“My experience of developments in Asia has led me to conclude we need good men to have good government. However good the system of government, bad leaders will bring harm to their people…The single decisive factor that made for Singapore’s development was the ability of its ministers and the high quality of the civil servants who supported them.” – Lee Kuan Yew
Few leaders in post-war history are as impressive as Lee Kuan Yew. In the space of a single generation, as Singapore’s Prime Minister from 1959 to 1990, he took a former British colony forced out of a union with Malaysia by ethnic tensions from the third world to the first. “A nation is not great by its size alone”, he once explained. As leader of his tiny city-state, he proved that.
I have recently had the pleasure of visiting Singapore. Having never previously made it further east than Salzburg – despite, rather incongruously, being a member of the Oriental Club – it was an enjoyable opportunity to see, up close, a country that so often plays a walk-on role in our political discussions. Just this week, Wes Streeting once again sang the praises of the island’s health service.
The most common guise in which the city-state crops in British public life is in the semi-mythical context of ‘Singapore-on-Thames’. During the Brexit years, this became an easy shorthand for a vision of Britain’s future as laissez-faire, low-tax, and free-trading off the coast of a declining and sluggish Europe. A soggy little island transformed into a poster child for prosperity? Bring it on!
Daniel Hannan made this case for us back in 2017. In 1950, the United Kingdom was roughly twice as rich as Singapore per head. By 2016, this position had reversed. Life expectancy had risen from 66 to 83; Britain’s only 71 to 81. As Hannan put it, “rich and poor Singaporeans are respectively better off than their British counterparts”. There’s nothing more galling than being bested by an ex.
My good chum James Vitali has more impressive stats in his latest Policy Exchange paper. From 1960 to 2022, per capita GDP increased by nearly 1800 per cent, compared to 200 per cent in the UK. It now has the fourth-highest GDP per capita in the world. Inflation averaged 2.5 per cent between 1961 and 2022, compared to 5.2 per cent in Britain. Homeownership sits at 93 per cent.
The good news doesn’t stop there. Singapore has had as many Prime Ministers in six decades as we have had in two years. It manages and integrates a multi-ethnic population with a level of stability most European nations can only envy. It runs a habitual budget surplus, keeps government spending at a third of UK levels, and keeps taxes below 15 per cent of GDP. What’s not to love?
Yet there is a great difference between coveting thy neighbour’s productivity statistics from halfway around the world, and seeing what they add up to in practice. Accordingly, I was very grateful to spend several days touring the island, meeting with interesting and informed parties, and familiarising myself with the essentials, from its underground network to its karaoke bars.
What did I think? Highly impressed. It is as clean and well-run as stereotypes would have it. The National Museum has a refreshing honesty about the benefits of imperial rule one would struggle to find in any British establishment today. It has a palpable sense of wealth found over here only in the richest parts of London. They even have Nando’s – a sign, quite clearly, of a civilised people.
Yet whilst I immediately admired the nation and its tangible achievements, I was also struck by just how alien it is. Partly, this is because I am a stereotypical Englishman abroad. I insisted on wearing three layers in thirty-degree heat, showed scepticism towards local food, and longed for a pint. But it was also the experience of being confronted with a wholly different political culture.
As with our American ‘cousins’, a shared language provides an illusionary veener of similarity. As a former colony, Singapore has a parliament, judiciary, and civil service modelled upon our own. Unlike in Britain, the same party – the People’s Action Party – has remained in power since independence. Regular elections are combined with a zealous intolerance of any form of corruption.
What this manifests itself as is a governing culture of technocratic excellence. “Underpaid ministers and public officials have ruined many governments in Asia”, Lee warned. Singapore resists that trend by ensuring that its ruling class is well-renumerated, and that it has the training and talent to match its reward. The quality of their politicians puts many British MPs and ministers to shame.
Single-party rule has ensured a degree of political stability that Tim Shipman could only dream of. Politicians also have an overwhelming focus on the national interest. Sixty years on from independence, and there is still a sense that Singapore – for all its success – is a small island with the world against it. Imagine if British politics was stuck in the summer of 1940. It’s not too hard.
The first question for any minister is what is best for Singapore, not what appeases an ideology or stakeholder group. As such, the ‘Singapore-on-Thames’ vision of a libertarian paradise is inaccurate. Taxes and tariffs may be low, but the government is highly interventionist. Homeownership rates rely on 90 per cent of land being owned by the state and mass public housebuilding.
More Harold Macmillan than Margaret Thatcher. Singapore’s government has also rigorously promoted how society should be structured. Few Conservatives would be unhappy with the state suggesting the importance of family. But a few at the wetter end of the party might be uncomfortable with the bracingly high levels of public support for corporal and capital punishment.
Singapore also offers less to Britain in guidance on managing multi-racialism than one expects. 76 per cent of citizens and permanent residents are ethnic Chinese, with ethnic Malay and Indians comprising another 15 and 7.5 per cent. By contrast, England and Wales are 74 per cent white British, 9 per cent Asian, 6 per cent white ‘other’, 4 per cent black, and 5 per cent mixed or other.
Considering Michaela academy’s recent travails, parallels have been drawn between Katharine Birbalsingh’s cask strength secularism and Singapore’s system of multiculturalism. Freedoms to criticise religions or live where one chooses are curtailed to prevent a repeat of the inter-ethnic conflict that marred its early history. Does multi-racial Britain require something similar?
Not only would such an approach challenge the relaxed liberalism with which we have previously integrated ethnic and religious minorities but avoids a crucial component of Singapore’s success: low immigration. For sixty years, Singapore’s demographic balance has been kept consciously stable. Simultaneously, Britain has gone from being overwhelmingly white to strongly diverse.
Mapping Singaporean solutions onto a British context also contends with the basic problem that, unlike Britain, Singapore is really, really small – half the size of London – with a population less than a tenth of the size. This not only makes policing, infrastructure construction, and travel much easier, but helps maintain that quintessential sense of both national identity and existential threat.
As such, admirable as Singapore is, the more one learns about it, the harder one finds identifiable the copy-and-paste solutions Streeting et al are looking for. The country has a refreshing approach to the fundamentals of government that we lack. God knows Britain could do with a Lee Kuan Yew. Improving the quality of people in our public life is the greatest challenge of our age.
Nonetheless, even if I found less immediately imitable from the Singaporean model than I had expected, there is one of Lee’s initiatives that Conservatives this side of Eurasia should adopt right away. He took an active role in transforming Singapore into a garden city. Everywhere you go, there are trees, flowers, and vegetation. The island is like one big, wonderful greenhouse.
One understands that Susan Hall’s chances of being elected as London Mayor are hardly high. But if she has won come May 3rd, she should make it her mission to revive a pet project of the last Conservative Mayor that found itself waylaid by Sadiq Khan’s spiteful penny-pinching. If we want to build Singapore-on-Thames, the easiest route is obvious: build the Garden Bridge.
The post The real route to Singapore-on-Thames? Build the Garden Bridge. appeared first on Conservative Home.
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Author: William Atkinson
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