he did not book the hotel rooms himself. This is probably the limpest apology for an excuse ever to hit Hong Kong newsprint.

There are two things which can be said in Mr Tsang’s defence. One is that he really does need a suite. Not necessarily the best one in the house, but some sort of suite. I have been urging future reporters for 30 years to avoid at all costs interviewing contacts in hotel bedrooms. Of course most of the time nothing will happen but this is asking for trouble. There is something about being in a small room with a bed and a young lady which brings out the Dominique Strauss-Kahn in a man. I was not impressed by the suggestion that Mr Tsang’s refined taste in rooms was a necessary consequence of his exalted rank, but clearly we cannot have the Chief Executive of the Hong Kong SAR meeting people in a hotel coffee shop.

The second thing which can be said is that Mr Tsang was continuing a long tradition of extravagance and greed which goes back into the Colonial era. Senior civil servants in Hong Kong were for many years in the happy position of deciding their own remuneration and terms of service. The results were predictably generous. So senior types have palaces on the Peak and fleets of servants, justified by their “need to entertain”, cars which are supposed to be for public purposes are misapplied to transporting bigwigs to work, policy secretaries have personal assistants, personal secretaries, personal toilets and what have you. I remember in the 80s it was discovered that if you were really senior you could retire, collect your farewell pile of gold and pension, and then carry on working at the same salary, thus being effectively paid twice. Our senior civil servants vie with those of Singapore for the title of most conspicuously overpaid in the world. Mr Obama leads the free world on a comparative pittance. Mr Tsang’s extravagance is perhaps unreasonable, but also very traditional.

On the other hand the idea that he did not know what was going on is totally untenable. This might work if the problem had only happened once. But in 40-odd overseas trips it cannot have escaped Mr Tsang’s notice that the accommodation he was staying in was really rather nice and no doubt commensurately expensive. A word from him would have been enough to inaugurate a more parsimonious policy. Qui tacet consentire videtor, as the lawyers used to say– he who says nothing will be taken to agree.

Actually I hope the next CE will seriously consider how many of these trips are really necessary. Hong Kong has a Trade Development Council to inform and attract overseas investors. We are not allowed our own foreign policy. And if he must go, can we at least have an end to the preposterous nonsense of sending an advance party to make arrangements? I understand the need for the CE to have a few underlings with him. Like the emperor in a Cantonese Opera he needs a couple of “fragrant flowers” behind him as a mark of rank. But there is no need for the preparatory trip. A travelling CE is not a circus.

The left-wing line on the right of abode for people born in Hong Kong has been making surprising progress considering it is arrant nonsense. I was distressed to see it surface in Frank Ching’s column last week.

The basic situation goes like this. According to Article 24 of the Basic Law permanent residents of the HKSAR include “Chinese citizens born in Hong Kong.” To put it another way, if you are a Chinese citizen born in Hong Kong you are ENTITLED, under the Basic Law, to be a permanent resident. Rather surprisingly the government contested this point in a case some years ago. The Court of Final Appeal decided that the law meant what it says. Note that despite some efforts to sow confusion this has nothing to do with the right of abode issue which was subjected to reinterpretation in Beijing, because that concerned the status of people claiming residency through parentage, not through place of birth.

Now the line which is being pushed is that actually the judges are being obstinate. There was a body called the Preparatory Committee – apparently an offshoot of the National People’s Congress – which decided that people born in Hong Kong should not be permanent residents. All that is necessary is for the judges to take into account this statement of what was intended in the Basic Law. They are being sticklers for a peculiar common law tradition by refusing to do this.

Let us note first of all how far we have come from the pro-Beijing line as peddled in the run-up to 1997. In those days the Preparatory Committee was never mentioned. I am not sure that the general public even knew it existed. The Basic Law was drafted by a Basic Law drafting committee, which was presented as an autonomous body comprising mainly Hong Kong people, deciding matters on their merits subject to the limits set to Hong Kong’s autonomy by the Joint Declaration. Then there was the Joint Liaison Group, which was explicitly described as “not an organ of power”, and there was the shadow Legco, meeting in Shenzhen. These three bodies did the public part of the preparations. Of course we all supposed that there was a certain amount of string-pulling behind the scenes, but if anyone at the time had suggested that the Basic Law drafting committee was merely a front for a Preparatory Committee meeting in Beijing he would have been accused of outrageous cynicism and “lack of trust”. It is a recurring delusion among Chinese officials that trust is something they are entitled to, not something they have to earn.

Now to the Common Law. It is nonsense to suggest that judges in the common law tradition never interpret the law in creative ways. They have to do it all the time, either because the law is not clear or because the circumstances to which it applies were simply not envisaged by the legislature. There is an interesting recent book by a late Law Lord, Tom Bingham, devoted mainly to exploring where exactly the borders of judicial discretion lie. There is a string of “rules of interpretation” which judges apply and in difficult cases they may go through all of them to see which ones fit. But this creativity has to give way to one important priority, which is that if the statute is clear then it must be taken to mean what it says. The judge cannot overrule it, even if he suspects that parliament might wish him to do so, or that the result in the case before him would thereby be more satisfactory and just. This is elementary. Judges interpret the law; they do not overrule it. The Basic Law says that persons born in Hong Kong are permanent residents. There is no ambiguity, no wriggle room. The law is perfectly clear and judges are duty bound to apply it.

We should disabuse ourselves of the notion that outside the Common Law world things are different and more enlightened. It may well be that other jurisdictions are more interested in records of the legislature’s intention, when they are dealing with an ambiguous statute. But judges in Germany and France are in the same boat as judges in England and America when the law is clear. Their job is simply to apply it. This is a common feature of countries which enjoy the rule of law. If the law says that the speed limit in Sui Wo Road is 50 kph then no amount of fancy legal footwork is going to get a judge to contemplate the possiblity that what the legislature really intended was a limit of 70 kph.  The line between the places where judges enforce the law as written, and the places where judges enforce what is politically convenient, is not the line between Common Law countries and Civil Law countries. It is the line between countries which enjoy the rule of law and countries which do not.

This is the line which Mr Ching is apparently willing to see Hong Kong cross. Shame on him.

I am a regular reader of Jake van der Kamp’s stuff in the English newspaper you have to pay for. I am sure Mr van der Kamp is a sociable fellow, kind to children and animals, generous to charities and so on. I usually agree with him. But he has one curious habit which grates. His attitude to any scheme to improve the lot of the poor is the same as my dog’s attitude to fire hydrants – he just can’t walk past one without peeing on it.

Sometimes the attack is no doubt justified. Measures to change society are often ill-designed, and even if well-designed can lead to unexpected consequences, sometimes profoundly disappointing ones. On the other hand if the quality of a writer’s criticism varies considerably it generally means we are dealing with a prejudice, not a reasonable opinion. Consider Jake’s line on the government scheme to offer travel subsidies to workers who live in distant new towns. They are, officials suppose, discouraged from taking jobs in more central areas by the prospect of giving a good deal of their hard-earned wages to Kowloon Motor Bus, or one of that crowd. Jake’s line, to which we have now been treated twice, is that the travel subsidy will be completely futile. He explains that the employer of such a worker will simply reduce his or her wages by the amount which the government is supplying.

This is nonsense. There are three ways of showing that it is nonsense. One is to try to imagine how it works out in practice. “Good morning Mrs Wong. As you are now receiving the government travel subsidy I am going to cut your wages by $600 a month to make up for it.” I yield to nobody in my willingness to believe the worst of bosses, proprietors, taipans, moguls and “the fat man, the very fat man, who waters the workers’ beer”. But can you really imagine a local Scrooge coming out with a line like that?

The second way of showing it is nonsense is, oddly enough, to refer to Adam Smith. In German economic circles they have a special term “the Adam Smith problem” for people who have read the Wealth of Nations but neglected the companion work on “Moral sentiments”, by which Smith meant the fact that people do not actually behave in the way that economic theory suggests they should. This is a point which economists have rediscovered recently, or some of them have. People are not mere automatons pursuing wealth at all costs. There is an innate sense of fairness in most of us, and Jake’s idea would have it wide awake and rattling the bars of its cage. It would, after all, be manifestly unfair if a worker who lived in Central were paid $3,000 a month and one who lived in Tin Shui Wai was paid $2,400 on the grounds that the government was paying her bus fares.

The third way of looking at it, I suppose, is to ignore all this new-fangled nonsense about human nature and just apply traditional economics. If bosses in Central are paying $3,000 a month for cleaners then the lady who finds herself suddenly getting only $2,400 will change her job for one which attracts the going rate. It is true that the going rate may come down a bit, because more people from Tin Shui Wai will be interested in working in Central. For the same reason there should be a rise, albeit no doubt microscopic, in the wages paid in Tin Shui Wai because some people who were formerly in the job market there are now working in Central. But in the traditional view of these matters the market reaches equilibrium at a particular price level, and there is no room for bosses to deduct the workers’ other income, any more than they can, for example, cut the wages of someone whose son becomes old enough to go out to work and help the family.

I do not expect the government’s scheme to be enormously effective, because commuting a long way involves time as well as money. But I do not believe the money will effectively subsidise employers. There is quite enough of that going on already.

While we are on transport matters I must also respectfully disagree with Mr van der Kamp’s view of suggestions that the MTR should not raise its fares. Jake says that the result of this is that travellers will be subsidised by the taxpayer. But nobody is suggesting that the MTR should receive a subsidy to help it keep its fares down. They are suggesting that the money should come out of the MTR’s ample profits – most of which it pays to the government, which already has more money than it knows what to do with. They’ll be shovelling it down a hole next. The hole is calle the High Speed Rail Link.