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Britain should open her doors to Hong Kongers looking to flee China’s overreachHong Kongers are some of the most educated and entrepreneurial people in the world, so even folk who depreciate immigration from the Third World should be able to get behind this idea, given Hong Kong is very much First World. I rather doubt Hong Kongers (Hong Kong GDP/capita = $49,334, UK GDP/capita = $42,976) are not going to be competing with poor British people for council houses. May 29th, 2020 |
 47 comments to Britain should open her doors to Hong Kongers looking to flee China’s overreach |
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Don’t they already have Commonwealth passports or at least some kind of right to entry. They are all over Vancouver.
We should have done this before the handover. The PRC would have won an empty prize. I thought that then. I still do.
bob sykes,
A Commonwealth passport matters about as much these days (and hasn’t done for some time) as the gold star you got for a spelling test when you were nine.
so even folk who depreciate immigration from the Third World should be able to get behind this idea
Erm… nyone who regards HK as “Third World” is in need of a serious reality check!
Clearly HK is not Third World, that was not the point I was making, so let me edit to make that even more clear.
PdH: “Britain should open her doors to Hong Kongers looking to flee China’s overreach”
Yea, why not? Residency only, subject to deportation if they commit a crime, and so long as they aren’t a member of one or other triad.
If we flood Britain with well educated, well behaved foreigners, that might dilute the incidence of child molestation and child rape. Which won’t then get into the news, certain factions around this ‘ere manor will deem that a good thing.
Followed immediately with issue of HK passports to every occupant of every Chinese prison and insane asylum, and free tickets to LHR.
Worked for Fidel!
@staghounds
They’d have to forge them (not that they couldn’t)
Given they are numbered, that is more than just a matter of reproducing the document itself perfectly.
I used to question asylum seekers at an international airport. Spotting the fakes was very easy.
They’d arrive and say they were from the disputed Kashmir region, or similar, and in threat of their lives. If one of the Indian origin members of staff was present then they would indicate that the Bengali accent was a bit of a giveaway they were lying. Sometimes I got the atlas and asked them to name a major town directly to the north of where they said they lived. When they couldn’t, I would ask them to name any town near where they lived. Simple stuff that anyone from the place would know.
Chinese mainlanders aren’t going to be able to sneak in unless the border control people are totally stupid or want them to. You could ask 5 basic questions about HK, in HK cantonese to make it more sure, and the fakes would be immediately spotted.
(Also, do you actually think the CCP would want a whole bunch of released prisoners in the West able to talk about mainland China’s prison system with relative impunity? They might use it to get rid of difficult types, but then Israel has a huge number of such people released from the USSR.)
Chester Draws: “but then Israel has a huge number of such people released from the USSR.”
Bugger! The UK will just have to get in the queue behind Israel. Israel is obv., gonna snaffle all ’em Jewish Hong Kong refugees.
PdH: “Given they are numbered, that is more than just a matter of reproducing the document itself perfectly.”
Yes, all those guys currently being escorted across the Channel by HMS Compassion, are in possession of correctly sequenced British Passports.
Whew!!
I was in favour of British passports for Hong Kong at the time. It would have been a disincentive for the CCP to mess with them and any HKers that came to the UK would have just used it as a springboard to somewhere else anyway.
Stop being idiotic. My point is that the sort of people that China thinks are bad and want to lose — those that value liberty over state party rule, in their case — are not necessarily a problem to the country that receives them, and may well be a major benefit. The USSR removed all sorts of “anti-social” elements that were anything but — depleting their own productivity while increasing Israel’s.
The UK illegal immigrant problem is not a result of the difficulty of distinguishing the cases wanted from those who arrive unbidden. It arises from a lack of will to deal with the illegals. They are entirely separate problems.
Sober hard-working immigrants from HK should not be prevented because there is a problem with chancers arriving illegally.
Well, that’s
idioticoverly simplistic. The USSR’s productivity was depleted not by the ‘anti-social’ elements, but by itsanti socialinsane political system.A comparison between Israel’s racist immigration policy and the deranged political system of the USSR is not ‘like for like’.
And as a side note, Israel’s ‘productivity’, has much, much more, to do with massive US$ subsidy to Israel, than Israel’s immigration policies.
The ultra orthodox are not considered ‘productive’ among Israel’s more secular population. They are in fact considered something of a welfare problem. Being largely recipients of tax shekels rather than net contributors to the Israeli treasury.
How quaint. You still think China cares one jot about anything, anyone in the West thinks about China? They are still persecuting Uighurs, and they’ve been persecuting Tibetans since at least the ’50s.
In the West, fashionable persecutions come and go. China has learned that indignant civil servants not withstanding, the West will never do one damn thing.
They won’t be voting for fucking socialism at least.
Likewise white South Africans should be free to migrate here–so long as they bring their guns with them.
Small chance BlueLabour Johnson would agree to such moves tho’.
Nah, Mr Ecks. White South Africans are too stupid to survive the Sahara or the mediteranian, so not intelligent enough to contribute to British society.
“Hong Kongers are some of the most educated and entrepreneurial people in the world”
How does a people get to be entrepreneurial? Nature, nurture or environment?
At the time HK was handed over to the Chinese I floated the proposal that the HK Chinese should be allowed to emigrate to somewhere similar in climate to HK – say Belize or similar. Then they would be
allocated land to do what they liked with under the same conditions as HK was originally set up (i.e. NO taxes). With the wealth that they should have brought with them and their enterprising nature we could have had New Hong Kong just across the Atlantic and denied the CCP the wealth and technology of HK.
However, the signs were there from the word go. Christopher Patten allowed the Chinese Army into the colony BEFORE the official hand over time and they drove around the place in trucks, manned with infantry carrying weapons. Just to make sure that the message was loud and clear to any observers. A supine, weak and pathetic gesture from the UK. China took note – we would do naff all about anything to do with HK.
But as for allowing them into the UK? No. A thousand times no. The practical problems of simply housing up to 7 million people is impossible at the present time. And that is the least of the worries.
Besides, the HK Chinese have had 23 years to get the hell out of Dodge and go elsewhere. They KNEW the type of regime in Beijing, knew what the CCP was like and as I pointed out, knew how weak and uncommitted the Bitish Government was to ensuring the agreements made were kept by the CCP.
Much as I sympathise with their plight, they knew what was coming and did not get out of the way. Why should the UK rescue them now?
Additionally, having potentially 7 million people who are NOT British, with their own customs, way of life and traditions again gives no consideration to the native British who must again see a dilution of their own culture and marginalisation of their country and themselves.
At this rate the British will be a minority in their own country.
Phil B–The UK govt can’t stop what is going on in HK. Not without risking nuclear war.
A couple of threads ago I asked what peoples thoughts were on nuclear war with China –better now than in 20 years ? etc and got not a single reply. So the punters on here don’t want to take the actions needed to rescue HK never mind BlueLab Bottler Johnson.
I sense an enormous reverse ferret on immigration coming from the Left, panicked at the thought of a million or so industrious people with strong ties to Britain who may be able to come here.
Phil B: ” Christopher Patten ”
Ah yes, another of the legion of Tory infiltrators. In another century, such filth would have been in the Liberal party along with the paedophile Cyril Smith.
@Mr Ecks – agreed on what the actions (or lack of action) that the present UK government can do with a much reduced military and no bases in the region. But there again, Britain behaved honourably by abiding by the terms of the lease and handed over the colony in accordance with international law.
And again, at the time, there was little that Britain could have done to safeguard the agreements made short of refusing to hand over the place.
My point was that from the word go, the Chinese displayed bad faith and no intention to allow democracy to operate.
No, in the 10 years leading up to the handover, the HK residents should have been encouraged to leave and set up elsewhere – Taiwan, for example or, as Belize was under British control, a similar state could have been set up there long before the handover date, as I outlined above.
But I reiterate that Britain has no obligation towards, or the resources to accept, 7 million HK Chinese. The Commonwealth and the “all Commonwealth citizens have a right to residence in the UK” was made when international travel was difficult, expensive and impractical for the vast majority of the worlds population. treating an illiterate peasant from a village in the upper reaches of India as the equivalent of a native born Britain is naive to say the least …
I am willing to bet that the number of aircraft landing in one normal day from abroad into the UK would far exceed the ANNUAL numbers capable of arriving by passenger ship in the whole of (say) 1950. THAT is the problem as I see it and any turd (no, NOT a spelling mistake) world country Commonwealth resident can scrape together the air fare to come to the UK or if not an Commonwealth country, to pay people smugglers. Which increases the problem.
It was a generous, if foolish commitment to make post WW2 and should NOT have been made. Try to obtain a copy of Enoch Powells book Freedom and Reality where he warned about this.
A spokesperson for the Foreign Office has said:
“There are claims that Hong Kong is in danger and that the People’s Republic of China is breaching the Sino-British Joint Declaration and Handover Agreement. May I just Pooh Pooh any such notion.”.
Do you mean Israel welcomes citizens statistically likely to be loyal and productive while excluding those statistically likely to murder and plant bombs and/or to provide a friendly background to such activities and/or to treat their new country as a parasite treats its host?
That is indeed how the word ‘racist’ is used in the modern anglo-sphere, and even more in the EU. This blog is a place where that usage can be challenged.
While I think that Chinese from Hong Kong will be welcomed by most britons in any event, it would greatly assist welcoming the right kind of immigrants if people saw the wrong kind of immigrants being deported and excluded. Nigel Farage’s recent trips to the the white cliffs of Dover to film arrivals from within his car have been deemed a violation of lockdown. (It’s clear no actual danger of infection arose, but I fully grant that “filming immigrants violating lockdown” is not included in the government’s list of “reasonable excuses”.)
Any political strategy to welcome immigrants from Hong Kong should include assuring the public that the UK has indeed “taken back control” of immigration and is visibly in control of it. You can welcome a lot of (the right kind of) immigrants once that lost trust has been regained.
So – if I understand correctly what it is – I’m all for an Israeli-style immigration policy. Indeed, I wonder if calling it that would positively assist getting all the right people to scream against it. 🙂
It might be an improvement then, if the UK adopted a similar approach to its border control. Youssef Zaghba might not have been allowed through customs by our border authority to maim and murder on the Streets of London.
According to the Italian authorities they had forewarned the British that Zaghba was travelling to the UK, I imagine he’d managed to learn by heart his local towns and cities off the list that British customs authorities were likely to ask him about ( Stringent control’s there by the way). Because he slipped through the steel like cordon the British customs authorities had thrown around our Island.
But I’m sure, ‘lessons were learned’.
“those that value liberty over state party rule, ” will be low on the list of Chinese exports. The very sick, thieves, rapists, insane people, and other people who are costing them social order and expense.
And statistically nobody really gets deported- too expensive and too much due process. Once you’re in, you’re in to stay.
I think those will be the ones the CCP will be delighted to see bugger off
All of the above.
And many did.
Yes, and a lot of them became very wealthy as a result of staying. Now things are different.
Because it is in the UK’s economic interests to welcome educated people from a First World entrepreneurial culture (HK quite different culturally to Mainland China as anyone who has spent much time there will tell you, it is a very modern sophisticated place).
That’s debatable. Just in terms of infrastructure to accommodate 6-7 million extra people would require:
Extra provision for fresh water supply.
Extra provision for sewage disposal, and sewerage provision.
Extra provision of electrical supply.
Extra provision of food supply.
Extra transport provision; trains, roads, fuel demand.
Extra provision of health and medical care.
All of those things are at the extreme of their utility now, having been built with a gradually increasing or even stable population in mind during the first half of the last century. But instead the UK has already accommodated perhaps fifteen million more than the infrastructure was designed to serve.
Just at the time the British government is in the process of destroying its own ability to fund its day to day operations, taking on such colossal extra liabilities for some wishful thinking and intangible benefits.. would be foolhardy.
*It would be in the UKs economic interest to educate its own population to equip them with the necessary skills to build and maintain their own society. But that seems to be too much trouble.
Presumably the more intelligent, which implies the quota of stupid is higher than otherwise would have been the case. Those are the one’s we’re gonna get now?
All of the above.
Does that mean that Hong Kongers will become significantly less entrepreneurial if they migrate to England?
“All of those things are at the extreme of their utility now, having been built with a gradually increasing or even stable population in mind during the first half of the last century. But instead the UK has already accommodated perhaps fifteen million more than the infrastructure was designed to serve.”
So build some more. Because we always build as much as is needed, we are always “at the edge” where supply equals demand.
“Just at the time the British government is in the process of destroying its own ability to fund its day to day operations, taking on such colossal extra liabilities for some wishful thinking and intangible benefits.. would be foolhardy.”
People are a resource, not a liability. More peole means more workers who can build the infrastructure and services.
“It would be in the UKs economic interest to educate its own population to equip them with the necessary skills to build and maintain their own society. But that seems to be too much trouble.”
Yes, it would. But you can’t force people to learn.
Yes, so we will be able to accommodate 7 m more individuals in ten years time, once we’ve ‘built some more’ and the new things we’ve built have come on line.
After all, we’ve a lot of excess skilled capacity in the economy just at the moment, thanks to those central planners who urged the shutdown of the economy and the destruction of the private sector and the ability of the government to fund its spending projections – other than by printing. I suppose the objection to ‘there is no money’ would be, ‘so print some more’.
Well, yes again. So don’t artificially and unnecessarily increase demand.
Have you seen the youtube video of the track-laying vehicle building the Chinese railway viaduct?
It’s pretty impressive, but it tells you that you don’t need more people to build the infrastructure.
We haven’t heard too much about the autonomous self crashing Tesla automobiles lately, but sooner or later we will get something similar that reliably doesn’t crash, and Poof! there goes the Taxi industry, no need for cheap casual labour, the mainstay of that service industry.
We don’t need more people, we need more better educated people. There is a good chance we could supply those ourselves.
And it’s simply not true to suggest that a lot of people means a prosperous country, I offer Pakistan to refute that assertion.
Did the Hugenots make England less entrepreneurial?
Simpliciter, yes.
I note certain caveats regarding the immigrant culture (people from some cultures have better statistics than others) and the host culture (immigration and political correctness don’t mix well together – or one could say they mix too well together).
But there seems good reason to expect the typical immigrant from HK to be a resource. As Thomas Sowell remarked after studying a great many migrations and refugee events, the most valuable property people have is what they carry between their ears – referring partly to what they know but even more to their willingness to work.
I guess you missed this bit of my comment:
The economy of Hong Kong post-handover went though the roof, are you not aware of that? The people who stayed took a calculated gamble that worked very well until right about now. Hardly an indication they are the gormless demographic 😉
As for needing more infrastructure in UK, who cares? Build more, it will generates jobs for salt-of-the-earth English types straight out of central casting (you like jobs, yes? “Pull up the drawbridge” folk are usually obsessed with blue collar jobs for white people, so then what do you have against building infrastructure?). And if there is demand for infrastructure rather than being make-work railways-to-nowhere kinds of projects, that actually adds value to the economy.
People are an asset, not a liability, particularly if they are educated & actually have money when they land at Heathrow, rather than arriving in a rubber dinghy nipping over from Calais whilst Nigel looks on disapprovingly. Your arguments might make at least sense if we were talking about Somali refugees from war-torn France, but we ain’t. The new arrivals from HK will be pushing up house prices in my borough, not yours.
Niall,
Your assertion and APL’s assertion regarding Israel’s immigration policy are not mutually exclusive.
Israel’s immigration policy is racist or – if you do not consider Jews to be a race – then at the very least prejudiced & bigoted. The Law of Return gives all Jews around the world the right to CUT THE LINE, and very quickly become citizens of Israel, and immigrate to Israel – regardless of how well-educated, skilled, productive, be loyal, or statistically likely they are to murder/plant bombs.
There are MILLIONS of people around the world who are better-educated, more skilled, more productive, and less statistically likely to murder/plant bombs than most of these Jews but most of those millions of people cannot become citizens of Israel or immigrate to Israel (or if they do it’s very difficult & takes a very long time usually, while for Jews it is easy, quick, and virtually guaranteed).
By Hong Kong standards, British rentals & property generally are quite reasonable. This would be a very middle class influx by people who find British culture and sensibilities easy to understand and who already speak English.
“I suppose the objection to ‘there is no money’ would be, ‘so print some more’.”
No, the objection is “so work some more”.
‘Money’ is just a credible, enforcible promise to give the bearer something of value at a later date. Promises are easy to make. But they have to be credible, which means they have to be backed by the productive work you promise to do in the future. It’s the production that matters. It’s the future production by the people of this nation that backs the government’s promises today.
When people say “there is no money”, what they mean is “there is no spare productive capacity”. That we’re working flat out to deliver on the promises made already, so making more promises would not be credible. But that doesn’t mean that ‘money’ is a finite, limited resource. You can print more money if you can increase productive capacity – either by making better use of the workers you’ve got, or by getting more workers, or both. Human ingenuity and organisation are the foundation of all wealth.
“Have you seen the youtube video of the track-laying vehicle building the Chinese railway viaduct?”
Have you seen the spinning jenny and the automatic loom? No more need for weaving cloth by hand. The Luddites had the same argument.
“We haven’t heard too much about the autonomous self crashing Tesla automobiles lately, but sooner or later we will get something similar that reliably doesn’t crash, and Poof! there goes the Taxi industry, no need for cheap casual labour, the mainstay of that service industry.”
Humans crash cars too. Particularly in the beginning, while they’re still developing the skills.
Technology moves everybody a rung up the ladder. What was impossible, with automation becomes possible to the skilled, what was difficult and the preserve of the skilled, with automation becomes easy and accessible to the unskilled. And what was easy is automated entirely and no longer needs to be done. Technology opens up new jobs to more people as it closes down old ones.
“We don’t need more people, we need more better educated people.”
We need both.
And we need more people who understand how and why our economic system works, so they don’t wind up breaking it in their endless attempts to ‘fix’ it.
“And it’s simply not true to suggest that a lot of people means a prosperous country, I offer Pakistan to refute that assertion.”
It’s an excellent example. A Pakistani in Pakistan produces little. Their economic system is broken. The market there is not free. A Pakistani who moves to England, opens a corner shop, works 24 hours a day to develop the far greater productive capacity needed to give their kids a good education, produces a new generation of highly productive Pakistanis. And then they’re over here, working for us, working to enrich our society. We spread the culture of production, make better use of the resources we’ve got, and society everywhere is wealthier.
It doesn’t matter where the production is located, or where the people originally came from. We want to increase the productive capacity of everyone, everywhere, all at once. We want to educate the British, but we want to educate the Pakistanis and Chinese and Africans, too. Any production, wherever it may be, makes all human society richer. If bringing them over here enables us to educate them and imbue them with our economic culture more quickly and effectively, to make them as productive, then that’s a gain. It takes 18 years (plus!) to turn a home-grown baby into a productive worker. If you can do it in only one or two years by importing under-used resources from abroad and training them up, that’s a huge gain in time and productivity.
Humans here in the UK are genetically the same organism as in Pakistan or Africa. The vast difference in productivity-per-capita is purely down to culture. We have fifty times the GDP-per-capita of India! If we could get a billion Indians up to our level, that would be a huuuge boost to global productivity! We need to spread that culture as fast as possible, to as many people as possible, not only because of the extra production that makes possible right now, but also because that buys us the production of all their descendents as they learn the culture from their parents. The only way to win, in all senses of the word, is to spread our own economic culture, the thing that makes us fifty times more productive, to the whole world.
You can’t ever make society richer by raising barriers to trade. Luddites, Socialists, Nationalists, and Protectionists think that you can become rich by creating artificial shortages, by walling out the competition, by hoarding resources, by raising prices. The history of the modern world says otherwise.
I agree that people from Hong Kong are unlikely to want British welfare payments and are unlikely to support hostile doctrines.
My thought is is not that they are unfit for the United Kingdom – but rather that the United Kingdom may be unfit for them.
Taxes and levels of government spending (especially government spending) are crushing in the United Kingdom – and regulations are endless.
If I was a person from Hong Kong – the United Kingdom is not somewhere I would want to settle.
Still – they may have no other choice.
Your assertion appears to be they became rich because they worked hard and were super intelligent, may well be true. But it could equally be true that they are just exceptionally corrupt, know how to work the system joined the CCP, milked the system for all they could. After all, China has had a booming economy this last couple of decades, so there would have been plenty of fat to skim.
I’m not especially critical of Israel’s immigration policy, for largely the same reasons Niall puts forward in his reply.
1. I said “your” not “our” so your quote of me is wrong.
2. How critical of Israel’s immigration policy you are is irrelevant to the point I was making, which is that Israel’s immigration policy is racist or at least bigoted/prejudiced.
You’ve obviously never been to Hong Kong if you think that. Much of why Hong Kong has been such a success is the relative lack of corruption and courts that enforce rule of law & contracts. Hong Kong has been a high trust culture compared to China’s extremely low trust culture, a point largely lost on people in Bejing who have no understanding of the importance of such things. All that may be about to change, but that’s why Hong Kong & Mainland China are such different places to do business.
Careless copy & paste error, and not intentional.
Portugal did the smart and right thing……..Britain did not.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1989-07-21-mn-4240-story.html
Correct, but I note APL’s typo of missing the first letter in what the copy&paste is one we all do from time to time. Thomas Sowell jokes that if anything could survive a nuclear holocaust, it would be a typo. 🙂
It is no different from the policy of e.g. France or Poland in regarding any WWII-born offspring of those who fled the Nazi invasion as having the right to claim French or Polish citizenship. The timespan between the Jews being driven from the holy land and their returning to it is unusually long, and the tenacity with which they have maintained their ancestral claim is also unusually long. Most ethnic/religious groups in their position would have just given up and ceased to be an identifiable group. But the Jews did maintain their claim, and the relevant other groups were well aware (through their Jewish-derived scriptures and similar) that the claim was maintained.
So there is nothing unusual about the Jewish policy in world terms except its persistence. Either you avoid calling that ‘racism, prejudice and/or bigotry’ or you notice that you are praising ‘racism, prejudice and/or bigotry’ as something that most countries, though not the US, do, just on a shorter timescale.
I have always seen the critical attitude to the law of return as, like much else, just demanding Jews be judged by special standards.
“How critical of Israel’s immigration policy you are is irrelevant to the point I was making, which is that Israel’s immigration policy is racist or at least bigoted/prejudiced.”
Your point is correct, and I think many Israelis would see the point perfectly well.
The original aspiration of the Zionists was that their return to Jerusalem should be free and open. They did not ask that anyone else be excluded, they only asked that they should be free to immigrate. The plan was that they should all be able to return home, and live together somewhere that they were not unwelcome guests in somebody else’s culture and country, not a tiny minority that could be abused with impunity, or seen as strange and outside the mainstream. What they wanted was a homeland, where they were accepted as belonging, and ideally around Jerusalem. They were willing to share.
That didn’t work out, because everyone else was racist and bigoted, and wouldn’t tolerate them. First, their immigration was blocked – even during the Second World War when they sought to escape from the holocaust in Europe. Second, when they set up a nation, they were attacked by the armies of five of their neighbours simultaneously. The threat of destruction, even now, is very serious.
Restrictions on freedom may be justified to prevent harm being done to others, and where such freedoms conflict, a trade-off between the competing costs and interests needs to be struck. On the one hand, restricting people’s freedom to immigrate is a harm – both to their liberty and economically. On the other, anti-semitism threatens genocide, death and destruction. Given the high cost of the latter, a fair trade off can justify more serious restrictions of liberty on the former. But make no mistake – they are restrictions of liberty and hence a heavy price being paid.
The ideal would be to only bar those who threatened to do actual harm. It is a really bad idea to use Jewishness as a proxy for this. There are a significant number of false negatives (Jews who don’t support Zionism) and lots and lots of false positives (Gentiles who do support Zionism). Such a filter makes many mistakes, which further raise the cost of the policy.
Given the stakes on the other side of the balance, and the impossibility of quickly and reliably identifying anti-semites, Israel sees it as a necessary evil. But unlike many other countries, I think they are conscious that it is an evil, and something to be regretted.
People commonly learn how to behave in society from the way society treats them. Considering how the Jews were treated by the rest of the world, it is an astonishment that they are as moral and tolerant as they are. Fortunately, they reacted against the principle of bullying itself, rather than figuring that bullying was how the world worked and it was therefore better to be the bully than the victim. But I don’t think there can be any doubt that they took a lot of psychological damage from the way they were (and still are) treated. It affects their behaviour. In addition, Judaism is more “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” than Christianity, and any tendency to “turn the other cheek” they will have picked up only at second hand from us.
So I’d say they’re remarkably well-adjusted, considering their past, but the damage shows, and their immigration policy is one sign of it. It *is* ‘racist’, it is undesirable, and they know it. But it is not top of the list of the world’s problems we need to solve, and other problems need to be dealt with first before that one can be safely tackled. The rest of the world, and we in particular, on the other hand, don’t have the same excuses.
Phil B
Until Patten, Britain didn’t allow democracy in Hong Kong. Few minded; they were busy getting getting on..
Democracy is not vital for commercial success; being left the f**k alone is.
NiV,
100%. Not often I entirely agree with you ;-). My heroes as a kid flew Mirages and Phantoms – with six-pointed blue stars. They still are. I was born in ’73. Israel for it’s sins, is still the only approximation to a free country in the region (maybe Turkey sans Erdogan) and for that (Tel Aiv has a big Gay Pride do – does Riyadh?), even more than their sheer tenacity (although they get my vote for that as well – in spades) I support them. And, yeah, I thought, even as a kid, Operation Opera and Operation Thunderbolt were just well cool. I still do.