Sure, I'm not saying it's "free and fair elections", but it had a functioning, western-style court system, a level of free speech recognizable to any part of the west, things like that.

And given that the UK itself has most of these things, I highly doubt they'd arbitrarily deny them to a dependent territory without good reason (especially when their other territories all have some measure of representative government). Other comments describing Chinese threats provide one possible good reason.