A less than representative nominating committee can still be made to serve Hong Kong

While it is still not certain that a substantive discussion will take place between the government and students on Hong Kong's electoral future, the outlines of that discussion, should it take place, have just become clearer.

The key term is the "broadly representative" modifier to "nomination committee". If it were generally believed the committee were to be "broadly representative" - in the dictionary sense at any rate - then the protests are unlikely to have taken place.

Many in the community evidently do not believe the committee will be either structurally or philosophically "broadly representative", reservations which had considerable prima facie validity and which have only been reinforced by Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying's pronouncement that the explicit purpose of the structure is to the impede the political aspirations of the less well-off majority.

The palpable ironies notwithstanding, this does clarify what the issues are: chief executive nominations are being restricted not so much for constitutional reasons as political ones. Whether or not this comes as a surprise, politics at least has the virtue of being subject to pragmatic compromise; statements from Leung and Chief Secretary Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor have intimated as much.

So let's ask what one might want the result of a nomination process, however arranged, to be. Two, maybe three candidates: more might result in a chief executive without a mandate; run-offs or complicated preference voting will not necessarily yield the "right" result. Assuming the people to be on the whole centrist, these ideal three would presumably include one somewhat right of centre, one somewhat left of centre and, if at all, one something else. The inclusion of a grass-roots candidate, for example, might not be the unalloyed benefit it might at first appear: it would probably split the left-of-centre vote.

Could a nomination committee deliver a "broadly acceptable" slate of candidates? Possibly. Leung is of course correct that "broadly" is not synonymous with "numerically". But the phrase presumably implies ensuring the committee is, in effect, more representative rather than less.