Should we Abandon Liberal Democracy in Favour of the Singaporean Model?

This is an expanded version of my most recent Spectator column.

I was in Australia a couple of weeks ago, having been invited to give the annual oration by the Robert Menzies Institute, and stopped off in Singapore for a few days on the way home. I’ve always been curious about this Southeast Asian city state, having read so much about Lee Kuan Yew, its Cambridge-educated founding father who holds the record of being the world’s longest-serving Prime Minister. When he assumed office in 1959, Singapore was a fading outpost of the British Empire, destined to be swallowed up by one of its larger neighbours. The population was impoverished, illiterate and riven with racial conflict. It had no natural resources and most of its 284 square miles was swampland. Yet by the time Lee stepped down thirty-one years later, it had been transformed into an Asian tiger with the second highest GDP per capita in Asia. Today, it is arguably the most successful, best governed country in the world.

For someone like me, who believes Western liberal democracy is the best system of government – or the least bad, in Churchill’s formulation – Singapore poses a challenge. Lee ruled with an iron fist, exiling political opponents, muzzling the press and introducing severe penalties for low-level antisocial behaviour such as spitting, littering and – famously – chewing gum. Like many post-colonial countries, only one party has been in power since independence and Singapore is dominated by a dynastic ruling family, with the last-but-one prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong, who was in office for 20 years, being Lee’s son. The model put in place by its founder has been described as ‘enlightened authoritarianism’, but it’s not that enlightened. Public caning is still a regular occurrence, a drug trafficker was executed the day before I arrived and homosexuality was only decriminalised in 2023 (although no one had been prosecuted for buggery since 2007).

Yet you only have to set foot in the place to realise just how well run it is. In stark contrast to Britain, everything works. It took all of 20 minutes to get to my hotel from the airport, not because it was particularly close, but because traffic jams are virtually unheard of. Cars glide along five-lane expressways, untroubled by bicycle lanes or 20mph speed limits. If you look at the quickest way to get from A to B on Google Maps, buses are often a better option than the subway, although the metro is remarkably clean and reliable. The carriages are decorated with posters featuring smiling cartoon characters telling you how to behave – cute authoritarianism – and among the verboten activities are feet on seats, loud music and consuming food or drink. Hard to argue with that.

Singapore is a low-crime, high-trust society, which is remarkable given that it’s largely made up of different immigrant populations. Lee Kuan Yew put various measures in place to end the racial tensions that threatened to boil over in the 1950s and 60s, the most important of which was to desegregate neighbourhoods. He recognised the dangers of multiculturalism, having seen the damage it had wrought in Britain and America, and worked hard to create a sense of common identity by insisting schools teach children to be proud of their country and introducing national service. It helps that annual growth has averaged about seven per cent between 1965 and 2025, creating a thriving middle class. Widespread home ownership has been made possible by the Housing and Development Board, a state agency responsible for swamp clearance, land reclamation and building tower blocks. Close to 90% of Singaporean housing is owner-occupied, although in the vast majority of cases the state is the freeholder, with leaseholds limited to 99 years.

Like Sir Keir Starmer, Lee boasted of being unburdened by ideology, but to describe him as a ‘technocrat’ would be to miss just how conservative he was. To begin with, he was much more enthusiastic about capitalism than contemporary European leaders who call themselves ‘technocrats’, creating a fiscal regime that made Singapore an extremely attractive place to do business. The highest rate of income tax is 24%, there’s no capital gains tax and his son scrapped inheritance tax in 2008. He was also staunchly anti-Communist, in spite of identifying as a socialist at the beginning of his political career. Yes, he was a pragmatist, but only in the sense of being flexible about how to turn Singapore into a modern, economic powerhouse. (“Does it work? Let’s try it and if it does work, fine, let’s continue it. If it doesn’t work, toss it out, try another one.”) When it came to the ‘values’ he thought should underpin Singaporean society, he went beyond simply promoting those that would create stable conditions for growth and sounded more like a post-liberal conservative.

“Certain basics about society do not change,” he told Fareed Zakariah in a wide-ranging interview for Foreign Affairs in 1994.

Man needs a certain moral sense of right and wrong. There is such a thing called evil, and it is not the result of being a victim of society. You are just an evil man, prone to doing evil things, and you need to be stopped from doing them. Westerners have abandoned an ethical basis for society, believing that all problems are solvable by good government, which we in the East never believed possible.

He thought Singapore’s success was rooted in ‘culture’ – in the Eastern veneration of the family, of values like thrift and deferred gratification, and the willingness of the individual to subordinate his interests to those of his family, community and country. He was an admirer of the British society he observed as a student in the 1940s, but disapproved of our over-generous welfare system, which he thought undermined self-reliance. Consequently, he ensured that education and health, while heavily subsidised, were not 100 per cent free. Social security works differently, too, with employees being able to keep track of their payments in different pots and even use some of the money to put down a deposit on a flat. Margaret Thatcher once remarked that Lee was “never wrong”.

So, Singapore presents a challenge for supporters of the Western democratic tradition. It’s a powerful argument, not just for one-party rule, but for centralised planning – every technocrat‘s dream. In this respect, it’s success is profoundly unhelpful, helping to persuade the Tony Blairs and Ursula von der Leyens of this world that the rule of central planners, unfettered by the preferences of the masses, works best. Yet it clearly doesn’t, with the burgeoning populist revolt in Europe’s three largest economies testifying to that. Would the sclerotic elites clinging on to power in Britain and the EU have fared better if they’d heeded Lee’s warnings about multiculturalism, not allowed welfare spending to balloon to its current levels and reduced taxes? Probably, but I suspect it’s the model itself that’s flawed. After all, the 20th Century is littered with less successful examples of this centralised, authoritarian system of government, from Stalin’s Russia to Mao’s China. The model works in Singapore because it’s a city state and because Lee Kuan Yew was a political genius with a clear-eyed understanding of human nature and a ruthless commitment to economic growth. The test will come when a less gifted successor comes to power – and a new generation of Singaporeans, with social ties eroded by social media, may be less willing to bend the knee to a strongman.

As Aristotle pointed out, the problem with the best kind of rule – a virtuous and wise monarch – is that it can easily devolve into the worst – tyranny. Democracy is more limited and less able to bring about the miraculous transformation of a country in the way that Lee and his successors have managed in less than half a century. But it’s also less risky – much less risky.