My Take | British winter of discontent looms for BN(O)ers
- Those fleeing Hong Kong ‘totalitarianism’ and who protest in their adopted homes, such as Manchester, may find people have more to worry about with rising fuel bills, high inflation and a crumbling health service
Sometimes I worry, or at least wonder, how many Hongkongers who have joined the recent waves of emigration to Britain will survive the coming winter. The rich ones will, of course, live comfortably anywhere they go. But those who moved to Britain solely on the strength of their BN(O) passport status now face a costly winter like nothing they have ever seen in Hong Kong. And that includes the breakdown of basic social services such as rubbish removal, itself much more expensive than Hong Kong even in the best of times.
But perhaps the air of democratic freedom makes it all worthwhile. After all, Britain has just had a new prime minister chosen, as one respected local commentator put it to me, “not by the electorate, not by the Tory party’s own MPs but by an 0.02 per cent population group representing southern, privileged, old white males with a tenuous grip on what is happening in the UK!”.
Parliamentary democracy in action! Even the trade-based seats in the Hong Kong legislature represent more people from the local population.
But, if you only watch blogs and YouTube channels run by what Hong Kong locals call “BN(O)ers”, you might think Britain today is paradise. Perhaps it is, if you don’t listen to the BBC.
Winter is coming, as the tagline of a popular North American TV show used to say, but many seem completely oblivious to the impending doom. Some still have the grit and determination to fight for freedom in Hong Kong.
A friendly reader and long-time Hong Kong resident has just given me an account of a noisy procession by a small group of Hong Kong people in Manchester. It’s worth quoting.
“I am visiting relatives in the UK and yesterday [Sunday] witnessed a weird sight in a very busy shopping street in the centre of Manchester,” he wrote.
“I heard shouting getting progressively louder and thronging its way through the shoppers was a snake of bedraggled yellow umbrella and British Colonial era Hong Kong flag-waving protesters. I think they were shouting in broken English “revolution in our time” and freedom for Hong Kong etc but their diction was so poor, the words were virtually unintelligible.”