tim's experiment

I am not often moved to comment on American politics but I see the new Speaker is a gentleman who spells his name Boehner … which, The Economist observed for readers who might be confused on this point, rhymes with “trainer”. This will have come as a profound disappointment for many readers who will have supposed that it rhymed with “loner”.  This is, after all, in conformity with the usual practice. The “oe” combination usually comes out as a long “o”, as in Boeing or Goebbels. Putting an “h” on the end of it shouldn’t make any difference. If it was meant to rhyme with trainer it would be spelled Behner, you would think.

Now of course there is a reason why Mr Boehner might prefer to rhyme with “trainer”. Boner, in the slang of many English-speaking countries, is not only the word for a butchery implement; it is also the word for – um – an erect male sexual organ. Indeed before Mr Boehner’s pronunciation preferences had been pronounced in Hong Kong, the internet was already alive with some rather indecent plays on words. Mr Obama was to face “stiff opposition”. His opponent would give him a “hard time”.  Other authors speculated on the headlines which might accompany Clintonesque indiscretions on the part of Mr Boehner, supposing he perpetrates any. Clearly for a politician who wishes to be taken seriously the Bayner pronunciation is rather important.

Still it is, I fear, wrong. We must salute Mr Boehner’s exemplary persistence and success in persuading people to adopt a thoroughly implausible version of his name for public purposes. Even TVB is rhyming with “trainer”, which considering the problems they used to have with Leicester City is a remarkable achievement. But there is a cost to Mr Boehner’s success. Many of us have suspected for a long time that Americans are a puritanical lot who also cannot be bothered to pronounce foreign names properly. A plausible theory, it seems.

The whole town is talking, as journalists say in their usual exaggerated way, about the goings-on in the Lee clan. The story was that the elder Lee (otherwise known as Henderson Land) was keen to have grandsons to inherit the family firm. His second son had married and done his best, but produced only daughters. Eldest son is not married, but did his duty by getting a surrogate mother in the US to give birth to triplets on his behalf. The three babies have now arrived in Hong Kong.  The Standard reported this entirely as a feel-good happy story, which seemed a bit odd to me, but I must in fairness report that it was a better effort than that of the Post, which missed the item completely.  It did not seem to occur to anyone, at this stage, that some people might find the whole idea a bit controversial.

In the Standard’s follow-up story the next day some misgivings had appeared. One radio caller apparently thought the whole deal was morally wrong and unfair to the kids. A millionaire was quoted as saying that “it’s more reasonable to have children after marriage”, which could be considered a bit of an understatement. Another caller said that “they are not harming anyone and everyone has gotten what they needed,” which seemed to be rather missing the point.

Which is, I think, that using medical technology to help people with medical problems is one thing. Using it to allow very rich people to, in effect, buy babies, is another. This is not a question of the acceptability of surrogacy. In fact, strictly speaking, the woman who bore the babies is not a surrogate. A surrogate is, according to the Oxford Dictionary, “a substitute, especially a person deputizing for another in a specific role or office”.  In this case there is no wife for whom the surrogate is a substitute so she is not a surrogate. She is, I suppose, a sort of rented incubator. We were not told where the eggs came from – from the incubator or someone else – but it seems that the “father” was able to stipulate the sex and that a multiple birth was not unexpected, so I suppose the actual meeting of sperm and egg was done in a laboratory dish. The father’s part of the proceedings was limited to 20 minutes with a test tube and a copy of Playboy, and paying a very large bill.  

The new father of three now says he is studying fatherhood and intends to be a hands-on Dad, changing diapers like any other single parent. On the other hand I suppose being a vice chairman of Henderson Land takes up quite a lot of his time and he has left an awful lot of the proceedings so far to the hired help, so there may be some doubts about this. He also says he hopes to get married eventually, though I would have thought that finding a Miss Right who is romantically inclined to a pre-existing family of four may be a bit challenging, even for a millionaire.

I believe there is some reason to worry about the babies. Firstly, being a twin (as I am) has some serious disadvantages. I suppose being a triplet is even worse. The appearance of Mum, when Dad gets round to it, is going to raise some tricky questions. Are further offspring on the cards, and if so will they be treated differently? Or are they not on the cards, and will the future Mrs Lee have to live with the fact that some nameless American lady had done her job for her before she even reached the altar?

Clearly the Lee clans’ activities are legal. Whether they are moral is not a question on which I feel qualified to have an opinion. I just think the whole thing is in very poor taste. If you  are rich enough you can buy almost anything. “Can”, not “should”.

The government web page has now sprouted a little logo which invites you to go straight to what officials call the Outbound Travel Alert system. This would he a kind thought if the alert system was trustworthy. It is not. The list supplied has three categories. There are countries in which travellers should exercise caution and monitor the situation:  India, Indonesia, Iran, Nepal, Pakistan and Thailand. This is a reasonable observation given the recent history of the countries concerned, though the inclusion of Indonesia may be a bit unkind. Then there is a category of countries which should be avoided unless your travel is essential. There are currently no countries at all in this category. Then there is a category to which all travel should be avoided. There is one country in this category: the Philippines. And this is of course preposterous. There are some hazards to travelling in the Philippines, no doubt, but to suggest that the country is in a class of its own, two degrees more perilous than the scenes of recent civil wars, is too outlandish to be taken seriously.

Now of course we know how this happened. After the bus tragedy in Manila the Hong Kong government in essence put the Philippines on its no-go list as a sign of displeasure. There may have been some justification for caution in the immediate aftermath of the killings, when there was at least a theoretical possibility that the victims had been chosen because they were from Hong Kong, rather than just being an unlucky pick by the hostage-taker. This possibility has now wholly receded. None of the millions of words devoted to the tragic event has suggested that it was in any way connected with the nationality of the hostages. Having put the advisory on, though, officials are now faced with a difficulty: having had no good reason for putting it on they now have no good excuse for taking it off. So it sits there, a shameless lie, commemorating our officials’ contempt for the people they serve.

Because the travel advisory system is an important safety measure. But it only works if people trust it. If it is used as – say – a way of imposing economic sanctions on governments we are having a tiff with, then it loses its informational value entirely. If the alert on the Philippines is ostentatiously unwarranted, why should people feel worried by those for India, Indonesia and other unhappy spots?  Actually there are probably parts of the mainland where one would be well advised to exercise caution and monitor the situation. But I somehow do not think we shall ever see a travel advisory for them. If the government is not going to offer honest advice it would be better if it offered no advice at all.

One of my more easily shareable birthday presents was a translation of a poem:

At the foot of Shade Mountain

The sky, a woolly tent over the wilderness

Blue is the sky; boundless is the wild.

Grass bends in the wind, cattle and sheep showing

Since I first heard of it 30 years ago I have found something strangely haunting about the vision of tall grass bending in the wind, revealing previously hidden cattle and sheep. I would love to see it. One suspects a certain amount of poetic licence here. Grass tall enough to hide a sheep I can accept, but a cow?  On the other hand experience has taught me not to jump to conclusions about these things. I used to think that the odd-shaped mountains in so many Chinese paintings were purely conventional, perhaps partly motivated by the desire to fill a very vertical canvas. Upon coming to Hong Kong, where photographs of Chinese mountains are everywhere, I discovered that the paintings were no more than faithful renditions of some unusual but perfectly authentic pieces of landscape. So I am keeping an open mind on the cow-high pasture. Still the place sounds beautiful, and reading things like this brings on a vigorous urge to get up there and see it.

This urge is then attenuated by reading the daily news, in which the picture of China, while still doing justice to the scenery, also includes currupt officials, violent policemen and a pervasive absence of anything recognisable as the rule of law. It is one of life’s little mysteries that a government which cannot protect the constitutional rights of citizens in the suburbs of its own capital should be so eager to extend its rule to distant islands and provinces. This poroduces a dilemma, particularly for foreigners who have studied Chinese history and culture before making the aquaintance of its modern manifestation. There used to be occasional complaints in Hong Kong that Foreign Office mandarins who had studied up on China developed a romantic attachment to the Tang Dynasty version of the country which was a severe handicap when dealing with the Deng Dynasty. One of my friends who, after growing up in Hong Kong, studied Chinese in the UK, lamented the number of his classmates who were distressed by the discovery that the country they had come to admire in its literary manifestations was in real life a nasty police state.

Of course the situation is in a way much worse for Hong Kong people, who would like to take their place in the great historical epic which is the heritage of China but are all too well aware that the epic has had some nasty moments in the last 50 years and not all of them have finished yet. In this morning”s papers was a story — not at all unusual — about a security firm in Beijing which had been caught rounding up petitioners, robbing and beating them before sending them back to their home provinces, under a business arraangement with the local governments concerned. What, I wonder, goes through the mind of a faithful local left-winger when he reads a story like that? It cannot be dismissed as capitalist propaganda. Like most such stories it comes from a mainland newspaper. One can say that China is better than it was, but when you start from a condition in which politically motivated persecution, violence, murder and even cannibalism are not just tolerated but encouraged as a matter of state policy, then a lot of improvement can still leave much to be desired. I suppose the solultion to the problem is to say that the government represents the country and “my country right or wrong”. G.K. Chesterton observed that this was like saying “my mother drunk or sober”.

It is nice to see it almost universally recognised that the cost of housing in Hong Kong is becoming outrageous. Last week saw the passage of another grim landmark – a former public housing unit sold for more than a million dollars. I hope this made the idiot ideologies who insisted that public housing flats should be available for purchase by their occupants feel better. It made me feel that a flat which mighrt once have housed the desperate was now available to house millionaires. No doubt there will be limits to the gentrification of former public housing estates, if only for reasons of prestige, or lack of it. Still, we are left with a situation in which buying a small flat for a newly wed couple is beyond the reach of even two of the sort of salaries which most young Hong Kong people can command. Buying a flat in which one might wish to raise a few kids is simply beyond the reach period.

I do not seek your sympathy for me. Actually the Hamlett family benefited greatly from Mr Tung Chee-hwa’s demonstration that a government which controls the market in land can make house prices go down as well as up. While everyone was complaining about negative equity we bought a house which we could never have afforded before and we have not been able to afford since. What this experience illustrates, of course, is that price movements in any direction are not good or bad in themselves. They benefit some people and cost other people money. This explains why there is a certain infirmity of purpose in the government’s present attempts to reduce the rate at which the cost of housing is increasing. I put it in this rather elaborate way because I think to say that the government is trying to lower housing costs is to give them credit they do not deserve. There are two reasons for this.

One is that actually our legislators and their sycophants and small horses have their own interests at stake. If you look at the register of members interests, or take the trouble (thank you, SCMPost) to look up the interests of the political appointees who, at enormous expense, carry their briefcases, you will find very people who own no flats, quite a lot who own one, and a clear majority who own two or more. No doubt in a few cases the extra flat is for a relative, the domestic servants or the book collection. But in the majority of cases our leaders are investors in the very racket which they are now pretending to deplore. They have bought flats in the hope of making money by selling them at higher prices. I do not suggest that we shall see anything as shameless as people seeking to boost housing prices as a way of increasing the value of their own investments. I do believe that people in this position are likely to find arguments which tend to complacency more persuasive than those which tend to urgent action.

The second reason is the “negative equity” con. Look, if you buy a house its value as a resale object is a matter of pure fiction. You own a house or flat. You can live in it. If the price goes down you can still live in it. It is just as warm and waterproof as it was before. Now there is a catch in some places, and that is that you may need to move. If you live in a mining town and the mine closes then you will probably not be able to find a job locally. As large numbers of people are in the same position it is quite likely that the value of your home will fall, and you may well find it is worth less than the amount you still owe the bank. This presents an agonising dilemma and explains much of the pain caused in places like America and Spain by the bursting of local property bubbles. The choices lie between bankruptcy and unemployment, with a strong possibility of both. But this will never happen in Hong Kong, because ours is a small city with decent public transport. One would not, if given the choice, choose to commute between, say, Chai Wan and Tin Shui Wai. But it is possible, in the sort of times commonplace in sprawling commuter cities in other countries. So a Hong Kong person whose flat is having a downmarket moment can sit it out.

Negative equity is not a threat to home-owners. It is, of course, a threat to real estate investors. If the flat is worth less than you borrowed to buy it then your prospects of a profit are dim. It is also a threat to banks. Owners whose homes are worth less than the outstanding loan may be tempted to throw in the towel, send the bank the keys and leave it with a house or flat worth less than the loan for which it was supposed to be security. So any time there is negative equity we will here a concerted moan of dismay and sympathy for the victims, which is actually a hymn to hypocrisy. It will, though, be heard by Hong Kong officials, whose ears are particularly sensitive to any communication from the real estate business or the banks which support and batten off it.

So do not expect too much. It has been interesting, in recent months, to see how many people now recognise that Hong Kong enjoys government of the rich, by the rich and for the rich. It has been even more interesting to see many commentators suggesting that unless this is changed there will be some kind of violent explosion. This is all rather theoretical, though. And anyway, in a competition between greed and fear, greed usually comes out on top.

It is beyond dispute that the tragedy in Manila was a tragedy. Grief is fully justified. Frustration with the local police is equally understandable, but perhaps less justified.

Should such an unhappy event take place in Hong Kong we will have to consider ourselves very lucky. Because it seems that everyone and his dog in this town, from Donald Tsang downwards via various pundits, columnists etc. to the man in the street. is an expert on the way in which such problems should be handled. The consensus among local talking heads is that the attempts to rescue the hostages were bungled, the police were bumbling, and this is why the whole thing ended in tears. Comparisons with the Keystone Cops were commonplace. The Phillipines, we were told, was a hotbed of corruption and incompetence, and that was why it should be punished with a government-organised travel boycott for not having a well-organised police force like ours, in which deranged cops only shoot themselves or – occasionally – each other.

The one thing which all these commentators have in common is, if you will excuse a blunt expression, ignorance. How many of us have watched live coverage of a hostage situation lasting several hours, after all? Answer, probably, none. We know that as hostage rescues go, having half the hostages killed doesn’t count in anyone’s training manual as a success. On the other hand having half of them rescued more or less unharmed is a distinct improvement on the worst possible outcome. Nobody learns anything about hostage rescues from news programmes, because on news programmes time moves very quickly. If the drama lasts an hour, or a week, you will only see 30 seconds of it: the SAS man swoops through the window, stun grenades pop distantly, the triumphant prime minister says a few words and it is on to the next sensation.

Consequently, I fear, most of us get our idea of what a hostage situation should look like from on-screen dramas of one kind or another. The problem with this is that they follow the rules for drama, which go roughly like this: the situation has to be sorted out in 90 minutes; the hostages, unless extremely obnoxious, must survive; the hostage taker, unless extraordinarily sympathetic, must die; the hero, who is usually a policeman, will unerringly make the right decisions. This is not because scriptwriters are dishonest, it is because time is money, viewers are easily bored, and they have to meet the standards set on other programmes. When do you ever see the hero go round the block in search of a parking place? He doesn’t, because there isn’t time for that sort of thing. What comes next has to come next.

The consequence of this long period of media training is that most people have no idea what a real hostage taking should look like. I have no idea either, but knowing your limitations is important. Some things – like construction sites and slaughter houses (or, to use the American euphemism, meat packing plants) – look a mess even when they are working properly. Others, like the annual meetings of listed companies, look smooth and well-organised even if the underlying reality is chaotic.  You have to wonder what the people who are complaining about the performance of the Manila police are comparing it with. Would they rather have German efficiency? At the Munich Olympics all the hostages died. Would they rather have the Brits running things, and have innocent foreigners blown away in the underground? Or should we call in the Yanks, and hope we don’t get the people who were in charge at Waco? I get the distinct impression that what most commentators really want is not the SAS or the Navy SEALS or the Los Angeles SWAT team or the Russian Spetznaz. What they want is Keanu Reeves.

Some of the complaints were clearly of cosmetic matters. One columnist complained that some of the Manila policemen were overweight. Another thought the hammer used on the coach windows disappointingly domestic. Oddly enough the only person I met who did not complain about the Manila police was a Hong Kong police person who might find himself in charge of a similar event here, if we are so unfortunate. His only comment was “There but for the grace of God go I.”  It is about time people recognised that hostage situations are unpredictable, difficult and do not always have happy endings. The Manila police may not be the bees’ knees of law enforcement. But they could be seen approaching a bus containing a homicidal lunatic armed with an M-16. Those of us who are not up for such dangerous activities would do well to shut up.

I am all for justice being tempered with mercy. The only statement in the Bokhary row that I agreed with was the magistrate’s observation that sending her to prison would ruin the rest of her life. This was probably true of many of the hundreds of people he has sent to prison during his judicial career, but it is nice to see enlightenment dawn, however late. Anyway, I am not by instinct a hanger and flogger, all right?

Still, I am moved to protest by the campaign Jake Van der Kamp has been running in the Sunday Post, to the effect that financial crime should be regarded as trivial, or better still as not really crime at all. I realise that it is common for people in dodgy professions – like salesmen of used cars, double glazing, Oriental carpets or uncompleted Hong Kong flats – to feel that the little tricks they play on the public should be regarded as a bit of harmless fun. But I did not think people in the financial business wished to be considered in that category. Although looking at some of the people they elect to Legco, perhaps they do.

Look, if the events of the last two or three years have taught us anything, it is surely that financial shenanigins have serious consequences. They lead to stagnant economies, bankrupt businesses, lost jobs, wrecked families, ruined lives. The consequences may be out of sight. That does not mean tbey should be out of mind.  Me Van der Kamp argues that financial crimes do not leave “blood on the pavement” so nobody is hurt, and the victims volunteered by swimming in a pool which they knew contained sharks. These attempts at mitigation tell us nothing about whether a crime should be treated seriously or not. “She was not hurt” and “she asked for it” are the two excuses most often offered by rapists and paedophiles.  The people who rob you with a fountain pen are gentlemanly types with nice cars, Jockey Club memberships and friends in the business media. But they’re still robbers.

Watching the Global Football TV programme twirl past my nose (you have to watch something while you’re exercising and I have conscientious objections to 24) I suddenly realised that I had passed an unexpected statistical landmark. The entire 2010 World Cup had passed, and I had seen none of it.   Not one kick of the ball – no goals, no noteworthy incidents, no opening or closing ceremonies – nothing. I realise that for some people this might be unexceptional, and even welcome. I remember one of my colleagues on the Derby Evening Telegraph going out to get some public reaction to the latest development at the local footy club. “Son,” said the first person he asked, “if they played in my front garden I would close the curtains.” Not everyone is a fan. Well I am not really a fan, but I take an interest.

I remember sitting at home to watch the World Cup in considerable detail when it was held in England, and we won. I remember hiring a second hand television on behalf of a floor full of students so we could watch it in Mexico, although England had I think not qualified. When I had done five years as a sports reporter the urge to watch the whole thing had disappeared. Watching football was work. But I still tuned in for the odd game. If you work in the education business and have modern teaching technology you can now put your employer’s equipment to work and watch on a very large screen, which is fun. But as far as South Africa is concerned I missed the whole thing.

This is partly, of course, because they no longer have it on the old free-to-air television network. You can’t see anything unless you have cable. I fell out with the cable people a couple of years ago – a long story – so we just have the basic stuff. And the World Cup was not on it. No doubt I should have expected this. More surprisingly it was not on the news either. News coverage of every football league in the world includes a bit of footage. Usually a few seconds of action with a goal at the end of it. But this time the World Cup was an exception. No clips, however short, on the news. So the television news people were reduced to still pictures and occasional computer reconstructions, followed by live interviews with fans outside the stadium.  The excitement in South Africa, if there was excitement, was not conveyed. Even after the Cup was over the mysterious shortage continued. The Global Football programme has no clips either.

Now I don’t know if the World Cup people adopted this as an explicit policy, but the result of their efforts, at least in Hong Kong, was that you could not so much as see a ball being kicked unless you payed someone. It might be the cable people, or a cinema, or a bar owner, but the idea that this was something which a moderately interested person could watch for free has disappeared. So I suppose I was not the only moderately interested person who missed it completely this time around.  And I wonder how long the thing will last as the great show it used to be if this level of greed is deployed every time. Of course the game needs its avid fans. But it also needs the vast legion of occcasionally interested onlookers whose attention fosters the delusion that what happens on the pitch is important. The game needs to be talked about. If all the water-cooler conversations die after a few sentences because only the fanatics saw any of the games then interest will eventually be combined to a few rabid enthusiasts, as it is for rowing or chess.

Having said which being bombarded with the Olympics for two weeks was no fun either. Is there a happy medium in these matters?

I am puzzled by the spectacle of the government fighting a flat-out legal battle over whether the mysterious Ms W (who was Mr W several operations ago) can marry her Mr Right. I mean we taxpayers have been pushing the boat out here. I have no idea what fees were paid to the QC flown out specially from London to argue on the government’s behalf, but I’ll wager she did not fly tourist and she did not stay in Chung King Mansions either.

I can see how we got to this stage. Faced with an applicant for marriage with a birth certificate in the wrong gender the bureacrat behind the desk would pass the matter to higher authority. This higher authority, still pretty junior, would take the safe course and say “no”. This would then work its way up the pyramid, with successive layers concluding that they must support the front-line staff and those people know what they are doing anyway. So the underlings say “no” becasue they think the matter should be decided higher up and the higher-ups say “no” because they think it should be decided by the underlings. This is how public administration works, or doesn’t work, as the case may be.

With the arrival of the court case the matter has to go to the Department of Justice, but to the part of the department where justice takes second place to finding legal pretexts for whatever the government has decided it wants to do. Since government policy is to say “no” the department says “no” and everyone is happy except Ms W. And so we go to court. Probably the best thing, actually. The gender situation is a good deal more complicated that it was when the law was drafted. And in all the paper-shuffling so far, nobody has really had a chance to sit back and consider the matter from scratch. Let a judge have a look by all means. But why the enormous trouble and expense? What has the government got to lose?

After all the fact is that this particular question is not going to come up very often. People in W’s situation have a hard row to hoe. Years of psychological confusion lead to prolonged and painful medical encounters. Finally making the longed-for transformation tends to lead to loss of friends and job. And having arrived, the new you is not going to be a prime property in the marriage market. Not only do you have an exotic personal history. Medical science has not actually reached the stage where pregnancy is possible. So the number of eager couples who are going to turn up at the registry with confusing birth certificates is minute. This is a decision which has virtually no practical consequences, except for those personally involved, for whom it is all-important. Saying “yes” would have done them a great kindness and done nobody any harm.

So why is the government resisting with such enthusiasm? I do not believe that this is a slippery slope situation. Are we really to believe that a homosexual man, wishing to contract a same-sex marriage, might undergo prolonged psychological therapy, have his hormones sabotaged, endure extensive and painful surgery to rearrange his private parts and turn himself into a woman to marry someone who prefers men…? This is nonsense. Some of our leaders lead a sheltered existence but surely there are experts who can put them straight on this sort of thing. The worrying rumour is that they are consulting the wrong sort of experts. It seems that a surprising number of our political appointees are members of fundamentalist sects of one kind or another. They spend their Sunday mornings being told that God intended sex to be conducted on rare occasions between married couples of opposing sexes in the missionary position. This is a poor basis for policy-making, but then these unelected people don’t have to tell us what they really think about anything.

If oyu don’t remember who Mr Zinger was that is probably because you are not a serious Bob Dylan fan. Mr Zinger, a rich young man, killed a waitress in a Baltimore hotel and was jailed for a mere six months. Dylan’s song about the case is a small masterpiece, though not one of his much-covered ones. Perhaps it is a bit too long.

Anyway Mr Zinger came to mind because there has been much discussion lately about the way in which the law treats, or doesn’t treat, defendants with rich daddies and other attributes like, as the song has it, “friends in high office in the politics of Maryland”, or the local equivalent. This has always been a delicate topic. Teachers of law will tell you at an early stage that one of the characteristics of the Common Law is that all people who appear in the courts are treated equally. As in principle they are. We all recognise that the practice does not quite come out like that. One of the important functions of the law is to protect property, and this is of little interest to those who have little of it. Judges tend to come from a sheltered and educated background; defendants do not.  Anatole France wrote of “the majestic equality of the laws, which forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets and to steal bread.” An Englishman observed more succinctly that “the Courts of Law are open to all – like the Ritz Hotel”.  To put it bluntly, we all know that if you are a rich bitch with good connections and an expensive lawyer you can get away with almost anything short of murder (sorry, Nancy) whereas the outlook for Tin Shui Wai housewives fresh off the China train is less rosy. Such is life.

Still it is usual for magistrates and judges to go to some lengths to conceal this. And this is a useful convention, because they then have to think seriously about the issues of principle involved. So while unstirred by the affaire Bokhari I am quite disturbed that the magistrate shamelessly explained his benevolent approach to sentencing by referring to the defendant’s “well-off background”. Still this was a minor peccadillo compared with another case later in the week, in which the magistrate, jailing a man for indecent assault, said he would not risk the abuse he would get from the newspapers if he succumbed to a request for a non-custodial sentence for such a serious offence.  Leaving aside the question whether indecent assault is such a serious offence, this violates an important principle of judgeship. Magistrates and judges should not read newspapers if they can’t handle comments on their work. You boys and girls better all write out 200 times this quote from Lord Justice Salmon: “I am quite convinced that no judge … would be influenced in any way by anything he read in the newspapers. If he were he would not be fit to be a judge.”