"What did the Prime Minister's trip achieve for Jimmy Lai?"
1. What has Ms Badenoch achieved for me?
2. Mr Lai Chee-ying (Jimmy Lai) is a British-Hong Kong businessman and politician, his business interests
include a newspaper and other media. He is a critic of the China Communist Party and was arrested in 2020 for
breaching the National Security Law of 2020. He was subsequently charged with further offences, including organising
illegal protests. He has been convicted of at least some of those offences. He is detained in solitary confinement.
(i). Article 35 of the Constitution of the People's Republic of China (1982) guarantees citizens freedom of
speech, press, assembly, association, procession, and demonstration.
(ii). Mr Lai may have breached the laws on national security and organising illegal protests; I am not familiar
with the particulars of his case.
(a). if Mr Lai merely exercised his right to free speech, assembly, demonstration, etc., of course he should
not have been detained in the first place.
(iii). Mr Lai knew, when he engaged in the actions that led to his arrest, that what he was doing would very
likely produce such consequences as it did.
3. I am an ordinary, inoffensive man who was quietly going about his life when, for no reason I can divine,
the resources of the state appear to have been levied against me:
(i). I am detained in defiance of all our national laws and defiance of international conventions to which we
are signatory.
(ii). the judiciary has sanctioned my detention and its continuance through unlawful decisions
(iii). Prime Ministers, Secretaries of State for Justice and other authorities have countenanced my unlawful
detention when they could have ended it at any moment and
(iv). I am mistreated routinely and appear to be subjected to unlawful surveillance.
4. At worst, the lesson of Mr Lai might be that in China, today, a person may be detained for political
expression.
(i). The lesson of my case is that, in the United Kingdom, today, a person cannot know what might land him in
very serious trouble with the authorities, occasion his detention for more than ten years, incessant mistreatment of
him and several attempts on his life, all countenanced by each member of Parliament, including Ms Badenoch.
5. For Ms Badenoch or any other politician to criticise China for Mr Lai's detention is extremely duplicitous,
and insulting even to the point of hostility. Even if China is not aware of my case, common decency would prevent a
person from doing so while ignoring a case such as mine.
6. No one should be bereft of his freedom to think (mine has been under attack for over a decade), freely to
express himself and to associate and properly to express his displeasure at the authorities. If anyone thinks the
Chinese or anyone else has engaged such fundamental freedoms, it is right they speak for these Rights.
(i). The correct way to do so would be for a person first to live those values himself and to observe them at
home and then, afterwards, respectfully to discuss such cases as he is moved to discuss. Such an approach might be
more successful.
(ii). Ms Badenoch has chosen to countenance a case more egregious than that of Mr Lai, in South Yorkshire, and
to hector the Chinese on the treatment of Mr Lai in Hong Kong. It is easy to see how this could be considered a
grievous insult, an act of open hostility and would be unlikely to be productive.
7. If