Originally published on Oxford Policy Podcast.
Lord Christopher Patten is the Chancellor of the University of Oxford, having served in the role since 2003. Lord Patten was the 28th and final British Governor of Hong Kong, who oversaw its handover to the People's Republic of China in 1997, symbolically marking the end of the British Empire. Lord Patten was also a Conservative Member of the UK Parliament from 1979-1992, where, as Conservative Party Chairman from 1990-1992, he was credited with architecting the election of the Major Government.
In this episode, Nick Fabbri speaks with Lord Patten about:
His lifelong relationship with Oxford University
The state of higher education in the United Kingdom - including freedom of speech on campus and the rise of cancel
The Israel-Hamas war, and the University of Oxford's response to recent student protests and demands, and his work with Medical Aid for Palestinians
Lord Patten’s Governorship of Hong Kong and the 1997 handover
The current political situation in Hong Kong and the erosion of civil and political rights, and hope for Hong Kong's future
The rise of China and its increasing authoritarianism
Reflections on the recent 14 years of Tory rule in Britain, and
The future of right of centre political movements in the United Kingdom.
Transcript below ^_^
[Nick Fabbri] (0:00 - 1:07)
Welcome back dear friends and listeners to another episode of the Oxford Policy Podcast. My name is Nick Fabbri and I'll be your host for today. I'm a producer of the show with a background in the humanitarian sector, government and the military in Australia.
It's a great honour to be joined today by Lord Christopher Patten, Chancellor of the University of Oxford, the former and final British Governor of Hong Kong and former Conservative Member of Parliament from 1979 to 1992. Today we'll be speaking about Oxford and higher education in the United Kingdom, Lord Patten's governorship of Hong Kong and its current political situation, the rise of China and British politics, policy and the future of right-of-centre parties. So thank you so much for your time today, Lord Patten, it's an honour to have you on the show.
Nice to be here, Nick. So you've had a remarkable relationship with the University of Oxford over the course of your lifetime, from being a student here at Balliol College from 1962 to most recently serving a remarkable 21 years as Chancellor of the University before you retire at the end of this academic year. Starting right from the beginning of your time here, what are some of your fondest memories of Oxford when you were a student?
[Lord Patten] (1:10 - 4:11)
Oxford in most ways has shaped me. I first sat the entrance exam or the scholarship exams for Oxford in 1960 when I was 16. I was lucky to get an exhibition, a junior scholarship, and came here at what was a golden age for Balliol historians to read history.
And I think the most important shaping experience of my life was the people who taught me and how they taught me, and some of the friendships I made there, friends most of whom now are dead. It's one of the problems of getting old. And I was extremely lucky to be taught by people like Christopher Hill, who was a Marxist, greatest Marxist, I suppose, with E.P. Thompson of the last 70 or 80 years, a very tremendous historian. Richard Cobb, who was one of the best historians of the French Revolution. John Prest, hugely courteous man who was an expert on Lord John Russell in the 19th century. And probably above all, Maurice Keane, who was a medievalist, a great medievalist, a pupil of Dick Southern, one of the best historians and an extraordinarily nice man who understood completely that teaching and research were not in contradiction in any way, but were different sides of the same coin.
And he was wonderful, funny, kind, charming, conservative, but not reactionary, and believed strongly in institutions because of the people who were in them and made them. And he felt that particularly about Balliol and about Oxford. So that was important to me.
And then what was like winning the lottery after that experience had sent me off into, rather surprisingly, into public life, into politics. And then I'd gallivanted around the world from Westminster to Hong Kong, to Brussels, to Northern Ireland, and so on. And to be able to come back here as Chancellor and spend, well, the last 20, 21 years as Chancellor.
I'd been a Chancellor before. I'd been Chancellor when I was in Hong Kong of every university, which was crazy. It's just because of my post as Governor.
But I'd also been a Chancellor of Newcastle University, which is a very good Russell Group University, where one of my daughters studied. So I knew a bit about the job. Though this post is not really a job, but this post is, I think, different from most others at universities.
[Nick Fabbri] (4:12 - 4:42)
Yeah. And so we'll come to, I suppose, some recollections and achievements of your time as Chancellor. But if we could stay with Oxford and just thinking about one of its most striking features is how much of the built environment stays the same over nearly a millennia now.
What the generations change year on year, it sort of resembles a cultural and institutional palimpsest, with different layers of generations sort of accumulating. What are some of the most significant changes in the culture of Oxford, or the feeling of the place, since you first attended 60 years ago? Yeah.
[Lord Patten] (4:45 - 6:06)
I'm not sure that the culture has changed all that much. Although we've certainly been going through an extraordinary period since before I became Chancellor, but for the last 20, 25 years. What you say about the relationship between the buildings and what we do is an interesting one.
Because you look around Oxford at the buildings, and it reminds you of what an important part of national history Oxford has been. And it also reminds you of the extent to which Oxford has been the result of a sort of marriage between philanthropy and scholarship. The Clarendon building, where the Vice-Chancellor has one of her offices, was originally the result of a benefaction from the Earl of Clarendon, Thomas Hyde, who'd been an advisor to Charles I and Charles II, wrote a book on the Great English Rebellion, and then gave the proceeds for building the Clarendon.
We've got in the gateway of the Clarendon a list of some of our main benefactors. And it's important to see that relationship between private generosity and scholarship.
[Nick Fabbri] (6:06 - 6:08)
And we're sitting here in the Blavatnik School of Government.
[Lord Patten] (6:08 - 7:38)
We are indeed. It's another such an example. And there's one being built next door, the Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities.
So that's what's really made Oxford and put us in the position that we're in today as one of the greatest, some say the greatest university in the world. Because the other point about the relationship with history is it's not just our history, it's the world's history. And I keep on reminding people that we're not just a university for Britain, not even just a university for Europe, but a university for the world.
And when you look at the number of American students here, Australians, Chinese, and you see that. And one of my favourite examples of that is when showing a very distinguished member of the Politburo, one of probably Xi Jinping's greatest guru at the beginning of Xi Jinping's time in office was Wang Qishan, who was here. And after we'd shown him round, he had a lunch in Rhodes House with Chinese academics and students.
And the ambassador came to get him to encourage him to go back to London for a meeting. And he said, but I can't go back to London. I haven't been to the Bodleian yet.
You wouldn't necessarily expect a member of the Chinese Politburo to have heard of the Politburo, of the Bodleian, but he had.
[Nick Fabbri] (7:39 - 7:42)
So I hope the librarians let him in despite not having a vodka.
[Lord Patten] (7:42 - 8:45)
So it's both been timeless and able to change. My favourite political novel is The Leopard by Lampedusa. And there's a prince in it, one of the characters in it is called Prince Tancredi.
And his great line is, things have to change in order to remain the same. And Oxford's been able to do that to an extraordinary degree. If anything, you asked about changes.
I think there's a broader base of undergraduates here than there was when I was here. And that is partly because of change in society. But it's also because of deliberate efforts we've made to ensure that we're open to all talents.
It's important to be able to do that while not allowing any lowering of the quality. And I think we've managed to do that extraordinarily well.
[Nick Fabbri] (8:45 - 9:04)
And so looking back on your stewardship as Chancellor of this great British and global institution, as you put it, over the past 21 years, how do you assess, I suppose, your legacy here? And also, what are the challenges that Oxford faces going forward as we hurtle towards the middle of the century?
[Lord Patten] (9:05 - 10:46)
Well, I think my legacy is for other people to discuss. I don't honestly think that I can lay claims, sort of post hoc, prop to hoc, on the fact that Oxford has gone through such a wonderful period. That's because of academic leadership and scholarship and the fact that we've managed to go on being a great teaching institution.
I think probably the main thing which people will take from my 21 years is this is no longer, if it ever was, just a sort of ceremonial position in which you turn up periodically in a black and gold gown and make a couple of speeches a year, usually the same speech. I think it's much more, not hands-on exactly, but I spend maybe in term time two days a week here, maybe sometimes more, trying to help the Vice-Chancellor in colleges. I do a lot of work fundraising.
I speak out for the university when necessary and go around the university as much as I can. So that others don't perhaps have to do quite so much. But I don't think you could, I mean my successors will have to make up their own minds, but I don't think you can perform these functions on the basis that you just have to come here three or four times a year.
It's a more active role, an engaged role. Much more, and much more than I think any of the other Chancellor roles around the place. I think even more so than Cambridge.
[Nick Fabbri] (10:47 - 11:22)
And as an observer of the university or being sort of intimately involved in it as you've been over the last 21 years, notions of academic freedom and campus culture have come into intense focus and scrutiny recently, with the rise of de-platforming council culture and even intellectual censorship in some fields, particularly in the United States. This is a global phenomenon, I think. What's your assessment of this cultural shift in the academy and the student body, and how can the British universities avoid the intense polarisation which has gripped their US counterparts?
[Lord Patten] (11:22 - 12:54)
Well, it's very important that we do. Because the one thing that should not be tolerated at universities is intolerance. We should be bastions of freedom of inquiry, freedom of speech.
We should be able to conduct arguments with civility. We should recognise the importance of club-ability in a great university. So I think council culture at a university is a ridiculous contradiction in terms.
And I think that not to recognise that other people also have a right to free speech, and to think that the right to free speech is unlimited, which is not true. Burke said freedom has to be limited in order to be possessed. And while I think there is no right not to feel that you've been disagreed with, that's nonsense.
But I do think that the ways in which you disagree have to be managed with that civility that I mentioned earlier. And if a university isn't teaching you that, God help us all, because universities are one of the linchpins of liberal democracies, and liberal democracies are under attack from within as well as from without.
[Nick Fabbri] (12:55 - 13:32)
And I asked that question having attended a talk yesterday evening by Neil Ferguson, famous Scottish and British historian. He's obviously been involved in setting up the University of Austin in Texas, which is a new institution, I suppose, in response to a lot of frustration with some of the perhaps growing intolerance on campus, both through the academic faculty, but also the student body being perhaps unwilling to engage in robust and respectful debate. So that's a fascinating, I think, development over in the US.
But of course, I think Britain has avoided the worst of that polarisation.
[Lord Patten] (13:32 - 14:50)
And must continue to do so, despite the fact that when extremists, and the conservative and other parties have difficulty explaining how they would like to make Britain better, or how they have made Britain better or worse, it's an easy thing for them to do to pick up the headlines and tabloids and try to encourage the notion that there is a culture war raging in higher education in this country. I don't think there is. I think there are some people who have unfortunately, sometimes forgotten the difference between an argument and a quarrel.
And I think there are some times there are people who overlook the fact that other people can feel hurt if you conduct an argument in a particular way. And that shouldn't have any place in an open liberal society. It certainly shouldn't have any place in a university.
And I think on the whole, there are some blemishes, I suppose. I think on the whole, we've managed to avoid the worst of that American takeover of universities by the intolerant.
[Nick Fabbri] (14:50 - 15:20)
Yes. And on the question of, I suppose, freedom of speech and expression at the University of Oxford and more broadly, there are currently encampments established by Oxford Action for Palestine across the university at the Radcliffe Camera, Wellington Square and the Museum of Natural History demanding that Oxford divest from and boycott Israeli businesses and commit to greater transparency or disclosure of its finances.
And so, some of the background to that has been that multiple arrests of student protesters has occurred following the occupation.
[Lord Patten] (15:20 - 15:27)
After they broke into the university vice chancellor's office. I think at the Clarendon building, yeah. No, it's at Wellington Square.
[Nick Fabbri] (15:27 - 15:48)
Oh, sorry, Wellington Square, yeah. And also, accusations of police brutality following trespass. So, do you think that the university leadership has done enough to enter into a dialogue with students about their demands?
And do you think the student response as the protests, which they have a right to peacefully protest, has gone too far? And I suppose, where do you see the situation heading?
[Lord Patten] (15:49 - 18:17)
Well, the whole question of the Middle East, of Gaza, of two state solutions and so on, is one about which I know quite a lot. Well, that's not bragging. When I was a European commissioner, I was one of those who was involved in the so-called quad, which was the attempt after the terrible assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, an attempt after that to keep the two state objective in an area where it could still be accomplished, to keep the Oslo peace process going.
Halfway through my period here as chancellor, I was head of medical aid for Palestinians. And I sometimes wish that those who feel very strongly about what's happening in Palestine and Gaza, which is wholly understandable, because what is happening in Gaza is plainly out of all proportion to what happened tragically in some kibbutzim in Israel. Those who feel very strongly about those things might, over the years, have considered helping to raise money for medical aid for Palestine.
And maybe they could do some of that as well. I think that, going back to what I was saying, those who are protesting are protesting about things that matter hugely. But I think they have to recognize that theirs is one voice, and other people have views too.
I think we have to be tolerant of the way they're arguing their case, but they have to be tolerant about other people's views. And they also have to recognize that they should do so in a way which encourages their knowledge of what's happening, and which recognizes the responsibilities of other people in a university to ensure that there's still an environment in which people can learn, can be taught, can revise for exams, can do exams.
[Nick Fabbri] (18:18 - 18:20)
And that Jewish students can feel safe as well.
[Lord Patten] (18:20 - 18:32)
And that Jewish, well, I didn't, I thought, I think I needed to say that even, because it should be, it's pretty contemptible not to be prepared to understand that.
[Nick Fabbri] (18:33 - 18:41)
Look, you know, I think here, just as I think here has been very peaceful, but I mean, certainly around the world, I think a lot of Jewish students have felt intimidated by it.
[Lord Patten] (18:41 - 26:59)
I think they have. And whenever I've thought of this subject or written about this subject, while being passionately of a view, as I said, like my friends of mine, like Yoshi Beilin, who was part of the Camp David process, Shlomo Ben-Ami, who was the same. I'm conscious of the appalling blot on Europe's history of the Holocaust and of the way we've treated Jews down the centuries.
My own, I'm a Catholic. And until the Vatican Council, there were aspects of the Catholic liturgy, which really seemed to suggest that the crucifixion of Jesus Christ was an example of murder by Jews, not day aside by all of us. And that's, in retrospect, I mean, I was a kid when that was still a view until the Vatican Council, I suppose.
And it's now, I mean, it's preposterous. One of the funniest and best and most accurate things that anybody has said to me in the last few months was one of the founders of our new college, Reuben, one of the donors who said, of course, this is the third Jewish college in Oxford. And I said, what do you mean?
So he said, well, Reuben, our college, Wolfson and Jesus. And it's, you can't, I think, be aware of our history and civilization without understanding that. We have other responsibilities, which should make us very concerned.
I mean, I think the, yes, we were responsible for the Balfour Declaration, but then we were also responsible of the worst sort of diplomacy in which you tell both sides what they want to hear rather than what's actually possible. And our own history in Britain, in the Middle East, in, not just in, I mean, after Sykes-Picot, and not just in Israel, Palestine, but elsewhere too, is not one that should enable us to wash our hands. So it's understandable that we should both be very concerned about those scenes that you see every day of people being killed in Gaza.
You should be concerned about what's happening on the West Bank. You should be concerned about the extent to which it was provoked by Hamas, but also the extent to which there's a context in which they operate, and that many of the people who perpetrated those atrocities are themselves the children of people who were campaigning about Palestinian rights a long time ago. I bang on about like this at some length, because it should be possible for us to understand that this is a discussion with context, that it's very important at a university, and if you're a student here, to understand as much about that context as possible.
And we have people here like Eugene Rogan and Avi Shleim at St. Anthony's who know as much about this subject as anybody in the world. And I don't think there's much justification of being too active if you haven't bothered to find out more about the subject. And I think it's true to say that many of the people in what are called astonishing lack of a sense of humor, liberated zones.
I mean, if you can talk about bits of Gaza or bits of the West Bank as though you would want them to be liberated zones, but the lawn around the radioactive camera. And the other thing I just want to say is that I think the university does talk and wants to talk to those who are demonstrating, and to the whole university body. But it needs to be sure that the people it's talking to are representatives of Oxford, because we know that there are others who aren't.
The majority, of course, or academics. And that's important. And it's also important for people to listen to the answers they get and take account of them.
And the idea that the university has blood on its hands is, I think, far from the truth. And we've been completely transparent. It's nothing to do with me.
We've been completely transparent about where university investments are. And we've been prepared to talk about that to talk about whether people have examples of the rules being broken in any way. And we should respond to that.
But I think that if you think that it's we've the police have been called in, when a small group when a group of students barge into the university headquarters, when they terrorise a receptionist, and automatically, the alarms go off, which bring the police in, not anybody picking up the phone and asking for the police to come in. That happens. And that's not, I think, in my view, an account which is accepted.
It's an endlessly challenged as though university authorities couldn't wait to bring the police in. I mean, for heaven's sake. So I think that this is a moment when it's really important for people to stop and think a bit and to be prepared to accept that they have every right to feel strongly and to express their views strongly.
But they need to do it in a way which doesn't, first of all, hurt other people. And secondly, undermine the ability of some students to do their exams to revise for their exams. Let's pick up their degrees.
I mean, so I think it's it needs to be people need to think about it very carefully. I've been to Gaza. And recently, too.
I mean, like last year, no, not as not as recently as that I went when I was still doing medical aid for Palestine. And I thought it was a really dystopian experience. Right.
And I won't go into detail, but I raised the case of some students in Gaza who got scholarships from universities in Europe and America to go there, and weren't being allowed to take up the degrees, the courses, because the Israeli government wouldn't let them out of Gaza. And it's that sort of thing, which the university has a has a real role in in helping to help university academics in Gaza and Israel as a whole, the West Bank as well, to help students and to help provide online learning. And I'm sure that some of those people who've been involved in the academics who've been involved in in protests will be only too pleased to take part in more, you know, more provision of academic facilities.
So I think all that's tremendously important, but for heaven's sake, if we are not prepared to do all this in a way which is civil, tolerant, as well as strongly felt, as well as well informed, then we're really falling down on part of our most important function, because the people we, we educated, I hope well today will be making big decisions tomorrow.
[Nick Fabbri] (27:00 - 27:08)
Yeah, I mean, so just to sort of summarise or wrap that up, I mean, it seems as though you're pro students' peaceful right to protest.
[Lord Patten] (27:08 - 27:09)
Of course.
[Nick Fabbri] (27:09 - 27:50)
The university needs to be open to entering into a genuine dialogue with students about their concerns. Equally, students do need to feel safe on campus and there needs to be, I suppose, a level of order around the place. But perhaps the university executive needs to maintain its autonomy, I suppose, in its decision making, its disclosure of accounts and its investments and things.
But I think what I'm getting from what you're saying as well, and noting your comments late last year about, you know, the need to end this medieval siege on Gaza, which I thought was quite forthright and, you know, welcome robust debate, that perhaps Oxford University and other universities could be doing more to perhaps broker a peace process. And maybe with reference to you.
[Lord Patten] (27:50 - 31:10)
Well, I wish that was more obviously the case. Through scholarships and academic. Yeah, I mean, I think that's entirely true, because we've been doing that.
For example, with Ukraine, I mean, I had not very long ago, a group of the Ukrainian students who've been here home for a few drinks and to talk to them. And we've been very supportive in providing a safe haven for them. And it's depressing if we need, but we probably do to provide a safe haven for the Palestinians.
But we should be able to do that without making some Jewish students feel that they're in an anti-Semitic atmosphere, which I hope isn't the case. And I don't think is the case most of the time. But look, this is a subject on which I don't know as much as Eugene Rogan or Avi Shleim, but I know as much, if not more than most people who've been in public life.
And it is the only subject I can think of in my political life where I've been self-censoring, where I haven't said or written all the things which I feel strongly. Why? Because I know that things can be torn out of context, because I know that there are people, the Vice Chancellor and others, heads of college, you know, a huge amount about these sort of issues, Valerie Amos, Don Fletcher, Jan Royal, Tim Hitchens, and so on and so on.
I know that they're all keen on talking to students about these things and talking to the academic community about these things. But I don't want anything I say to be ripped out of context and used as it were to either to encourage those who say, which is a pretty disgraceful thing to say that the university has blood on its hands, or on the other hand, to encourage those who think that to raise the real and profound concerns about what's happening in Gaza and the West Bank are somehow necessarily being anti-Semitic. The most powerful argument I've seen about Netanyahu was written by, in Haaretz, or by the editor of Haaretz, actually in Foreign Affairs in the March edition.
He's called Ehud Ben, and it's a devastating piece about Netanyahu and the way his whole political career has been about trying to divide the Palestinian community between Fatah and Hamas, to underline the fact that he doesn't think there is a negotiating partner for the Palestinians, and to at every stage diminish or try to diminish the arguments for a two-state solution. But the only way of preventing this going on for years and years and years is a two-state solution. And the point I come back to Yitzhak Rabin, that remark of his statement, Diane said much the same thing years ago, a great general.
Rabin was a great general. And Rabin's remark, enough blood, enough tears, should make people think twice.
[Nick Fabbri] (31:11 - 31:52)
And so turning from one, I suppose, geopolitical flashpoint to another, I'd like to come to the topic of your time as governor of Hong Kong in the 1997 handover of Hong Kong to the People's Republic of China. So you served as the final, or the 28th governor of Hong Kong from 1992 to 1997 before it was handed over. So can you take us back to that time on the night of the handover, which I understand was pouring with rain as the British troops marched through the parade ground, and reflect on what it was like to witness and play such a central role in a night of historical significance like that?
[Lord Patten] (31:53 - 35:04)
Well, the whole five-year period was an astonishing one, both because of the negotiations with China, but also because I was, as it were, in the role of being the mayor of a great Asian city, a great international trading and financial hub. And one of the things we had to do was face up to a difference between our colonial responsibilities in Hong Kong and those elsewhere. By and large, as empires were wound up and elections decided the future and independence of these countries all over the world, the view taken by Britain was that we should prepare countries for independence on the launch pad, like the blue Dutch paper, off the rock it would blast into outer space, and you'd have an independent country and hopefully a democratic one.
And that's what happened in places like Singapore and Malaysia near Hong Kong and elsewhere. But that was never possible in Hong Kong, because part of it, admittedly, had been acquired on a grant, but pretty seemingly as a result of the opiate wars, part of it was only there as a lease for 99 years. So we were never in a position where Hong Kong was going to become an independent country.
Would naturally revert back to China. It would naturally reverse back to China, or else we would be in breach of an international agreement. Leave on one side the fact that the Chinese breach international agreements the whole time, or a lot of the time.
So what we had to do was to try to secure a position in which Hong Kong, which was a free society, and the only example I think most people can think of was of a free society which wasn't entirely democratic. And I wasn't elected, and the legislature was only partly elected, though more elected and more democratic than before I became governor. So how did we secure that Hong Kong would remain a free society with the rule of law, with all the liberties you associate with an open society, and with a degree of local autonomy?
How would we just enable that to happen when it had become part of China? And the answer was actually provided by Deng Xiaoping, which was originally meant for Taiwan, one country, two systems. And we spent five years trying to ensure that Hong Kong's system survived.
When I left in 1997, I think our view was that there was a reasonable chance of that happening.
[Nick Fabbri] (35:06 - 35:09)
But the system was meant to maintain until 2047.
[Lord Patten] (35:09 - 37:25)
It was meant to go on for 50 years after 1997. And that was put into what was in effect an international treaty at the UN called the Joint Declaration, and was then turned into Hong Kong's sort of mini constitution called the Basic Law for, I suppose, 10 years or so after. I'd left Hong Kong after 1997.
The Chinese interfered a bit. They went back on promises they'd made about the democratic process. But by and large, things weren't too bad, and then it changed, I think, with Xi Jinping and with the sense that at the top of the Communist Party, they were starting to lose their grip in China as a whole.
And Hong Kong, with all its freedoms, represented, I think, for many of them, a sort of existential threat. There were delusions on both sides. First, I'm not absolutely sure that when the Chinese signed up to one country, two systems, they really understood what Hong Kong's system was, the relationship between the rule of law and free economics, the difference between the rule of law and rule by laws.
And I think we were content not to explain it in too great detail to them in case they threw up their hands in horror. I think there was also a delusion that it's automatically, virtually, umbilically, there was a relationship between economic growth and political change or technological change and political change. So that, for example, when China joined the WTO in 2004, Tony Blair said, now China's road to democracy is unstoppable.
And it wasn't only Tony Blair who had that sort of idea that everything would be all right, because economics and growth and prosperity would change everything.
[Nick Fabbri] (37:26 - 37:29)
If you bring China into the liberal international economic order, they'll democratize.
[Lord Patten] (37:29 - 40:47)
I mean, the guy I mentioned earlier, Wang Qishan, was one of the reasons why he came to Oxford was he wanted to see if he could find some correspondence between Alexis de Tocqueville and an academic at All Souls. And he was passionate about this subject because he thought that not de Tocqueville on democracy in America, but de Tocqueville on the Ancien Regime and the French Revolution, which anyone who's read history here has probably read with interest, that that was a lesson for China. Because what it demonstrated was just because people were getting better off, which they were in 18th century France, didn't mean they were going to be easier to govern.
And secondly, that authoritarian regimes were always at their weakest, their most vulnerable, when they tried to change or reform. And I think that became a sort of intellectual underpinning for what Xi Jinping was doing. And there was for a time, a spike in sales of this ancient book by de Tocqueville in China of all places, so the publishers must have been delighted.
But it was compulsory read at the Central Party School. And of course, a lot of what de Tocqueville wrote then is entirely accurate. So I think that we hoped that things would be all right.
And we weren't absolutely, we couldn't be absolutely convinced of that. And we kept our fingers crossed. But I think by and large, we mostly did our best.
And there were some things we could have done better and some things we could have done earlier. But I think that if you go back to that rain sodden night, what I hadn't really realised was the extent to which it wasn't just an important event for Britain, it didn't just represent the end of the British Empire. But people all around the world saw it as the end of the empire.
And I've got a summer place in France. And I went there after we left Hong Kong. And I was walking down the country lane one day about two or three weeks after I'd arrived, taking the dog for a walk.
And I bumped into an old farmer. And we had an exchange in French. And he said, I told him I lived in a local hamlet, told him what the name was.
And he said, Ah, he said, Have you met the great man who's come to live there? So I said, What do you mean? He ran things in Asia.
He said he was very famous. He was the governor of Saigon. And it made me realise how much not just French expropriation, but how much that was the Hong Kong experience was something that so many countries had gone through.
[Nick Fabbri] (40:47 - 41:41)
Yeah, yeah. Fascinating. In your final speech on the night of the handover, you remarked that Britain's contribution to administering Hong Kong was to provide the scaffolding that would allow the people of Hong Kong to ascend with the rule of law, clean and light handed government, the values of a free society, the beginnings of representative government, and democratic accountability in a Chinese city with British characteristics. And so obviously, how do you assess Hong Kong's development since 1997 in light of the CCP's increasing authoritarianism, the national security laws, the repression of democratic protests, beginning with the Yellow Umbrella protests in 2014, the maltreatment of business people like Jimmy Lai and the repression of the church and things?
I mean, that British dream, I suppose, of being quite interesting. Yes, smashed to bits.
[Lord Patten] (41:41 - 46:15)
Although what's left is an idea and the remembrance of what a free election is like, and what an apolitical civil service is like. I mean, the Chinese have in effect established a sort of quizzling government, a tin pot police government. Carrie Lam and all the appointees.
Yeah, and now run by policemen. We used to have a very good police force in Hong Kong. And I see huge numbers of the Hong Kong diaspora.
I spoke recently at Osney Mead here to about 1,000 Hong Kongers who were gathered together by some of the local churches. And they're all doing hugely valuable jobs in the community, paramedics, doctors, teachers, people setting up their own businesses. And again and again, I would say to them, they're all here under the BNO passport scheme.
I would say to them, hasn't it been a wrench leaving Hong Kong? And they said, yes, we've left behind our family. I left a job.
But we wanted our children to grow up in a free society. And it's tragic that what was one of the best examples in the world of the relationship between economic and political freedom, one of the greatest international financial and trading hubs has been throttled by a dictatorship by Chinese communists. And I'll tell you one story which goes to the heart of our dilemma and what's actually happened.
Shortly before I left Hong Kong, I was visiting a mental hospital. And it was being redeveloped. So the wards were all porter cabins with wire fences around them.
And I'm walking down a sort of alley between these porter cabins. And somebody is shaking on the wire and calling for my attention. Governor Patton Pang Ting Hong, can I have a word with you?
So to the horror of my bodyguards and the doctors and the civil servants around me, I went over to talk to him. And he was in a three-piece suit, middle age, probably my age, charming and spoke very good English. He was Chinese.
And he said to me, can I ask you some questions? He said, would you agree that Britain is the oldest democracy in the world? And I said, sometimes people suggest that.
If it's true, we're very proud of it. And he said, would you agree that China is the last great communist tyranny in the world? And I said, well, I'm too diplomatic to say that, but I see what you mean.
And he said, well, can you explain this, Governor Patton? He said, how is it that a free society like Hong Kong is being handed over by a great democracy like Britain to the last great communist tyranny without asking the people at any time what they wanted to happen? And that was the moral and political dilemma that we faced.
And I said afterwards to my officials, it's a terrible, terrible lunacy about the man with the most intelligent question in Hong Kong being a mental hospital. That's quite brilliant. So it's been, being in Hong Kong was not the most difficult job I've ever done.
But the most one of which brought me the greatest pleasure. And with my family, we had a wonderful time in Hong Kong, which is a great city. But it's the thing which I'm now saddest about.
I mean, the other day here, I was talking to a PhD student from Hong Kong, whose parents live here as well now with him. Extremely bright, nice, interesting. And the thought that he's not able to be all those things in Hong Kong now in the city where his parents were born and where he was born is sad.
[Nick Fabbri] (46:15 - 47:09)
Yeah. And going to that sense of, I suppose, historical responsibility, or the debt or ongoing obligation that Britain owes to the people of Hong Kong, given it created this beautiful, prosperous, free, civilian enclave in Hong Kong for so long. This is actually a question that a couple of Hong Kong friends, people, Hong Kongers at the University of Oxford wanted me to ask you.
What realistic hope or room was there for people in Hong Kong to preserve those remaining features of the one country, two systems principle as they knew it, which included those freedom, that prosperity we've talked about? Adding on to that, what does Britain owe Hong Kong ongoingly in terms of visa schemes of people who want to leave, ongoing responsibility to speak out against the worst excesses of the CCP and so on?
[Lord Patten] (47:09 - 54:22)
Well, first of all, one of the things which I think is most important is that the ideas of free society are still embraced by young people, by students not least, who only knew me if they knew me at all, or they didn't when they were in primary school, or perhaps haven't even heard of me at all. So this isn't a plot to undermine Hong Kong's Chineseness. And we were talking earlier about student protest.
The students in Hong Kong were protesting about the way of life. They know what it's like to be beaten up by policemen, tear gassed, hauled off with a policeman hitting you over the head. I can think of at least one case of somebody being killed.
I mean, that's police brutality. And I think that when I think about their heroism and what they were standing up for, it really does make me think that we're very lucky to live in a society like this. So for me, one of the hopeful things is that, as Nelson Mandela said, you can't lock up an idea.
And I think that dictatorships don't have a good history as far as their ability to last is concerned. And I think the things that Hong Kong has represented will survive a lot longer than anybody is prepared to remember the present quizzling government there. But it's a difficult question for me always to answer.
Again and again, I get asked by people, I won't tell you all my favorite anecdotes about this, but students who are here, who've just finished, it happened with four of them, that one of them had just finished his DPhil, the other three had just qualified as doctors. And they said, should we go back to Hong Kong? And what am I to say?
It's extremely difficult. And it's difficult emotionally for me, among other things. Terrific people with a great contribution to make to society.
And unfortunately, an awful lot of them now are having to make that contribution in Australia, in Canada, and here. We're very lucky to have them. And I wish, I hope we'll be as flexible as possible with the BNO passport scheme.
And one thing I feel quite strongly about is that we should treat Hong Kong students from that diaspora like home-based students when it comes to grants and loans and so on. Jimmy Lai, who will be locked up as long as the Chinese communists can keep him locked up. And this is a week when they've also, they're about to, they've locked up or they've found guilty a group of pro-democracy activists who actually thought that it was reasonable to argue in an election, you should hold the government to account and vote against the budget if you didn't like him.
This is taken as being sedition. Holding a primary to decide who is the most electable person in an election, that's taken as sedition. I mean, it's appalling.
But the Jimmy Lai case is pretty open and shut or should be as far as we're concerned. He's a British citizen. He has a British passport.
And the Chinese communist party hates him, hates him for two main reasons. First of all, well, three reasons. First of all, because he was critical of the then Chinese premier Li Peng after Tiananmen, after the murders in Tiananmen Square.
Secondly, because Jimmy Lai represents what two-thirds of the population of Hong Kong, maybe three-quarters. He's a refugee from communism. He stowed away to get out of China during the Cultural Revolution.
He's a fantastically successful entrepreneur. His first business, which was in retail, was closed down by the Chinese on spurious grounds because he'd been critical of the Tiananmen Square massacres. He started a new media enterprise with the most popular Chinese language newspaper in Hong Kong, which they hated because he supported democracy.
He supported the things which he thought had helped him to survive and thrive. And they hate him, finally, because he had the guts to stay, because he didn't want to leave Hong Kong when it was plainly going to be in some difficulty. He thought he should stay and continue to argue for what had made Hong Kong so special.
And they hate that. And we should be speaking out more about him. I've just signed yet another letter to foreign secretaries and to other people.
We have to run as effective a lobby of that as possible. And the British government have to forget about the so-called golden age of relations with China, which was a humiliation when they were starting to prepare to turn the screws in Hong Kong. We have to actually speak out and not lose our self-esteem and recognize things as they are.
Of course, we have to have a China. But we should do so while understanding that China is a threat. It's a threat to our internal political system.
It's a threat to our well-being around the world. Only recently, the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office is being charged, or one of the chaps who works for it, is being charged. Of course, it'll have to be decided in an open court, and we'll see what happens, for running a fund to help the spying on and the espionage and the surveillance of Chinese, Hong Kong, and other people of the diaspora.
[Nick Fabbri] (54:22 - 54:32)
The same thing happens in Australia, actually, as well, with the persecution. And it's not, we're not threatening China.
[Lord Patten] (54:32 - 54:33)
It's China threatening us.
[Nick Fabbri] (54:34 - 55:30)
Indeed, yeah. And I suppose my final question on this subject of the security dimensions in the Indo-Pacific, really, I think are kind of microcosmically represented in the major changes in Hong Kong, experienced really in 2019-2020 with the national security laws and the tightening up of the legislature, etc. But given this kind of CCP mythology, I suppose, about Han nationalism, Han supremacy, the way in which that manifests in the repression of the Tibetans, Xinjiang, Hong Kong.
I'm increasingly concerned as an Australian, obviously, about the saber-rattling in the Taiwan Strait. And do you think that this, obviously, the Hong Kong model might be presaging what might happen in Taiwan, whether we're trying to actually try to preemptively take it, given the narrowed window of opportunity with the war in Ukraine and the Middle East, as well?
[Lord Patten] (55:31 - 59:10)
Well, it would, of course, be insane for China to do it, because it would wreck the Chinese economy, comprehensively. All sorts of, I mean, not just withdrawal of investment and so on, but if you think about the costs of insurance for taking exports out of China or imports into China through the Taiwan Straits, if there was a war or if there was more military activity, it seems to me that one has to believe that at the end of the day, as vicars tend to say, Xi Jinping and his acolytes, his gang, will understand what the consequences would be of starting a war over Taiwan. The dangers are, I think, which some of our spooks and ex-spooks point to. And there are people who would have said five years ago that there was only maybe two chances in 10 of there being a war over Taiwan.
They put it now higher, sort of five or six. And that is, I think, for this reason. The Chinese Communist Party's moral authority, if that's not using the words incorrectly, has come from being able to say to people in China, you're getting better off.
The deal that they've offered is you stay out of politics and we'll make you better off. And if that stops to happen, then they have to find other ways in which they can keep the public on side. And what we can see is that the Chinese economy is now post-peak.
Combined with demographic collapse. Demographic collapse. I mean, one of the things which always, I think, is most worrying for the Chinese demography is the gender imbalance, which gets bigger and bigger as you go down the ages.
So from 10 to 20, the gender imbalance is now about 16% between boys and girls, which has huge consequences for the future, let alone the aging of the population and the decline in the awful phrase economically active. But somebody who's brilliant on describing wholly and rationally without being polemical is George Magnus, who's one of the economic experts, greatest ones on China and works here for part of the time at our China school in St. Hugh's. So I really do think that there is a danger that as people in China cease to be able to see the middle class dream, cease to be able to see the chance of breaking out of what's called the middle income trap as a country, have to face up to more interference in their lives politically and not much coming out the other end in terms of economic well-being, that the government will see the advantages in trying to whip up nationalist frenzy about Taiwan.
[Nick Fabbri] (59:10 - 59:18)
And also clamp down domestically in terms of domestic security with its dystopian techno kind of surveillance.
[Lord Patten] (59:18 - 59:51)
It's the surveillance, the surveillance state. It's one of the reasons why we were obviously right to turn down collaboration with Huawei long before the government was doing it. So people sometimes question whether we are aware of our responsibilities when it comes to investment and so on.
Well, that's a very good example of just how aware we are. Oxford turned down collaboration with Huawei before the government actually banned it. Yep.
Everybody thought it was me. It wasn't me at all. It was decided by the group of academics.
[Nick Fabbri] (59:51 - 1:00:36)
Yeah. Okay. That's fascinating.
And Australia obviously led the charge, I think, with the government actually refusing to cooperate with Huawei too and introducing it into our national infrastructure for that exact reason. Scott, conscious of your time, so we've got one question on politics before we wrap up. We're coming to what looks like the end 14 years of Tory rule in Britain, with the polls showing a thumping Labour victory in the works on 4 July.
The country seems to be distressed and disillusioned, notwithstanding the shocks of Brexit and COVID-19 with rail strikes, anemic economic growth outside London, and anxiety about migration and Britain's place in the world post-Brexit. So how do you assess the legacy of the past 14 years of conservative government in Britain?
[Lord Patten] (1:00:38 - 1:06:51)
Pretty indifferent at best. I mean, whichever way you look at the economic figures, they're pretty bad. I was reading an article the other day which pointed out that wage growth in Britain in the last...
Well, since the 2008 financial crash, so right through this period of conservative government had been lower than at any time since the Napoleonic Wars. So I think the economic legacy is pretty bad. And what's depressing is that we're so reluctant to face up to what is one of the main reasons, perfectly reasonable for the government to say, we had to deal with the coronavirus.
It's perfectly reasonable for them to say, well, we know we're having to deal with the consequences of a European war. Fine. What they refuse to say, nobody will own up to it, is that Brexit was a bloody disaster.
And Brexit was an attempt, a foolish attempt, to use a referendum to quieten the conservative party over our relationship with Europe. And the government thought they'd be able to deal with that. And for a variety of reasons, I mean, I talked about some of them in a lecture the other night, the Dorothy Roe lecture at Magdalene.
For a variety of reasons, our relationship with Europe poisoned British politics. I don't think it was Europe's fault. It was a fault of extremists, not least in the conservative party.
And today, to have an election campaign in which nobody's allowed to talk about Brexit, the fact that it must have taken five or more percent of our GDP, the fact that there is nothing, nothing somebody who is in favor of Brexit can do if she or he is elected to parliament this summer, nothing in any of them could do as MPs in five, 50 years, which will make up for what we've lost by being outside the European Union. You've cut yourself off from your main market.
Absolutely. But also, it's had a it's had a toxic effect on our politics. I mean, what sort of party chooses a moral vacuum to be Prime Minister Boris Johnson?
What sort of party then chooses Liz Truss, an ideological lightweight at best, and pretty incompetent? What sort of party does that? And then to lecture Oxford about the way where the university and it's all its thousands of alumni will choose my successor.
So the conservative party's been only good at doing this. We've got a Prime Minister at the moment who is, I'm sure, well-meaning. He's clever.
He, I'm sure, does his best. I think he's politically pretty tone deaf. But he has been a supporter of the two most disastrous decisions since Suez, as far as Britain is concerned.
Brexit. He was arguing for Brexit when he was a school boy. Sunak.
Sunak. And the other is he supported Boris Johnson for the leadership of the Conservative Party. I've only met him once in a television studio.
And he was arguing in favour of Boris becoming Prime Minister. And I was arguing against on the grounds which I've just suggested. So I sympathise with some of the problems that he has to face with.
But a lot of them are the consequences of things that he has helped to do. And I think what's depressing about the election campaign is that it's turned into an exchange of attempted bribes by the parties with money which everybody knows they don't actually have. You cannot go on promising better public services with no effect on taxation.
It's drivel. And I think people know it's drivel. At the same time, you can't go on pretending we can solve the political problems we have, which are huge, without trying to collaborate.
And one of the obvious areas there is about university finances. Universities are going bust. We should be able to collaborate over social care for the elderly.
We should be able to collaborate about how we can, without going back into the European Union, that's not going to happen in my lifetime. I mean, certainly not in my lifetime. I'm 80.
So that's not going to happen. But there should be ways in which we can collaborate to have a better, a stronger relationship with the European Union and without being terrified of tabloid headlines. I mean, Sistema was being criticized the other day because in his choice of favorite classical music, and he was a very good musician himself, his favorite piece of music was Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, Ode to Joy and all that.
The European anthem. So immediately, two or three of the tabloids said, this just shows he was feeble on Europe. He wouldn't stand up to Europe.
I mean, it's such awful drivel, and we shouldn't take any notice of it.
[Nick Fabbri] (1:06:52 - 1:07:37)
So looking forward, just a final, final question, if we've got two minutes, but looking forward, you were elected as the Conservative member for Bath in 1979 with the election of the Thatcher government. The terrain of right-of-center parties has changed dramatically since those days of Thatcher and Reagan, with the rise of Trumpism in the United States, the radical right, and often increasing authoritarian and demagogic and isolationist expressions of conservatism across Europe and even in the UK. Farage and reform and so on.
So is this the future of the right from the baseline we're at today? Or do you think it's possible to sort of see a kind of conservative resurgimento or like reorganization of the 1980s conservative consensus to tackle some of those policy problems you've identified we're facing today?
[Lord Patten] (1:07:37 - 1:10:50)
Unless there's that, the Conservative Party, which calls itself the Conservative Party, even though it's not really conservative, unless that happens, then conservatives will be in opposition for years and will become increasingly irrelevant as populism becomes, I hope, increasingly irrelevant as it's seen as being a threat to liberal and open societies. So I think either the Conservative Party has to recognize that for conservatives to do things like attack the courts, which is unimaginable, for conservatives not to understand the importance of institutional constraints on majoritarianism, for conservatives not to understand the importance of balance in our policies, for conservatives not to understand those things and to know nothing about our history is pathetic and self-defeating.
And there's something else which I always wanted to write a book about and didn't. One of the tragedies of the post-war period was that Harold Macmillan, my predecessor, but one, and Rab Butler didn't get on. Harold Macmillan thought that Rab had been an appeaser and Rab didn't like Macmillan's style.
Actually, Macmillan was terrific and extraordinarily brave in both world wars and at other times. And Rab was, I think, the wisest policymaker able to transfer ideas into legislation and action, like the 1944 Education Act. He was a great chancellor of Exchequer.
He was a great liberal home secretary. And a friend of mine who I worked with was once helping him with a speech at his home in Essex. And at the end of the morning, Rab went out into the garden to pick some flowers for my friend's wife because he'd been away all morning.
And as he was cutting the flowers, my friend said to him, what's the most important lesson you learned in politics? And Rab said, oh, that's easy, he said. It's more important to be generous than efficient.
And there are all sorts of ways you can look at that. It's not literally true, but I know exactly what he meant. And when the Conservative Party forgets that, they're scummed.
[Nick Fabbri] (1:10:51 - 1:11:11)
Well, I hope you go on to write that book. Lord Patten, thank you so much for your time today. It's been an absolute pleasure speaking with you about a very wide and interesting range of topics.
And on behalf of all of us here at the Master of Public Policy at the Blufatnick School of Government, thank you for your remarkable 21 years of service as Chancellor of Oxford University. Thank you.
[Lord Patten] (1:11:12 - 1:11:13)
Thanks very much indeed.