Singapore’s Real Lesson for Britain and Europe

I love Singapore. It’s a favorite city of mine, and on those mornings when I am feeling too cosmopolitan, I can imagine myself living there again. I was there for a few weeks a decade back, and it is a paradise compared to most western cities. What’s not to like? It is clean, orderly, modern, and civilized: a perfect city-state. And in an era of resentment and social upheavals across the west, it is a bastion of old-school, conservative political stability. 

As recently reported by my colleague Spencer Neale, Singapore saw “its first Singaporean parliamentary election since the election of Prime Minister Lawrence Wong in 2024, the People’s Action Party (PAP) won a decisive victory Saturday, capturing 87 seats in the city-state’s 97-seat Parliament.” PAP’s landslide victory gives Singapore’s ruling party a clear mandate heading into the future. Of the nearly 3 million people registered to vote on the island, more than 65 percent of voters selected PAP, giving the ruling party its 14th consecutive win for PAP since independence. Unusually consistent for our times. 

It seems odd to start a column about a febrile mood in Britain and Europe with a paean to Lee Kuan Yew (LKY) and Singapore. But for those who are not afflicted with myopia, they are connected. There are a few types of slop available on social media. One particular genre consists of cherry-picked and unoriginal quotes from LKY, Singapore’s legendary founding father and Anglophile ruler who transformed a backwater port city-state to a modern nation.  Singapore itself is an actually existing multiracial society, with three main groups: the Singaporean Chinese with around 75 percent of the population, the Malays with around 15 percent, followed by the Indians around 9 percent of the total. The rest are Europeans, other Asians, and Pacific Islanders. And yet there is no racial reaction, nor much crime, nor civil discontent.

But LKY can at most be considered a classical liberal—a fact that might chagrin the dissident right is that he was hugely admired by none other than Tony Blair. Blair visited Lee in Singapore, and the former prime minister has reportedly said that Lee is the smartest leader he ever met.

Whatever one might say of Blair, he was competent. He learned from Lee to have that competent government, although channeled towards destructive social policies in Britain. Mode of governance can do nothing if the worldview that underpins it is toxic.  

Because it is the Blairite British state that is now considered illegitimate by a significant chunk of Britons. I don’t think there’s a civil war scenario in Britain (or Europe) yet: First, arms are not so prevalent as in, say, the Middle East or Latin America; second, the state capacity is robust enough to oppose any foreign intervention and steady supply of weaponry; third, the state still maintains a monopoly on violence. Nevertheless, the chances of permanent sectarian strife are increasing; such strife might lead to capital outflow and even, eventually, make civilized government impossible. The root causes—from mass-migration to sectarian ghettos to the absence of any unifying national mythos to rape gangs and violence against the most vulnerable and fatherless—can be attributed to the Blairite conception of state, which is a minoritarian entity maximizing secular concepts of human rights while also reducing state capacity and undermining impartial justice. If the gendarmerie were to crack down harshly on both juvenile and migrant crime regardless of race or gender, Scottish teenagers would stop carrying knives to protect themselves from predatory migrants. It is really that simple. 

The problems facing Britain, Europe, and of course the U.S. have simple solutions. LKY is a guide towards them. In a society that is basically unalterably multiethnic (as is the rest of the Anglosphere), if you want to maintain some form of democracy, enforcement of order must be considered supreme. As LKY said, a society cannot have democracy, liberty, and order all at the same time; a corollary is that you cannot have mass democracy, social liberalism, and multiracial society all at the same time. You have to get rid of one. There is a fundamental tension between democracy and order in modern, multiethnic states; the coexistence of maximal democratic expression and social stability is inherently unattainable. 

Democracy in its basic form presupposes a homogenous societal ethos, cultural coherence, and mutual informational hegemony among citizens. None of these are present in the current Western states for various historical reasons. Absent these, excessive democratic freedoms and individual rights result in cultural cocoons and encourage sectarian disorder, ultimately rendering authoritarianism inevitable. Lee said, “The main object is to have a well-ordered society so that everybody can have maximum enjoyment of his freedoms. This freedom can only exist in an ordered state and not in a natural state of contention and anarchy.”

Multiethnic societies, in simple words, demand imperial-style law and order, and not lax policing or two-tiered justice systems: the first encourages disorder and authoritarianism, and the second encourages revolution. Lee, a keen British student of history, surely must have studied the Mahabharata, in which Bhishma counsels Yudhisthira, the eldest Pandava prince, that the perpetuation of arajakata (anarchy) is the gravest failing of a ruler. 

Multipolarity’s logical and inevitable end would be a return to a pre–First World War order. That part of the debate is settled. How major powers manage to navigate that is the key future research question. Liberals, as is becoming evident from Europe, will eventually revert back to choosing order over democracy when push comes to shove. One might soon get a continent-size Singapore after all. But for those in the Anglosphere who still desire liberty and democracy, imperial-style race-neutral policing would solve the liberal dilemma.