Put aside for a moment the winners in last week's Legislative Council election. Think about the biggest losers and why they lost. The Liberal Party itself says it doesn't yet know exactly why it got thrashed at the polls. Others say maybe the candidates couldn't click with the people or maybe they didn't work hard enough to win over the working class. But here's the thing: how can the party of big business win over the working class? Their agendas and ideologies clash. What serves the interests of big business seldom serves the interests of the working class.
You can see it in a simple thing like a minimum-wage law. Hong Kong's lowest-paid workers have long agitated for a law that guarantees them a living wage. Many earn as little as HK$4,000 a month. But the No 1 priority of big business is to keep costs low and profits high. There's nothing wrong with that except, in Hong Kong, big business has taken this to such an extreme that the most vulnerable workers receive near slave wages. Business leaders - backed by a compliant government - have had great success in advancing the phoney fear that a minimum wage messes with market forces, weakens our tradition of anything-goes capitalism, and puts Hong Kong on the path to a welfare state.
Societal indifference and bureaucratic subservience allowed employer manipulation to go unanswered until the injustice was forced onto centre stage by the widening rich-poor gap which created an angry, vocal and vengeful underclass ravaged by high inflation and stagnant wages.
It cannot have been a coincidence that the election that saw the fall of the party of big business also saw the rise of the party for the underclass. The Liberal Party's three heavyweight candidates, including incumbents James Tien Pei-chun and Selina Chow Liang Shuk-yee, all lost in the very same constituencies that elected the three candidates from the League of Social Democrats, which champions the grass roots. What were the people saying when they embraced candidates such as the League's radical grass-roots champion, 'Long Hair' Leung Kwok-hung, and spurned the Liberal Party, which always votes with government and big business to derail things such as a minimum wage, greater democracy, tougher food labelling laws, a smoking ban and a fairer way to measure the size of flats that our super-rich developers sell to the public?
Those who want to play down or distort the message of the voters will say big business lost because the party that represents it messed up its election strategy or that infighting and the system itself caused them to do poorly.
But that's just running away from what is now a new reality in Hong Kong - that big business has become a dirty word at a time when a growing number of families are struggling. Fed up with what they see as a system deliberately designed to favour tycoons at their expense, people now readily blame virtually everything that goes wrong in Hong Kong on government collusion with big business.
