Hong Kong Phooey No More

Even in what is now his quite advanced dotage, John Humphrys can still have his uses. This morning, he told Joshua Wong, who was not quite three years old at the time of the handover, that, "You want more democracy in Hong Kong than there was under British rule."

To which Wong could only answer along the lines of, "Well, yes, but that's not really saying very much." The coverage by the likes of the Telegraph, that the protesters in Hong Kong are somehow pining for the Empire, would once have been pernicious, but it is now merely hilarious. 

Hong Kong under British rule was repressive in the extreme, with the worst of all under the Labour Government of the late 1960s, when vicious measures were deployed against the inevitable expressions of disaffection with the invariable economic consequences of the lack of representative government.

Off the Humphrys and Hannan types blather about "the Anglosphere", no part of which is doing the first thing for Hong Kong, and every part of which is actively pursuing a much closer partnership with China. Donald Trump blows hot and cold, but it has been clear in recent days that he is coming round. The rest of the Five Eyes have always seen things perfectly clearly.

It is side-splitting to watch the mutation into this of the old white supremacist ideology from the 1980s, which is heavily bound up with the cult of Margaret Thatcher. Hong Kong? You really could die laughing. Exactly the same people took full British passports away from the Saint Helenians because, "Otherwise, we'd have to give them to Hong Kong."

They have them back now, though. Whereas the Gibraltarians and the Falkland Islanders never lost them. Go onto Google images, and see if you can spot the difference. To the best of my knowledge, there has never been a riot in Saint Helena. There has certainly never been one against British rule, as there were in Hong Kong in the 1960s. And Saint Helenians speak English. Not Cantonese. English. "Hong Kong, outpost of the "Anglosphere""? I ask you!

In fact, Britain has far more chance of post-Brexit economic opportunities with China (and with India, which is now under the rule of the people who assassinated Gandhi because he was a sellout and who campaign against rival politicians for speaking English), than it has with any of Canada, Australia or even New Zealand, whatever polite noises their leaders might make on their extremely rare visits to London.

As for the United States, it will let us have a trade deal if we will let it plunder our NHS and other key resources. It says much the same thing to every country in the world, and it will in principle sign a deal with any of them, including coal-rich North Korea. Its Relationship with Britain is nothing Special.

And as for Hong Kong, not only did no one demonstrate against British withdrawal, but in 1997 most of those who are demonstrating today were either very small children or not yet born. Both of those facts may bewilder John Humphrys or the Telegraph. But that only gives them even more force than they had already enjoyed.