Political career
Apart from his business interests, Landale was appointed an unofficial member of the Executive Council, from 1946 to 1951, and the senior unofficial member of the Legislative Council, from 1946 to 1950, by the Hong Kong government, being one of the first unofficial members appointed when civilian government resumed after the war in May 1946. As an active critic of the government, he openly criticised the government in the Legislative Council meetings for a number of times, such as to blame the government for the perfunctory way it compiled the annual Budget and for its failure to maintain effective communication between Hong Kong and Whitehall in London, of which he thought was a key factor to achieve good governance. In 1947, the government started to require an increase in the extent of developments on some of the Rural Buildings Lots in offering re-grants to landowners, as a measure to cope with the influx of refugees from mainland China and the housing shortage. The measure was complained by Landale as oppressive to the landowners due to the higher construction costs that they had to bear.
Besides, Landale was one of the leading businessmen in the colony who repeatedly opposed the introduction of income tax. As early as during the Second World War, the government proposed for the introduction of the tax to support the British war effort in Europe and to subsidise the local defence budget. Landale was one of the members who were appointed to the War Revenue Committee by the government in October 1939, which was tasked to offer advice on the proposed new tax. The Committee later submitted its report in February 1940 in which Landale and other members expressed strong reservations about the tax proposal. Despite their reservations, the government eventually managed to secure the support of the Committee to introduce the income tax in April 1940, having promised that the tax, as an interim measure to generate war revenue, would be repealed after the war. Ironically, although the government did repeal the tax after the war as promised, the tax was soon re-introduced in 1947, a move which was strongly opposed by Landale and other unofficial members of the Legislative Council. In response to the tax proposal, Landale requested that it should be put on hold for a year to have sufficient time for further review, but his request was turned down by the government. After heated debates, the bill to reintroduce the tax was read a third time and was passed in the Legislative Council in May 1947, notwithstanding that it was rarely voted against by three unofficial members, namely Chau Tsun-nin, Chau Sik-nin and Leo d'Almada e Castro. Landale, however, was compelled to vote for the Bill during the division.
Landale also took part in the debates on the "Young Plan" during his service in the two Councils. The plan was named after the Governor of Hong Kong Sir Mark Young, who unveiled it in 1946. One of the major proposals as recommended in the plan was to establish a Municipal Council that would have a certain number of elected seats. Nevertheless, as the public opinion at the time could not agree on the breadth and depth of the constitutional reform, the plan was stalled for more than two years. It was already March 1949 when Landale moved a motion in the Legislative Council to revive the debate on the "Young Plan". In the debate, he criticised the government for deliberately slowing down the pace of constitutional reform. He described the government as the "Dormouse", a character in the novel Alice in Wonderland, which would wake up to disclose a little bit more about the whole story only when the "Hatter" pours hot tea upon its nose. Landale agreed that constitutional reform was needed for Hong Kong, but instead of supporting the "Young Plan", he believed that reforming the Legislative Council would be a more practical alternative than setting up the Municipal Council. In June the same year, another unofficial member of the Legislative Council, Lo Man-kam, proposed his own reform plan, in which he argued that there should be more unofficial seats in the Legislative Council and some of these seats should be elected. This plan gained the support of all the unofficial members, who had by that time already made themselves clear that they opposed the "Young Plan". Yet, having considered the regional instability and the lukewarm response from the general public, Young's successor, Sir Alexander Grantham, concluded that it was not an appropriate time to implement the reform plan. He particularly feared that Hong Kong would be drawn into the political row between the Chinese Communist Party and the Kuomintang if there was a constitutional reform. Finally, the British government told the Parliament in October 1952 that except for increasing the number of elected seats in the Urban Council, no major constitutional reform would take place in Hong Kong.
