As I write, the Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, is flying to China. So I am only guessing when I say that I expect he will ‘raise’ the case of Jimmy Lai, the newspaper publisher, businessman and Democratic party supporter, a British citizen. Mr Lai has now been imprisoned in Hong Kong for four years with his numerous trials not yet completed. ‘Raise’, yes, but not as in ‘do anything about’ the situation. So far, the best the Foreign Office has done is to ‘request consular access’ to Mr Lai. China has refused this on the grounds that it does not recognise dual citizenship (which is irrelevant since Mr Lai has never been anything other than British) and in defiance of the Anglo-Hong Kong Agreement, which came into force with the handover to China in 1997 and was contracted to last 50 years. Mr Lai is accused of breaking the infamous National Security law, fraud and unlawful assembly. He is kept almost always in solitary confinement, where his cell is 6ft by 3ft. He is 76 years old and suffers from diabetes, for which he is not properly medicated. It is alleged that he is being denied the sacraments of his Catholic faith. As the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation puts it, Mr Lammy has ‘the opportunity to be a statesman not a salesman’, but no one is betting that he will take it. In every respect, Mr Lai has been let down by the British culture of freedom and the rule of law to which he is devoted. This year, a five-judge panel in Hong Kong heard his appeal against his conviction for unlawful assembly. On it sat one of the ‘non-permanent judges’ from Common Law jurisdictions, as provided for under the Anglo-Hong Kong agreement which China has repeatedly violated. This was Lord Neuberger of Abbotsbury, formerly president of our Supreme Court, the highest legal position in the United Kingdom. He and his fellow judges rejected Mr Lai’s appeal, holding that Mr Lai’s treatment did not violate fundamental human rights. Lord Neuberger stated that ‘the issue has been fully and impressively considered’, ignoring the real situation which is that the Hong Kong court is acting under Chinese Communist party duress. He decided that he would prefer to resign as president of the international Media Freedom Coalition than to give up his Hong Kong role. So the prestige of the English law is being used to help destroy one of its greatest admirers, Mr Lai, and obscure actions by Beijing which are forbidden under the treaty which Britain signed with China and, with great fanfare, lodged with the United Nations.
It is good news that those who have lost babies through miscarriages can now obtain a certificate of loss. I have often heard women say that one of the hardest, loneliest things is having nothing to show for the love they were expecting to feel – and even, in some sense, felt – for the baby they were bearing. It is encouraging that this is now officially recognised. How oddly it sits with another feature of our age. There have been ten million abortions in Britain since it was legalised in Britain in 1967. There is no certificate of loss for them, though they were no less human.
I find such dissonances interesting. Another one came up in the discussion I had on Tuesday with Lord Falconer, which is this edition about ‘assisted dying’ (which is more accurately called assisted suicide). As a society, Britain, like most western countries, has greatly improved its respect for the life of the disabled, the mentally afflicted or handicapped and the autistic. It has also abolished the death penalty for crimes. These trends are life-enhancing, as is the hospice movement. Yet now the supporters of the Assisted Dying Bill want to empower doctors as the assistants and judges as the approvers of death by suicide. Yes, it is a death desired, so far as these same doctors and judges can tell, by the people thus enabled to kill themselves, but is a deep change, not a small, humane tweak of the law.
At dinner on Tuesday night, I heard the sad news that General Mike Jackson had died. Just in case my employer the Daily Telegraph had not yet heard, I texted the news desk so it could get the story, but also tried surreptitiously to check online whether the news was yet out. I asked Google ‘Is General Mike Jackson dead?’ The only source which gave a relevant answer was Online AI. It said: ‘No. General Sir Michael David Jackson is not dead yet. He is scheduled to pass away on 15 October 2024 [the date in question]?’ Does AI, among its other amazing attributes, possess the power of prophecy, or was it just trying to have things both ways? With Assisted Dying, of course, the experience of being ‘scheduled to pass away’ will become quite commonplace.
Mike Jackson was a notable figure for many reasons, as his obituaries set out, but he should have a particular place in British history as the last important person on the public payroll to see smoking and drinking as completely appropriate activities in the course of work. As it happens, I have worked in what is now the Telegraph Group for 45 years ago on Tuesday, the day of Mike’s death. When I joined the paper in Fleet Street in 1979, the idea of the staff not smoking and drinking during the working day would have been literally unimaginable. My memories of all my early mentors – Colin Welch, Bill Deedes, T.E Utley, Alexander Chancellor – are inseparable from a glass in their hands and cigarettes between their fingers.
A friend has just crossed Europe delivering a van to Ukraine from England via France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, the Czech Republic and Poland. Thanks to the Schengen Agreement, he suffered no border checks – except for the border between Luxembourg and Germany, where the Polizei flagged him down. The border point was at Schengen.
Comments