Off Centre | Is tipping the answer to Hong Kong taxi drivers' woes?
The cab industry wants a fare hike - but is it better to tip the drivers instead of lining the pockets of the taxi owners?
It is well-known in the journalism trade that on any given day conversations with taxi-drivers end up as news. The usual practice is to simply regurgitate these conversations in the guise of factual content. More meticulous reporters will often attribute their cabbie's views to some made-up person; on the odd occasion they will be honestly cited.
It will have come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the views of taxi-drivers, either through reading the news or taking an actual taxi, then, that the ones in Hong Kong want more money. That is what they are like, taxi-drivers – folksy, flatulent, devious types who slow down when you're coming up to a set of lights, hoping they'll change to red so the fare will run up a bit. Men (as a general rule) who are, more than likely, capable of holding the public to ransom with the threat of reckless driving aforethought.
That's an approximation, at least, of what the former British government minister David Mellor thinks of taxi-drivers. It hasn't emerged what prompted his tirade, but what he actually said to a London cab-driver, who recorded him, a few weeks ago, was: “[You] sweaty, stupid little s***... I don't want to hear from you. Get a better education.” And: “Shut the f*** up. Smart-arsed little b******.”
For what it's worth I tend towards the popular view that Mellor's a frightful, pompous ass who just let the mask slip on a contempt which, though he is no longer in parliament himself, lingers yet in certain precincts of the British Conservative Party. It seems to me, however, that in Britain cabbies are often indulged in the name of democracy – British society, not least the press, needs its honest-to-goodness, salt-of-the-earth types to assuage its guilt at having destroyed most of its traditional working class. In reality, most of them are fairly well-off.
I won't deem to pontificate on how free-wheeling Hong Kong ought to address this – other than to point out that there are taxi-drivers who take you where you want to go, without ado, and there are others who don't.