Opinion | Carrie Lam must address legitimate demands to end the Hong Kong protests in time for Chinese National Day

For those of us fed up with or simply weary from 12 weeks of demonstrations, negative publicity and lost business, there is both good news and bad news. The good news is that the calendar has now given us a firm deadline: we are just five weeks away from celebrating the 70th birthday of the People’s Republic of China.

The bad news is that we need to address the underlying issues quickly and much more effectively than we have done up to now, so as not to spoil the party.

As a first step, we need to understand that the protesters are not a monolithic group, but rather a main body with a number of separate strands added on or blended in.

The vast majority of protesters have, from the beginning, been the ordinary men and women of Hong Kong, outraged that a significant and potentially dangerous piece of legislation was going to be rammed through an unrepresentative legislature after cursory public consultation and without even the fig leaf scrutiny of a Bills Committee.

In the front of their minds, therefore, has been the need to stop a particular act by the government and to change our political structure to reduce the chances of such things happening again.