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How did ‘lady’ become a four-letter word?

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on January 26, 2026| Leave a Comment »

What went wrong with the word “lady”? Until recently it just appeared to be the polite way to refer to females. It appeared on their public toilets without giving offence, and public speeches were routinely addressed to “ladies and gentlemen”.

Esteemed singers like Tina Turner were routinely referred to by their road crews as “the lady”. It would perhaps be going too far to say that the use of the word was a sign of respect. It was just a polite word in routine use.

I first realised that something was going on here when I despaired of the managerial merry-go-round that was Chelsea FC and started following the club’s female team instead. Female football teams at that time were generally called Personchester Ladies, or whatever. This had been the way since the pioneering days in the 1890s when a mysterious person using the name Nettie Honeyball started the British Ladies Football Club.

The greatest club name of those early years was the Dick, Kerr Ladies (Dick, Kerr was the name of the factory where they started) who drew crowds in excess of 60,000 before the infamous day in 1921 when the Football Association banned women from playing.

Back in the modern era ladies remained the term of choice until one day quite soon after I started taking an interest, when the clubs – or at least those which attracted news coverage – changed direction with the unanimity of a shoal of herring threatened by a shark, and “ladies” was replaced by “women”.

I then noticed that something similar was happening to my copy on its way into the Hong Kong Free Press. The words “lady” or “ladies” were routinely replaced with “woman” or “women” as appropriate. I did not complain, firstly because I do not complain about editing as a matter of principle; it is a thankless task and for every editing error (we are fallible) the writer is saved from ten faux pas of his own. I also thought I was perhaps being rescued from trampling on some new taboo, introduced after I left the UK.

It remains a puzzle. No such odium appears to have descended on “gentleman”, which is usually the other half, as it were. I have occasionally been accused of being a “gentleman”. I always accepted this is a kindness, even if it was preceded, as it usually was, by one or both of “old-fashioned” and “English”.

There was a time when “gentleman” was a class marker. When Henry V promised that “He that sheds his blood with me … this day shall gentle his condition” he was clearly offering social promotion as a reward for military performance. Ladies similarly used to be a rank. In 19th century India the military rule was that “officers have ladies; sergeants have wives; Other Ranks have women.”

But this had long gone by the time I was a kid. Being a lady or a gentleman was something to which anyone could aspire. As Vin Diesel (of all people) has put it “Being male is a matter of birth; being a man is a matter of age; being a gentleman is a matter of choice.”

For males this involved stoicism, self-control, politeness and (outside of law enforcement or warfare) non-violence. Honesty was important, as was respect for ladies, a status which was the default for females.

We were also taught some rituals which have long gone. A male, on meeting a female in the street, would raise, or at least touch, his hat. Men no longer wear hats. If a woman joined your table you were expected to stand up briefly – a habit to which I occasionally still succumb on formal occasions. If you were walking along the pavement side by side the man was expected to take the side next to the road, a meaningless rule after horse traffic disappeared.

I do not know what was inflicted on girls in those numerous books of “advice” with Grace Darling on the cover, but a bit of internet ferreting suggests that much of it was quite similar: intelligence, kindness, honesty and reading are praised, gossip, rudeness and swearing are condemned. There are probably serious objections on the grounds of foot health to “keep your heels, head and standards high” and age has I fear withered the suggestion that ladies should “not kiss before the third date.”

Still I am not sure that there is anything there which parents would not wish for their daughter.

Well it seems that these days no oppressed minority can hold up its head in public unless it has insisted on being referred to by its preferred term. Cautious publications now shy away from “disabled”, “eskimo”, “negro” “Chinaman” and many others. The curious thing about preferring “women” over “ladies” is that “ladies” was always intended to be flattering and respectful. But if women want “women” that is their choice.

I also note with concern that what is being discarded here is not just a word, but an ethic.

Let us digress for a moment. Steven Pinker has achieved much fame by propounding the view that mankind has become notably less violent in the last 300 years or so, and there is indeed much evidence for this. There is less evidence for his inferred cause, which is that people became more sensitive to and conscious of other people’s feelings.

An older theory is that the reduction in violence was due to a change, not in sensibility but in manners. Polite society was set about with rules. These rules condemned violence and encouraged polite modes of intercourse. Some of them were meaningless – it really doesn’t matter how you eat your peas – but they formed a rules-based society in which most people obeyed the rules because they were the rules. In a sense it did not matter whether there were good reasons for them.

Those of us who were young in the 1960s will remember the glee with which many old rules which no longer made sense were swept away. But eventually the idea that there were rules which we should all follow went the same way.

Nobody goes to church any more. Teachers dare not condemn misbehaviour. It seems that politeness, honesty, sincerity and respect are no longer requirements. So we are free to enjoy … Donald Trump.

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Sadly, Olympic gold may not lead to a political podium finish

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on December 18, 2025| Leave a Comment »

​The only part of the recent Legco election which cheered me up was the success of Ms Vivian Kong.

This is not because I warmly support her political views. I know nothing of what she thinks, but my rule in these matters is that the vetting and selection of candidates is now so effective that anyone allowed to run can be considered someone I would not wish to vote for.

On the other hand Ms Kong’s gold-winning Olympic efforts tickled the memory because I, too, was once an épéeist.

My career was much shorter and less glorious than hers. I was recruited at short notice by the Lancaster University fencing team because the league in which they played (North Lancashire had a fencing league? I was surprised too) required every team to include one épée person.

I had no relevant experience. Perhaps they thought someone who was used to waving an oar about would be able to handle the épée, which is heavier than the other two sport fencing swords, and has much simpler rules.

I expected to be massacred every week, but in practice it appeared that many of the other teams had a similar shortage of épée specialists, so I did reasonably well apart from the rare occasions when I came across a real épée person who knew what he was doing.

The following year such a person appeared at Lancaster U so I retired to do other things. But fencing can be recommended. I enjoyed the ritual side of it, and for a military historian it is a treat to practise a skill which was cherished by soldiers for centuries.

Ms Kong says she has learnt a great deal from her career as a professional sportsperson. She is a bright spark, has two real degrees and is working on a third. But the track record (if you’ll pardon the phrase in this context) of sporting superstars in politics is not impressive. Huge if rather patchy survey here.

Clearly winning an Olympic medal requires an impressive amount of dedication and toil, typically spread over years. Putting the legendary 10,000 hours in to acquiring one highly specialised skill must teach something. But how much of that is transferable?

It appears that a lot of former sportspeople have reached, and no doubt loyally served their respective communities in, what you might call the foothills of politics. In small countries they may hope for ministerial posts connected with youth or sports. But getting on the podium is much rarer.

There are examples of political gold medal winners, though none of them actually managed an Olympic gold as well. There is Lester Bird, a distinguished cricketer who became prime minister of Antigua and Barbados, or George Weah, who after playing for many of the best football clubs in Europe became president of Liberia.

Combat sports have a mixed record. Khalimaagiin Battulga, a star of Sambo (nor did I; here it is) later became president of Mongolia. The boxing champ who went on to become president of Uganda was the appalling Idi Amin.

Hong Kong citizens hoping for a livelier Legco will note with approval that Ms Kong has at least excelled at something outside of politics, and hope that she does not drop her current day job.

An ominous trend in Hong Kong politics is the rise of the full-time politician who does nothing else, and indeed in some cases has never done anything else.

Looking at the list of Legco candidates, for example, of the 161 hopefuls 28 described themselves only as “district councillor” and 16 offered only “lawmaker”. Some of the jobs offered were also political (NPC member, trade union official) and some of them did not look as if they would take much of the candidate’s time (company director).

More than a third of those actually elected did not have a “day job”: ten district councillors and 23 “lawmakers”. We must suppose that some of the others will decide to give up, or become part-timers, in the professional activities they have declared, once the rather generous remuneration provided for Legco members hits their bank balances. Other pursuits may be difficult to combine with regular meetings. Lam Ming-fung, for example, is a “vessel captain”.

So I suppose that in the end quite a lot of our representatives will be spared any contact with life as it is lived by the average voter. This is perhaps a pity when it seems the average voter was not terribly impressed by them.

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On Mr Trump’s aspirations to nobility, or Nobelity

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on October 13, 2025| Leave a Comment »

Quite the mind-boggling headline of the week announced (wording varied in different places of course) that the government of Norway was bracing itself for some retaliation from the USA if American President Donald Trump was not awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Well no doubt it would be good if all international statesmen were eager to qualify for the Peace Prize. On the other hand there is a widespread suspicion that Mr Trump’s ambition owes little to a passion for peace and much to resentment of the fact that Barack Obama got one.

Students of the history of international relations will no doubt have noticed already that standards drooped when the professional diplomats were elbowed aside by national leaders, whether elected or hereditary. But this is surely a new low.

I may be biassed. It is true that English culture traditionally sets a high value on modesty and self-deprecation. One may hope for honours but one does not ask. There is a character in one of CP Snow’s novels who is a senior civil servant and thinks he is due for a knighthood. So instead of signing with an initial he starts signing with his full Christian name (John Smith instead of J. Smith) in the hope that his seniors will see fit to put a “Sir” in front of it.

This is regarded as a serious, if amusing, character defect and the knighthood does not materialise.

The press pioneer Alfred Harmsworth had better luck. To the suggestion that he should agitate politely for a peerage he famously replied “When I want a peerage I shall buy one like an honest man.” He did later (without paying) become Lord Northcliffe. When I worked for the Derby Evening Telegraph we still had a rather poor portrait of him in the hall.

The presentation of honours in Hong Kong has never caused much controversy. The colonial ones were not taken very seriously because they were … well … colonial. Their post-handover replacements have not established themselves as a big deal.

I once did a rough study of the arrival of honours in the Legislative Council. It appeared that if you were a loyal supporter of the regime there was a fairly predictable time-line along which, as long as you survived re-election, you would travel from Justice of the Peace through bauhinias of various colours. One DAB member seemed to be stuck on the launch pad, as it were. I suspect he had refused to participate.

I am not aware of any similar study of how life treats those who go “seeking the bubble reputation” through the consultative apparatus.

There were some misgivings a few years ago when some people with qualifications in engineering adopted the pretitle “Ir”, which works like “Dr”. The “I” is because the title originated in French. Lawyers suggested that they should perhaps put in a bid for “Lr” before the librarians grabbed it.

Some people disapprove of this sort of thing. One of the idols of my youth was Charles Carter, who was the first Vice Chancellor of Lancaster University. Mr Carter was a devout Quaker and spurned titles of any kind. He always signed, and described himself, as plain Charles Carter and I only discovered that he was entitled to both Dr and Prof when I got a look at correspondence from polite outsiders.

He did tell me – a point lost on holders of honorary degrees in Hong Kong – that such honours should only be worn in the premises of the university awarding them. So if you have an Hon Doc, whether or not you earned it or “bought one like an honest man”, it should not be on your business card.

Anyway all this suggests that there may be an easy way to propitiate the unpredictable Trump. Countries which wish to bow before the president should look into the possibilities of honorary degrees, orders, knighthoods, perhaps (lucky old England) even a Lordship.

Alternatively, at the risk of punishment, they could refer him to the work of Thomas Gray:

The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow’r,

         And all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave,

Awaits alike th’ inevitable hour.

         The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

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Same-sex marriages law: Legco veto is not the last word

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on September 17, 2025| 1 Comment »

The continuing controversy about the recognition of same-sex marriages conducted overseas is depressing.

After all, underneath all the political and legal skirmishing what we have here is a government with few limits on its power, which is exerting itself vigorously to curtail the rights of a tiny minority. Do you know any same-sex married couples? Quite. Neither do I.

Interpretations of the saga vary widely. Pretty much everyone agrees that the original judgement of the Court of Final Appeal – that the government was at at fault for not recognising in some way the status of same-sex couples – came as an unpleasant surprise.

The government has had considerable success in persuading our supposedly independent judiciary to lend a receptive ear to its legal efforts, however questionable. We are regularly reassured about judicial independence. Indeed this happens so often that the standard reactions tend to run from Hamlet’s mother (“The lady doth protest too much”) to Mandy Rice Davis (“He would say that, wouldn’t he?).

Anyway, a rare moment of judicial innovation, cushioned by the provision of a two-year deadline.

Needless to say, most of the two years passed with no sign of thought or action. As a journalist I am in no position to criticise this: in our business waiting until the deadline looms is common if not compulsory. Bernard Levin actually wrote an amusing piece about his work as a theatre critic, in which the review had to be delivered the same evening of the performance, but the deadline varied depending on the amount of advertising in the newspaper.

Mr Levin noted that if advertising was abundant and the deadline early, he got down to work as soon as he returned to the office. If advertising was short and the deadline late, on the other hand, he wandered round the office cadging biscuits and distracting colleagues until time and adrenaline prompted the writing of the necessary piece.

So no complaints from me about the delay. Actually there seem to be very few things the Department of Justice can do in less than two years, no doubt a tribute to the care devoted to its work.

And this brings us to the resulting proposed piece of legislation, which would have given same-sex spouses the right to authorise medical procedures and decide on the disposition of the remains of deceased partners.

This did not sit well with the government’s usual supporters (nobody else is allowed in Legco) who vetoed it last week.

At this point views diverge considerably. Some take the cynical view that the bill was never intended to pass and the Legco proceedings were a charade intended to put the judges in their place, while demonstrating that the council was “not a rubber stamp”.

A more idealistic view has it that the decision was a fine example of the legislature performing its allocated function under the “separation of powers”, a constitutional theory routinely denounced as inapplicable to Hong Kong by Beijing officials in the past.

Personally I find both views unconvincing. Clearly the officials responsible for getting the bill through Legco wanted it to pass. Whatever positive spin could be put on failure afterwards it would still be a failure. I believe also that the government wanted it to pass.

The trouble is that “want” in the English language covers a lot of territory, from “Do you want sugar in your tea?” to “Do you want your cancerous foot amputated?” There was desire, but not too much desire.

Consequently legislators knew what they could get away with. They know that if a recalcitrant group is large enough there will be no consequences. Difficult individuals will not be reelected but a mass clear-out would reveal too many of the strings behind the puppet show.

In fact it seems that the fun involved in a display of independence may have been the main motivation. None of the other reasons given stand up to scrutiny. The idea that the electorate in general has strong views on the topic is obvious nonsense, and in any case legislators do not depend on the electorate any more.

It may be that same-sex marriage is a cause of horror and revulsion among DAB voters, but they are hardly typical; the average age of those busloads turning up at polling booths is somewhere between 80 and dead.

I can find no support for the claim that traditional marriage is the only kind allowed by the Basic Law, whose thoughts on marriage are contained in Article 37: “The freedom of marriage of Hong Kong residents and their right to raise a family freely shall be protected by law.”

However all is not lost. Generally courts will not require people to do what they cannot do. If Legco will not pass a bill that is not the government’s fault. That does not, though, mean the government can sit back and claim that it has fully complied with the court’s order on this topic.

Legco president Andrew Leung commented after the fatal vote that “making laws” was “not the only solution”. Chief Executive John Lee said that the government would explore “administrative means” of complying with the court’s ruling.

Could there, one wonders, be any objection to the government saying that as a matter of administrative practice, marriages lawfully registered overseas would be recognised in Hong Kong regardless of the sex of the parties concerned, a line already followed in housing and visa matters?

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A man, a plan, Panama!

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on March 27, 2025| 2 Comments »

I generally hesitate to say anything about what appears in the Chinese-language press, because it reaches me only second-hand, and in translation. But recent commentaries in Ta Kung Pao have me puzzled.

I do not participate in controversies about China, for or against. Such matters are not very interesting and in any case, as a marooned Brit, none of my business. But I thought I understood how the game was played.

Take the row about Huawei and its exclusion from the business of providing telecom networks in Western countries. What we might call the Trumpeters’ tune is that there is no such thing in China as a private company. Whether or not Huawei wished to tweak its software to facilitate spying, it would have no choice.

But this is a smear peddled only by China haters and stirrers-up of trouble who wish to start a new Cold War. Actually Huawei is free to make its own decisions and would not dream of tricking its customers in this way.

A similar division of views hovers over the Belt and Road scheme. Critics say this is a cunning ruse through which China can extend its ownership and control over vital links in the world trade network.

Not at all, explain the scheme’s defenders. Belt and Road projects are win-win affairs which benefit everyone concerned: both the trading countries at each end of the road and the country which actually contains the port, railway, canal, or whatever. They are a benevolent donation to the common good by the PRC, and the eventual ownership of the items constructed will normally be vested in the country in which they sit.

Then there is the matter of the national security law. When this first appeared many critics (I rather think I may have been one of them) complained that there was a shortage of precise definitions of the new offences created. Not at all, we were assured. The descriptions of the offences were perfectly adequate and nobody who had read them carefully would be in any doubt as to what was intended.

All three of these comfortable thoughts have been thrown into doubt by the Ta Kung Pao leader-writers, who are generally assumed to be privy to the truth as senior Hong Kong government people see it.

The news which stirred all this up was that Hutchisons, generally regarded as a Hong Kong firm though most of its business is elsewhere and its registration is in the Cayman Islands, was selling 40 ports to an American consortium led by BlackRock. Among the ports in question are two next to the Panama Canal, about which President Trump has been complaining bitterly.

Hutchison’s explanation was that this was a purely business decision, basically to get out of the overseas ports business; the group will still own ports in Hong Kong and mainland China. In view of the danger of tariff wars shredding the international trading network this is not an ostentatiously surprising decision.

It did not, though, go down well with Ta Kung Pao. Hutchisons’ move was denounced as a “betrayal of all Chinese people”, an act of “spineless grovelling”. Former Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying asked “Do merchants have no motherland?”

Well no doubt the whole thing would have looked more attractive if President Trump had not so rudely called for changes in the Panama Canal Zone in the first place. On the other hand if Hong Kong companies (we’ll leave the Cayman Islands out of it) are expected to tailor their activities to PRC foreign policy objectives, how can we be expected to believe that mainland firms do not?

As the row rumbled on the deal was stigmatised as sabotaging the Belt and Road initiative. This is not what we used to be told about the Belt and Road at all. Is Ta Kung Pao now of the view that the purpose of the Belt and Road scheme was to ensure that no container could be unloaded anywhere in the world without China’s approval and participation?

And as the writers warmed to their task we came to the inevitable ingredient in any political storm these days, national security. Was the sale of the ports a national security crime?

Well one rather hopes not. The crimes created by the national security law are secession, subversion, terrorist activities and collusion with a foreign country or with external elements to endanger national security. Clearly the first three are not relevant, and it is difficult to see how the fourth could be applied to selling a business asset for a realistic price to a foreign buyer. It may be a source of pride and pleasure for Chinese people to know that one of their number is a global presence, but it can hardly be a national security necessity for someone with a Chinese name to own a port on the other side of the Pacific.

A couple of thoughts might soothe. The first is that ownership of two Panama ports does not confer any power at all over the canal, which remains the property of Panama and under the control of the Panama government. The ports are actually outside the canal proper and their main function is to deal with Panama’s own imports and exports. President Trump does not seem to know this, among many things.

The second is that the new American owners will not be under the same pressure or expectations which local patriots would like to exert on Hutchisons. Much has been made of the fact that the chief executive of the buyers, BlackRock, is an old friend of Donald Trump.

Well all these plutocrats go to the same parties, no doubt. But American business is not inhibited by concerns about the national interests of the USA, or indeed anywhere else. Ethical standards have gone down the tubes over the last 50 years. Money trumps morals every time. Ports controlled by American companies will be ruled by pure greed, unsullied by politics. Doesn’t that feel better?

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There are too many Trump supporters on my desktop

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on January 21, 2025| 1 Comment »

Having sworn off Hong Kong politics I am certainly not going to start writing about American ones.

Besides, what American electors get up to is really none of our business. If citizens of the Land of the Free wish to be represented on the international stage by a convicted criminal, serial sex pest and compulsive liar, that is their choice.

I am, though, concerned about reports that the titans of US tech have been lining up not only to make the usual polite noises about a new president, but to throw money at his inauguration and express admiration and allegiance to the Orange Catastrophe.

Press people are not much better, I admit. Six months ago Mr Trump was being written about in the sort of condescending tones usually reserved for unsuccessful stand-up comics. Now we are treated to thoughtful analysis of Mr Trump’s possible policies.

In their innermost thoughts most of these writers are well aware that Mr Trump does not have policies. To have a policy you must first read and think about the issues involved. Mr Trump notoriously does neither. Where other people have policies he has prejudices and impulses.

The prejudices are unchanging and unchangeable. The impulses come and go from day to day, under the unhelpful influence of Fox News. Neither the prejudices nor the impulses are hampered by any close examination of the real world.

Still, none of the press people has been adopted as courtiers. Whereas at the Inauguration on Monday the tech tycoons were lined up for the cameras. The nobodies in the background are members of the new Cabinet, who are apparently going to get the same respectful attention as Mrs Thatcher’s Cabinet got from her.

The problem this poses is nicely exemplified by the flourishing market in bumper stickers for embarrassed Tesla owners to put on their cars. These run to variations on “I bought this car before we knew that Elon was mad”. An entertaining option: “I bought this car before Elon became First Lady.”

Fortunately I had not got round to buying a Tesla of any kind. Also, having never been a Twitterer I have effortlessly avoided X. As I have no ambitions to move to Mars I suppose I am pretty Muskproof. Which is just as well, because I know what a Nazi salute looks like and I am looking at one now.

However my computer is an iMac. It is a very fine computer and it is a recent purchase. I can hardly give it up. But I understand the big Apple man has made his bow although he doesn’t seem to have attended the inauguration.

Definitely in the picture, though, are the billionaires responsible for my two favourite pieces of time-wasting software, Youtube and Facebook, as well as the modern journalist’s essential tool, Google.

This integration of digital imperialism with the political kind must be a worry in a good many places. There is mounting evidence that indulging in extensive internet use is toxic for children and young people. And if there is no attempt to stem the torrent of lies it can be pretty disturbing for adults, too.

It will be a source of much justified resentment if attempts to deal with these problems in Europe or South America are opposed by the US in the name of “free speech”.

We all like free speech and we all recognise, as our local government occasionally reminds us, that it has limits. Steven Pinker asserts (in “The better angels of our nature”) that humanity was elevated to a new level of sympathy and gentleness by the invention of the novel, and the resulting invitation to put yourself in other people’s place and imagine what they must be thinking and feeling.

According to Mr Pinker this was a slow but dramatic change, leading to a great reduction in violence generally. This raises the question: what is five hours a day of web browsing doing to people? I am not sure what the answer to this question might be but it seems increasingly likely that the answer is “nothing good”.

So the titans of tech are poisoning our minds. And if we use their stuff I suppose we are in danger of complicity. They invite you in, but only so that they can sell you to advertisers. It seems under the circumstances the least you can do is install a good ad blocker. This also has the important benefit of making Youtube much more enjoyable.

I cannot unfortunately recommend the further step of urging our government to restrict nasty internet content. This is because our leaders have a track record of using laws intended for other purposes to harass or punish activities they disapprove of, like fund-raising for unliked causes, playing unliked tunes in public, running independent bookshops or dubiously loyal restaurants, and so on. They’re doing quite enough censorship already.

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Political appointments have become a failed effort to meet discarded objectives

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on December 21, 2024| Leave a Comment »

Did you notice the odd thing about the two latest appointments to the upper ranks of the government? Both the two women appointed to secretarial posts were career civil servants, who were recruited to the Administrative Officer ranks in (coincidentally) 1989.

This is not quite the way these things were supposed to work. Before 2002 all secretaries (that is, heads of bureaus, not word processors) were career civil servants who had worked their way up the bureaucratic pyramid.

In that year the then Chief Executive, Tung Chee-hwa, introduced what was then called the Principal Officials Accountability System, under which heads of bureaus would be appointed, not by the existing promotion mechanism from within the civil service, but instead by him, from outside it.

These people would fill Exco (which roughly corresponds to the Cabinet, in the US system), and would be answerable to the CE who appointed them. They would not be on civil service terms and their appointments would expire at the end of the CE’s term of office.

There was little public discussion before this brainwave was launched on us, so there remains a good deal of ambiguity about what it was intended to achieve. What you might call the “realist” interpretation was that Mr Tung believed the traditional civil service was not responding to his wishes and instructions as enthusiastically as he might wish.

There may have been something in this. Mr Tung’s background as the patriarch of a family shipping company was perhaps a poor preparation for dealing with civil servants who were used to being given a task and then being left to sort out the implementation by themselves.

The “idealist” interpretation was that the new system would subject the administration of Hong Kong to more critical appraisal and monitoring. The new secretaries would be ostensibly political creatures who could deal with Legco, explain the policies they were pursuing in public, and could be dismissed if they erred.

Even in its earliest incarnation this system did not live up to expectations, whether realist or idealistic. Having an obedient Exco did not help Mr Tung’s problems in government, and three years later he resigned with diplomatic health problems.

The new secretaries proved not unlike their predecessors. Even in the first batch there were five civil servants. The government’s relations with Legco became more contentious as it aligned itself explicitly with the DAB and Civic Party against the others.

“Accountability” did not ensue. The CE was reluctant to admit an appointment was a mistake and appointees were reluctant to resign. Secretaries who had committed egregious blunders were hounded from office by public opinion, more or less as they always had been.

In 2008 the system was renamed and extended by the next Chief Executive, Donald Tsang. Under the new “Political Appointments System” the existing secretaries were reinforced with undersecretaries and assistants. Launching the innovation the then Secretary for Constitutional and Mainland stuff said the existing secretaries would continue to study and design government policies in conjunction with the Permanent Secretary (senior mainstream civil servant) of their bureaus. The new deputies would liaise with legislators and provide policy input. The assistants would help bureau chiefs to reach out to the community.

Officials also said the new system would preserve a “permanent, professional and politically neutral civil service”, while nurturing talent which would be needed for the introduction of universal suffrage, then considered a likely future prospect.

The two new layers of appointees, with the associated fleets of drivers and personal secretaries, would cost $60 million a year.

Which brings us to the outstanding question. Now that this scheme has demonstrably failed, and many of the objectives which motivated it have been abandoned, would it not be a good idea to save a lot of money by abandoning the whole thing?

The system has not succeeded in introducing a wave of talented outsiders to the top of the administration. There are now 15 secretaries, of whom nine are career civil servants. Three of the others came from government-funded hospital or school backgrounds and one is an apparatchik of the FTU, the pro-government simulated trade union. There are only two genuine outsiders.

Since we no longer aspire to political pluralism the idea of a politically neutral civil service has become meaningless, and indeed civil servants are no longer expected, according to the latest version of their code, to be impartial and objective. Chief Executives have many problems, but passive resistance from the civil service is clearly not one of them.

The system has not nurtured any conspicuous political talents, and indeed the selectors now appear to prefer to seek candidates for office in the upper ranks of the police. There is no need for an extensive herd of specialists to liaise with Legco, which is expected to do as it is told, as indeed is the general public.

In these straitened times the Political Appointment System is, at best, an unaffordable luxury. At worst, an expensive attempt to put lipstick on a political pig?

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The primary polls case: from a distance, it’s a duck

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on November 28, 2024| 2 Comments »

One of the distressing things about writing for the media in Hong Kong these days is that there is one law for the government’s supporters and another for the rest of us. The system is, as a Brazilian president once put it, “for my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.”

So during the trial of the 45 primary poll participants, carefree writers in pro-government publications were free to imply that all the defendants were guilty of the crimes charged, and some of them were guilty of other things as well. This used to be illegal. The offence is known as strict liability contempt of court.

You are not allowed to imply a particular conclusion for the trial, so it is also illegal to imply that the defendants are innocent. None of the numerous people who held this view dared to publish it. There has only been one prosecution for this offence in the last two decades. The accused publication was Apple Daily. One gets the message.

However, now the matter has concluded a few local voices, and some overseas ones, have ventured the opinion that all was not well with this case. And in due course this produced a predictable response from the government, and some more interesting ones in other places.

Oddly, though, these responses tend to ignore the most important criticisms. The question which has been awaiting an answer since before the trial, and indeed before the primary, is how can this possibly be illegal?

Lord Sumption (a very senior retired judge) having removed himself to a safe distance, put it bluntly. The Basic Law, he said, explicitly authorised the Legislative Council to reject the budget and … force the city’s leader to resign. It now appeared that “Legco cannot exercise an express constitutional right for a purpose unwelcome to the government.”

His Lordship characterised the situation as “legally indefensible”. This is a serious fundamental objection to the whole case. The council has a power conferred by law, and a procedure specified through which that power can be exercised. How can it be illegal for a candidate for election to say that he or she will, if elected, activate the procedure and exercise the power?

This point seems to elude commentators. Even Cliff Buddle, in an otherwise admirable dance along the tightrope that independent commentators all perform on these days, summarised the crime as the defendants intended to “blindly veto the government’s budget”. But blindness had nothing to do with it. The procedure was intended to allow the resolution of a situation in which the council and the Chief Executive could not get on with each other. The merits of the budget as a budget were not relevant.

Of course times have changed since the Basic Law was drafted in the 1990s. It seemed conceivable then that in some unlikely set of circumstances, and with a procedure designed to be discouraging, there might eventually be an occasion when it was acceptable for an elected Legco to dispense with the services of an elected Chief Executive. And the mainland officials who were “consulted” about the law went along with this.

Nowadays mainland officials are all subscribers to the theory of “whole-process democracy”, in which wisdom descends the pyramid from layer to layer like those extravagant displays in which a large bottle of champagne is used to fill several layers of wineglasses. The idea of someone appointed by them being fired by a local legislature is not acceptable at all.

The second objection which seems to have passed defenders of the prosecution by is that the prosecution’s case is based on the notion that sacking the Chief Executive would precipitate a “constitutional crisis”, paralyse the government or overthrow the system.

This is an entirely fictitious prospect drummed up to justify longer sentences. Whatever the organisers of the referendum may have dreamed, the Basic Law provides for a continued orderly and effective government at all stages of a bid to fire the Chief Executive. If there is no budget the government is authorised to continue with the old one. If there is no Chief Executive another official takes over pending the election of a replacement.

Of course there would still be considerable embarassment for whoever chose the CE in the first place. But embarassing officials is not a crime. Is it?

More forgivably, local commentators do not seem to pick up the fact that people overseas are considering the case in its context. As a poet once put it “You can tell a man who boozes by the company he chooses,” and the same thing applies to government actions.

For a government to jail large numbers of opposition politicians will always inspire suspicion. OK, politicians do get up to mischief, but are our guys completely innocent?

However when said jailing is accompanied by a blizzard of stories in which elections are cancelled, rules are changed, critical people are prosecuted for long-forgotten offences, companies and societies are abruptly closed, student unions disappear, and laws are changed to make it easier to prosecute … well never mind the details. The view from a distance is based on the overall impression: if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck … it’s a duck.

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Hong Kong’s worst ever riots? Read the history

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on June 14, 2024| 2 Comments »

Ronny Tong’s graduation from a producer of occasional pro-government soundbites to a fully-fledged writer of op-ed pieces will no doubt raise the literary quality of local journalism, but calls for one piece of advice.

At the risk of sounding like everyone’s favourite Fawlty Towers episode (“Don’t mention the war”) I would suggest not mentioning the 1967 riots.

Mr Tong thought it germaine to controversies about national security law cases that in 1967 the colonial government had prosecuted some people for subversion. This is a fairly unhelpful analogy in any case, because that was the old unamended subversion law with a maximum penalty of two years in prison.

It also subverts a key message propagated by fans of the new approach to national security: that the events of 2019-20 involved unprecedented quantities of gore and vandalism.

A recent piece by Lau Siu-kai, for example, featured “The riots in 2019-20 were some of the most violent, bloody, significant, lengthy and destructive in Hong Kong’s history.” The anonymous author of defensive government press releases said in a recent offering that “During the Hong Kong version of ‘colour revolution’ in 2019, massive riots and violence occurred incessantly.”

Well, someone has not been studying their history very carefully. The most violent and destructive riots in Hong Kong history probably occurred in 1956, triggered by tensions between supporters of the two sides in the then recent Chinese Civil War.

When the teargas cleared a total of 59 people had been killed, more than 500 injured and some 6,000 arrested, though only 2,200 of the latter were eventually charged with anything. Property damage was estimated at US$1 million.

The only rival to this as a public catastrophe was the 1967 outbreak, also an offshoot of then current mainland events, which at the time included the Cultural Revolution.

The 1967 riots left 51 people dead, ten of whom were policemen and 22 of whom were shot by the forces of order. More than 800 people were injured. Many of the injuries were caused by home-made bombs, of which 1,100 were planted, as well as 7,000 bogus ones to keep the authorities on the hop.

Police arrested 4,979 people, of whom 1,936 were eventually convicted. Statistically minded readers will notice that the number of arrests was about half that recorded in 2019-20. This probably reflects the size of the police force, which more than doubled between 1969 and 2019.

Clearly in its effects both human and economic the 1967 outbreak dwarfs our recent difficulties. The government hastened to implement reforms to address the grievances discovered by a commission of inquiry into comparatively minor riots the previous year. It also changed the law on riot, introducing the prosecutor-friendly version we now enjoy, which is something of an international scandal. Even the Singapore version provides more protection for defendants.

Businesspeople panicked in large quantities, and optimistic property types set themselves up for life by buying at bottom prices the landbanks of fleeing emigrants.

Another aspect of the 1967 outbreak which sheds an interesting light on current affairs is that by a little over two years later all those convicted had been tried, sentenced, collected the usual discounts and been released, a landmark signalled by the release of a hapless Reuters journalist who had been held in Beijing as some sort of hostage for 27 months.

In short, compared with previous outbreaks in Hong Kong the 2019-20 unrest was not so much an outbreak of massive violence as an extended piece of street theatre: violent, dangerous and athletic but, like professional wrestling, not actually homicidal.

The only death, apart from a handful of protest suicides, was of an elderly gentleman who wandered between two hostile groups who were throwing bricks at each other. The government tried hard to attribute the fatal brick to the protest camp by prosecuting a protester, but he was acquitted because there was no evidence that he had actually thrown a brick at all. So the political affiliations of the projectile remain a mystery.

Some of the injuries were serious and some of the property damage was no doubt expensive. But “massive and continuous violence”? Surely we can all learn to love the national security law and its local offshoot without pretending that the city was a mass of blood and flames before they arrived.

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A national security sentence is longer than you think

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on April 25, 2024| Leave a Comment »

It is a commonplace political observation that carelessly passed legislation often has unintended – and maybe ridiculous – effects. Our newly minted local legislators seem to have neglected this important warning.

We are all, these days, eager to secure national security. Attempts to achieve this by jailing those convicted of national security offences for long periods have reached a curious position.

Readers will recall that under the national security law bestowed on us by Beijing, national security offences come, like Pacific Coffee, in three sizes: small, medium and large. Those convicted must be imprisoned (there is no room for the usual alternatives; they do not mess around in Beijing) for terms ranging up to five years, from five to ten years or from ten to 15 respectively.

It has already become clear that five is going to be a hot number. In the present climate nobody, or at least nobody in the Department of Justice, is going to risk classifying a nat sec offence as anything which could be mistaken for “trivial”. So the popular classification among prosecutors is the medium one.

When the case finds its way to the sentencing judge, however, some comparison is inevitable with sentences commonly imposed in less political cases, and a five-year stretch is usually reserved for cases involving the violent separation of a victim from his health or property, or large quantities of drugs.

So five years is likely to seem enough for nat sec cases, most of which involve the holding and expression of inconvenient opinions. Note, though, one curiosity which will become relevant later: the Court of Appeal has decided that the five years is not a guideline, like the conventional suggestions on sentencing which it dispenses. Five years is a solid minimum, so the usual discount for pleading guilty is not available.

Traditionally, if you pleaded guilty, you got a third knocked off what would otherwise have been the sentence. Recently local judges have followed an odious innovation from the UK and replaced the one third discount with a sliding scale. You get one third off if you plead guilty at the earliest opportunity. After that the scale of the discount declines, reaching 20 percent at the trial kick-off and ten percent later.

The objection to this is that it encourages prisoners to admit offences before taking legal advice, which in complicated cases may mean they admit a charge to which they have a good defence. Never mind.

Now we come to the local contribution to the punishment regime, which is that nat sec prisoners will not be eligible for any of the usual early release schemes, unless the Commissioner for Correctional Services is satisfied that they will not infringe again.

Given the difficulty of proving a negative and the degree of nat sec paranoia expected of senior officials these days this looks like a plausible way of ensuring that nat sec offenders are going to be enjoying the correctional M and Ms for a long time. No doubt that is its intention.

And this gives rise to a curious situation. Let us take two prisoners, who were arrested on the same day and kept in custody thereafter. One of them is an Ordinary Decent Criminal (a term coined in Belfast for miscreants motivated by greed rather than politics) and the other is a nat sec offender.

The ODC has committed armed robbery. The judge takes as his starting point in sentencing the guideline supplied by the Court of Appeal for this offence (provided no firearm is used) which is five years. The ODC has pleaded guilty at the first opportunity so he gets the full one third discount and is sentenced to three years and four months in jail. The nat sec offender, whether he has pleaded guilty or not, gets the grande five-year minimum.

Let us suppose they share a cell. You may think that the ODC, lucky chap, will be leaving a year and a half or so before his neighbour, but that is not so. He can apply for release under supervision after serving half of his sentence, which would be just 20 months, or a little over a year and a half. If he does not fancy being supervised by the Correctional Services he can wait a bit longer and, if he behaves himself, get the discount for good conduct which is one third of your sentence. This would get him out after just over two years, on the streets and unsupervised.

At this point his cellmate still has virtually three years to serve. This is likely to strike both of them as rather unfair.

You can look at it another way. What would the sentence have to be if a judge wished to ensure that an ODC would actually, like our nat sec offender, be off the streets for five years, even if he qualified for the guilty plea discount and early release. The answer is 15 years.

This weird situation is a predictable result of the system of sentencing and imprisonment which has been around a long time. You might hope that legislators who were proposing to tinker with it would have first studied it in sufficient detail to avoid constructing obvious new anomalies. You would hope in vain, apparently.

The purpose of the guilty plea discount is to encourage early pleas, which save the time and expense of a contested trial. It appears that if you are accused of a nat sec offence you might as well try your luck in court. You won’t get the discount anyway. At least it will give you a few chances to wave at your mother.

Similarly the purpose of releasing prisoners early if they behave themselves is to encourage conformity to prison rules and sincere participation in rehabilitative activities. If these are desirable objectives you might think they would be equally desirable for all prisoners.

National security is an important objective of the law and order industry. So is fairness.

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