It is only just over four years since the crisis surrounding Regina Ip Lau Suk-yee's proposed national security legislation brought half a million people on to the street to protest, and Mrs Ip resigned and left Hong Kong. Now that she has returned and is running for election, she has given a half-hearted apology for her handling of the Article 23 proposal while, at the same time, claiming that most of her critics did not read it and that the details were not so bad.
I spent a lot of 2003 reading and discussing Mrs Ip's proposals. The truth is that the devil was in the details. Only on close reading did their frightening nature emerge.
Mrs Ip was right to say that part of the law looked no worse than the colonial laws on treason and sedition which it would have replaced. However, the old colonial laws had to be read subject to the modern human rights provisions in the Basic Law. Hong Kong's last treason prosecution, of George Wong in 1946 for betraying to the Japanese secret police several people whom they tortured to death, may have complied with those standards. The last sedition prosecution, of Fei Yi-ming and Lee Tsung-ying in 1952, almost certainly did not, and could not be carried out in the same way today.
However, it was not the repetition of parts of the colonial laws which generated alarm. It was the inclusion of new provisions with no colonial counterpart. These included new offences of 'secession' and 'subversion' - well known instruments of oppression on the mainland, but previously unknown to Hong Kong law.
'Secession' and 'subversion' were there because they are referred to in Article 23 of the Basic Law. That is not much of a justification, since Article 23 - widely believed to have been inserted as a late reaction to events in Beijing in 1989 - is itself a breach of the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration, which was supposed to guarantee Hong Kong freedoms after 1997.
The two worst provisions in Mrs Ip's bill did not even have the justification of being required by Article 23.
The first gave the power to ban any Hong Kong organisation which had ever given money to a mainland organisation, if the mainland group was declared subversive by Beijing. Such a declaration was to be conclusive as to the subversive nature of the organisation.