This article was pubished at spiked-online

There is something about Boujis in Hong Kong that tugs at ex-pat sleeves - even sleeves like my own, which would probably no more belong at the other Boujis, in Kensington (the private members club of choice for young royals and their chums) than, oh, let's see, those of Eric Joyce, the lumpen Scottish MP who keeps getting nicked for fighting with toffs, perhaps.

It's not so much the overt Britishness of the place, which opened at the tail end of last year: half the bars, pubs and clubs in Hong Kong go in for that. Rather, it's the little touches of Cool Britannia ('cool' as in 'fashionable' and hence the same thing as 'hot', of course; but also in the sense of not shouting about it all from the rooftops). Back home you might well be sick to death of vibrant post-Jubilee post-Olympics Blighty but when you've been away for two years bright turquoise velvet upholstering and cocktails with stupid names like The Faboujis Egg speak endearingly to an inner Albionic daftness.

Its appeal to ex-pats is not the whole story with Boujis Hong Kong, though. Matt Hermer, the Welshman who started Boujis in London and now manages a host of high-end hotels, bars and restaurants around the world, tells me that local 'Canto' celebs and socialites were lining up to inquire about joining way before the club opened. Yes, the financial services sector is well represented, but Hermer wanted local 'elites' coming through the door as well as the ex-pats and he got them. 'Without a doubt the Britishness appeals, and the brand, and the knowledge of our royal associations in England,' he says.

That British branding retains enormous cachet in Hong Kong a generation on from the 1997 handover of sovereignty to China is obvious to anyone who walks the city's streets: for a start, there is no more ubiquitous emblem on bags and clothing than the Union Jack. And London property developers have latched on, too. Jones Lang LaSalle recently hosted an event here called Legends of Battersea Power Station: A British Bonanza. Showcasing the new Circus West development on the Thames, it 'recreated' London with red phone booths and street signs pointing to Big Ben and Buckingham Palace. A band performed songs by The Beatles and Pink Floyd and guests played bingo and drank Scotch.

All of which tells us at least one thing we already know: that there are some jolly clever marketing professionals out there doing Britain's bidding. But the affection for British culture and British institutions runs deeper. As John Simpson wrote in The Spectator last year, even elder statesmen at the heart of Hong Kong's 'pro-establishment' (for which read pro- the current 'one country, two systems' settlement with Beijing that Mrs Thatcher helped to broker) government and civil service still feel emotionally bonded to the old colonial regime.

Many Hongkongers, especially the wealthy, take comfort, meanwhile, in cocking a snook at mainland China's nouveau riche. (Of course, the latter are now looking to prove their worldliness, too, and who better to emulate than the English nobility? At one newly-opened finishing school in Beijing, society daughters are being taught to behave more like the Duchess of Cambridge and are promised talks from visiting aristocrats.) But for growing numbers - particularly of young Hongkongers, it seems - opposition to a non-democratically elected executive that owes its legitimacy to the central government in Beijing and therefore the Chinese Communist Party, is being expressed through open admiration for the city's old colonial masters.

The most astonishing assertion of this came last month. The morning after 99.8 per cent of Falkland Islanders voted to remain a British territory, the South China Morning Post - a newspaper whose editorial policy cannot accurately be described as hostile towards Beijing - decided to run its own poll online. The question: Would Hongkongers vote to return to a British overseas territory, given the option? Thousands voted. By evening the ayes had 91 per cent.

No doubt generalised anti-government grievance had more to do with it than any real desire for recolonisation, but the numbers reflect the times. Recent months in Hong Kong have seen the Chief Executive, C.Y. Leung, forced into abandoning plans for mandatory 'national education' classes in schools following widespread revolt at the notion; controversy over anti-government protesters brandishing colonial flags; and officials removing poster adverts for a British Council education exhibition that bore the slogan 'This is GREAT Britain'.

Labelled 'sheer morons' by one Beijing official, protesters rallied over these issues in Hong Kong's Victoria Park, aptly enough, and online: one Facebook group declared the colonial flag carried 'global recognition and legitimacy'; comments such as 'Great Britain built Great Hong Kong' were rife.

Clear from these tensions is the fact that people under 35 or so in Hong Kong are not afraid to defend the liberties bequeathed in large part by a colonial government that in its final years sped through reforms which made the city one of the freest societies in the world and one of the easiest in which to do business.

The truth is that since then its future has been dependent on Beijing's good will; but you could argue that that now goes for the rest of us too. Long before Matt Hermer opened Boujis Hong Kong, he says, he tried to open a club in Beijing but 'came up against so many obstacles and so much bureaucracy... and eventually the development got shut down.'

Britain, at least, is open for business, even if China isn't interested. Whether or not Hong Kong remains so won't involve choosing British rule again. Instead, it needs to think about which it values most: 'one country' or 'two systems'.

In all the recent controversy over colonial flags and British Council MTR advertisements, it is curious that the vast yarns of polyester clothing the citizenry of Hong Kong in the livery of English football clubs have escaped mention.

It would be a stretch to label the English Premier League neo-colonialist. For a start most of its clubs' owners, and players, are foreigners. But as Britain 's biggest cultural export these days, it is unsurpassed in its global reach; and for the ex-pat that means fending off one-word questions like "Chelsea ?", or " Liverpool?".

Call me churlish - I'm Scottish and nobody ever says "Aberdeen?" - but it seems obvious to point out that in embracing English football, Hong Kong has spurned its own footballing heritage. After all, the city has the oldest professional league in Asia, had a handy "national" side when most other Asian countries still couldn't kick their grannies, and, pre-EPL, important local matches could attract crowds of 30,000. Nowadays, the average first division gate is just over 1,000. Heavens above, in the 80s fans even had the cojones for the odd riot.

It doesn't help that those in charge of football in Hong Kong - the same small group of people who seem to have a hand in most of the city's sporting initiatives - have such a knack for making a Horlicks of everything, or that national coaches rival David Beckham's hairdos for getting the chop. But consider this: EPL sides make a total of some £1 billion in broadcasting revenues every season; in Hong Kong, clubs pay NowTV to show games. Time to get back to watching football in the flesh. Polyester optional.

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post's Post Magazine

I'm comfortable with the word "bespoke" when it's applied to tailoring. There is nothing worse than a suit that accentuates rather than disguises unshapeliness. I understand it is also applied to software, which is all very well but will make you sound like you've downloaded your clothes on Second Life.

"Bespoke cocktails" are a phenomenon at which a line must be drawn, however. It would be insulting to weasels to call it a weasel phrase but it is one that is becoming ever-more ubiquitous in Hong Kong - in magazines and in the PR gibberish thrown about on behalf of bars. Almost certainly it comes from New York, where everything now is either "bespoke" or "boutique" or "bijou" and everything on the menu is grass-fed, single cask, hormone-free, blah blah, hand-slaughtered, blah blah blah.

Insofar as "bespoke" means "made to order", one would trust all cocktails to be so - as opposed to, say, out of a tin. You like Bulgarian gin? Ask for it. You want the thing shaken for 43 seconds? Count them.

Problem is cocktail bars have too much choice already. You knew where you were when it was just the classics: the dry martini, the Negroni, one or two others. Now it's all jujube berries and organic cane sugar ground by unicorns and Orgasm this and Zombie that.

The worst of it, though, is the way people tell you about these places as if only they know of them; as if they'd invented a new colour. They haven't. They just know where to get some over-priced booze.

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post's Post Magazine

What happens when you disobey someone in a uniform in Hong Kong? Have you ever seen anyone at it? Cops are beheld with grovelling respect, due or otherwise. But it's the other kind of uniformed Hongkonger I mean: the orderly, the security lackey, the anonymous yellow-jacketed steward, all of whom reckon themselves to be entrusted with some degree of authority over us. What happens when you disobedy their ilk?

Well, from my limited experience, I should think not very much: it's the uniform, rather than any power invested in it that cows people. (All the same, they are cowed: Hong Kong is not mainland China but quiescence seems almost a given wherever there are walkie talkies or fluorescent clothing.)

The other day I was waiting to meet a friend outside a mall in Central and had happened to find a perchable spot on which to remove myself from the flow of pedestrians when I was approached by what I took to be an ariline pilot: a chap in epaulettes and a headset. "Cannot sit", he announced. When he was gone I sat down again, but it bothered me that I had not thought to ask him "why?".

Partly what is at play here is the misguided notion, post-9/11, that "security" staff simply must be obeyed, else there will be chaos. But secondly, the piecemeal privatisation of public space means we are unsure as to where we stand vis a vis men with radios, or indeed who and what they represent. We are not quick enough to tell them to "eff off". We lie down.

Try as I might, I could never work out quite what the Occupy mob camped out under the HSBC building wanted or stood for. But staying put for so long in their tents under the noses of so many jobsworths merits a little respect.

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post's Post Magazine

Oh yes: a big old racism row. US sitcom 2 Broke Girls (TVB Pearl, 11.45pm, Saturday) arrives on Hong Kong screens berated by critics in the western media but already part-way through its second series at home, where it has been an emphatic ratings success.

Among other things, the show has been deemed by arbiters of comedic propriety to be anti-Semitic. That must come in a future episode (there's no Semitism, anti- or otherwise, in the opener) but the main charge - of Asian stereotyping - does stick, like tofu to an unattended wok.

Max (Kat Dennings; she was in Sex and the City once) is rough around the edges but soft at heart; born sucking on a plastic spoon, she's a waitress. Caroline is a rich bitch who has to slum it and become a waitress, too, when her dad's Ponzi empire goes down. Their boss is Han Lee (Matthew Moy), an Asian-American who looks about 14 going on 40 and speaks English like Charlie Chan (the Hollywood Chinaman of the 1920s and 30s who was, if you recall, played by a Swede).

You'd have to be pushing it to isolate the character as being offensive, though. Firstly because the comedy is so cuddly; secondly because everyone and everything else in 2 Broke Girls is a social stereotype, too. Of course, social stereotypes can be fun, and funny; here the jokes just aren't good enough. For proof that "working class" American sitcoms don't have to be this lame, watch It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia instead.

A more entertaining glimpse of the undercarriage of modern America is to be had in Omens in the Sky (TVB Pearl, Monday, 9.30pm), which takes us to Beebe, a Bible belt town in Arkansas where a host of extremely fat people are in a flap about hundreds of red-winged blackbirds falling out of the sky dead. It's like the X-Files, or South Park; either way, it has the free-wheeling feel of fiction.

According to some Beebians the birds deserved it, with their diseases and their chirping. Others blame the government. And the Bible-thumpers say it's God's judgment on us all for tolerating promiscuity and gays. Turns out mass bird, fish and animal deaths happen around the world all the time, usually as a result of plain old meteorological or biological factors.

It used to be just the Americans who bred insanely enthusiastic presenters, but the Brits have been at it for years, too. The ones on Bang Goes the Theory, the new season of which starts tonight (BBC Knowledge, 8pm), go in for the whole bantering, matey approach (most things are "absolutely amazing") that's nowadays deemed necessary to persuade young people to pay attention. No doubt there's something in the theory; but anyway, what sets the show apart is that there is some actual real science in it. On tonight's show one chap explains how tumours develop and another presenter tries to make diamonds from charcoal using some kind of special Bunsen burner. It's hardly Joseph Bronowski's The Ascent of Man but at least it'll learn the kids about the value of metastable carbon allotropes.

This column appeared in the South China Morning Post's Post Magazine

If there is a subtext to Rick Stein's Spanish Xmas (Saturday, 7.50pm, BBC Lifestyle) it would go something like this: nothing you're going to eat this Christmas will be anywhere near as good as what Rick's been cooking up with intimate friends of his in Spain, where everything is much, much better. More than likely, though, this is just accidental, Rick's enthusiasm for anything in front of him (in this instance, Spain) fetching up the default TV foodie prejudice: against you - philistine brute! - with your supermarket turkey.

TV chefs' Christmas specials are now part of the whole pre-Christmas Christmas saturation deal. By December 25, you just want it to be January 1, or February, or Easter. Stein's had a go at doing the whole thing differently, though, out there in Spain, with his lovely Spanish friends; dozens of them. "It's just so blinking good", he purrs, tasting one of the dishes he intends to make for 200 of his closest ones, in London. He cooks a lot of unpretentious food that looks good - clams with serrano ham and oloroso sherry, lamb stuffed aubergines with moorish spices - but there's nothing exclusively festive about any of it.

I once sat down to watch a Rick Stein programme about the poet John Betjeman that turned out to be about Rick Stein and his love of fish pie, so let's not dwell on the fact this one isn't all that Christmassy, because at least the Flamenco music will remind you he's in Spain; albeit "the Spain untouched by the hand of progress" and not the one with all the defaulting banks and riots and food shortages going on.

All of which privation would likely be more bearable than spending time in the company of either the contestants or the judges on TLC's Ultimate Shopper (Tuesday, 10pm). Watching them being horrible to one another on the show is fine, but only for about five minutes. Producers, I'm told, think women like watching other people being horrible to one another (a la The Apprentice, or Come Dine With Me), but producers, like game theorists and murderers, are somewhere on the spectrum.

Anyway, the gist of Ultimate Shopper is that four women are let loose in a department store at various intervals then come back and are told how ridiculous they look by a sassy Aussie (Holly Valance) who sounds like she's just smoked 40 fags, an old plastic-looking American woman, a deranged Italian person and a male fashion journalist whose job it is to be even more horrible than the others. It's the British version of a prime-time Italian show, which you can be sure is simultaneously classier and more vulgar.

This column appeared in the South China Morning Post's Post Magazine

Are you one of the 20 per cent? No, not the 20 per cent of Americans who think Barack Obama is a Muslim; or the 20 per cent of us who can do the Moonwalk. Rather - are you in that percentile for whom there is no point at all to exercise?

The discovery that a fifth of us simply cannot increase our anaerobic capacity - the main point of exercise in health terms, apparently - no matter how vigorously we exert ourselves, is among a series of exciting scientific nuggets served up in The Truth About Exercise (TVB Pearl, Monday, 9.30pm), a BBC Horizon programme. Even more encouraging is that for all but 15 per cent  at the other end of the scale, anything more than six minutes a month of real exertion is a waste of time: just three 20-second bursts of "high-intensity" physical a week will see you right, by fooling muscle into burning up more fat; or something like that.

Michael Mosley, who trained as a doctor, visits lots of clever fellows who use acronyms and make charts and fit people out in hi-tech underpants that monitor their activeness, or lack thereof. So the science is all kosher, and it's bad news for the over-bearing, over-distended fitness industry. The only gripe with the show is that it shouldn't take Mosley - a likeable enough chap - a whole hour to lay it bare to us. Better to have edited out the "obesity expert" who keeps imploring people to do things like move about instead of staying seated all day eating sausages. Sitting down is "literally killing millions!" he whinnies in that kind of appalled way usually reserved for when conversation turns to genocidal maniacs.

That such maniacs rarely retire to nursing homes is a truth seldom recognised. Similarly, you would never have expected JR Ewing to end up in one. He was badly shot up twice in the 1980s, I seem to recall. The new Dallas (above) premieres on Thursday (WarnerTV, 9pm), 21 years on but actually only 14 in TV time, and is still about Texans, oil and money.

The nefarious JR, one of the Texans, is in a nursing home, having fallen into a melancholic state of muteness worthy of Shakespeare's Pericles after being divorced by Sue Ellen, a former sun-pickled soak now running for state governor. Their son, John Ross (Josh Henderson, Desperate Housewives), wants to drill for oil on the Ewing ranch; JR's brother Bobby's adopted scion Christopher (Jesse Metcalfe, also Desperate Housewives) wants the family to go all fluffy and develop renewables instead. And so, with handsome, tanned people cropping up all over the place, a good old soap opera feud brews, setting the stage for JR to rouse himself and rekindle his old rivalry with Bobby.

Texas - being brash and vulgar - always fitted the format: ridiculous storylines, ham acting, grand-guignol melodrama. The new Dallas has all those ingredients, so is likely to satisfy those who liked the show first time round. These days, of course, we're forever being hectored into believing television drama has never been better. It may well be true, but the success or otherwise of this "redux" may shed light on the issue of whether it's characters and themes or just slick plotlines and cliffhangers that have stacked up the audiences for HBO's hit parade.

This column appeared in the South China Morning Post's Post Magazine

Every so often one hears scare stories about rising grain prices, food going short and the likelihood that soon we will all be stabbing one another in the throat in the clamour to nail down a rat for supper. All nonsense, of course: food was never cheaper or more abundant than in our own gilded age of biotech and agronomy. Which makes the continued presence of Spam, and its room-mate in the fraternity of indeterminate victuals, luncheon meat, on shop shelves and in Hong Kong's cha chaan teng restaurants (out in the open for all to see), a confounding facet of modern life.

As with many other things, Hongkongers acquired their taste for this most dubious of substances from the British. The irony is that while doubtless it still goes on, very few people in Britain will confess to eating it nowadays: its street cred just never recovered from being the butt of a Monty Python skit in the 1970s.

Previous to that, British children were commonly force-fed "Spam fritters", a deep-fried preparation regarded for decades as being essential to their well-being. It was later established, however, that there is more salt in a tin of Spam than nutritionists recommend you should eat in a month.

What else it contains is more of a mystery. Many of us no doubt blithely consume lung and testicle when it is in pate or sausage meat - but then such foods are often delicious. Spam, by comparison, tastes of not very much; boiled tile grouting, perhaps. It is also said it will remain edible inside the can for up to a century. A nice rat might not be such a bad idea after all.

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post's Post Magazine

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post

One hears a lot of about "the grass roots" in Hong Kong. It's a phrase that seems to carry a more specific meaning here than I have encountered elsewhere, having come out from Scotland some 18 months ago.

Whereas in Britain and the US it intimates more generally the ordinary rank and file, or the population base at large, in Hong Kong "the grass roots" also tends to serve as a rather euphemistic term for the poor. We are told that grass roots people feel neglected, or that they are being effectively papuerised by inflation, or that they do not trust Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying to deliver on his pledges to help them.

There is one problem with the metaphor, however: real grass roots find it easy to break through the sod and grow. If they have the strength to seek their days in the sun, then so it shall be. By comparison, many of Hong Kong's poor can legitimately be described as being downtrodden.

Much has been made recently of inequality in Hong Kong. As indicated by the city's Gini co-efficient, a statistical measure of income disparity, we are living in one of the most unequal societies in the world. But it would be a mistake to unhesitatingly conflate, as many do, these two problems: stalled social mobility (the thwarted seedbeds) and a yawning gap between rich and poor.

To seriously confront the latter would require large-scale redistribution of wealth, which seems an unlikely course for any government here to take. There is more than a whiff of crony capitalism in Hong Kong, but it remains one of the world's freest market economies: increasing the tax burden significantly on wealth creators would be to curtail much of the activity that stems from that.

It is always worth stressing, furthermore, that a more equal society is not necessarily a better one. "Solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short" is how Thomas Hobbes described life in mankind's "natural" state - relative equality tends to prevail in primitive societies as there is little scope for accumulating wealth. There is therefore less economic activity, less innovation and less incentive to create employment - things which benefit everyone.

How to ensure this is so is the challenge faced by governments: even the right accepts the state has a responsibility to help the poor. But where the right may be correct to insist that income disparity is necessary, the solution to ensuring inequality works for the benefit of society as a whole is perhaps the most sensible idea to come from the left.

It was the great liberal 20th Century American political philosopher John Rawls who outlined it best. Arguing for the free market and social inequality, he nevertheless insists in his A Theory of Justice on equality of opportunity: "Those who have the same level of talent and ability and the same willingness to use these gifts should have the same prospects of success regardless of ... the class into which they are born and develop until the age of reason."

To be born poor in Hong Kong is to have one's prospects of success seriously blunted. Partly this is because the strivers who are given the chance to better themselves in one generation have a tendency the world over to pull up the ladder behind them on subsequent generations. It is also, however, a matter of public policy.

During his election campaign, Leung promised to focus on livelihood issues affecting the poor. Some of these he will no doubt follow up on; others he will not. But in a city whose coffers are directly swelled by booming asset prices - which themselves create new haves and have nots - and which has a grievous track record of billions spent on unnecessary infrastructure projects, the fact that people are forced to live in cage homes is nothing short of scandalous.

No doubt the isolation and immiseration of swathes of what used to be the working classes in rich societies is a global phenomenon and one related to deindustrialisation, which in Hong Kong happened in the space of a generation. Economic circumstances will stall social mobility, but this is when government spending - on housing, on education subsidies, on underwriting small business loans - is at its most useful.

For all the protest and agitation in Hong Kong in recent weeks and months, the conditions for class warfare thankfully do not yet exist. But for the "grass roots", a bit of Rawlsianism would not go amiss. The city can afford it.

This article appeared on the South China Morning Post's Rewind page

Most scientists agree that aliens probably look something like David Bowie, with his cultivated strangeness and differently-pigmented eyes (the result, apparently, of being punched in a schoolyard brawl).

Actually, "most" might be an exaggeration: there has been no extensive polling. But what is even less certain is Bowie's idea of himself. Whether as Aladdin Sane, Ziggy Stardust or the Thin White Duke, the English singer's most interesting years saw him shifting otherworldly shapes like nobody's business. And the quantities of drugs he is known to have consumed in the 1970s make it feasible that he thought himself arrived from outer space.

Nicolas Roeg's 1976 film The Man Who Fell to Earth casts pop's original chameleon as a humanoid alien who drops from the sky in a rocket. His objective, sketchily outlined, has something to do with developing the technology to reverse the drought now killing his own planet, and to that end he brings with him high-tech patents that make him a billionaire overnight.

Unfortunately he does not count on human greed or decadence, and, sadly, things do not go well. Mary-Lou, a first-rate mentalist who falls in love with him, introduces him to booze and he becomes addicted to it, and to watching television.

But enough of the spoilers, other than to state that 1970s paranoia - about impending planetary ruin, the brain-sapping properties of TV, political corruption and big business being dreadful - is writ large. Ideas that now seem tired abound. And yet, the movie's visual boldness, ambition and insistent focus on character over plot put it on a superior plane to most current genre film-making.

Roeg was on a rich vein of form (a run that includes Don't Look Now - named best British film ever in an industry poll last year - Bad Timing and Walkabout) and by this time Bowie had conquered America. But when the brass at Paramount saw the final cut of The Man Who Fell to Earth, they refused to fund its release and the film struggled to break even.

It's likely the studio felt it was too, well, alienating. Roeg cuts incessantly between scenes without explanation, only to then linger on things which interest him visually, not least the desert landscapes of New Mexico, where Newton (Bowie) opts to reside. The result is that the film-maker himself seems to approach America - whether New Mexico or New York - from an alien's point of view. He confronts its strangeness, asks questions of its culture, puzzles at capitalism's outward manifestations.

Naturally, Bowie is an alien with a British passport. Feeble, androgynous, melancholy, he is the ultimate outsider. And the ultimate tragedy is that like Icarus falling, almost unnoticed, into the sea - as referenced in the film by way of W.H. Auden's poem about Brueghel's painting of the scene - humans very soon lose interest in that which they don't understand.