tim's experiment

Here is a lttle puzzle. Some time ago, readers will recall, there was a big row over the road which runs through Fairview Park. Residents complained that large lorries used this residential boulevard as a short-cut to nefarious non-agricultural doings in nearby villages, even though the government had provided a new, slightly longer, road expressly for their use. The intrusion of large trucks in what was basically a low-rise housing estate posed obvious dangers, a point driven home when a boy cyclist was killed by one of them. The management of the estate, after carefully considering its legal position, decided to ban articulated trucks from the road. This was an entirely sensible suggestion but it was bitterly opposed by residents of said nearby villages. At no point during the ensuing fracas did any official voice make the fundamental point that this was a private road whose owners had a perfect right to bar from it any vehicle of which they disapproved, whether the result was inconvenient to third parties or not.

Now come to the more recent past and the problems of the residents of Tsoi Yuen Tsuen.  The village, the SCMPost told us yesterday, “must make way for the $66.9 billion Hong Kong-Shenzhen-Guangzhou rail link”. Actually this is not entirely true. The link will not run either through or under the village site, which is actually needed for a large siding. This in turn is only needed because of the idiotic and extremely expensive decision to put the whole line underground. I also do not think much of that $66.9 billion price tag. That figure was itself the result of vigorous massaging – previously the government had admitted to something in the upper 80s. And since the project was approved there have been spectacular rises in the predicted costs of other MTR projects. Face it, folks, this white elephant is eventually going to leave us no change from $100 billion. I suppose the government has to get rid of the surplus somehow.

Anyway, be that as it may, the villagers have to move, and many of them settled on a vacant plot in Yuen Kong, another village. Their move has been delayed because the only access to the new site is a road through the existing village, and the road is private. The owners refused to allow the newcomers to use it unless they paid sums initially reported at several hundred thousand and rising to $5 million later. The names of the extortionists were never divulged. Officials might have been expected at some point in this fracas to intervene, as they did in Fairview Park, to ensure that the owners did not use their legal powers to inconvenience other people, even if those other people wished to kill their children. Not a bit of it. The official line was that this was an entirely private matter involving potential users of the road and its owners. Officials would not touch it with a barge pole. In the end the would-be migrants were rescued by Mr Lau Wong-fat, who recruited a mystery donor to pay the mystery extortionist or extortionists. Clearly Mr Lau is wasted on Exco – he should be negotiating with Somali pirates, to whom some residents of Yuen Kong display a remarkable resemblance.

This is a depressing spectacle. If the government really wishes to discourage unreasonable behaviour in New Territories villages it has plenty of means at its disposal. Relying on Mr Lau is pathetic. It is also wrong in principle. Mr Lau is the chairman of the Heung Yee Kuk, which represents indigenous villagers. They are only a small minority in the New Territories population and it is unfair to say the least that the affairs of the region should be run entirely in their interest.  Also Mr Lau has a famously poor memory. I felt a twinge of sympathy for the Tsoi Yuen villager who wanted the agreement in writing, though it will be interesting to see who, if anyone, will sign it.

Have you read the controversial Mrs Chua’s book on motherhood? I thought not. Nor should you. Writing a newspaper article claiming that American mothers are no good and that is why California’s universities are full of Chinese kids is a provocation. To do it as a way of promoting a book is OK if that is what the book says. But apparently it isn’t. The book is comparatively boring. Mrs Chua was just trying to pull a few people’s short hairs so that her book sales could surf on a wave of public controversy about “tiger mums”. This is dishonest. Unless she wishes her kids to be Hong Kong real estate salesmen when they grow up, she is setting a bad example.

In any case, having been a parent myself, I think people should be strenuously discouraged from offering amateur advice on the subject, especially if that advice is based only on their own experience. Families are different; schools are different; children are different. What works in one set of circumstances will not work in another. My mother was not a tiger, but she believed in encouraging any constructive interest that came along. Finding that I asked many questions about signs and newspapers, she decided to teach me to read at the age of about three. For me this was a complete success. I had read the complete works of A.A. Milne by the age of 5, those of C.S. Forester by the age of 11. I was omnivorous and no doubt in the long run this helped. My twin brother did not share the interest so he was allowed to wait until he learned to read at school with everyone else.

I am sure Mrs Chua is right in supposing that, other things being equal, children whose mothers encourage them to do their homework will do better at school than those whose mothers do not. but the difference is probably not that great, compared with the influence of genetics and peers.  And this certainly does not justify the current enthusiasm for stories about supermums whose kids, at an improbably early age, can play the harpsichord, ski down Mount Everest on one foot, and are going to Cambridge to start a Mathematics degree. I understand the enthusiasm for extra-curricular activities. In Hong Kong, where the parks are miniscule and the streets are death traps, you cannot let kids out to play with their peers. The alternative to piano and Kumon is that your offspring are shut up in the usual tiny flat with little alternative to watching TV.  Still, taking these things too seriously is counter-productive.

I meet many students who have studied the piano. This is so common that it is generally not mentioned on applications at all unless the young lady (men do not generally do journalism) has reached Grade Seven.  Yet when put in a room with a piano, very few of these advanced learners have actually aquired a taste for playing, or a repertoire of pieces that they enjoy, and can entertain other people with. In the old days the point of learning the piano was that you could tinkle tunes which the people could hum, and the whole family would gather round the piano to sing them. In Hong Kong it’s just another string of examinations. After the last exam, nothing.

Sport is a healthy thing for young people. And I have noticed that even four decades after I graduated, when I turn up at reunions those of us who wasted much of our youth on the river have lasted rather better than most of our more conscientious contemporaries. But here again there is a danger that what is compulsory will eventually be dropped with a sigh of relief when freedom arrives. Kids should do things they enjoy, if you want to establish a habit. I was distressed to see in one of the superkids stories that the brats concerned were getting up early every day for swimming training. Swimming has always seemed to me the least mind-expanding of sports. You go up the pool, turn round and go down the pool. Then you do the same thing again, and again, and again…. God knows football is not an intellectual pursuit but it involves choices and some social skills.

So if your kid is playing Mozart, starring in the minirugby team and getting top marks for spelling, good for you. If your kid isn’t, don’t beat yourself up over it. Youngsters proceed at different paces and will find their own interests if encouraged. Years ago they had an exam in the UK called the 11 plus, which you took at the end of primary school. This was supposed to pick out people of promise. I did very well in this exercise. On the other hand my university room-mate had failed it.

The Heritage Foundation is traditionally described as a “right-wing US think tank”. This is presumably because “bunch of loony market fundamentalists” would take up too much space. This week the foundation announced again that Hong Kong topped its index of economic freedom. This was not a very stunning piece of news because Hong Kong has been similarly honoured for the previous 16 years.

In some places this would no doubt be greeted as a piece of welcome news. In Hong Kong it is so obviously idiotic that most people greeted it with derision. Even the back page of the Business Post, where you might expect to find this sort of thing taken seriously, greeted the news with scorn and satire. Those of us who live here know, of course, that Hong Kong is not a bastion of untramelled economic freedom. It is a festering hotbead of monopolies, duopolies and cartels, ruled by a government which does very well out of its control of land supply. The only people in Hong Kong who had a kind word to say for the Heritage folks were the Hong Kong government itself, which came out with a fawning, forelock-tugging welcome for the accolade, suggesting hilariously, among other obvious lies, that the local administration seeks to “establish an appropriate regulatory regime to ensure the integrity and smooth functioning of a free market.”

One can of course see what the Heritage Foundation’s problem is. If you believe with a fervour usually reserved for more theological matters that economic freedom is conducive to happiness, prosperity, political freedom and a clean environment, then you have to produce some encouraging examples. Unfortunately most of the countries which are demonstrably successful in producing happy and contented citizens are places like Iceland or Denmark which not only regulate their economies but also have generous welfare provisions. One does not wish to make the United States the shining example, because the whole point of the exercise is to influence US policy in the direction of freer markets. So the Foundation needs a plausible specimen of prosperity which is neither nominally communist, which eliminates China, nor avowedly dirigiste, which takes care of the European candidates, as well as India and Brazil. So Hong Kong is it. The fact that this clashes violently with the established facts about how Hong Kong works can be glossed over. Most Americans know nothing about the rest of the world and the index is intended for their consumption.

This would be a piece of harmless fun if the foundation could restrain itself from commenting on Hong Kong’s domestic matters, but it can not. The publishers of the index expressed misgivings about the minimum wage legislation and the prospect of some legal effort to ensure competition. Most of us would not give a fig if Hong Kong lost its top spot in the foundation’s index but no doubt the prospect will worry some people. Actually there seems to be a logical problem here. I understand that a minimum wage is an interference in the working of market forces. That is its purpose. But a law against anti-competitive practices seems to be something the foundation would welcome, if it was really concerned with the free play of the invisible hand, and not with fostering opportunities overseas for American business.

Hong Kong is not, by international standards, a tough place to do business. But some of the consequences of economic freedom call for remedial action. Being the place in the world where this point is least understood should not be regarded as flattering. And the degree of ease can be overstated. Certainly its very easy to set up an import/export company. On the other hand if you wish to open a restaurant…

Time has alas caught up with my last passport. This is a sad moment because it means saying farewell to an interesting collection of chops and visas, some of which I am unlikely to collect again. The replacement process is reasonably painless. One goes to the British Consulate, an improvement on the arrangement in Lancaster, where the passport people shared premises with the unemployment benefit office, an arrangement which used to lead to interesting misunderstandings. Here the wait is not excessive, the charge is reasonable, the staff are friendly.

I remain resentful that the handsome dark blue hardback which used to stand out in a pile of passports on any group tour has now been replaced by a soft little red thing, with European Union on the front. Some further changes have been made since my old passport was issued. The pages of translation, which tell Immigration officers in 22 languages the meanings of such vital terms as “name” and “sex”, have been moved to the back of the book, next to the page where such matters as my name and sex (the demure use of “gender” for this purpose has apparently not yet reached the Foreign Office)  are actually recorded. The inside front page, which used to say only “European Union”. “United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland” and “Passport”, but said them in 12 languages, has now been tidied up.

The same phrases are provided, but now only in three languages. One of them, mercifully, is still English. I am not sure about the other two. The language which renders European Union as “Yr Undeb Ewropeaidd” might I suppose be Welsh. Actually providing this translation seems a bit unnecessary, certainly as far as the word “Passport” is concerned. The Welsh word for Passport is Pasbort. I would have thought Welsh speakers could have worked out what Passport was. Perhaps they’re thick. The other language has a passing resemblance to some of the technical terms used in Scottish bagpiping, so I suppose it might be Gaelic. Why Her Britannic Majesty’s Sec of State for Foreign Affairs bothers with these lingistic adornments is beyond me. Most of the few people who speak Welsh or Gaelic are perfectly capable of reading English. If the Foreign Office wants to help British citizens who can’t handle the language they would probably help more people if the extra language supplied was Urdu.

The other thing which has changed is the instructions which come with your new travel document. These now tell you that your passport contains a sensitive electronic chip and should be treated like a mobile phone. It must not be bent, twisted, dunked, heated, steamed, microwaved or put near a television set. It should not be allowed to sunbathe. I have never heard of anyone microwaving their passport but I suppose after the famous case of the woman who tried to dry her cat in a microwave oven we are taking no chances. The irony in this is, of course, that if you were designing a passport from scratch and you knew it was going to contain a fragile chip, you would not produce the pathetic floppy thing which we are now offered. You would go for something solid like the traditional blue hardback which was abolished as unEuropean. While one bureaucrat was moving to snappy paperback passports, another one was planning to insert therein a sensitive chip which should not be bent or twisted.

This is the sort of thing which often happens in large organisations. Indeed it happens in Hong Kong. I notice that the MTR Corp is still planning its network so that everyone will have easy access to Hung Hom, where the old mainline station will be devoted entirely to trains to China. Meanwhile, at enormous expense, a new station for trains to China is being constructed on the other side of Kowloon. Needless to say it is too late to change any of this…

Readers who suspect that judges live on a distant planet barely visible from the Earth will not have been surprised by the performance of Mr Justice Alan Wright in the Court of First Instance last Thursday. In His Lordship’s dock was a Ms Ng Wai-bing, whose story is rather interesting.

The court was told, according to newspaper reports, that in 2007 Ms Ng’s husband (who may or may not be Mr Ng, Hong Kong habits in this matter being unpredictable) was charged with managing a vice establishment. Ms Ng was waiting in the room outside the court where witnesses, friends of participants, people whose case has not come up yet and other hangers about sit on hard benches produced by resentful previous customers in prison workshops.  She overheard a policeman urging witnesses in the upcoming case to “nail”  the defendant. We only have Ms Ng’s word for this part of the proceedings but in view of what came later the story is plausible. Now policemen are not supposed to coach witnesses in this way, but Ms Ng thought her testimony in the matter might well be dismissed as unreliable or irrelevant. She was the defendant’s wife, after all, and also Hong Kong judicial figures tend to be impervious to complaints of police malpractices. Ms Ng was familiar with this point because she is a former police person herself.  So in order to produce evidence which would brook no dispute she started taping the conversations in the waiting room, and over four months (this seems to have been a very complicated case) collected 47 recordings.  As a result of this evidence-gathering exercise the case against her husband was dismissed, and two of the officers involved in it are now awaiting trial on charges of attempting to pervert the course of public justice. In other words, a miscarriage of justice has been prevented, and two suspected criminals have been brought to book.

Naive readers might suppose at this point that Ms Ng might be eligible for one of those awards occasionally dished out to law-abiding citizens who help the police. Well perhaps that is a bit optimistic. Oddly enough these awards do not seem to find their way to people who help the police to avoid infelicities in their own behaviour.  What may come as something of a surprise is that Ms Ng was not only not praised; she was charged with contempt of court. Quite how this worked in legal terms did not emerge very clearly from the newspaper reports. The Post had some quotes from Ms Ng’s lawyer which suggested that what was going on was an extension of the ban on recording in court on the grounds that the waiting room was part of the court.

Reading the quotes provided from Mr Justice Wright’s judgment, on the other hand, suggested a more general offence of conduct whereby confidence in the administration of public justice might be impaired. Certainly reading the story reduces one’s confidence in the conduct of public justice, not so much because of the possibility that someone might have bugged the waiting room, as because of the possibility that policemen are coaching prosecution witnesses with impunity and Wright J thinks this happy state of affairs should be preserved. There was a substantial risk, he said, that litigants or witnesses would be deterred from attending court if they thought that someone might be eavesdropping or recording their consultations and conversations. This is, with respect, nonsense. The waiting room is a public place. Everyone can eavesdrop on everyone else. People who want to have private consultations and conversations have other places to go to. In any case, as judges frequently observe when giving the green light for phone tapping, close circuit cameras, random breath testing and other intrusions on privacy, the law-abiding have nothing to fear.  The thought that someone may be taping your conversation is a yawn unless your conversation consists of an attempt to pervert the course of justice. Mr Wright, though, thought Ma Ng’s conduct a “singularly grave instance of contempt of court”. It was “unprecedented … throughout Common Law jurisdictions”, he had been told. Presumably by the prosecution, whose research on this point may not have been very enthusiastic.

At this point Ms Ng must have been looking forward to the chance to sew a few mailbags, read the whole of War and Peace, and sample the Correctional cuisine for a few months. And indeed she was sentenced to nine months. A friend who helped with the recording got six months. But Mr Wright seems to have had some inkling that this outcome would be seen as somewhat bizarre by many people denied the benefits of a lengthy legal education, because both sentences were suspended for 18 months. So Ms Ng walked from the court a free woman, and will stay that way unless the temptation to commit contempt of court again becomes overwhelming in the near future.

The story behind this story will be familiar to former students who have been subjected to my version of media law over the years. The law on contempt of court in the UK was reformed in 1981. In 1987 the Law Reform Commission recommended that Hong Kong should have a comprehensive Contempt of Court Ordinance which would incorporate reforms and also remove uncertainty. Like so many of the commission’s recommendations this one was ignored. So the law is still a mess. So it goes.

Our beloved Post was in a right tizz this morning over the number of accidents involving minibuses. “Minibuses’ high crash rate fails to spur action,” complained the lead headline. The story started with the news that the accident rate for minibuses was 7.5 times that of all other Hong Kong vehicles, said that this “translated” into 21 deaths and 187 injured last year, and proceeded to accuse the Transport Department of dragging its feet despite the “alarming figures”.

Further statistics floated in further down the story. We were told that the accident rate for minibuses was 255.2 per thousand vehicles, compared with 34.1 per thousand for all vehicles. Alert readers would have spotted at this point that they had already been misled. The minibus accident rate is not 7.5 times the rate for all other vehicles, it is 7.5 times the average for all vehicles including minibuses.
Looking at it another way we were told that only 0.76 per cent of the vehicles in Hong Kong are minibuses, but they are involved in 5 per cent of all accidents. And the question which all this left in my mind is where are the alarming figures? We have all heard the rumours that, as the story put it in due course, “minibuses are notorious for speeding and violating traffic regulations”. I have heard, indeed, that the late night express to Sheung Shui is the most exciting ride in Hong Kong outside Ocean Park. But if we are going to hang a story on the statistics they had better be the right ones. And these weren’t.

Look at it this way. The number of accidents per minibus is bound to be higher than the average. Most Hong Kong cars do a half-hour drive to the office in the morning, and half an hour back in the evening. Much of the “driving” actually consists of sitting in tunnel queues, where a serious accident is scarcely possible because everyone is moving so slowly. Some car drivers don’t even do that. The owner commutes by public transport and drives for fun at the weekend. Minibuses are on the road all the time. Of course the number of accidents per minibus will be higher. I expect we would find that the rate for taxis and buses is also above average, for the same reason. If we want to know whether minibuses are unreasonably dangerous then we need another figure. We could try the number of accidents per mile travelled. Or we could use that great favourite of the airlines the number of accidents per passenger mile. Or if we prefer we could try the number of accidents per trip. I am quite willing to believe that whichever figure you used the outcome would be alarming. But if you are going to beat a government department over the head with the statistics you need a figure which means what you say it means.

The rule of law requires, or so it seems to me, not only that the law should be obeyed but also that it should know its limits.  The rule of law is sabotaged, not served, if laws are passed which cannot be enforced, or if courts presume to sit in judgement on matters over which they have no control. Traditionally one of the limits on the powers of the courts was the geographical terrain covered by their jurisdiction. There have always been some exceptions to this. Treason, for example, would still be treason if the offending action took place abroad, as it often did. Lately we seem to have seen a good deal more. Some countries feel their courts should be prepared to try people accused of serious crimes committed elsewhere, like General Pinochet. Some feel that their own citizens should face criminal charges at home for crimes against children in other jurisdictions where such matters are pursued less avidly. At least in these cases the defendant, if not the place of the crime, is in the country claiming jurisdiction and the court can inflict punishment on him or her. So the proceedings are not pointless.

Which is more than you can say for the Hong Kong government’s decision to hold an inquest into the Manila bus tragedy. The Coroner, we were told last week, had “called” or “summoned” more than 100 witnesses from the Philippines. The correct word here is “invited” because it is entirely up to such witnesses whether they wish to spend a day or two participating in a Hong Kong legal circus. Or not. Anyone who has anything to hide would be well advised to stay away and probably will. Actually it is difficult to see what this exercise can be expected to achieve. The UK government has occasionally held inquests into the deaths of Brits abroad, when there was genuine uncertainty about how they died. But this is hardly the case with the tragedy in Manila, which has been very thoroughly explored already. We know who killed the victims and how they died. That is all a Coroner is supposed to be concerned with anyway. When I reported on inquests we were frequently reminded that the purpose of the proceedings was merely to arrive at the right choice from a limited selection of verdicts: the proceedings were not intended to produce a detailed account of the death, not supposed to gratify the curiosity or resentment of surviving relatives, and not supposed to lay the foundations for civil action later by or on behalf of victims.  People may feel disappointed that the very thorough inquiry by the Manila government was not followed by more stringent punishment for officials who erred. But that is hardly an argument which can be advanced seriously by our government, whose idea of suitable punishment for an official who commits a gross error of judgement is that she should apologise. But only if she has not done so already.

Fans of our local system will wish to interject at this point that errors in considering applications for post-retirement employment from former mandarins do not lead to loss of life, unlike errors in handling hostage situations. This is true in a restricted direct sense. Nobody dies if a senior civil servant cuddles a property mogul. In a broader sense it is not. Two people died during last week’s cold snap because they were sleeping in the street. If Hong Kong’s housing policies were driven by social need instead of the wish to cosset a small circle of property developers then maybe we would not have people dying under our flyovers like the heroine of the Little Match Girl.

To return to our bus tragedy, what is going to happen after the inquest? Normally the Coroner might make recommendations. Even our government frequently ignores them. It is difficult to imagine any great new insights emerging from the Hong Kong proceedings. In fact as there will be a general absence of such useful formalities as a visit to the scene of the tragedy it is rather easier to imagine the proceedings producing some thoroughly unhelpful observations which will give grievous offence without helping anybody. The inquest may publicise some things in Hong Kong which are not widely known here, but it will hardly have anything to say which is news in Manila. The government there can afford to greet any suggestions made with one of those phrases which our government uses when contemplating an unhelpful public opinion poll – something along the lines of all views will be considered with the attention which they deserve. Basically the Philippines may have problems but it is not a sort of diplomatic domestic helper at the beck and call of the Hong Kong government.

Well the inquest will produce a lot of media fodder, enrich some lawyers and perhaps gratify some Hong Kongers who want to watch a Manila official squirm in the witness box. No doubt it can be defended along roughly the same lines as the Asian Games – it will encourage local legal culture, boost interest in judicial matters and give our aspiring competitors a chance to perform before a large sympathetic audience. Students now still in Form Three will later attribute their choice of a legal career to the inspiring and educational effect of a long inquest on an overseas gunman’s victims. It will be worth the expense, about which we have so far been told very little. Meanwhile our Travel Advisory people continue to pretend that the Philippines are more dangerous to travellers than Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia or Colombia, which suggests that either ignorance or political vindictiveness is polluting what should be a source of objective information.

I wonder. The official inquiry in Manila concluded that the affair had held up a mirror to a society and showed distressing levels of corruption and incompetence. That was a brave conclusion. Hong Kong’s official reaction suggests distressing levels of arrogance, ignorance, and racism. But I fear introspection of this kind is not our leaders’ forte.

Never let it be said that our Mainland brothers have no sense of humour. The morning before Liu Xiaobo’s chair was awarded the real Peace Prize in Oslo, readers of the local newspapers were treated to the news of a rival award, called the Confucius Peace Prize, bestowed in Beijing. Clearly no trouble had been spared to make this an occasion beyond satire. The recipient, a Taiwanese politician, was not present, so the bauble was bestowed on a sweet but puzzled 6-year-old girl. Her connection with the prize-winner, or peace, was not explained. The winner was supposed to be selected by an internet poll, but it eventually emerged that this had been cancelled because of “technical problems”.  So quite how the winner was picked remains a mystery. The shortlist, however, was compiled by four professors at Beijing universities. The eight people on it comprised, reportedly, the winner, one poet who works at the Ministry of Culture, the Panchen Lama and six foreigners. The prize money came from – ah, another mystery, – someone who “loves peace and wishes to remain anonymous”.

The idea, apparently, is that peace (like democracy?) has a Chinese version visible only from Beijing, and those who pursue it should be honoured in their turn. Although I noticed that on the same day the Foreign Ministry was being less modest. The Nobel committee, said a spokesman, “are in the minority. The Chinese people and the overwhelming majority of people in the world are opposed to what they do”. Let us all hail another symptom of China’s peaceful rise; the Beijing Foreign Ministry now speaks not only for the Chinese people, but for the overwhelming majority of people in the world.

Well we must not be unkind to something which is still in its infancy. But I do wonder whether giving a peace prize is the most promising option, if the Chinese government wishes to give international prizes. Norway may be a small country, but it is demonstrably peaceful. It has never invaded anyone. Admittedly this is partly because it only became an independant country in 1905, but some countries manage lots of invasions in a mere 50 years. Like the PRC. Frankly the idea of “peace with Chinese characteristics” is not very convincing. Giving the prize to a Taiwanese KMT politico suggests that the Chinese idea of peace follows that of Carl von Clausewitz. The great military theorist pointed out in one of his more sardonic moments that the person who invades your country is always a pacifist: he wants nothing better than that you should submit to him without fighting. Anyway, in view of the PLA’s rich military history – not to mention its huge size – it may be a bit early for China to be regarded as an international authority on the pursuit of peace. Distributors of international prizes should stick to matters on which they have demonstrable expertise.

So I suggest that the Chinese government should institute a Confucius Prize for the world’s top despot. This is a matter on which China, with its eclectic collection of international friends — and its own venomous internal habits — can speak with authority. Indeed they can skip the shortlist phase of  the selection and go straight on to vote. All the likely candidates will be found on the list of countries which boycotted the Nobel ceremony this year. I dare say that any of this fine selection of nasties and ne’erdowells would be very happy to get a prize. And for people like this, such chances do not come up very often.  At least we could trust them to turn up to receive it.

Well the good news is that a Hong Kong restaurant has been awarded three Michelin stars. The bad news is that if you ask for it, this restaurant is quite willing to serve you sharksfin soup. That was enough to get local tree-huggers, or fish-huggers, up in arms. Michelin should take sustainability into consideration, said a WWF spokesperson. “Excessive consumption is driving sharks to extinction,” she said, “and the award will indirectly encourage further consumption.”

I have several quarrels with this approach. One is that sharks are nasty carnivorous creatures which do not reciprocate the warm and cherishing feelings which they evoke from some human beings.  Species are going extinct all the time. This is nature’s way. If it is the shark’s turn, well it coundn’t happen to a more deserving fish.

Leaving the lovability of sharks aside, though, the WWF seems to be taking the oppportunity for a good whinge on a slender foundation here. I suppose they were put up to it by the newspapers and the opportunity was irresistible. But the restaurant concerned is not going to ram shark fins down the throats of reluctant diners. The consumption of fins will be entirely at the discretion of the customer. If the customer has any sense he will spurn an over-priced and under-flavoured dish. Sharks’ fins don’t actually taste of very much at all.  The WWF has every right to urge diners to consider sustainability in their menu choices. Asking restaurants to participate in the latest conservation PR stunt is another matter. Fins are expensive because they are hard to get hold of. If they are banned by some restaurants, or some restaurant guides, they will become more, not less attractive. And that “indirectly encourage further consumption” phrase looks dangerously vague. How much further consumption? Presumably there is a threshold below which the WWF would admit it was wasting people’s time. Have we passed it?

Also I think the Michelin people have the right to say that politics, the environment, and other worthy causes are important and interesting, but not what their guide is about. The guide is about the food. All that a Michelin star says is that the food in a restaurant is good. It says nothing of the sustainability or other worthy qualities of the restaurant’s menu policy. This is a sensible arrangement because it would be very difficult to run such a guide any other way. Lots of food is the result of processes open to one objection or another. The things done to geese to produce foie gras, for example, are painful and disgusting.  As for veal … These are matters which a sensitive diner should consider carefully.  WWF has every right to persuade people to stop ordering shark’s fin. If that is not producing the desired results, try harder. Restaurants give their customers what the customers want. This is the way to stay in business.

There is something endearingly antiquated about the row over a Catholic priest, Father Thomas Law, who was rather misleadingly reported as “likening Li Ka-shing to the devil”.  Generally the modern habit is to keep the religious rhetoric for religious contexts and condemn the exploiters of the poor or gullible in terms borrowed from sociology or economics.  Perhaps this is a shame. Anyway I thought Father Law was subjected to a certain amount of poetic licence by local reporters. Actually he did not compare anyone to THE devil. In a clearly jovial speech at a party he compared property developers generally to devils,  an obvious metaphor because he was speaking at a Halloween party. Devils in the plural are a different matter from Beelzebub in  the singular. Plural devils used to flourish in mediaeval paintings, where they could be found pitchforking sinners into the furnace, but they don’t really feature in modern mythology, at least outside the wilder fringes where exorcism in still practised, and in the resulting movies.  This was not a devastating figure of speech in its context. It seems this point was not lost on the property developers, because none of the others has complained.  Mr Li featured by name in the next sentence, which contained the observation that he should be worried about what would happen to him when he died. This was perhaps a bit personal. As I understand it in the Catholic view we are all sinners so most of us should share the same concern.

On the other hand I seem to recall that Father Law’s boss — the real boss, not the one in charge of fund-raising for Caritas — did say something to the effect that it would be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. If the difficulty is proportionate to the wealth it seems a legitimate theological observation that Mr Li will have a lot of talking to do when he reaches the Pearly Gates.  Father Law then went on to say something critical about Cafe de Coral, but so many people have done that lately that this was not considered newsworthy.

The really interesting bit comes next. There was a telephone conversation. On one side we have a senior member of the Li empire. We were assured that this was not Mr Li in person but that is not surprising. Being rich means never having to do anything for yourself. Even procreation can be outsourced these days. On the other end of the conversation we have a senior spokesman for the Church who, we are also assured, did not apologise. It seems he offered some carefully worded assurance that Father Law’s views were not necessarily shared by the Pope, and in return received an assurance that Mr Li would continue to donate to Caritas.

It seemed to me rather unfortunate that these two topics had come up at the same time. Many years ago it was considered acceptable for the Church to sell what were called “indulgences”. The way this worked was that you supported the Pope of the day in his purchases of hand-painted chapel ceilings and other artistic extravagances, and in return were promised a reduction in your stay in purgatory, a sort of half-way house between Heaven and Hell where moderate sinners could pay for their errors before joining the Choir Invisible. But that was many years ago. While I cannot say the Beatitudes are my daily reading I think I have visited them often enough to say that in the traditional version there is nothing along the lines of “Blessed are the property developers, because they shall be cossetted by the Catholic Diocese of Hong Kong”, and nor was there one saying “Blessed are donors to Caritas, because all their sins shall be forgiven them.”

Well, Mr Li’s charitable impulses do him credit. Quite how much credit I leave to Saint Peter. Where a church which is supposed to “hunger and thirst after righteousness” should draw the line in its fund-raising is a tricky matter. I realise that the church sincerely wishes to help the poor and the money to do this has to come from somewhere. Also, local standards in these matters are low. Few charities refuse the assistance of the Jockey Club, whose money comes from the industrial exploitation of a notorious vice.  Still a church is a church, not the Heung Yee Kuk. Like most Hong Kong people I am not a Catholic. Quite a lot of non-Catholics, I imagine, found Father Law’s original observations refreshing and apposite, if expressed in what seemed to us rather picturesque language.  The subsequent non-apology was … shall we say less inspiring?