Surely, Ms Truss, you must be joking about Hong Kong?
- Failed UK premier says Article 23 security legislation threatens women and claims that Hong Kong’s female prison population is higher than Iran’s
Britain’s ghoulish Conservative politicians have their equivalent of the undead and zombies, of which the country’s shortest-serving prime minister Liz Truss is a prime example. These are people whose political careers are truly dead and buried, something obvious to everyone except themselves. And so they refuse to go quietly into the dark.
Having disgraced herself by her utter incompetence during just 49 days in office, the ex-premier has been trying to reanimate herself as the Cassandra of the West warning against the yellow peril of communist China, joining dozens of others in Washington, London and Brussels.
Most self-respecting newspapers in the UK wouldn’t even touch her opinionated drivel, so it’s left to the primary mouthpiece of the Conservative Party, the Telegraph, to run her latest piece. Let the drums roll, please: defending Hong Kong women’s rights because, get this, Beijing is repressing our women through the introduction of Article 23 security legislation.
It was International Women’s Day last Friday, that was the excuse. The Western media’s united front has been going after Article 23 – all the while cheering and defending the actual mass murders of women and children in Gaza by Israeli forces. Understandably, Truss thought she needed a fresh angle on Hong Kong.
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Written with fellow ex-Conservative Party leader Iain Duncan Smith, the day to celebrate women was therefore exploited for a very different agenda. The shamelessness is breathtaking. The pair actually did women a disservice.
“Hong Kong surprisingly has more female prisoners than Iran, where authorities flog women for refusing to cover their hair,” the pair thundered.
I don’t know if their prison uncited numbers are correct. But let’s assume they are. The biggest reason may be that Hong Kong is in the unique and unfortunate situation – but not if you are a frequent client of prostitutes – that there are many overstayed mainland China visitors working illegally as sex workers in the city. When they are caught, they need to serve a sentence before being sent back. That greatly pushes up the female prison population, though properly speaking, they aren’t even Hong Kong residents.
If the UK also counts refugees and illegal migrants being kept in confined facilities as part of the penal system, I am sure their female prison population would jump right up, too.
You can argue whether or not Article 23 is politically repressive, but it is not sexist; it’s an equal opportunity legislation, for men and women alike.
“We know that almost 50 of these women have been subject to sham charges,” the two Brits wrote, “under the pro-CCP administration, including the Beijing-imposed national security law which has criminalised forms of freedom of expression.”
According to Truss and her Conservative pals, every single one of those who have been charged and jailed for taking part in the 2019 riots and mayhem in Hong Kong, which they alleged to be perfectly peaceful, are by definition a political prisoner.
Truss and Smith continue: “Then there is Agnes Chow Ting, a pro-democracy activist who fled to Canada in 2023. Chow, who was listed among the BBC’s list of 100 inspiring women in 2020, the same year she was convicted of ‘unlawful assembly’ for peacefully protesting, served seven months in a maximum security jail as a ‘Category A’ prisoner where she was imprisoned alongside the most severe offenders, including murderers and other violent criminals.”
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She served seven of a 10-month sentence and was granted bail, which she promptly jumped and then landed in Canada. Some totalitarian system!
That maximum security prison also happens to have served illustrious inmates such as a former Hong Kong chief executive, an ex-chief secretary and one of the city’s biggest property tycoons. Why? Because it’s our biggest prison but it doesn’t mean they were all housed with serial rapists and murderers.
As a seasoned hack, I love a sensationalist as much as the next person. With her undoubted talent in that direction, Truss may yet find a satisfactory afterlife on Fleet Street.
