Kelly’s Eye

ITWILL be one year ago tomorrow that my wife and son and me joined around 180,000 people in Hong Kong at a vigil to mark the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.

We stood out for what we were, tourists. But what really made us feel conspicuous was the welcome we were given and the concern with which the demonstrators enquired how much theWest was aware of the steady erosion of their rights by the malevolent giant who casts such a sinister shadow over them.

Since then, Beijing has found the coronavirus it originated the ideal cover for arresting leading dissenters, and imposing a national security law that overrides the legal system Britain bequeathed Hong Kong.

It ends any pretence at respecting the rights supposedly guaranteed in the agreement struck when this country handed over the territory.

At least Hong Kong offers us some much needed perspective. While its student leaders know from harsh experience the value of real free speech, their counterparts here shut down any debate that deviates from their own orthodoxies.

Our universities are as much in thrall to Chinese money as the big businesses who now define the meaning of kow-tow. Poor devoured Tibet and the region of Xinjiang – where a million Muslims are “re-educated” in internment camps – offer a terrifying glimpse of Hong Kong’s possible fate.

Still, what’s the importance of that next to indulging in a collective nervous breakdown about some bloke driving up a motorway?