Hong Kong needs its leaders to lead, for once, or protests will continue

The campuses of Hong Kong's universities are peppered with faculty buildings that bear the names of their generous sponsors, mostly prosperous business tycoons and their heirs and successors. It is sobering to reflect - in the wake of the extraordinary events of the past few weeks - that while huge donations can pay for the bricks and mortar of these splendid edifices, they cannot buy the hearts and minds of the students they were designed to serve.

The street protests of the "umbrella movement" may have been triggered by the August 31 decision of the National People's Congress Standing Committee, but the social pressures that have led to this eruption of anger and defiance of authority have been building for years. The students are fighting for their future, a future they see threatened by a steady erosion of "one country, two systems" and the core values and freedoms it is intended to preserve; a future in which their job prospects are being diminished and their ability to rent or buy a decent roof over their head becoming increasingly remote.

Those of us in the older generation should feel ashamed that the best and brightest of our young people feel so disaffected and marginalised that they have lost all respect for the government and the business elites and vested interests that underpin it. Instead of intoning endlessly about how they are breaking the law, we should be asking ourselves what has driven them to this extreme course of action and what we might have done to prevent it.

One thing of which I am certain: these protests are home-grown. The suggestion that they have been instigated and orchestrated by clandestine and so far unnamed "external forces" would be laughable if it wasn't so insulting to the intelligence and integrity of the demonstrators and so clearly being used to distract attention from genuine grievances. Frankly, only those with their heads totally in the clouds - possibly as a result of spending too much time in their penthouse offices - could be so profoundly out of touch with the feelings of the average man and woman on the street.

The sad fact, as reflected in results of a recent Chinese University public opinion poll, is that Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying's administration has lost all moral authority to govern. Brazen manipulation of the outcome of the public consultation exercise on constitutional reform has been compounded by a complete failure to foresee that dashing people's aspirations for the genuinely democratic election of their next head of government in 2017 would be the straw that breaks the camel's back.

Now, in the face of the most serious social crisis since the handover, Leung and his top officials are reduced to standing helplessly on the sidelines, apparently waiting for instructions from Beijing on what to do next. At this most challenging time, Hong Kong people crave leadership, but it is nowhere to be found. Only the government can break the impasse by setting out the way forward clearly and unequivocally.

First, Chief Secretary Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor must affirm the government's willingness (hinted at during the televised discussion with the student leaders) to prepare a supplementary report for submission to the NPC, setting out the reasons why there is so much public dissatisfaction with the Standing Committee's decisions. Among other things, it should specifically acknowledge the strong body of public opinion in favour of the complete abolition of functional constituencies by 2020 and the consequent importance of making interim changes to the system of functional constituency elections to the Legislative Council in 2016.