Wednesday 1 July 2020

Take Up The White Man's Burden

The Conservative Party won 317 seats in 2017, the hardcore Tory heartlands. Send 10,000 Hongkongers to each of them. Let there be a new town in each of those leafy shire seats that were blue on the map every time. Anyone could live there, but the original 10,000 inhabitants would be Cantonese. Who could object to that?

There are also longstanding ties between Hong Kong and Northern Ireland, where it was said for many years, before the recent mass revival of Irish there, that Cantonese was the second most widely spoken first language. The 10 constituencies that elected DUP MPs in 2017 might therefore share the load. Seven of those would easily be rural enough to accommodate a new town apiece.

So that is 327 constituencies altogether. Take out the 24 most urban Conservative ones and the three DUP ones with the word Belfast in their names, and then build a new town, initially for 10,000 Hongkongers, in each of the remaining 300. "Ye dare not stoop to less."

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