Carrie Lam, you must tell Beijing a price has to be paid to keep P.L.A off our streets

Clinton Leeks (right) was former Private Secretary to Governor Lord Wilson, Deputy Secretary of Security and Corporate Affairs Director before and during the opening of Chek Lap Kok airport.

Dear Hong Kong Buzz Editor,

I have watched from UK for months as a city I love has been trashed and a Police Force which is (let us all please face the fact) HK’s last best hope of maintaining law and order has been attacked physically and verbally and has fought back. As a former Chairman of the HK Society in UK I am often asked for my view of what is happening. I have thought it better being so far away to keep my counsel: but with the summer holidays now ending but no sign yet of things quietening down, now may be the time to scribble some thoughts.

First it amazes me to see protestors and others damaging HK’s world class infrastructure, its airport and MTR that many dozens of workers died building, that are the enablers of HK’s civic wealth, and that most other cities in the world (including London!) can only dream of having. HK has long been one of the safest cities in the world. When friends of mine tell me they have just cancelled their planned first ever trip to HK, I realise I no longer recognise the place.

Secondly I see very little understanding of what it does to young policemen and women, who have been trained to fulfil a commitment to keep HK safe, to be subjected to regular confrontation and abuse on the streets, and to be demonised in some of the media. They are of course not saints—hands up those who would like to live in a city policed by saints?—but I cannot envisage a city like HK which so values its many freedoms surviving long without a fundamentally decent and professional police force. In the HK Government of the 1970s onwards we British knew that the day we had to deploy British troops on the streets of HK to maintain order then British rule would be finished: a failed bankruptcy, with no hope of new credit. I cannot see that this judgment is so far from the truth 22 years later.

Thirdly, I puzzle over how this storm has been allowed to erupt initially over an admittedly flawed extradition bill, and then to turn into one long summer typhoon on the streets. In HK in February the coming dangers of the extradition bill were mentioned to me over lunch by one of HK’s most astute and upright politicians. It was the first I had heard of the bill. Later from others I heard a lot more. What on earth has happened to the really rather effective “two way listening process” we in the HK Government set up after the 1967 Troubles, to try to ensure we would not be caught out again by widespread anger at “the grassroots”. The 1980s taxi riot was a salutary reminder that for all HK’s orderliness, in a busy hectic city anger spreads very fast. Has all that listening machinery via the District Offices and consultative boards been abolished? Or maybe it is just that HK’s own unique brand of electoral politics was deemed good enough to replace it. Time for a rethink if so.

Fourthly it is not enough as some sources north of the border have done to blame all this mayhem on “black hands”. Of course there will be some who will capitalise on discontent (as there are in the UK, I assure you). But to succeed in doing so as dramatically as this, they clearly need that rich vein of discontent in the first place to feed on. Something has brought a section of HK’s youth to a depth of frustration where they are willing to trash their city. That must surely be a concern to the Government?

So, what does the Government need to do about it? Well a lot more than it is doing, at least visibly. The days of stoic imperial calm as a viable Government policy went out when the internet came in. Carrie Lam, who I know from past encounters is a very decent, experienced and intelligent person who is passionate about the wellbeing of HK, needs to work with her advisers to retake some of the initiative “from the streets”. At the moment the police are carrying the burden alone of supporting (and in effect delivering, it seems to me) Government policy. That will not do. It is not their job. The Government has a dodgy electoral mandate—in Carrie’s case via an electoral college of sorts, and for the rest of Government dependent on working with a Legislature and district boards they can try to persuade but cannot control. OK. So first—yes, withdraw the hated Extradition Bill: it is toast anyway. Then take the issues you are (I hope) wrestling with to the streets yourself (or more accurately to the community halls and local centres spread liberally around HK). Go on a listening exercise. You will be shouted at—that is what happens these days to elected leaders, and in an odd way it validates your leadership. Listen to what ordinary people are complaining about. Housing, education, medical care, jobs at a guess. Yes and the police. And of course the current political system.

Then go back and act. HK has reserves that are for most Governments riches beyond the dreams of Avarice. Take on the housing oligarchs with a major land supply programme of brownfield and NT sites—not massive artificial islands—to build genuinely affordable housing for those with HK residence rights only. Yes property prices will wobble and yes the oligarchs will moan, not just to you but to Beijing too. Call the oligarchs’ bluff and explain to Beijing that this is the price of not having to put the PLA on the streets of HK, which as we Brits knew before 1997 was a point of no-return for local government. And—always keeping within the Basic Law framework of course—revisit that 2014 electoral package for choosing a CE. People may see it differently now. Looking back all the way to 1997, the current system just clearly is not working.

Above all, go out and govern. That is what people expect you to do and in my HK experience want their Governments to do. Someone once unkindly said that a certain British Prime Minister was “in office but not in power”. Go out and exercise the legitimate power that the right to govern gives you. Otherwise there is no point in holding office.

Good luck Hong Kong. You have millions of friends and well-wishers all over the world.

Clinton Leeks OBE

29 August 2019