Outside In | With any luck, Hong Kong’s ninja protesters will hang up their masks and the summer of discontent will pass

To keep things in perspective, the Hong Kong protests have been less self-destructive than Brexit. With Carrie Lam’s withdrawal of the extradition bill, the city may have a slim chance of returning to calm and restarting political reform

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A demonstrator stands on top of a traffic light during a protest on August 25. Most people do not willingly spend their precious weekends at political rallies. They are stirred to take political action when life becomes so bad they feel they have no choice. Photo: Reuters

Published: 6:00am, 7 Sep 2019Updated: 6:28am, 7 Sep 2019

For those of us confounded and stressed by the convolutions roiling the streets of Hong Kong over the past months, I offer one small but important source of comfort: Brexit.

Hong Kong’s awesome street protests (I can think of no other city in the world whose compactness and excellent transport infrastructure would make it possible for so many hundreds of thousands of people to surge as fluidly across the length of the city as we are seeing daily in Hong Kong), its ninja demonstrators acting out computer war games oblivious to the real-life dangers of real-world violence, and the epic ineptitude of its administration’s responses to community concerns may together make for marvellous “Breaking News” in the world’s media.

But on the spectrum of economic and political self-harm, the Hong Kong protests are minor-league material compared with how the convulsions of Brexit are ruining Britain and its economy.

The implosion of one of the world’s most treasured constitutional democracies may lack the pyrotechnic drama of the Hong Kong protests, but its effects will probably reverberate long after the young Hong Kong protesters have hung up their gas masks and goggles, spawned families and ascended to the senior levels of financial houses, law firms and accountancy practices across the region.

I speak from some experience, and perhaps a helpful perspective. Around the early 1970s, as recession gnarled Europe, the Vietnam war raged, Parisian students were hacking up cobble stones to hurl at armoured police and students on most campuses across Europe were debating the imminent collapse of capitalism, I had the dubious fortune to be appointed student president at my university.

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.css-1m2rp1p{color:#34b8b5;}Outside In | With any luck, Hong Kong’s ninja protesters will hang up their masks and the summer of discontent will pass

Outside In | With any luck, Hong Kong’s ninja protesters will hang up their masks and the summer of discontent will pass