Don’t let China’s climate sins cloak its crushing of Hong Kong

China’s failure to bring anything new to COP26 surprised no one. The world’s worst carbon emitter offered no advance on President Xi Jinping’s earlier promise to reduce coal use after 2025 and bring overall emissions to a peak in 2030 — thereby negating for at least a decade much of the rest of the world’s efforts to clean up the planet. But spotlighting China as a climate sinner should not be allowed to cloak its other villainhood, as an abuser of human rights: so let’s not forget Hong Kong.

The fate of the once-British enclave and its future as an international business centre have been much on my mind lately. At an Oxford garden party, the former governor Chris Patten recalled my 1995 interview with him for The Spectator: ‘I told you so’ would be a fair summary of his view on China’s imposition of its ‘national security law’, crushing protest and local democracy today.