tim's experiment

All readers who enjoy seeing their social betters publicly humiliated will have relished the recent spate of stories about illkegal adornments on top people’s houses. Hong Kong may not be the investigative reporting capital of the world but we know a sitting duck when we see one. Suddenly any reporter in search of a spicey story has only to follow some newsworthy individual home and take a picture of his illegal structure. Most of them seem to have one. A surprising number of people, including combative columnists and (Oh, my paws and whiskers) at least one judge seem to think that the law should not apply to them. Senior officials who would get the sort of advice service from the Buildings Office which the rest of us can only dream of, turn out to have been lamentably misinformed, or even uncertain, of the exact status of their balcony windows.

It all started, you will recall, in the New Territories, where the ombudsman discovered that the law was being enforced in a rather feeble way. There was a charming story about a gentleman who was building a swimming pool in his garden. He refused to admit officials who wished to look at it, so they took no action. Eventually they got in and found the pool was finished. There was, apparently, a policy that no action would be taken against structures which were finished. So the pool owner got away with it.

Actually this so-called policy did not apply in the New Territories as such. My house is in the New Territories. When the Buildings people took exception to a structure on its roof they did not get, and indeed did not seek, admission to the house so they could look at it. Nor were they in any way inhibited by the thought that the structure was clearly finished. I got the usual stream of threatening letters. So the explanation provided was nonsense. What seems to be going on here is two legacies from the old colonial days.

One concerns a matter of principle. Generally in the English legal system you are free to do something unless the government has a reason for making it illegal. In colonies, though, this principle was discarded. In many matters you were not free to do something at all unless the government had given permission. This can be seen most clearly in the police attitude to parking, which is that all parking is illegal unless in a place specifically dedicated by the government for that purpose. The result of this approach, of course, is that everyone breaks the law. Most people park in what seem sensible places, and hope for the best. Flat owners who wish to glaze their balconies go ahead. The merits of the resulting situation from the cokonial point of view were clear. Firstly the law did not in effect apply to the employees of the occupying power. Secondly those in charge of enforcing it were endeared to the regime by spectacular opportuinities for corruption. Where everyone is breaking the law it is easy to find people who will slip you a tip to pick on someone else.

I do not suggest that corruption is what is going on now. What happens, I suppose, is that the Buildings people respond to complaints. What else can they do?

More interesting in its way is the evident fact that in some places they do not even do that. Told that someone is bulding a swimming pool – a fairly conspicuous garden ornament by any standards – they do not look over the wall, borrow a helicopter or resort to Google Earth. Nor do they seek a court order which would allow them to force their way into the scene of the crime. They politely ask the home owner if they can inspect his illegal swimming pool and when he tells them to f*** off they go meekly away. The law is an ass. This is not the Buildings people’s fault.

The British technique for imposing foreign rule on conservative rural societies was to befriend and reinforce existing landowners and other bigwigs, who would support colonialism in return for social order and the preservation of their privileges. What this meant in the New Territories was that officials would, and were expected to, befriend local bigwigs, even if the local bigwig was a gangster, as with the influx of lucrative opportunities for skulduggery of various kinds he increasingly was. The implicit deal was that this person would be supported in his social eminence in return for his backing for “the admnistration”. The support he wanted in practice was the non-enforcement in his area of the law generally, so that villagers might continue with impunity to explode fireworks, eat dogs, discriminate against women, rob strangers under various pretexts, and pocket occasional dollops of government money on the pretext of “fung shui”. My house does not benefit from this policy because it is not in a traditional village. Clearly though some people think this deal is still in force. My favourite illegal buildings story was the one about a group of villagers who thought they should be paid compensation for removing illegal structures from their houses. And perhaps, as a bonus, be allowed to add another three storeys.

Where do we go from here? I am reminded of the tale of the man who asked an Irishman  in the street in Dublin the way to the Post Office. “If I were you,” the Irishman replied, “I wouldn’t start from here”.  An amnesty will infuriate people like me who have been forced to obey the law. Allowing people to pay to keep their extensions is clearly discriminatory against the poor. Getting rid of the lot is hardly practical. And as bits are still dropping off buldings unexpectedly it seems the Buildings Office is rushed off its feet already. All law and order depends on the idea that most people will follow the rules even if there is no policeman watching them, because they are the rules. If the rules are widely flouted they don’t work, and no amount of police action will fix the problem. I am tempted to put my illegal extension back and see what happens.

The launch of the consultation on the third runway was accompanied by a barrage of propaganda from the general direction of the airport, warning of the dire consequences of not providing the new runway in planty of time. The gist of this was that the present airport would be full to capacity in 2020, at which point we would presumably have to start turning people away.
Fortunately these predictions did not come from the government, which seems to be constitutionally incapable of calculating anything ten months ahead, let along ten years, and would in any case be widely disbelieved. Having been sold one white elephant in the form of the high-speed rail link the public will not, I suspect, willingly buy another one, at least from the same vendor. Anyway the airport interest is perfectly willing to pay for propaganda itself. It is not, apparently, willing to pay for the runway on the other hand. That is going on our tab. So what are we to make of these figures?

Well I for one would be happier with a range of outcomes. It is very easy to project the growth rate from the last few years and announce that in so many years something will hit a limit. The possible problems in this approach are nicely illustrated by the gentleman who pointed out a few years ago that if then current trends were followed then the entire US defence budget in 2030 would buy one aeroplane. All trends are, in a sense, temporary. And you can pick which of the past few years to start from, depending on whether you want to hit the limit early or later. This procedure is subject to gross errors because very small variations in growth rate or starting position can compound over time. So I am suspicious about that date.

A more tricky problem which has not been explored yet is that we are not talking about a new terminal (or at least we are, but the cost of that is trivial). We are talking about a new runway. Now the required terminal capacity of the airport is roughly proportionate to the number of passengers. And the required cargo handling capacity is proportionate to the amount of cargo. But the runway does not care whether the aeroplane trundling down it is large or small, empty or full. The required runway capacity is proportionate simply to the number of landings and take-offs. This is important because before we translate our projected passenger and cargo quantities into future needs for runways we need to consider whether the planes will remain the same size.

Now there are several reasons for believing that they will not. One is that aeroplanes generally have tended over the years to get bigger. Another is that if capacity is short the airlines may be persuaded to waste less of it. If you are flying to London you gfet a large aeroplane because the short ones cannot make the trip. If you are going to some city in China, on the other hand, you do not walk down a tube to a Jumbo jet. You get a bus out to some distant part of the tarmac, where you board an aeroplane which is not much bigger than the bus. The attraction of this to the airlines is that they can offer a lot of small flights every day, thereby appealing to the business traveller, who is presumed to be picky about these things and to place a high value on his time., But of course this means that the number of runway slots needed to get a particular number of people to Wuhan is about six times the number of runway slots needed to get the same group of people to London. The third reason to wonder about runway capacity is our beloved high speed rail link. This is supposed to bring most Chinese cities within a few hours travelling time from Hong Kong and while some of these claims will turn out to be exaggerated it is certainly true that lines already completed in the mainland have wiped out some short-range air routes.

So I wonder if we will need another runway. If it turns out that we don’t then you will not, needless to say, be able to ask for your money back…

Nice one Henry. I did enjoy Mr Tang’s suggestion that people should aspire to emulate our multi-millionaires rather than chafing under their yoke. But Mr Tang seemed to have funny ideas about how local fortunes were made. Our local tycoons do not get rich by inventing new things. Loopholes in the planning regulations don’t count.

Youngsters setting out in search of fame and fortune will, sadly, find that many of the avenues formerly leading to wealth are no longer available. China is not now subject to UN sanctions, so patriotic smuggling is out. The insurance companies are much more suspicious than they used to be of mysterious sinkings. Textile quotas are no more. Insider trading is a crime. The government is no longer papering the New Territories with “land entitlements” which can be turned into a fortune on our ever-rising property market. Industry has disappeared, leaving only two rotten boroughs in Legco. The retail sector is pretty much spoken for and the obvious government franchises have all been taken.

Having a rich daddy still works, for some people. Otherwise … well there’s the Mark Six.

As headlines go, “Opinion leaders believe business trumps heritage” certainly has the “read-me ingredient”. Because you have to wonder: how on earth did the SCMPost discover that?

The answer, alas, is that they didn’t. I should in fairness note here that people who think the old Central Government Offices should be turned into a shopping mall are, in my opinion, wrong. So I exemined this report with a certain extra skepticism. It was based on a poll, conducted by a market research company, which concluded, according to the newspaper’s report, that “The city’s opinion leaders believe Hong Kong means business and that the need for more commercial space overrides the need for preservation”.  So good by to the West Wing of the CGO.

Later in the story the opinion leaders had turned into “elite respondents”. In the small headline under the main one they were “the city’s elite”. Wow.

Which of course raises the question who are these opinion leaders who are the city’s elite? Or vice versa, if you prefer. Now opinion leaders in this context is a dangerous term. It arise in research into the way people formed their opinions about public issues in American towns. Researchers discovered that a lot of people did not generate their own views about such matters. They tended to follow influential individuals who were prominent in the community, like priests, newspaper editors, the chairmen of clubs and owners of the town’s more important enterprises.  But this is a slippery concept. Some people are opinion leaders because they have strong views, some because they have a lot of contacts. We must note also that this finding related to rather distant matters from most of the people forming the opinions. Remember the old joke: my wife decides the trivial things like where we should live and what we should eat, and I decide the important stuff like who should be the next president and whether we should sign the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty.  Actually we do not know if opinion on matters like heritage works the same way, or indeed whether opinion on anything in Hong Kong works the same way.

So the pollsters, I suppose, had to guess. We were given two indications of how the  “elite” was selected.  One was a list: “included writers, businessmen, lobbyists and strategists”. Well Shelley said that poets were “the unconscious legislators of mankind” so we can give them the writers, though I suppose they were not numerous. The businessmen are unavoidable because the polling was done by a market research company. Of course they think highly of businessmen. Whether the rest of us are very impressed by the opinions on public issues of this selfish bunch of bandits seems dubious. I do not know any sane person who would accept a second-hand opinion from a lobbyist, because lobbyists spend their time saying what they are paid to say. And what the hell is a strategist in this context? Did we include a few modern Major-Generals?

If you weren’t happy with the list we were given two rules. Respondents had to be aged over 25 and live in households with a monthly income of more than $40,000. In other words, no students, and as Basil Fawlty would say, “no riff raff”.

I really don’t know why we should give a hoot about the results of this exercise.  There is no reason to suppose that there are such things as “opinion leaders” in Hong Kong, still less that the Post and its paid pollsters know who they are. And no group which comfortably includes me can be considered “elite”.

I do wonder, though, why the newspaper thinks this sort of thing worth doing. After all the elite, whoever they are, do not lack opportunities to put their views before the public. Many of the writers and lobbyists polled are for hire. PR people and lawyers will queue up to speak for the rich. If the Post wishes to support the idea that Hong Kong means business it can print editorials on the matter. There is no need to manufacture non-news and the money spent on this exercise might have been devoted to real reporting.

I seem to be spending far too much time pointing out the deficiencies of our beloved government (no shortage of material, thanks) so let us keep this quick.

The Hong Kong government appoints judges. The Hong Kong government also makes laws. So when one of the judges whom the government has appointed finds that the government is in breach of one of the laws it has passed, the correct response is contrition, not a public attack on the motives of the plaintiff. It does not matter whether the person who asked the court to rule against the Environmental Impact Assessment on the Macau Bridge was motivated by spite, public spirit, affection for clean air, affection for the rule of law, or affection for the Civic Party. The judge is not a member of the Civic Party and his verdict requires respect and contrition from our Chief Executive, not a freshly minted conspiracy theory.

The government is, it says, going to appeal. Now it is of course a fundamental legal principle that judges in the Court of Appeal would not be influenced by anything they would read in the newspapers. Nor would they discuss an upcoming case with a government official, however senior. Still, for the benefit of those lay members of the public who did not receive a full legal education it would be a good idea if officials did not continue to complain that “the judgement” was going to cause delays, cost increases or both in all sorts of White Elephants planned or under construction. What is going to cause the delays etc, is the government’s attempt to get away with impact assessments which meet bare minimum requirements, instead of the careful job required by the law and a proper concern for the local environment.  Hearing constant complaints about “the judgement”  people might naively suppose that officials were trying to influence the judges. And that would never do, would it?

More than 600 cyclists pedalled from Tsim Sha Tsui to Chaung Sha Wan and back on Wednesday night. This was a “Ride of Silence” in memory of cyclisats killed on the roads. It was apparently timed to coincide with similar rides in more than 300 cities worldwide. It seems rather touching that cuyclists should be so eager to commemorate fellow cyclists who died in road accidents. One does not see “Walks of Silence” to commemorate dead pedestrians. And as policies, driving habits and attitudes to cycling vary considerably around the world, this is not a political event, though no doubt a useful reminder of the importance of safety to all road users. That did not seem to be how local riders saw it, however.

The facts – and they are highly regrettable certainly – are that cyclists are killed on Hong Kong roads at an average rate of one a month. Serious accidents average about 20 a month and others about 140. This is a rather small contribution to death on the roads. Society seems to be willing to contemplate a steady flow of accident casualties, although we all feel painful grief if the victim is someone we know. Whether the figures for Hong Kong are unusually high on a regional, or global, basis we do not know. Nor were we offered any comparisons on — say — the number of accidents related to the number of cyclists. Instead we were offered the simplistic complaint that the figures were unreasonably high and it was all the government’s fault.

Michael Turner, chairman of the Hong Kong Cycling Alliance, said the consistency of the figures over the years proved (!) that cyclists had been neglected by the government. As a result, he said, drivers did not know how to deal with cyclists and treated them “aggressively”. He complained (and I think with good reason) that the government did not take cycling seriously as a form of transport (at least outside Shatin) but also accused it of failing to inform the public that cycling was “” normal, legal and cyclists deserve respect”.

In other words, the steady stream of dead cyclists is all down to the government and killer drivers. Now hang on a minute. No doubt there is something in these complaints. It is a commonplace observation in traffic engineering circles that cycling is safer in cities where there are lots of cyclists, because motorists are more perceptive of things they expect to see often. Standards of driving in Hong Kong are not high and driver education does not seem to include a great deal about dealing with cyclists. On the other hand complaints from cyclists would go down better if they were preceded by some self-criticism. Many cyclists seem to have a death wish.

In the urban area they are usually riding a heavy black sit-up job with a huge basket. Riders of this kind of bike wear neither bright clothing nor head protection. They routinely ride on whichever side of the road suits their purpose, whether that is the left or not, and totally disregard all traffic signals. The bike is frequently loaded to the point where the rider has difficulty keeping it going in a straight line. In rural areas you meet the sporting types. They do at least wear sensible headgear and bright clothing. They seem to be much attracted by Sui Wo Road, where I live, because it is a long hill. Unfortunately these people have jobs so they usually practise in the evening and many of them do not bother with lights. Sometimes they ride two to four abreast, which is asking for trouble. I must say also that the speeds they do going down the hill are well in excess of what I think reasonably safe in my four-wheeled carapace, Of course they are practising for races. This may not be a safe thing to do on a public road.

The report on the silent ride came with two touching stories of recently deceased cyclists, one of whom was “rammed by a minibus” and the other “struck by a car, sustaining serious head injuries”. Both of these accidents were tragedies for the two men concerned, for their families and for their friends. But I am afraid that drivers who have seen their share of local cyclists will also have some questions about these incidents. Was it dark, and if so were the cycles carrying lights? What was the gentleman who sustained fatal head injuries wearing on his head? Were the cyclists on the correct side of the road? Was there a red light in the vicinity? Were they racing, or practising for races? I do not know the answers to these questions and it may be that in the two cases concered the cyclists were conscientiously taking every possible precaution. But in that case they were not, I fear, typical.

Safety needs the cooperation of all road users. Including cyclists.

There are times when the government has what we used to call a credibility gap. Not everything it says is easy to believe. But the explanation given for the abolition of by-elections floated over a credibility Grand Canyon. I suppose the luckless spokesperson who was put up to say that the government was abolishing by-elections so that the people’s will might prevail had no choice in the matter. He didn’t look as if he believed it and I didn’t either.

The proposal is that instead of holding a by-election the government will simply appoint the loser who collected the most votes in the last election. Clearly this has nothing to do with reflecting the people’s will. If we wished to preserve the election result we would appoint the person next on the list behind the legislator who has died, resigned, or whatever. But of course the People’s Will has nothing to do with it. Nor despite the helpful suggestion from the TVB reporter covering the matter, is this anything to do with the allaged cost of the multiple by-elections which were Not A Referendum, according to the Comrades. I thought the figure given for this was grossly exaqggerated. Anyway our government is not short of money.

What was bothering them, clearly, is the discovery that if a legislator dies, resigns, falls under a bus, is jaled for having an illegal structure on his rooftop or whatever, then the resulting by-election is in effect run on a first-past-the-post basis. There is only one seat on offer, so there is no room for the elaborate electoral subterfuges adopted to compensate for the low levels of support enjoyed by the DAB. Every time the democratic camp will win, unless they contrive something suicidal like running two candidates against each other.  When Anson Chan prevailed over Regina Ip in a by-election this could be put down to personal factors. Ms Chan was famous and Ms Ip had a controversial history. But in the by-elections which were Not A Referendum all the democrats, including the ones you had never heard of, effortlessly prevailed. So this will happen all the time.

Not only does this mean that every time there is a by-election the government and — indirectly — the Comrades will be humiliated. It also means that if the legislators who disappear happen to be government supporters then its automatic majority in the chamber will gradually shrink. And we can’t have that, can we? No such perils attend by-elections in the Functional Constituencies so by-elections there will continue. What a give-away.

Many observant readers of the SCMPost will have noted, perhaps with more amusement than dismay, that the paper managed to mark the demise of Osama bin Laden by breaking the first rule of journalism and spelling his name wrong.  Having fed the conspiracy theorists the idea of Obama bin Laden the paper then made another error in the correction, which suggests that someone was perhaps not concentrating. This sort of incident generally serves as a peg for age-encrusted former reporters like me to hang a gloomy tirade about the fact that times have changed for the worst and young people in the news business are not as careful as we were.

Well you are not going to get that here. I do not know if the Post prints more mistakes than it did when I first worked there in the early 80s.  But if it does, this is not a result of an increased human failure rate, but changes in the way things work.  In the days when a computer was a mysterious object with a room to itself at the local university, a piece of news was the work of many hands, all of them attached to functioning human brains. Your reporter typed on a piece of paper. In some offices he was expected to produce a carbon copy (known as a black) as well, but usually there was just one copy of the copy. The pieces of paper were intentionally small, because the story would have to be split up and put together again later in the process. So your story, now a pile of pieces of paper, would be passed to the News Editor, or some such title, who overlooked the reporters. He would probably glance at it to make sure that the story had lived up to its possibilities, and pass it to a person picturesquely entitled the Copy Taster. This person would assign it a space on a page, according to its comparative importance and other considerations. It would then go to a page designer, who would attach to it a series of instructions which would produce the desired shape on the page when the story was translated into type.

Then the story, plus instructions and pictures or other adornments, would be passed to another editor who would go through it in exquisite detail, correcting errors and adding instructions to the printers, to whom it goes next. But first, at least on careful newspapers with time, another editor would look through it to make sure the finished result made sense. Then, typically, you would drop it down a hole. The printing machinery was always on the ground floor because of its weight, the eidtorial was upstairs and one-way communication was often achieved through a vertical tube running down the building.

At this point the story fell into the hands of the type-setters and compositors. These were skilful and literate artisans whose training took much longer than ours did. The standard apprenticeship for a journalist was three years; for a printer it was seven. This was a cherished opportunity for bright working class kids who would be urged by older relatives to “learn a trade” to ensure their lifetime employability. Only males did it. Nowadays one would wonder why this was so but in those days it was a common feature of skilled manual jobs and we did not question it.

Your story would at this point be split up, because any part which needed a different type size or column width would have to be done on a different machine. After the type-setter had turned it into a lot of small pieces of metal they would be passed to a table called the random, each still accompanied by its original  piece of paper. Here the story would be reassembled. Its metai version would go in a tray called a galley, from which a galley proof could be made – which is where that phrase comes from. The proof and the original story on paper, would then be passed to another department, known formally as the Correctors of the Press and less formally as the proofreaders. In some newspapers this department was used to meet government requirements that a certain proportion of disabled people should be included in a firm’s employees, so everyone in the room seemed to have a limb missing. In other newspapers the overwhelmingly male atmosphere in the printing department was countered by the recruitment of lots of young women as proofreaders, leading to occasional complaints from their supervisor if the copy was too raunchy, in his view, for young ladies’ eyes.  In theory the proofreaders’ only job was to ensure that the type as set had followed the original copy. In practice a detailed examination of the story often disclosed other problems which could at this stage still be corrected. Meanwhile the story in type form would travel to a place called “the stone” because a slate-topped table was the traditional piece of furniture. Here a whole page would be assembled. At this point there would also be an editorial representative called the Stone Sub. In theory his only job was to resolve problems in fitting the stories into the page according to the plan provided. In practice the stories usually had to be cut a bit, so the Stone Sub would read the proofs as they arrived with an eye to parts which could be pruned without sending the whole story back for resetting. So again, another pair of eyes, another chance to rescue Mr Obama from a terrorist’s tomb stone.

I must not give you the impression that this system produced infallibly correct results. In fact when produced in this way The Guardian included so many misprints that even its own staff called it The Grauniad. But on the whole the system worked. Unfortunately from the point of view of avoiding mistakes most of it has been replaced by the computer. There is no paper copy, there are no type-setters or compositors, there is no Stone Sub and there are no proofreaders. Careful readers will note a small tragedy lurking here, with eager young men spending seven years learning a trade which was wiped out overnight by the microchip. Technology marches on, leaving mangled bodies in its trail. All these people who no longer have to look at a story leave more opportunities for error. To compensate we get the spell checker, but that is, as you might say, knot mulch kelp because it misses a mis-spelling if the erroneous word is a legitimate one in its own right.

A less technological question is the way we produce reporters these days.  When I started it was unusual to meet graduates in the business (outside the Financial Times) and only one UK university offered a journalism degree. Most reporters started on local newsopapers where they did rather boring and repetitive jobs reporting things like whist drives and school sports days, which did not do much for the writing skills but cultivated accuracy about names and numbers. Being a reporter was exciting but not prestigious and it attracted enterprising types who had had discipline problems at school. Nowadays you get complaints, at least in English-speaking countries, that the switch to a graduate in-take has filled the business with fully paid-up members of the middle classes who can draw an inverted pyramid but lack the skills or the inclination to hang about in grubby pubs on the scent of a good yarn. It would be easier to dismiss this as the wails of a few dinosaurs if the newspapers now staffed entirely by graduates and computers were not losing readership in most places…

Who are they? Who is this “Concerned group of financial professionals” who can afford to rent acres of local newsprint to beg victims of the minibond scam to let by-gones be by-gones? After all if you are going to pose as a friend of all the world, defender of humble shopkeepers and timid tourists, we are entitled to know whether this is a sincere piece of public-spirited peace-making, or a hypocritical attempt to dress financial interests in the garb of concern for public order. There are times, we all know, when honest man may wish to express an opinion pseudonymously. But the Financial Professionals are not seeking to criticise the PRC, call for independence in Tibet or seek the liberation of the latest jailed “subversive”.  The pursuit of peace and quiet on Central pavements is not controversial. So why are we left to ponder the possibility that the people now calling for peace are the same sorry crew who caused the problem in the first place?

Personally I do not go to Central that often, but I must say that I have never been intimidated or otherwise distressed by the protests going on there. It is a cherished right of the ripped off to demonstrate outside the premises of the bandit concerned, and I am quite willing to make whatever small sacrifices may be involved for the rest of us if people exercise that right.

The financial professionals are, it seems, a pretentious lot. I am not sure that anyone in the finanncial business is a professional in anything but the broadest sense. Mostly they sell things. On the whole the suiting is better than in brush sales but the principles involved are the same. Professionals in the more restricted sense are people with ethical obligations which over-ride their personal interests. Can you say “ethical banker” without giggling?

Certainly our financial professionals are not hampered by any old-fashioned notions about truth. The interesting thing about their advertisement is the way it starts with something we can all agree with and gradually escalates the rhetoric. Of course there are protesters in Central, sometimes dressed in funeral garb, sometimes carrying coffins, sometimes talking through bull-horns and usually just sitting on the pavement. This, the financial professionals believe, is making Hong Kong a laughing stock the world over. Well really? Everywhere from Belize to Beijing morning coffee is interrupted by raucous laughter at the spectacle of Hong Kong minibond protests? Pull the other one.

A couple of paragraphs later the amusing crowds have turned into “howling mobs”.  Through the howling mobs “sophisticated international customers” have to push. This is making them so uncomfortable that they are taking their business elsewhere. Rubbish! International business is driven by the same greed that motivates the local variety. Your sophisticated international customer is not going to go home to his sophisticated international boss and say he missed a good deal in Central because he was too intimidated by a mock funeral on the pavement.

The verbal escalation then continues. We are now dealing with “violent uncivil protests”. Two examples of the boodcurdling violence involved are provided. People have resorted to “lying down or sprawling across the roadways” and “camping out at the Cheung Kong Centre”. On the basis of this threatening behaviour “visitors are right to question whether Hong Kong is still a safe and friendly tourist city.” Are they indeed?

Others may find it more interesting to ponder what is going on here. Do the banks think that it is bad for their business to have a grzphic reminder on their doorsteps of the facts that investments may go down as well as up, and that this is a point on which your salesman’s advice is unreliable?  Or is there some deeper significance in the fact that the only detailed complaint is about the Cheung Kong Centre?

During my occasional run-ins with the anti-smoking loonies I have occasionally suggested that they were by now so addicted to making decisions for other people that they would be opposed to smoking even if a version of it emerged which was entirely healthy. This was necessarily a hypothetical statement, and one which I did not really expect to see in the real world. Traditional snuff is quite harmless compared with the inhaled versions, but that did not save it from being banned. Still it does at least have nicotine in it.

Happily, however, on Tuesday my point was elegantly demonstrated. A company called Shortcut has begun to market a rather expensive gadget which looks like a cigarette, but isn’t one. There is no tobacco in it whatsoever. The user inhales flavoured water vapour. I suppose some people might go on to the real thing. But then some people might not. Some smokers might find that sucking something else helped them to quit. Despite these uncertainties, though, the Post’s intrepid reporter had no difficulty in finding members of the tobacco Taliban who wanted the new gadget to be regulated, or better still banned.   An assistant professor at the HKU School of Public Health (was no real professor available?) said there was “no good evidence that e-cigarettes were safe to use”.

I fear the School of Public Health and the rest of us are not going to see eye to eye until the school gets its head round the idea that we ban things which are proven dangerous. We do not ban things because they have not been proven to be safe to use, at least when ostensibly harmless activities like inhaling water vapour are concerned. Of course what was bothering the True Believers was the effect of the new gadget on young people. Puritans who wish to curb adults’ freedom of choice always claim to be motivated by the desire to protect young people. Heavens, they might get the idea that sticking something in your mouth and sucking it was pleasant. On this basis we shall I suppose soon see calls for a ban on oral sex…