Mayoral election (1)

Finally, I witnessed the city’s historic election of her leader by universal suffrage!

  No, unfortunately I am not talking about my home of Hong Kong, where we are still clamouring for full democracy (about which I am quite pessimistic). I am in Bristol, the largest city in Southwest England. The first directly elected mayor here was inaugurated this Monday.

  For those wondering how come Bristolians had never elected a mayor by ‘one person, one vote’ before, let me explain a bit here. Currently English city governments are run under two different systems, the council leader model and the elected mayor model. While the name of London mayor Boris Johnson has been familiar to outsiders, not every city in this country has a Boris Johnson. A council leader, which Bristol used to have and some other cities still keep, is elected among city councillors, who are popularly elected by the cities’ voters. A mayor, in contrast, is directly elected by the general public.

  One may wonder: Who would reject the right to choose the person running his/her city when such a right is available to him/her? Interestingly, voters in nine out of the ten English cities which held referendums this May on whether to replace the council leader system with the mayoral system said NO.

  Bristolians were unique. They were the ONLY ones to opt for the change pushed forward by Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron in the May referendums.

The other nine cities were Birmingham, Bradford, Coventry, Leeds, Manchester, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Nottingham, Sheffield and Wakefield.

  By now do you imagine Bristolians as politically enthusiastic and passionately about voting? Intriguingly, this does not seem to be the story told by voter turnouts. Only 24% of voters here cast their ballots in the referendum, with 53% of them saying yes. This effectively meant the city’s move towards a mayoral system was brought about by the wish of just 13% of the electorate.

  Also paradoxically, merely 28% of voters exercised their new right to choose the candidate despite it sounds exciting, at least on the surface, that people here could directly choose their political leader for the first time…  (To be continued)

Remembrance Day

For someone who was born in an epoch and a place of peace like me, the concept of war is remote.

The Remembrance Day, a day widely observed in Britain, alerted me that wars were in fact not so far. In the past two weeks people in the streets were seen wearing poppies on their lapels, while troops from this country were fighting in Afghanistan and some might be sent to Syria in the near future.

On Remembrance Sunday I happened to read two newspaper articles from different parts of the world, which together caught my attention. One was a piece by British Prime Minister David Cameron published in the Daily Telegraph, giving a sentimental narration of his past visit to a battlefield, followed by his administration’s plans to commemoration of the 100^th anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War and pledges to improve the welfare of servicemen and veterans. He wrote,

  "Remembrance Sunday is a time not just to look back, but forward too – to what more we can do for those who serve in our Armed Forces today, and for our veterans. This government has taken the Military Covenant – which was frankly gathering dust on the shelf – and made it something meaningful, writing its principles into the law of the land."

  A voice from my home city of Hong Kong, which appears to have nothing to do with wars at present, emerged in the local Apple Daily on exactly the same day. It was a story about a retired British-Chinese soldier’s recent visit to London to lobby Members of the Parliament on his peers’ right of abode in the United Kingdom. Some of his fellow former servicemen had taken part in the Korean War and some had been sent to Cyprus to join the UN’s peacekeeping force, all under British Crown, but only those of higher ranks were given right of abode in the UK after HK’s handover to China.

  “Now hardly anyone knows of our existence,” said the campaigner. What would he to the Prime Minister had they met on this trip?

  Feeling even closer, since I came to Bristol I have met a retired nurse who worked in the British army in HK in the 1960s, and the granddaughter of a Canadian veteran who had fought to defend my city in the Second World War. These all make the Remembrance Day more meaningful to me.

On studies (2)

So in the second Research Methods lecture someone told our professor that he could not find any of copy of the book on the “required reading” list in the library shelf because all had been checked out. I had a hard time looking for it too and realized that the library had seven copies of that book while there were some 50 students in my class, not to mention those doing similar programmes who might also need that book. Our lecturer's response to this problem was that he could not make photocopies for us due to copyright laws. He told us we really needed to compete with one another for the books and that looking for reading materials was part of our training!

Fortunately the book fight did not last long. After some panicking in the second week, I went to the library earlier to look for the books for the third week. Not every book on our reading lists was there but at least I managed to find some. And as the programme proceeded, book availability improved! I realized that it was just impossible to do all the reading on the lists of the three courses and one lecturer assured me that we did not actually have to read them all. So I reset my target to covering some reading materials of each the three courses every week, instead of unrealistically expecting myself to read all of them given the limited amount of time. I also realized that some reading items in fact had duplicating content so there could actually be some strategy to skip through. Another way to get around the book fight was to read eJournals instead of paper books. It did not only make access to academic materials easier but also saved me from carrying loads to and from the library every day!

Given the book fight at the beginning, one would think the whole class was really enthusiastic with doing all the reading required by the lecturers. Quite the contrary it did not seem to be the case. Well, at least not for the Research Methods class. When our lecturer asked on a later class how many had read the required articles for the discussion topic on that day, only a few raised their hands. Chitchats outside of the classroom confirmed that many of my colleagues were not withholding their hands out of shyness but had really not read the book chapters. That made me relieved… I am not suggesting that I don’t have to study if others don’t. In fact on a few occasions I felt irritated by those who did not do any reading yet then complained while walking out from the classroom that he or she did not understand anything in the lecture. (Sorry if this sentence offends anyone but since this is my personal blog I reserve my right to be candid here) However, learning that I was not in a peer group with everyone super studious did relieve me from unnecessary competitive pressure and enable me to study in a relaxed manner on my own pace.

  Upon the brilliant suggestion by one colleague, four of us formed a reading group which meets every Friday. A fifth member later joined. It was set up because we found it would be useful to divide reading among ourselves and exchange what we have learnt from different articles with one another as it was impossible for each of us to cover all the necessary materials for the class (not to mention “extra-curricular” reading). At first I hesitated a bit, worrying it might be inflexible. But the first meeting proved it was extremely rewarding and had exceeded my expectation. With colleagues from different countries - Korea, China, Pakistan and Mexico, chemistry was generated as each of us contributed not only what we had read but also what we had seen in our parts of the world.

Back to the question of whether my programme was “too relaxing”, I must firmly tell those who hold such suspicion that there is never a “too relaxing” learning opportunity. I buy the idea of what I’d call the adult mode of learning. Everyone is free to choose the style and pace of learning which best suits him/herself and is responsible for his/her own work. How much each person gets out of the university, I believe, is the choice of each individual and there is no point to pack grown-ups’ schedules with heaps of classes, tests and exams to ensure they “study” as schoolchildren do. Next time when someone asks me whether my study is busy, I will probably say, “Yes and no”.

On studies (1)

  I have classes only on Monday and Wednesday mornings and the whole days of Tuesdays. That translates into 8.5 hours per week. I say “only” because the class hours are short compared with other programmes in the university, and compared with what many of my friends and I would expect.

Upon hearing this you may find my masters programme very relaxing, or TOO relaxing. One can procrastinate or play a lot. One can spend a great deal of time on a part-time job. One can travel frequently even during term time. Etc, etc. Indeed I once thought before formal classes began that I could make occasional short trips using my consecutive days off from Thursday to Sunday (four days!) and that I could do quite some freelance journalistic work. I totally disbelieved it when our lecturer told us in Week Zero that we had to do the course as a 35-hour-per-week full-time job. (I worked far more than 35 hours per week when I had a full-time job!) But upon receiving the reading lists in Week One I found the workload was in fact much more than what it had appeared!

 

Every alumnus told me “Don’t study too hard” and even our lecturer told us not to read the two articles when she dispensed the photocopies to us in Week Zero. “Just relax and don’t worry about reading anything. I don’t expect you to know anything when you come to the first lecture,” she said. Out of curiosity I did read those two articles (which were planned for discussion in later parts of the term) before the first class, finding them extremely abstract. But I didn’t check the reading list for Week One. Then after the first week of lectures and seminars I suddenly discovered that we were supposed to do the readings for Week Two before the second lectures and classes of each unit - which effectively meant I had lagged behind the timetable for Week One readings! Suddenly I had to catch up with two weeks of reading within a few days. But what was even scarier was that when I went to the university library to look for the books on my reading list, I discovered that the majority of the copies were checked out. So do all my colleagues study so hard that I am the last one to reach the bookshelves? I can’t quite believe I’m the laziest among a class of 50 people… (To be continued)