The Lunchbox Vote

True Colours

Sports Quiz

Q. What is the difference between the Hong Kong football team and the Hong Kong government?
A. The football team can stand up to China for 90 minutes; the government can't stand up to China at all.

What a bunch of spineless wimps we have running Hong Kong!  Nowhere else in the world would a reporter even consider it necessary to ask a government minister which team he was supporting when his local team was playing - and nowhere else would the answer be so equivocal.  So fearful are CY Leung and his minions of offending the central government that CY effectively evaded answering altogether, while Health Minister Ko Wing-man (whom I used to consider one of the more sensible members of the sorry crew that passes for a government here) hedged his bets by declaring support for both teams.

According to the Basic Law - to which the government constantly promotes adherence - the function of the Chief Executive is "to represent Hong Kong".  If he can't even be bothered to support the territory's sports teams against external opponents, he is obviously failing in this legal obligation, and should be sent off by the referee.  He usually appears to be playing for the away team anyway.

Some people aren't going to like this, but...

The massacre in Paris is of course horrific, but innocent civilians are getting killed every day by French, British, American, Russian and Syrian bombing.  Is it any less terrible because governments are doing it?  Why don't we see the same outcry against it?  I really want to know.

All the worst

As a general rule, I try not to delight in the misfortunes of others; and I have seen enough dysfunctional families to sympathise with those trapped in them.  Yet against my better judgement, I found it hard not to feel a smidgen of pleasure when reading this story yesterday.  CY Leung has caused so much harm to Hong Kong that it is only natural to feel a twinge of enjoyment at the discomfiture he must feel when seeing his family's dirty linen hung out in public.  Ignoble of me, sure, but I';d be willing to bet that many other Hongkongers feel the same way.

Triple Jeopardy

When someone is found innocent once and the prosecution appeals, one may suspect a miscarriage of justice.  When the person is cleared for a second time, only to face yet another trial, it begins to look very much like political persecution.

It is of course entirely coincidental that Stephen Chan supported Henry Tang for Chief Executive.

Photo borrowed from View Hong Kong blog.

Why is Queen Elizabeth II like a bar hostess?

Watching President Xi's visit to the UK on television, it suddenly occurred to me that the Queen's job is remarkably like that of a bar hostess.  Consider the similarities:

• You don't get to choose your guests - the [Prime Minister/Mama-san] does that for you.
• You have to be friendly and smiling towards them no matter how unlikeable they may be.
• Encounters tend to follow a standard - and not necessarily entirely truthful - script: [the long-established friendship between our two countries/You handsome man, me love you long time].
• Some subjects are best not discussed: [and this was seized by our troops when they looted the Summer Palace/Does your wife know you're here?]
• You have to encourage the guest to keep buying [British exports/drinks].

Cheers!

Up Yours

In view of the South China Porning Most's (as we may now call it) report that the above photograph shows "a naked victim pinned down in what appeared to be a [fire station] changing room while a group of men, some half-naked and others in firemen’s uniform, tried to insert an object in his bottom", the Fire Services Director's choice of words may have been a little unfortunate when he announced that the Fire Services Department would "launch its own internal probe".  Ouch!

Who wins?

Hong Kong has once again proved it is different from anywhere else on earth.  While I am sure there have been previous cases where FIFA has fined national teams because their fans have booed the anthem of an opposing country, this must be the first time in history that a team has been fined because its fans booed the anthem of their own country.  Beijing may consider the fine a victory for China, but is it?  In fact it could be seen as a moral victory for Hong Kong, because it draws the world's attention to the fact that many Hong Kong people do not want to show any allegiance to a dictatorial state they had no say in becoming part of.

Has it been a year already?

Last week was the first anniversary of the most inspiring event in Hong Kong since 1997.

 

Looking at President Xi Jinping at official meetings, have you noticed how he shakes hands then turns away - not to smile for the camera, but as if he is expressing disdain for the person he's greeting?  It's an odd mannerism for a politician.

Shock as British Politician Refuses to Commit Mass Murder

30 September - British politicians rushed to express their outrage today as new Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn stated that he would not be prepared to murder thousands of innocent people.

Prime Minister David Cameron said "Since the Crusades, indiscriminate slaughter has been an essential tool of British foreign policy.  Britain has a long and proud record of the brutal killing of enormous numbers of people - the starving of the Irish in the mid-19th century, the concentration camps of the Boer War, the Amritsar Massacre in 1919, the bombing of Dresden in 1945, Kenya and Malaya in the 1950s, and the genocide of Tasmania's aboriginal population, to name but a few.  Now this fellow Corbyn comes along and wants to overturn all this magnificent heritage of violence in favour of building world peace.  Has he no respect for tradition?"

Some members of Corbyn's own party joined in the angry criticism.  One asked "The Americans have at least one massacre a week in their own country.  How can we expect our American allies to take us seriously if we're not even prepared to drop the occasional nuke or two?'

Making It Better:
Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament

How many shoe-shiners does it take to commemorate the end of a war?

Almost 300, apparently.  Chief Executive CY Leung is leading a delegation of 296 handpicked Hongkongers to attend tomorrow's ceremony in Beijing at which the Chinese government will celebrate 70 years since the end of the Second World War and Japan's invasion of China by having large numbers of soldiers march around.  Presumably we - the Hong Kong public - are paying for this trip.

The list of those invited shows that most of them are the usual United Front suspects - from the Quat Doctor to the odious Robert Chow.  Some of them are multi-millionaires like James Tien and Allan Zeman who could easily afford to pay for their own tickets, though I doubt if they will be asked to.  A token 1% of the group is made up of representatives of the watered-down end of the pan-democratic spectrum, but the party as a whole is hardly a cross-section of Hong Kong society.

How many of these people, I wonder, bothered to attend the recent events marking Hong Kong's liberation from Japanese occupation - once a public holiday here - and paying tribute to those who fought and died for Hong Kong?  And how many of the few surviving warriors who fought for Hong Kong were invited to the event in Beijing? It would be nice to have a Hong Kong government that paid attention to Hong Kong occasionally, instead of being entirely focused on sucking up to the central government.

What, Me Worry?

Nevergreen

Does their compulsive urge to destroy beautiful vegetation stem from some deep-rooted childhood trauma over being forced to eat up their spinach or broccoli?

[First frame adapted from the delightful Calvin & Hobbes comic strips.]

Labour's Leadership Dilemma

It's ironic that while the remnants of the Blair/Brown New Labour leadership in Britain continue to label Jeremy Corbyn unelectable, ordinary Labour voters - and many who had given up on the party but are now flocking back to it - are voting for him in droves in the Party's leadership election, making him the clear favourite to win.

The essence of "New Labour" was the concept that only by abandoning almost everything it stood for could the Labour Party get elected to power.  That worked for a while - in part because of the charisma and enthusiasm of the then young Tony Blair - but resulted in an administration that was effectively a more Euro-friendly Thatcher Light - continuing to turn nationalised industries over to greedy businessmen at the expense of ordinary consumers, removing in the name of deregulation anything that protected people from unscrupulous corporations, and slavishly following America's catastrophic foreign ventures.

These policies certainly attracted a sizable number of middle-class voters away from the Tories, but they alienated many traditional Labour voters who held fast to the Party's principles - particularly in Scotland, where the generally left-wing Scottish National Party succeeded in capturing much of Labour's electoral base.  Now with the LibDems as a credible alternative effectively wiped out by their ill-judged alliance with the previous Tory government, with Tony Blair and his former ministers facing probable intense criticism in the long-delayed Chilcot report on their role in launching the disastrous Iraq War, with UKIP nibbling away at the Tory vote on the other end of the political spectrum, and with the 2008 banking crisis and the subsequent Eurozone crisis making the "New World Order" appear positively frayed at the seams, the time may just be right for an "Old Labour" revival.

I've been out of the UK so long that I've lost my right to vote there, but I shall be watching developments with interest.

More fiddling

CY Leung plays Nero again with a big announcement at his last LegCo appearance - primed by an obviously staged question from DAB leader Starry Lee.  I'm as much in favour of clean streets as the next man, but doesn't the government have more important things to do something about?  Their problem is that genuine solutions to the real problems would require offending either their Beijing overlords or the tycoons who control our economy, so they are forced to fall back on sideshows instead to give the appearance of doing something.

Private Beach Art

Our Private Beach by American artist Barbara Ann Whalley.  You can see another of her paintings here.

Booby Crap

Secretary for Justice Rimsky Yuen announced today that, having taken legal advice following the recent conviction of a female protester for assaulting a police officer with her breast, the Hong Kong government now plans to prosecute every woman in Hong Kong for unlawful possession of offensive weapons.  Exceptions will however be made for girls below the age of puberty and women who have undergone a double mastectomy.

"It is true that we may need to construct many more jails to accommodate three million additional prisoners," said Yuen, "but we cannot afford to have half the population walking the streets freely with these fearsome devices attached to them.  This is a small price to pay to protect the safety of our gallant policemen."

Discord in the Wolf Den

The sudden stepping down of two government ministers yesterday provides fertile fodder for speculation, particularly as Chief Executive CY Leung was typically less than forthcoming in his announcement: "I shouldn't discuss in public the background, the details of these changes, but suffice to say that both gentlemen will soon issue a press release in their own names and you will soon be able to find out the reason why".  Except we didn't find out - Home Affairs Secretary Tsang Tak-sing merely said he was "glad to retire", while Civil Service Secretary Paul Tang  cited unspecified family circumstances and expressed a desire to spend more time with his family - always a popular excuse for politicians eager not to discuss the reasons for their departure.

Leung should of course discuss the circumstances in public - firstly because we pay the government's salaries and are entitled to know what is going on; and secondly because uncertainty breeds rumours which can often be more damaging than unpalatable truths.  The mystery is compounded by the fact that the men were variously described as having been removed, retired or resigned.  Given that the two cases came at the same time, one must suspect that they reflect disagreements within Leung's inner circle rather than mere coincidence.  It's doubtful the ministers were sacked for incompetence, because there are far more obvious candidates for that fate - useless (National) Education Secretary Eddie Ng and Financial Secretary John "Never a Correct Forecast" Tsang spring to mind.  Maybe, according to Regina Ip's bizarre theory, the two were just too introverted for their posts.  Or perhaps Tsang Tak-sing, like his brother Jasper, showed occasional heretical signs of thinking outside the Beijing box, despite being a lifelong loyalist. 

Loyalty is hardly a quality one can attribute to Tsang's replacement, Homer Simpson lookalike Lau Kong-wah - an opportunist turncoat who (it is often forgotten) began his career as a democrat before switching sides to the DAB, making him probably the only politician to have lost LegCo elections on both sides of the political divide.  Despite being soundly rejected by the voters in the last LegCo poll, he wormed his way back into a position of power when CY indicated his contempt for the electorate by appointing Lau as Undersecretary for Constitutional and Mainland Affairs.  Having demonstrated his incompetence in this role with the failure of the government's political reform package, he is now being rewarded with a promotion.  Curiouser and curiouser.

Another strange appointment announced yesterday is that of former Housing Director Duncan Pescod as the umpteenth chief executive of the West Kowloon Cultural District Authority - supposedly after a worldwide search, which sounds unlikely.  Strange because we had people with an arts background - none of whom stayed long - appointed during the phase when construction of the buildings was the main concern, and now we have someone with a housing background when we are supposedly getting close to seeing some actual cultural activity on the site.  But then this mega-project has been mishandled from the beginning - true to Hong Kong's preoccupation with enriching the property developers, debate on what should be constructed on the site took precedence over actually determining the community's cultural needs and wishes first and building to meet them.

Acknowledgement - the picture is from the Wolves Throne blog.

The Hong Kong Government Finds a New Enemy - on Two Wheels

In its never-ending vigilance against threats to the community, the Hong Kong government has identified a new danger to the public - an elderly bicycle repair man.  After recently taking action against another elderly man for the heinous crime of telling a fib about his age so he could continue working past retirement age, the authorities are now descending to an even lower level of petty-mindedness.

If they really want to punish people for obstructing the streets, why don't they take action against the masses of smugglers who routinely block entire thoroughfares in the northern New Territories to sort out their goods?  Or do they just like to pick on easy targets who are not doing any harm?