On one level, this was just a low-rent campaigning story. Were it not for social media, it may not have been much noted outside of Surrey and perhaps not even noticed that much within Surrey. Yet it illustrates a broader point about British elections in recent years: the desperate desire of politicians to prove to their constituency how “local” they are.

Aside from the mockery of Mr McGuiness’s keys, over the past week I’ve seen a candidate attacked for not holding his birthday party within the boundaries of the constituency and another who tried to demonstrate his local roots by noting that it was where he had lost his virginity. Ok, I made the last one up, but the first is genuine and I do know of one Labour MP who talks about how he was conceived in his constituency, so it can only be a matter of time. Perhaps we shouldn’t give them ideas.

It’s been very clear from the selection contests this election that having some form of link to the constituency has been a key factor in determining who gets chosen to be a candidate, especially in many of the more winnable seats. The excellent Tomorrow’s MPs account on X, run by Michael Crick, found that around two-thirds of Conservative candidates are, or have been, local councillors. It’s all getting a bit too League of Gentlemen: local MPs for local people.

Just because you’ve lived in a constituency for a long time or have served as a local councillor doesn’t mean you have the required skills to be a decent parliamentarian. William Hague, for example, has complained that instead of would-be statesmen we will get glorified local councillors. “The House of Commons is being turned into Birmingham City Council on a bigger scale, and we all know what just happened to that.” 

But there is a reason candidates bang on about it so much. Because when you ask voters, being local comes very high up their list of what they want from an MP. It’s a collective action problem: we might well want a parliament bursting with talent and a decent number of statesmen, but that is not what voters want in their local MP. 

It is all very well pointing out that Churchill, for example, did not have exactly deep roots in the constituencies he represented in Oldham, Manchester, Dundee or Epping. Something similar, mutatis mutandis, could be said of Margaret Thatcher or Tony Blair. But people don’t especially want to be represented by a Churchill, Thatcher or Blair. They want to be represented by someone they see as, well, representative.

For example, just before the 2010 election, I ran a survey in which I asked people about the characteristics they wanted from their own MPs. Being local was one of the most popular responses, coming only very narrowly behind having MPs who shared the same political viewpoint. Indeed, more than a third of respondents prioritised having a local candidate over one who represented their views, and another 21% ranked them as of equal importance. 

It’s worth pausing and thinking about that last sentence for a minute. We often think about elections in terms of ideas and policies. And yet fewer than half the respondents to the survey said that sharing these with their MP was more important than having someone who came from the same area. Lest you think that this survey is now old hat, pretty much the same thing comes through in other studies. 

Of course, there are lots of different definitions of being “local”. Is it birthplace? Residence? (And if so, for how long?) And one interesting feature of “localism” is that you can become local — or, as with Mr McGuinness’s keys, at least appear to be. He is certainly not the first candidate to rent a flat in the constituency. It almost certainly means different things to different people. And it probably also varies between types of voter. While we don’t know a lot about how voters conceive of localism, we do know enough to know that overall they do care about it in their MPs.

Suggested reading

The populist battle for Ashfield

By Fred Skulthorp

For all that we can be sniffy about this, you can see why it might matter to them. The local candidate might be thought to be more invested in the area; an out-of-towner can just “up and off” if it all goes south. They might think that a local MP will work harder or understand them more. Perhaps a local politician will share their own values, in a way the carpetbagger does not. I am dubious that any of this is true, but it is surely not too difficult to understand the perception. 

For all that each election creates arguments about parachuted candidates — just as this one did — the trend is actually in the opposite direction. Between 2010 and 2019, there was an increase in every election in the number of MPs who sat for constituencies in the region in which they were born. That applied to more than half of the House of Commons that just ended. Labour MPs have been more local than Conservatives, but the increase is true across the board. At every election since 2010, those entering the Commons have been more local than those exiting — and those coming in as a result of taking a seat have been more local than those who inherited a seat from the same party. And while it is always unwise, before a single vote has been counted, to make too many predictions about the composition of the next House of Commons, there seems little doubt that, after 4 July, the 650 MPs sitting on the green benches will have deeper local roots than the parliament they replaced.

What’s driving this? In part it is the same pressures that have led MPs to spend more and more of their time working the parish pump much harder than they did 40 years ago. MPs are not only more likely to come from the constituency, they are more likely to spend time working for it. In part, it’s because the electorate is becoming more volatile. If voters behaved with bovine obedience, then it wouldn’t matter too much who the candidate is. To a certain extent this is still true, in that candidate effects are still pretty secondary in British elections compared with the effect of the party, but marginal effects can matter in marginal seats. It’s also obvious that the tendency to play the local card heavily is strongest at by-elections when there’s so much more focus on individual candidates and the area. 

I think it is also in part a response to the rise of identity politics, the idea that who you are is as important — sometimes more — than what you believe in. Some readers will deprecate this trend but it is a difficult one to ignore in contemporary politics. All candidates seeking election or selection will deploy whatever resources they have and if you can claim, however tenuously, to be local it would be difficult to understand why you wouldn’t stress it. When the Conservatives tried to diversify candidate selection under David Cameron, they allowed parties to consider local candidates “in exceptional circumstances” alongside the sex-balanced priority list. There were rather more “exceptional” local men than had been expected. Nearly half of the initial selections turned out to be local — and they were nearly all (86%) men. But that should not have been surprising. Male candidates are more likely to play the local card, simply because in a competition about presence it may be the only card some of them can play. 

And being local isn’t just one card to play among others. With the benefit that almost all of the target audience will relate to it, in a way that most other characteristics will not, it really can be an ace.

So there is nothing especially unusual about the current leadership election — except, of course, that the Conservative Party is choosing a new leader less than three years after the last one won a general election with close to a landslide. The only other real difference between the current contest and most of the others since 1945 is the involvement of the Conservative Party’s grassroots. The 2019 contest from which Boris Johnson emerged victorious was the first time that any party’s membership had directly chosen a Prime Minister.

This will be the second, and not everyone approves, with calls to restrict the vote to MPs in the future coming from both within and without the party. For some, this is about principle (MPs are accountable to the public, activists aren’t); for others it’s pragmatic (it’ll be quicker, or produce what they see as the right outcome).

Things are not helped by the demographics of the Conservative grassroots — average age around 57, mostly middle-class, disproportionately white and southern — which last time triggered complaints about how the Prime Minister was being chosen by an unaccountable, elderly, Right-wing cabal. (Given the demographics of the Labour Party, when, or if, they are next in power long enough to change leaders while in Downing Street, then their Prime Minister will be chosen by an unaccountable, elderly, Left-wing cabal, but people seem less exercised by this for some reason.)

Perhaps the most surprising thing about this debate is that it has taken so long to become an issue. Labour widened the franchise for its leadership elections to include party members in the early Eighties; the Conservatives did the same in the late Nineties. Yet both changes took place at the beginning of long periods of opposition; that, and two unopposed contests in 2007 (Labour) and 2016 (Conservative), meant that it’s taken almost 40 years for this issue to come to a head.

Suggested reading

Kemi Badenoch has saved the Tories

By Aris Roussinos

It was Willie Whitelaw — who stood as party leader, unsuccessfully, in 1975 — who once said that whatever system you have, someone was bound to think it was the wrong one; listening to complaints this week you have to feel he had a point. One of the few academic studies of British leadership contests — albeit one that is now almost 30-years-old — concluded that the rules chosen didn’t actually make much difference to the outcome. For all that parties obsessed about procedures, it was likely that the same people would have been elected in most cases (although the possible exceptions to this claim — including both Thatcher and Corbyn — strike me as important enough to treat that conclusion with some caution).

A central part of the criticism of grassroots involvement is that party activists are said to be more extreme than their MPs. We’re told our representatives are wise and moderate, thinking sagely about the electoral consequences of their actions; activists, on the other hand, are nutjobs, thinking only about ideological purity. If you let activists vote, the argument goes, parties get lumbered with extremist leaders with little appeal to their voter base. But again, one of the few academic studies to actually test this (and here I declare an interest as its co-author) found it wasn’t true. Conservative MPs, for example, are to the Right of their grassroots on economic matters — and the grassroots are closer to the Conservative voters on social matters.

And anyway, the Conservative rules ensure that only two candidates go through to the members’ vote. If one of those is so unsuitable that choosing them would be a disaster, then it’s not the fault of the grassroots. You can’t blame party members that the choice now before them is between someone who always sounds like an over-enthusiastic CBeebies presenter and someone who resembles a malfunctioning animatronic.

Nor do I understand the argument that this contest has been especially dirty, likely to damage the Conservative brand. I’ve lost track of the number of articles about how vicious it has been, a Tory civil war. It all looks relatively civilised to me. I’ve certainly been in much nastier departmental meetings. In 1995, the Redwood campaign put out a leaflet saying that Conservative MPs needed to vote for him “to save your seat, your party, and your country”. Compared to that, this contest is child’s play.

Suggested reading

How Boris destroyed Boris

By Dominic Sandbrook

Of course, you can’t blame the candidates in the lead for pulling out of the final TV debates – why risk it? And you can’t blame the opposition for pretending the contest is nasty (unlike Labour leadership contests, of course, which are always a love-in). Ditto journalists, who need to spice up copy a bit (and who are also always lovely to one another; never known for holding grudges). But spare me the Why Won’t Anyone Think About The Conservative Brand stuff. Have you seen the polling on the Conservative brand? The latest Ipsos Mori poll found just 21% of voters thought the Conservatives were “fit to govern” — their worst score since 2011. A bit of robust debate about how to improve things won’t exactly make things worse.

Besides, if the fear is that this will harm the party, the one study I’m aware of found that leadership changes actually tend to increase party popularity. The reasons are pretty obvious: they usually occur when the incumbent is a busted flush, with ratings going south. (He is, they are.) Again, it’s not a universal truth, but it’d be surprising if there wasn’t an electoral honeymoon of some sorts after the new leader comes in.

If polling of party members is any indication — and it almost always is — that person will be Liz Truss. If she is a disaster, the MPs who put her in the top two should carry the can. But if she’s a triumph — and after all, almost everyone assumed Thatcher would be an electoral disaster — then they can share in the glory of a system that worked.

That was Wodehouse in 1941, from one of his Berlin broadcasts. But pretty much the same has applied 80 years later in Hong Kong, just with fewer Germans. If your goal has ever been to get locked in a room for weeks on end, then Hong Kong has become the place to be. The authorities would lock you up if you had Covid. They’d lock you up if you’d been close to someone who had Covid. At one point, they’d even lock you up if you’d been close to someone who’d been close to someone who had Covid.

You also got locked up just for getting into the country. You paid for the flight and the Hong Kong authorities would do the rest. Actually, that last bit wasn’t quite true: you had to book and pay for your room as well. But you get the point.

Brutal as it was — caring little for minor things like family separation or childcare — this system worked relatively well by its own standards until earlier this year. For extended periods there were no Covid cases at all and overall deaths remained low. But then Omicron broke through, as almost everyone knew it would: ironically, as the result of a cross-infection in a quarantine hotel, something the government had been warned about repeatedly.

There soon became too many cases to make asymptomatic people spend weeks in hospital and there were not enough isolation units to lock up close contacts. By the start of March, the death rate went through the roof, becoming the highest in the world at any point in the pandemic. They couldn’t process the dead quickly enough, with bodies stacked next to the living, in overrun, under-staffed, public hospitals. Hong Kong ran out of coffins as well as smugness. It became the premier place to be if you wanted to die from Covid.

The tragedy was how avoidable all this was. Having broadly succeeded in the initial stages of the pandemic, cutting down local case numbers down zero for months, Hong Kong had an opportunity — almost unique in the world — to transition, with as few deaths as possible, to a sustainable mitigation strategy.

More from this author

Hong Kong's Zero Covid deception

By Philip Cowley

Its failure not to take that opportunity has now been widely noted — as has its recent announcement that it would begin to relax some of its stricter restrictions. From outside, this has been presented as a pragmatic shift away from its policy of “dynamic zero Covid” to something akin to co-existence. The idea of “living with Covid” was previously verboten here, a sign of Western decadence and a failure to care about the value of human life, so any such shift would be profound.

Yet from within Hong Kong the shift seems less significant and reaction to the policy changes here have been more muted than some of the overseas coverage might suggest.

This is partly because the details are less dramatic than the headlines. Schools were told they could go back to face-to-face teaching, only for the government to then announce that they need to have achieved a 90% vaccination rate among staff and students before they could return to full days, something many will find next to impossible to achieve in what remains of the school year. Some of the more extreme rules remain: mask wearing is compulsory outside, even if exercising, even in remote country parks. There are still stories of the police lurking behind bushes to catch out knackered joggers who have pulled down their masks to catch their breath.

While the outright country flight bans that previously existed are to be dropped from April, and quarantine has been reduced to seven days (until recently it was 21), it’s still seven days more than most of the world insists on and it is also open only to vaccinated residents — no visitors at all. At any point, if an airline is found to have brought too many positive cases into Hong Kong, they are banned from that route for seven days. Travellers then have to rearrange everything, including the quarantine hotel, which is often simply not possible given the demand, and means not getting into Hong Kong for months. All of this remains a serious problem for Asia’s self-proclaimed “world city”.

But my suspicion is that the real reason people here are less impressed goes beyond the details of the changes; it is now a broader issue about lack of faith in the government, and the absence of any strategy.

For some, this is inextricably linked to the protests in 2019 and the government’s heavy-handed response — something for which a fair few people have been locked up, and for longer than three weeks. A significant proportion of Hongkongers wouldn’t trust the government whatever they did. But even if you are one of those who thinks that the Hong Kong government was right in its approach, it is difficult to say that it has recently demonstrated competence. It is not just the failures to prepare properly for the current outbreak — although that alone should have been enough to have ended multiple political careers. There have also been constant U-turns on policy.

Suggested reading

New Zealand's lockdown fairytale is over

By Tom Chodor

Perhaps the worst recently was the announcement that all the school term dates were to change, bringing forward the summer holiday to Easter — I am not making this up — to allow school buildings to be used for a city-wide testing programme. Then it was floated that this might also simultaneously involve a lockdown, which triggered panic-shopping; only for the government to then decide that maybe they didn’t want to do any of it after all.

Given the U-turns so far it would be a brave person who would bet against another massive reversal of policy months down the line. What happens when case numbers start to rise again? Or there are the inevitable outbreaks in schools?

One common response to this is to say something like: “Of course, they can’t say they are going to live with the virus. That would involve too much loss of face. But that’s obviously what they are doing”.

But there are two problems with this argument. The first is that there is plenty of evidence that this is not what they are doing: at the same time as there is talk of reopening the schools and the borders, the government has also been building multiple new isolation centres. Mass testing may have been put on hold, but compulsory testing of people who have been in places with Covid cases has restarted. As case numbers have fallen to more manageable levels, so people have begun to get put back into isolation. None of this looks like living with the virus.

Second, even if this were true, it is never a good sign for any government to say it is doing one thing while doing another. Even if the people at the top of government think they are following a plan, it makes it less likely for there to be a proper alignment of strategy and implementation. Chief Executive Carrie Lam has said that Hong Kong’s struggle with Covid is akin to a war, so it’s worth considering what Clausewitz said about military strategy. It was “to identify the decisive point and to concentrate everything on it, removing forces from secondary fronts and ignoring lesser objectives”. We shouldn’t necessarily have expected the Hong Kong authorities to have read Clausewitz — but at times they act as if they have read him only so they can work out how to do the exact opposite. There is no identification of the decisive point, no concentration of resources, and there’s always a host of lesser objectives.

Suggested reading

China's Communist Party owes it all to colonialism

By Bill Hayton

In the same way that the massive focus on locking people up and keeping out those from overseas distracted what should have been the main priority of vaccinating people in care homes, only last week Lam argued that Hong Kong needed both to reopen the mainland border and to open up to international travel. Yet these are in direct tension. As long as the policy on the mainland is for Zero Covid, the mainland border won’t open up while there are outbreaks in Hong Kong — but if you allow international travel without quarantine, you will get outbreaks. “To govern,” as Pierre Mendès-France put it, “is to choose.”  Hong Kong’s administration cannot choose, and thus it cannot govern.

One of the curiosities about Hong Kong — at least to a polling junkie like me — is the almost complete lack of decent opinion polling here. When asking awkward questions can get you threatened with the National Security Law, it is difficult to ask tricky questions or expect honest answers, and to know what people really think.

But for many the tipping point has been reached and people are voting with their feet. A full 1% of the population left last month. Some may be coming back, but lots are not. And sure, in time, when all this is a distant memory, others will come in to replace them, but the immediate consequences are significant. Talent drains, organisations relocate, businesses fold. The infrastructure won’t return, the diversity is lost. It is said that the recent promised policy shifts came in response to pleas from the city’s great and good, worried that irreversible damage was being done to Hong Kong’s status as a financial centre. These pleas were too quiet, and, for many, too late.

Something similar applies to a story unfolding here in Hong Kong. It too involves dozens of senior officials ignoring the advice of their own government by going to a party — although many of the details reveal the differences between the two approaches to Covid.

The basic facts are straightforward. With Hong Kong on the brink of its fifth Covid wave, the Government this month advised people to avoid large gatherings. Yet last week, dozens of government officials and politicians instead went to a birthday party in a tapas restaurant, hosted by Witman Hung, Hong Kong’s delegate to the National People’s Congress. Estimates of the number of people present vary — and indeed, keep climbing as more information seeps out — but more than 200 seem to have been involved at various points in the evening.

A few days later, one of the women at the party then tested positive for Covid.

If you are a close contact of a known Covid case in Hong Kong, you don’t get pinged and asked to stay at home for a bit. Instead, you are taken off to a room in a quarantine centre for up to three weeks. It is common to see these rooms described as spartan or like being in prison, albeit by people who have never been to prison and wouldn’t have lasted long in Sparta — but they are not the Mandarin Oriental and three weeks stuck in a single room is far from pleasant.

This policy is stern and unbending. Currently sitting in quarantine, for example, are a class of kindergarten kids, aged three and four. Even contacts of close contacts have found themselves locked up, albeit it for shorter periods, while they are tested.

More from this author

Hong Kong's Zero Covid deception

By Philip Cowley

The result is that multiple members of the Government, including the home affairs secretary, the head of immigration chief, and the secretary for financial services, now find themselves in quarantine. Others escaped by being able to prove they left the party before the Covid case turned up — although at one point, when a second case was identified, it looked as everyone might get locked up, only for the second case to turn out to be a false positive.

A key difference between the stories in the UK and Hong Kong is that the Chief Executive Carrie Lam wasn’t at this party and moved swiftly to distance herself from those present, in an event one Hong Kong observer referred to as the Night of the Long Ibérico Ham Knives. To paraphrase Jeremy Thorpe, when Harold Macmillan defenestrated multiple colleagues in an attempt to save his own political skin: greater love hath no woman than this, that she lay down her friends for her life.

It is not that those attending Witman’s party had necessarily broken any laws, although things are a bit murky as to whether everyone had been entirely on it when it came to using the tracing app required to enter restaurants. But they had all gone against their own government’s clear advice.

And then there’s the public reaction. The overwhelming response of the public to the various Downing Street beanos has been anger at the hypocrisy of politicians who appear to have been behaving in a way that they were preventing others from doing. All those people who couldn’t visit a dying parent — and, as one of this group, here I declare an interest — look askance at politicians going on the razz.

In Hong Kong, there is anger at the behaviour of their politicians, but it is mixed with massive dollops of schadenfreude. By European standards, Hong Kong’s fifth ‘wave’ is less of a wave and more of a millpond. It has involved fewer than 50 cases thus far. In a territory of more than seven million people, one of them just happened to attend a party containing many of its most senior political figures; of all the tapas restaurants in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.

Depending on your point of view this is either a sign of how unlucky the politicos were or, and this seems to be the view taken by many of the people I speak to, it proves that that there is indeed a God. Because it is, bluntly, hugely enjoyable to see people who have inflicted such heavy-handed measures on the population hoist by their own petard like this, especially when not all of them have handled their incarceration with grace and dignity.

Suggested reading

Inside the Austrian lockdown

By Philip Cowley

As an example of how heavy handed it is, consider this. At the same time as the Witman story unfolded, a four-year old girl tested positive for Covid — and was put on her own in an isolation room in hospital, with a bell to ring should she need anything. Somehow, and because she was bored or terrified or lonely, she managed to escape. When she was spotted, maskless, outside of her room, she was sent back in, for what could be weeks of isolation, while the two staff who found her were themselves carted off to quarantine. In almost any other place in the world, isolating children like this would be a huge story; in Hong Kong it has somehow become accepted as normal. It, and the many other restrictions in place here, are not normal.

The flipside of how easily we understand some scandals is that sometimes we fail to comprehend the more complicated, duller, but maybe more serious issues. And however enjoyable the Witman scandal is, there is a danger that it all distracts from the broader points about Hong Kong’s record of dealing with Covid.

The cautious approach that initially served it well is now crippling it. The death rate remains staggeringly low relative to the rest of the world; per capita, the UK’s death rate is 78 times higher. But this policy is becoming increasingly unsustainable, the measures required increasingly harsh. What once advertised itself as ‘Asia’s global city’ is becoming ever more isolated. Multiple travels bans are in place; even of those who can fly in, most have to spend three weeks in quarantine. Hong Kong’s airport is now a ghost town, save for the families leaving. The goal of reopening the border with the mainland — which Lam and others see as their priority — appears no closer to fruition either.

The vaccination programme has been a disaster. Despite ample resourcing and availability, fewer than a fifth of the over-80s are vaccinated. The Government’s approach to driving up the vaccination rate has been woefully hands-off, wasting months when the city was effectively Covid-free which could have been used for a vaccination drive.

Suggested reading

The agony of the anti-lockdown centrists

By Daniel Hadas

The result has been that the handful of cases seen since January have led to a widespread reintroduction of restrictions, including, as I write this, the suspension of face-to-face teaching in primary schools. This will be the third time since Covid began that primary teaching will have been suspended. (All local schools, including secondaries, were anyway still not back to full face-to-face teaching anyway, even two years into the pandemic.) Announcing the closure of schools, Lam said that she didn’t want to see young children sent into quarantine; that there may be other ways of dealing with this appears not to have occurred to anyone.

The inter-generational tensions caused by Covid are evident all around the globe, with the young, mostly safe, forced to undergo restrictions to protect the more elderly. But nowhere is this issue starker than in Hong Kong, where the youngest are again being punished to protect an elderly population that has done next to nothing to protect themselves — and by a government that has also done next to nothing to make them protect themselves. This, rather than a piss-up in a tapas restaurant, is the real scandal.

That was the premise of EM Forster’s science fiction novella The Machine Stops. Like all good sci-fi, the story can be read in multiple ways. But for me the key thing is what happens when the machine begins, slowly but ineluctably, to break down. Trivially to begin with — strange noises, the wrong music, smelly bath water — but then things begin to get more serious when the food starts to go off, and eventually the machine collapses and everyone is killed.

Yet until it’s too late, these flaws do not make people challenge the machine or wonder whether they might in fact be better off living on the surface of the earth. Although each flaw is resented at first, people just get used to them and begin to think them normal. “Time passed,” Forster wrote, “and they resented the defects no longer. The defects had not been remedied, but the human tissues in that latter day had become so subservient, that they readily adapted themselves to every caprice of the Machine”.

I confess to not having given the story much thought since I studied it back in school, decades ago. But it has clearly been lurking somewhere deep in my memory — because all it took for it to leap out from the subconscious was the right cue.

It turned out that the right cue was Professor Sophia Chan Siu-chee. Professor Chan is Hong Kong’s Secretary for Food and Health, with responsibility for many of its Covid restrictions, and so for those of us living here she is a figure of some import. She is firmly of the Safety First, Can’t Be Too Careful school of thought, to the point where she makes Chris Whitty look like an especially rabid anti-vaxxer.

Suggested reading

How science has been corrupted

By Matthew Crawford

This approach served Hong Kong well in the early days of the pandemic. Moving swiftly, and encouraged by most of the population who often urged the Government to take more drastic action, Hong Kong has managed to avoid both mass outbreaks and any large-scale full lockdowns of the sort seen in the UK. The Covid death toll here stands at just 213 — fewer than died from SARS — and there now hasn’t been a locally transmitted case for over a month.

Faced with the choice between remaining Asia’s World City or prioritising Our Friends in the North, it has now chosen the latter, aiming for a zero Covid policy and hoping that the border with the mainland will open again soon. This has resulted in some of the tightest travel restrictions in the world – 21 days in a quarantine hotel for someone from the UK, for example, even if fully vaccinated. In turn, this has had a disastrous impact on the vaccination programme. Vaccines are freely and easily available, but uptake has been slow, with the most vulnerable being the least likely to have been jabbed. The figure for the over-80s vaccinated is still below 20%: when you’ve got zero Covid, and if you don’t want to travel anywhere, why bother?

Yet however frustrating some of this might be — and however much we might wonder if this is sustainable — these are all legitimate policy choices. Given the mainland’s own zero Covid policy, and the importance of cross-border traffic, it’s difficult to see what Hong Kong could really do. Plus, however much pain this causes many foreigners and others with relatives overseas, there’s little doubt that it is popular within the wider population.

All this I can cope with, just about. But last month, Professor Chan claimed that in Hong Kong there is now “local normalcy” — and it was this that provoked my Forster flashback.

Suggested reading

The cruelty of Australia's endless lockdown

By Shahar Hameiri

She was trying to argue that however grim the quarantine rules might be, life once here is fine and dandy. This might strike you as a bit “apart from that Mrs Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?”, but you can at least see her point: if they allow normal life to continue, maybe it’s possible to justify very strict travel restrictions.

Yet life is clearly not normal in Hong Kong, even if we just confine ourselves to the restrictions brought about by Covid. Rather, Chan’s claim is one of the best examples of the ratchet effect in public policy I’ve seen for ages.

Let’s just take just the things that affect me on an almost daily basis. Mask wearing is compulsory in public, for everyone, even when outdoors. There are limits on group gatherings, with still no more than four people allowed to gather outdoors (although unlike in the UK, say, there has never been any limits on private gatherings). Table sittings in restaurants are also restricted, usually to four, although some places are allowed to go really wild up to six, depending on the extent of staff vaccinations. Tracking entry and exit via an app into any public building or restaurant is compulsory.

Most schools are still not back to full-day provision, even though pupils are now in their sixth term of disrupted schooling, and even when at school there are innumerable restrictions on what they can do. Meanwhile, at home, there is routine compulsory testing of areas or groups. These can involve locking down whole blocks with no warning — so-called “ambushes” — even with the possibility of breaking into your home if you don’t answer the door.

And hovering above it all is the ever-present threat of being carted off to a government quarantine centre. Should one of your close contacts tests positive, there’s none of the would-you-mind-awfully-staying-at-home-please attitude here. Instead, you get picked up, with almost no notice, and chucked in a room in a quarantine centre for up to three weeks, just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Suggested reading

Don't blame Brexit for shortages

By Philip Pilkington

If you actually have Covid, you are taken into hospital. There is little care for family separation, as with the children taken away from their parents — or the breastfeeding mother separated from her four month old baby, despite the child being unable to take formula milk. (That one was solved only because women donated spare pumped breast milk).

It is common to see praise in the West for how countries like Hong Kong have managed track, trace, and isolate programmes, without being aware of what the reality of the isolate bit often means. We have a bag ready, by the front door, packed with emergency provisions, just in case the guys and gals in Hazmat suits come knocking.

These examples are illustrative, not exhaustive. Everyone in Hong Kong could list others. And remember: these are the restrictions currently in place with the Covid stats down to zero.

Just as when Forster’s machine starts to break down, some of this might be considered fairly trivial, but some of it is not. Some of it may even be justified in the short or medium term. But none of it is normal, and we should not let politicians — in Hong Kong or elsewhere — ever tell us otherwise.

Indeed, if you look at the overall figures for the electorate in Scotland, and include those who didn’t vote in 2016 — a group that is perennially ignored in this sort of discussion — you find that 42% of adult Scots voted to Remain, another 26% voted to Leave, and 33% didn’t vote at all.

In other words, sit 10 random Scots around a table, perhaps at one of the many election-themed Christmas parties next month, and four will be Remain voters, three will be Leave voters, and three will have stayed home. The dining partner you turn to first will be more likely not to have voted Remain than to have done so.

(If this was an academic article we would now have a lengthy footnote about the need to treat overall turnout figures — and therefore statistics about non-voters — with a bit of caution. It’s not an academic article, so you’ll have to take our word for it. But even so, our basic point stands.)

The same sort of claim is often made about London — which as everyone knows is packed full of metrosexual Remainers — despite it being a city where 40% voted Leave; or, on the other side of the coin, about somewhere like the West Midlands, the most Leave-voting region in the UK, but where 41% voted to Remain. Of the 12 regions or nations in the UK, only one of them (Scotland) had a split more extreme than 60:40 one way or the other, and even there, only very marginally so.

Of course, regions are big places, which contain multitudes. You get more polarisation if you look at smaller geographic units, whether it’s the local authorities by which the referendum results were originally counted (but which are of very uneven size), or the smaller parliamentary constituencies (for which, in most cases, we have estimates). But most of those are pretty diverse, too.

Of the local authorities, for example, the majority were no more divided than 60:40 one way or the other, and just 24 (that is, 6% of all the local authority counting areas) saw a pattern of voting that was divided by 70:30 or more. Of the 650 parliamentary constituencies, 59% were at most divided by 60:40, and just 59 (or 9%) saw a division greater than 70:30.

Suggested reading

What will survive this seismic election?

By Matthew Goodwin

Places such as Boston (on one end of the spectrum), where 76% of people voted Leave, or Lambeth (at the other), which was 79% Remain, really are the exceptions. Most areas are just not that polarised. And even in these outliers, once you factor in the non-voters, the apparent overwhelming hegemony of the “winning” side is much reduced. Walk down a street in Boston, for example, and under 60% of people you encounter will have voted Leave. In Lambeth, the most Remain-voting authority in the UK, only 53% of all those who could vote, voted Remain.

We’re not saying that regional variations didn’t exist in votes and views on Brexit. Of course they did, and do, and we’ve both happily written about them in the past. But they were differences of scale or direction, and were often quite small; yet instead of being treated as such, they’ve become fossilised into a series of false binaries that now dominate far too much of our political discussion. There isn’t, for example, really any such thing as a “Leave constituency” or a “Remain city” — although we will grant an exception to Gibraltar (96% Remain), where you do have to feel a bit sorry for the 4%.

Nor are we trying to claim that Brexit does not divide Britain. It does, and in important ways. People identify as Leave or Remain, in a greater way than they do with political parties, and see the world through these lenses — just as they used to view politics through partisan eyes.

Multiple pieces of research have shown the extent to which this can make us judge people or not want them as their friends. A new study, in a book we’ve edited (and which is available for a very reasonable price) shows that the referendum vote can even affect how who you want to move in next door to you, far more so than any of the other variables that were tested.

Suggested reading

Brexit is going to drive us all mad

By Ed West

At this point you might, fairly, object that everyone happily refers to parliamentary constituencies as Labour or Conservative or whatever, despite the fact that not everyone in those constituencies will have voted for the winning party. You could even argue the problem is worse in Westminster elections, where because of the electoral system it is usually the case these days that the local MP is someone most voters did not back .

Yet this seems to us slightly different. For one thing, in our first-past-the-post system, a party “winning” a seat actually matters — each seat won changes the outcome, in a way that doesn’t apply in the referendum. And besides, maybe we would anyway do better to remember that while a party may win a seat, they don’t own it or all the people in it.

You might also object that we are both massive hypocrites, because we’re pretty certain that if you searched the things we have written in the past, you would almost certainly find examples of us committing these very errors. To which we can only plead guilty, and pray in our defence Luke’s gospel, chapter 15, verse 7: “I say unto you, that likewise joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons, which need no repentance”.

And you could also argue that we’re over-reacting, that these phrases are just useful shorthands, and that everyone knows they are not to be taken as absolute. Sure, shorthands are fine and often essential — except we would argue that not everyone does know this, and that through repetition alone shorthands can come to be seen as true.

Too much of the discussion following the referendum has focused on the majority outcomes in areas, and not enough on the presence of minorities. That tendency has real consequences for what policies we get on things like Brexit, and whose voices get heard.

The same applies, by the way, to much of the discussion of the socio-economic or demographic cleavages in the Brexit vote. You know all the clichés: the middle class voted Remain, as did the young and BME voters and graduates; the working class, the old and those who did not go to university voted Leave.

True, the majority of each of these groups did indeed back that outcome (although again, in several cases, once you factor in non-voters even that doesn’t always hold), but there were millions, literally millions, of exceptions, who too often get written out of the narrative. There are a whole series of overlooked Brexit tribes — old Remainers, graduate Leavers, BME Leavers, working-class Remainers, middle-class Leavers — who still get almost completely ignored in most discussion.

Ditto for party divisions. We hear very little about Conservative Remainers, even though their behaviour was one of the key drivers of the outcome at the last election, and people seem to completely ignore SNP-voting Leavers (a group that, proportionately, was about the same size as Labour Leavers, and were also crucial to the 2017 result).

With Labour, curiously, the opposite occurs: we hear a lot about Labour Leavers, probably too much, and not quite enough about Labour Remainers, despite the latter making up the majority of Labour supporters in 2016, 2017 and now.

Suggested reading

How it could all go wrong for Boris

By Matthew Goodwin

These two errors frequently come together when discussing the relationship between political parties and the referendum. Just because a majority of people in a constituency voted Leave, and just because a constituency returned a Labour MP, this does not mean that a majority of Labour voters in that seat voted Leave. This has now been pointed out so often that it should not need repetition, but it clearly does, because people keep on making this mistake.

The most recent debunking came from British Election Study data, which showed that even in seats where a majority voted to Leave, most Labour voters in that seat had voted to Remain. Yet in turn, much of the coverage of this work then suffered from exactly the same problem of focussing only on the majority group.

In their haste to argue that this showed that Labour needed to please its Remain-backing voters, many commentators overlooked that the very same study showed significant minorities (around 40%) of Labour voters in these seats who had voted Leave. It would be a brave electoral strategy that would stick two fingers up to 40% of your support.

If you are on Twitter, we would recommend an account called @VoterBritish. It’s a bot, which is tweeting details of the thousands of people who took part in the British Election Study, one respondent at a time. Each tweet summarises key information about the individual, and then reveals who they voted for.

It constantly surprises you: you read that someone favours hanging, wants to grind down the poor, loves Brexit and favours tax cuts, but then discover they voted Remain and Liberal Democrat. (We’ve made that one up, although there probably is someone like that lurking in the data set somewhere.)

The bot is a reminder of the point we are trying to make: that the statements we often make about people in elections or referenda are, or at least should be, probabilistic, not absolute. It’s not that there are not under-pinning factors driving the way people vote, merely that voters are much more complicated than most discussion of this sort of analysis ever seems allows.

Even individual voters are complex and contradictory, so this will certainly be true of any group of voters — whether we define them by place, or profession, or past vote or anything else.

Philip Cowley and Robert Ford’s Sex, Lies, and Politics: The Secret Influences That Drive our Political Choices is published by Biteback.