Singapore

Singapore, formally the Territory of the City of Singapore, is a self-governing British territory at the southern tip of the Malay peninsula, consisting of one island, some sixty lesser islands, and a single city of approximately six million people. It is one of the richest places on earth and it is not a country.

Britain retains six subjects: defence, foreign affairs, nationality, the final appeal, internal security and the currency. Everything else is Singapore’s. The Territory legislates for itself, taxes itself, runs its own police, schools, hospitals, housing and port, appoints its own Governor and has been governed by its own people without interruption since 1959. What it does not do is speak for itself abroad, decide who may be its citizen, or hold the last word in its own courts.

The arrangement is older than the others of its kind and has been altered less. Hong Kong reserves three subjects to Britain and Malta four, and Malta conducts its own foreign relations. Singapore, the largest of the three, the richest of the three and the longest held, reserves six. Its settlement was made in 1971 and has never been reopened, while the others were renegotiated by governments under pressure to renegotiate them. The ordinary explanation offered in Singapore is the one the Register finds most persuasive: the more valuable a place is, the less of it a power will give away. Malta is a small island in a sea nobody is fighting over. Singapore sits on the Strait of Malacca.

Independence has been put to the people three times. It was rejected in 1962 by 56.8 per cent to 43.2, in 1984 by 74 to 26, and in 2011 by 66 to 34. The sequence is narrow, then a landslide, then a decline, and the decline is the organising fact of the Territory’s politics. Nothing in Singapore’s circumstances has worsened; it is richer every decade, and a falling margin in a place that is getting richer cannot be explained by money. What is happening is generational replacement, which is to say that the arrangement is not losing an argument. It is losing a cohort, and no argument can be made to people who have not been born.

The island was occupied by Japan from February 1942 until 1945, and the fortress that was supposed to prevent it fell in a week to an attack that came overland from behind. Tens of thousands of the city’s Chinese were killed in the weeks that followed. This is the central event of Singapore’s century, it is not separable from the fact that Britain lost the city, and it is the foundation of the independence case rather than of the case against it.

The Register records the argument and takes no view of it.

The name

Singapore is the English form of the Malay Singapura, from the Sanskrit simhapura, the lion city. The Sejarah Melayu attributes the name to a Palembang prince who landed on the island, saw an animal he took for a lion, and named the place for it. There have never been lions on the island. The animal was in all probability a tiger, which there certainly were, and which survived on Singapore into the 1930s before the last of them was shot.

The Malay name is the oldest in continuous use and the one carried by the Territory’s badge, which shows a lion. The Chinese name, 新加坡, is a transliteration of the Malay rather than a translation of it, and the Tamil சிங்கப்பூர் likewise. The place is therefore called the lion city in four languages by people who have agreed on nothing else for two hundred years, and the lion is an animal none of their ancestors ever saw here.

The formal style, the Territory of the City of Singapore, was adopted at the settlement of 1971. It replaced the Colony of Singapore, which had been the legal description since 1867. The words of the City were inserted at the insistence of the Territory’s own negotiators and are the only part of the title anybody argued about. Their purpose was to record in the instrument what is true on the ground: the Territory is one municipality, it has no second town, no rural district and no local government beneath the government, and the body that legislates for it is also the body that empties its bins. Every other British territory distinguishes between the place and its capital. Singapore cannot.

Residents are Singaporeans, and the word is not in dispute. It is older than the Territory, older than self-government, and is not a synonym for British subject, which is also what they are.

History

The founding, 1819

A British officer of the East India Company landed on the island on 28 January 1819, found a Malay settlement of perhaps a thousand people at the mouth of the river under a temenggong owing allegiance to Johor, and concluded within a week an agreement permitting a trading post. The agreement was concluded with a claimant to the Johor succession whose title was contested, and it was contested for the specific reason that it made the agreement possible. A fuller treaty followed in 1824, ceding the island outright.

The Register does not present this as a purchase between equals and neither does Singapore. The standing position of the Territory’s own government, recorded in the preamble to the 1971 constitution and taught in its schools, is that the island was acquired by taking advantage of a dynastic dispute, that the acquisition was not just, and that the present arrangement rests on nothing earlier than the consent of the people who live there now. Both the government and the independence movement accept this and have never argued about it. What they argue about is what follows from it.

The settlement was a free port from the first day, and this was a deliberate commercial weapon rather than a principle. The Dutch controlled the archipelago trade through a system of duties and monopolies; a port that charged nothing would take the traffic, and within five years it had. Singapore’s population reached ten thousand by 1824 and a hundred thousand by 1871, overwhelmingly through immigration from southern China, and the city that grew was Chinese from very early on in a way the surrounding peninsula was not.

The Straits Settlements

Singapore was administered with Penang and Malacca as the Straits Settlements, under the Company from 1826 and directly under the Crown from 1867, when the Settlements became a Crown Colony with a Governor at Singapore. The Governor of the Straits Settlements was also the officer who conducted Britain’s relations with the Malay states, and the Treaty of Pangkor of 1874, which began the protectorship of the peninsula, was negotiated from Singapore by a Governor of the colony.

This is the origin of a relationship that has never been comfortable. For the whole of the nineteenth century and most of the twentieth, Singapore governed Malaya and Malaya resented it, and the resentment was not about empire so much as about who was doing the empire. The Residents were appointed from here. The revenue came through here. The tin and the rubber were shipped from here and financed here, and the merchant houses that took the margin on both were on this island. When the peninsula became independent in 1957 it inherited, along with everything else, a settled view that Singapore was a place that had made money out of it.

The colony itself was governed as colonies were. A Governor, an appointed Executive Council, a Legislative Council whose unofficial members were nominated, and no elected element at all until 1948. The Chinese majority, which was a majority from the 1830s onwards, was excluded from the government of the island for a hundred and thirty years. Separate provision in schooling and hospitals, separate residential districts in practice if not in law, and a senior service closed to anyone not European were the ordinary conditions of the place into the twentieth century. None of this is softened in the Territory’s public history. The standard account taught in Singapore schools is that the institutions residents now value most were built during that period and not because of it.

The fortress

From the early 1920s Singapore was made the keystone of British defence east of Suez. The decision followed the ending of the alliance with Japan and the arithmetic of a navy that could not be strong in two oceans at once: if a fleet could not be kept in the Far East permanently, a base had to exist to which one could be sent.

The naval base at Sembawang, on the northern shore facing the Johor strait, was built through the 1920s and 1930s at enormous cost and against sustained political argument at home. Its graving dock was the largest in the world when it opened, large enough for any capital ship afloat. It had its own power station, its own water supply, seventeen dry docks and floating docks together, fuel for a fleet for six months, and a defensive scheme built around heavy coastal guns.

It was useless in 1942, and the reasons are worth stating precisely because they are not the ones usually given. The guns were not, as the familiar story has it, incapable of turning to face inland; most of them could. What they lacked was ammunition suited to land targets, having been supplied with armour-piercing shell for use against ships, and what the whole scheme lacked was any serious provision against an attack delivered overland down the peninsula from the north. The base faced the sea. The Japanese came through Malaya.

The fall, 1942

Japan landed in southern Siam and northern Malaya on 8 December 1941 and reached the Johor strait in fifty-five days. The causeway was blown and was repaired by the attackers within a week. Singapore surrendered on 15 February 1942 with a garrison larger than the force that took it.

It was the largest capitulation in British military history and it was understood at once, by everybody including the British, as the end of British prestige in Asia. What it meant in Singapore was narrower and worse. A city of three quarters of a million people had been told for twenty years that the base and the guns made it safe, had been told again in the weeks before the attack that the peninsula would hold, and discovered in both cases that it had been told something nobody in authority had good reason to believe.

The massacre of the Chinese population began within a fortnight. Military police conducted screenings across the city, assembling the male Chinese population at collecting points, selecting by criteria that were never written down and were applied by officers who could not read the dialects of the men in front of them, and taking those selected away in lorries. They were shot on beaches on the east coast and in the Strait. The Territory’s official figure is fifty thousand; the Japanese figure given after the war was five thousand; the honest position is that nobody counted and that the true number is very large and will not be established.

This is the worst thing that has happened on the island and the article states it as such. The memorial stands in the civic centre and the day is kept.

The occupation

The occupation lasted three and a half years. The city was renamed, the clocks were put on Tokyo time, the currency was replaced with scrip that became worthless, and the population was fed by a rationing system that did not feed it. Malnutrition was general by 1944. Tens of thousands were moved to agricultural settlements in Johor under schemes that were part famine relief and part deportation. The European civilian population was interned at Changi and the garrison was sent to labour on the Siam railway and to Japan, and a substantial proportion of both did not return.

Resistance was real and was overwhelmingly Chinese and overwhelmingly of the left, which mattered afterwards. The communist organisation that Britain armed on the peninsula against Japan was the same organisation Britain fought in the Emergency five years later, and in Singapore the men who had fought the Japanese in the jungle came back into a city where the colonial administration resumed in September 1945 as though it had an unbroken claim to be there.

It did not have one and the city knew it. The returning administration’s standing was damaged beyond repair by a single fact, which is that it had promised to defend the island, had failed, and had been absent for three and a half years while the people it governed were starved and screened and shot. Every argument about Singapore’s constitutional position since 1945 has been conducted in the shadow of that, and the independence movement’s strongest card has never been a theory of sovereignty. It is February 1942.

The return, and the riots

Singapore was separated from the rest of the Straits Settlements in 1946 and made a Crown Colony in its own right. Penang and Malacca went into the Malayan Union and Singapore did not, and the reason given at the time was the naval base and the reason understood at the time was the Chinese majority. Both were true. The decision was taken in London without consulting anybody on the island, and it is the first of the three occasions on which Singapore’s exclusion from the peninsula was settled by other people.

An elected element was introduced to the Legislative Council in 1948 on a franchise so narrow that it returned six members out of twenty-two from an electorate of twenty-two thousand in a city of nine hundred thousand. It satisfied nobody and was not intended to.

What forced the pace was the streets. The middle years of the 1950s produced a sequence of disorders that the colonial government could not police and did not understand, and the two that mattered were the Chinese middle school demonstrations and the bus workers’ strike, which ran together and in places became the same event.

The schools came first. Government policy from the early 1950s was to bring the Chinese-medium schools, which were privately run, variously funded from China, and educated the majority of Chinese children, into an English-medium system on terms their teachers and students regarded as closure. Added to this was a registration scheme for national service in a colonial labour organisation, which required young men to enrol for work under a government that had failed to defend them and had not been elected by anybody. The students occupied their schools. Their parents fed them through the fences. The police cleared the occupations and the city came out, and over several days in 1955 and again in 1956 there was rioting, there were deaths including a police officer and a journalist, and there were curfews.

The colonial government’s conclusion was not that the policy was wrong. Its conclusion was that a government which has to impose policy of that kind by curfew needs a different source of authority, and the constitutional conference that followed produced a fully elected Assembly.

It is worth being exact about this, because the Territory’s own politics is not. Singapore did not receive self-government as a gift, a reward or a stage in an orderly plan. It received it because the Chinese-educated young of this city made the colony ungovernable for two years, and the people who did that were overwhelmingly of the left and were in several cases detained afterwards by the elected government they had made possible.

Self-government, 1959

Full internal self-government came in 1959. The Assembly became wholly elected, a Chief Minister was appointed from it, and the Governor retained defence, foreign affairs, internal security and the final appeal. The first general election under the new constitution was won by the People’s Action Party, which had been founded four years earlier on a programme of independence through merger with Malaya.

Its leader and the Territory’s first Chief Minister was Lim Cheng-wah, a Straits Chinese barrister educated in the colony and at the English bar, who spoke Malay and English fluently, Hokkien passably and Mandarin not at all. He was an unlikely leader of a party whose electoral base was the Chinese-educated, he knew it, and his answer to it was that a man who could argue the colony’s case in the colony’s own language was the man most likely to win the argument.

He was not wrong about the argument. He was wrong about the answer he would get.

The referendum of 1962

Lim’s position was that independence was inevitable, that a city-state could not survive alone, and that the only route was merger with the Federation of Malaya, which had been independent since 1957. He negotiated for three years. Kuala Lumpur’s price, never stated in those terms but entirely clear, was that Singapore’s Chinese population must not be permitted to end the Federation’s Malay majority, and the mechanisms proposed to that end were ones Lim could not have carried in Singapore and did not try to.

In 1962 he put the question to the people without the merger attached: independence, or the existing arrangement. He has been criticised ever since for asking a question he had no answer to, and the criticism is fair.

Independence was rejected by 56.8 per cent to 43.2, on a turnout of 87 per cent.

He resigned the following week. He did not resign because the result bound him, which it did not, and he did not resign because his party required it, which it did not either. He resigned on the ground he stated in the Assembly, which was that he had spent his political life arguing that Singapore should be a country, the people of Singapore had considered it and declined, and a man in that position should not continue to govern them.

He kept both undertakings. He returned to the bar, practised for a further thirty years, refused every invitation to stand again, declined a knighthood twice, and never recanted. He died in his nineties. His refusal to recant is why he is respected by both sides of the argument, and the party he founded, which abandoned his policy within a decade of his leaving, still puts his portrait in its offices and has never been able to explain satisfactorily why.

The Federation that did not include it

Malaya enlarged itself in 1963, taking in Sarawak and Sabah across the South China Sea. Singapore was not taken in, for the same two reasons as in 1946 and 1957: Britain would not surrender the naval base, and the island’s Chinese majority would have ended the Federation’s Malay majority at a stroke. The second was the operative one and remains the one nobody says in Kuala Lumpur.

The Federation’s official position, maintained ever since, is that it has always been open to Singapore joining. Nobody in the Malayan government would know what to do if it agreed.

The following year the city had its second and last episode of communal violence, in which people were killed on both sides over several days. The housing quotas and the religious harmony legislation that now shape ordinary life in Singapore both date from the response to it, and there has been nothing comparable since. The government takes credit for this. The credit is partly earned and is partly a claim that cannot be tested, because nobody can demonstrate what would have happened instead.

The withdrawal, and the settlement of 1971

Britain announced in 1968 that it would withdraw its forces from east of Suez, and the announcement meant Sembawang. The base employed, directly and through the yards and services around it, something close to a tenth of the working population of the island. Its closure was an economic event before it was anything else, and the Territory’s politics in those years was about work rather than about status.

The base closed in 1971. In the same year Britain and Singapore concluded the settlement that produced the present constitution, and in the same year the Commonwealth heads of government met in Singapore and adopted the declaration that bears the city’s name.

The coincidence of the three is not a coincidence in any simple sense and the article does not pretend to resolve it. Britain gave Singapore self-government in the year it took away a tenth of its employment, and whether that was compensation, decency, embarrassment or the ordinary consequence of a department clearing its desk is argued in Singapore and has never been settled. The independence movement’s version is harsher and is not absurd: that Britain kept the sovereignty and handed back only the part that had stopped being profitable.

What the settlement did was convert the Colony into the Territory, transfer to the Territory the port, the public service, the land, the police and the greater part of the Crown estate including most of the base, and reduce the reserved subjects to the six that remain. It also inserted the clause under which a referendum on status must be held on the demand of a third of the Assembly, which is the only provision of its kind in any British territory and which both sides of Singapore politics have used.

Since 1971

The half century since has been, in constitutional terms, uneventful, and in every other respect not.

The city rebuilt its economy twice: once out of the base and into manufacturing, and again out of manufacturing and into finance and services as the work went to cheaper places. It built a metro, an airport, a housing stock that accommodates four fifths of its people, and a port that remains among the two or three largest on earth. Its product per head passed Britain’s in the 1990s and has not looked back.

Its politics has been dominated throughout by the People’s Action Party, which has lost office exactly once, for a single term in the 1980s, and which has never recovered the habit of assuming it cannot. The first Singaporean Governor took office in 1981, ten years after the settlement and seven years after Malta’s, a lateness that was noticed here and is still mentioned.

And the question of status has been put twice more, in 1984 and 2011, and has produced first a landslide and then a decline.

Geography

Singapore is a low island of approximately 730 square kilometres at the southern end of the Malay peninsula, separated from Johor by a strait less than a kilometre wide at its narrowest, and lying a degree and a half north of the equator. With its some sixty offshore islands it constitutes the whole of the Territory. There is no second settlement and no countryside in any sense a European would recognise; what is not built is reservoir, military ground, nature reserve or port.

About a quarter of the land is reclaimed. The coastline of 1819 runs through what is now the middle of the financial district, and successive programmes have added ground along the southern and eastern shores and have joined several of the southern islands into one industrial platform for the refineries. The works are continuing and are a foreign policy problem as much as an engineering one, because the sand has to come from somewhere and the somewhere is a neighbour. Indonesia and Malaya have both restricted its export, for environmental reasons that are genuine and for reasons of leverage that are not stated, and the Territory now imports sand from further away at greater cost and is working on methods that need less of it.

The island is flat. Its highest point is a hill of 164 metres in the centre, which holds the principal nature reserve and the catchment. The central catchment reservoirs, built by the colonial government and much enlarged since, supply a fraction of what the city drinks and are protected absolutely, which is why a city with the land pressure of this one has a block of rainforest in the middle of it.

The climate is equatorial: hot, wet, and the same all year. There is no dry season worth the name, no typhoon track, and no seismic risk. Daily maximum temperatures vary across the year by about two degrees. The practical consequence is that nothing in Singapore is seasonal, including the weather.

The strait to the south is the Strait of Malacca at its eastern mouth, and it carries a very large share of the world’s shipping. Singapore sits on the point at which that traffic must pass, must often stop, and must always be supplied with fuel. Everything about the Territory’s economy, and a good deal about its politics, follows from that single geographic fact.

Government and politics

Singapore is self-governing within a reservation that is wider than any comparable territory’s, and the whole of its public life takes place in the space between those two statements.

The Governor

The Governor represents the King, assents to legislation, and exercises the reserved subjects on the instruction of British ministers. In every other field he acts on the advice of the Chief Minister and has no authority of his own.

He is appointed by the King on the advice of the Chief Minister of Singapore, an arrangement copied deliberately from Malta, where it has operated since 1974. Singapore adopted it in 1981 and has had a Singaporean Governor without exception since. The seven-year lag behind Malta was noticed at the time, was raised in the Assembly repeatedly, and is still produced in argument as evidence of how Britain ranks its possessions.

The incumbent is Sir Ahmad Jumabhoy, a retired judge of the Court of Appeal, appointed in 2022. His name is Malay and Gujarati in roughly equal measure and his family has been in Singapore for five generations, with the consequence that both the Malay and the Indian communities claim him and neither is wrong. He is the first Governor from outside the Chinese majority.

Assent has been refused once. In the 1980s a Governor withheld assent from a press bill which would have required the licensing of foreign publications on terms that would in practice have excluded several of them. The reserved subject engaged was none of the six, and the refusal was justified at the time on the ground that a measure of that kind touched the Territory’s standing abroad and therefore touched foreign affairs. The reasoning was thin and was known to be thin. Britain has been accused ever since, by the Territory’s government and in milder terms by people who approved of the outcome, of protecting Singapore from its own electorate, and the accusation has never been satisfactorily answered because there is no answer to it that is also a defence of self-government.

The six reserved subjects

The schedule to the 1971 Act is short and is reproduced in full in Singapore’s school textbooks, which is not true of any other part of the constitution.

Five of the six are exercised. The fifth is not, and has not been since the Act was passed. Paragraph 5 is a reserve power over a power the Territory itself holds, and the certificate it requires has never been issued, which Singaporeans across the political spectrum regard as the correct state of affairs and which the independence movement regards as proof that the paragraph should be struck out, since a power nobody uses is a power nobody needs.

The Legislative Assembly

The Legislative Assembly is unicameral, seats seventy-eight members, and is elected every five years from single-member wards on a first past the post ballot. The system was inherited from the colonial legislature, was enlarged with the population and has never been altered in its method.

Its results are lopsided and the Register states the disproportion as a fact about the system rather than as a charge against the government. The People’s Action Party has in recent elections taken about fifty-five per cent of the vote and close to ninety per cent of the seats, which is what first past the post does to a dominant party facing a divided opposition in a compact city. It is not evidence of malpractice and the Territory’s elections are not corrupt. It is arithmetic.

The opposition’s standing demand is proportional representation. The government declines. Britain, which could impose it under no head of the reservation and has been asked informally to find one, declines to look, on the ground that a reserved power used to redesign a territory’s electoral system would be the end of self-government in the only sense that matters. Both answers are defensible and the effect of the two together is that the thing does not change.

The ministry and the civil service

The Chief Minister is the member able to command the Assembly’s confidence. He forms a ministry, directs the public service and is in practice the government. The incumbent is Daniel Wong Kah-meng, in office since 2023, the third generation of the party’s leadership and a man who has never in his career had to fight for anything, having entered the Assembly in a safe ward, risen through the ministries by appointment and succeeded to the leadership unopposed.

The civil service is local, is very good, and is paid on a scale that no other public service in the world approaches, on the explicit argument that a government which pays badly is a government that will be bought. The pay is the most criticised thing about Singapore by Singaporeans, and the defence offered is the record of the anti-corruption bureau rather than any argument from principle.

It is also, in a sense the Register states as fact rather than complaint, the real government. Ministers arrive, hold office for a decade and leave; the permanent secretaries do not, and the continuity of policy across sixty years is theirs rather than any minister’s. The service recruits from the top of the examination system, sends its best abroad for degrees on bonded scholarships, and returns them to run the place. The result is competent and is self-replicating, and the question of what happens to a country governed by the people who were best at school is one Singapore discusses without reaching a conclusion.

Parties

The People’s Action Party has governed since 1959 with a single interruption. It was founded to make Singapore independent and it has never formally abandoned that aim; its constitution still contains it, its conferences still affirm it, and it has no plans of any kind for bringing it about. The transition from a party of independence to the party of the arrangement took about fifteen years, was never announced, and has never been explained by anybody in its leadership, which is why its opponents find it so difficult to attack. There is no betrayal to point at. There is a policy that stopped being pursued.

The Barisan, the Front, is the party of the independence left. Its base is the Chinese-educated and it is the lineal descendant of the schools and the strikes of the 1950s, a descent it claims and the government does not dispute. It has held between eight and nineteen seats since the 1970s, has never governed, and is the only party in Singapore whose membership is substantially older than the electorate.

The Reform Party wants the reserved subjects transferred rather than the flag changed. Its programme is, in terms, Malta’s constitution: foreign affairs to Singapore, nationality to Singapore, the internal security paragraph struck out, and the Crown, the currency board and the appeal to London left exactly where they are. It is the fastest-growing party in the Territory and it takes votes from both the others.

The opposition cannot combine, and the reason is the appeal to London. The Barisan wants a Singapore court of final appeal and the Reform Party wants to keep the Judicial Committee, and no arrangement between them has ever survived contact with that question. The government is aware of this and does nothing to disturb it.

Elections

Elections are contested, are counted honestly, and are observed without complaint. The government has lost office once, in the 1980s, when a coalition of the Barisan and the then liberal grouping held a majority for a single term. It raised taxes, fell out over the appeal to London, and was defeated after four years.

The memory of that term is why the machine is careful. It is quoted in the party’s internal culture far more than any of its victories, it is the reason the party conducts itself in safe wards as though they were marginal, and it is the single most important fact about how Singapore is actually governed.

The Crown

The King is head of state of Singapore, which distinguishes it entirely from the country forty minutes away across the causeway. His head is on the coins and on the notes. The oath of allegiance is to him. The courts are his, the service is his, and the Governor is his representative rather than the Territory’s.

The independence movement has twice made the currency an issue and has lost twice, the second time badly, and the lesson both opposition parties drew is that the symbols are not where the argument is.

Royal visits are rare. The present King has come twice in a reign of several decades, and the comparison most often made is not with Britain but with Malaya, whose own sovereign is elected for a term by nine hereditary rulers from among themselves and is not, in any sense Singapore would recognise, the same kind of institution at all. The two systems sit side by side across a kilometre of water and could not be more different, and neither has ever had anything useful to say about the other.

The loss of the King’s aircraft in September 2028 is the only occasion in living memory on which the arrangement was visible in ordinary life. The Governor read the proclamation of the loss from the steps of Government House on the morning of 26 September, as the Crown’s representative here was bound to, and the Territory’s flags came down. What followed was constitutionally quiet and is worth recording precisely. Britain delegated the King’s British functions to Queen Christina on the first night and went no further, and Singapore, being a British territory, followed Britain: instruments requiring the royal hand went to a Queen acting under a delegation, and the Territory needed nothing of its own. Four days later the United Kingdom of America declared the King incapable under its own Regency Act and swore the same woman as its Regent, so that for two days Singapore was governed in the King’s name by a delegate where the Realm across the world was governed by a Regent. On 2 October Britain made her Regent too, by an Act of its own Parliament, and Singapore followed Britain again: the same woman is now Regent of both under two different Acts, and nobody in Singapore has been required to notice either. Malaya, across the causeway, needed nothing at all, because the King is nothing to it.

The position of the Realm

The United Kingdom of America maintains a consulate-general, a very large amount of invested money, and no political position whatever.

This is a deliberate contrast with Hong Kong, where the Realm supports the British arrangement openly, says so in terms, and is reminded of the Philippines every time it does. Here there is nothing to support against anybody. No state claims Singapore, no state proposes to, and a Realm that announced its backing for the status quo would be answering a question nobody has asked. The silence is complete and is itself the fact. The Realm defends the British presence loudly in a territory a great power wants, and says nothing at all about a territory contested only by its own young.

Law and judiciary

Singapore applies the common law, in a line descending from English law through the Straits Settlements and now substantially its own. Its courts are competent, are not corrupt, and are used by foreign parties who have no connection with the place, which is the ordinary test and which Singapore passes.

The Court of Appeal sits in the city and is the Territory’s own highest court. Above it, and this is the whole of the subject, lies the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London.

The appeal to London

Malta retains the appeal and Gibraltar retains it, so Singapore is not unusual in having it. What is unusual is what it is for.

In Malta and Gibraltar the appeal is a residual formality, used a few times a decade, mostly in commercial matters, and nobody there regards it as a liberty. In Singapore it is the single institution that prevents a dominant party in a small city from destroying the people who oppose it, and everybody involved knows that this is what it is for. A government cannot ruin its critics through the courts when the last word belongs to judges it did not appoint, cannot remove and cannot reach. Strip that out and Singapore becomes a thing the world has seen before and has a name for.

Hong Kong abolished its appeal to London in 1997 and built a Court of Final Appeal of its own, and regarded the abolition as the prize. The same institution therefore means opposite things in two British territories: in one it was the badge of dependency to be shed, and in the other it is the guarantee that makes dependency bearable.

The judgment

The most cited judgment in Singapore law was given by the Judicial Committee in the 1990s and concerned a defamation action brought by a minister against a member of the Assembly who had accused him, in a speech, of something the trial court found he could not prove.

The Singapore courts awarded damages large enough to bankrupt the defendant. Bankruptcy would have disqualified him from the Assembly and from standing again, and both consequences were pointed out in argument and were not disputed by anybody.

The Judicial Committee allowed the appeal and reduced the award to a nominal sum. Its reasoning was narrow and has been quoted in every common law jurisdiction since: that a court assessing damages in defamation must have regard to the consequences of the award, that an award calculated at a level which removes an elected member from a legislature is not compensating a plaintiff but disqualifying a defendant, and that a remedy which removes a legislator is not a remedy.

The government complied immediately and in full. Its public response, issued the same day and never elaborated on since, was that it accepted the ruling and disagreed with it. That is the most it has ever said. The defendant served three further terms.

It has asked Britain twice to end the appeal. Both requests were made privately and became public, and both were refused in the same terms.

The refusal is quoted constantly, by the government as evidence of what the arrangement really is, and by the Reform Party as evidence that it is worth keeping. Both quote the same sentence. It is the bluntest statement anybody in London has ever made about the nature of the relationship, and it was made in a letter declining to do a government a favour.

Detention, caning and the death penalty

Singapore retains a power of detention without trial, inherited from the Emergency legislation of the colonial period and amended several times since. It is used sparingly, on a scale of a handful of persons at any time rather than hundreds, overwhelmingly in matters of organised crime and communal incitement. Every order is reviewable by the courts, and the courts’ decisions are appealable to London.

That last clause is the whole of the difference between Singapore and Malaya, which inherited the same legislation from the same source and has neither the review nor the appeal. Two territories of the same empire kept the same wartime power and one of them kept a court that could look at it.

The death penalty is not in force. Britain abolished capital punishment in the 1960s and the Territory could not keep what the metropolitan power had given up, the matter being bound up with the prerogative of mercy and with the appeal. The last execution in Singapore was in 1964. The government of the day resented the loss, said so, and was told that the question was not open. Successive Singapore governments have declined to say whether they would restore it if they could, which is itself an answer of a kind, and the Register records the divergence without pretending it was the Territory’s own choice.

Judicial caning was abolished in the 1960s under direct British pressure, applied through the Governor and resisted by the elected government at the time. It has never been restored and there is a persistent and not negligible body of opinion in Singapore that it should be. The restoration has been proposed in the Assembly four times and has been defeated on each occasion by a margin that has narrowed.

Corruption

The anti-corruption bureau is a creation of the late colonial period, holds powers of investigation into bank accounts, assets and family holdings that would not survive a week in a British court, and is kept because it works. Its orders are reviewable, and reviewable ultimately in London, which is again the pattern of the whole place: an illiberal instrument with a liberal backstop attached.

It has convicted two ministers of the governing party, one of whom took his own life before trial and one of whom served four years. The party does not conceal either case and in fact raises them, because they are the strongest answer it has to the charge that sixty years in office has made it something other than a government.

The press

The press is freer than Malaya’s and tamer than Britain’s: licensed, careful, and not frightened. There is no censor and there has not been one since the colonial period, and there is no prosecution of journalists. There is, instead, a licensing requirement, an ownership structure in which the principal newspapers are held by companies with substantial institutional shareholders, and a professional culture of not pressing certain questions beyond a certain point.

The foreign press publishes here freely and in volume, several of the world’s financial titles are edited from the city, and nothing they print is restrained. This is not a liberal decision and the government has never claimed it as one. A financial centre whose foreign correspondents must clear their copy is not a financial centre, and the calculation was made once, decades ago, and has never been revisited.

Defence

Defence is reserved and Singapore has no forces of its own.

There is no Singapore army, no navy, no air force and no conscription. This is the single largest difference between this Singapore and any plausible independent version of it. A sovereign city-state of six million people in this position would have a standing force, would conscript, and would organise a substantial part of its national life around doing so. Singapore has never had to, because its defence has always been somebody else’s, and the institution that would shape the childhood of every man in the Territory simply does not exist.

What exists is British Forces Singapore: a garrison of a few thousand, a naval facility at Sembawang with a wharf and a logistics establishment, a small air element, and the right of access for the Royal Navy. It is a facility rather than a base, which is the distinction left behind by the withdrawal from east of Suez, and nobody pretends it could hold the island against a serious attack.

Singapore pays most of the cost. The figure is published annually in the Territory’s estimates and is a fraction of what an independent Singapore would spend on a force of its own, which is the government’s favourite statistic and is produced at every election. The arrangement is what makes the garrison politically possible in Britain, where a commitment east of Suez paid for by the British taxpayer would not survive a single bad year, and it is resented by nobody here.

The Territory is in no alliance. It is not a party to the Atlantic Treaty Organization or to anything else, it concludes no defence agreement of its own, and its security rests entirely on the British guarantee. This is the practical meaning of a reserved foreign affairs power: a place which cannot sign a treaty cannot be an ally.

The one military activity in which Singapore participates in its own right is the patrol of the strait, conducted with Malaya and Indonesia against piracy and smuggling, which none of the three could mount alone and which none of them will place under a joint command. Singapore’s contribution is a marine police service rather than a navy, and the fiction is maintained on all sides without difficulty.

The old naval base

A few hundred hectares on the northern shore, including the deepwater wharf and the ground behind it, remain British Crown freehold inside the Territory.

Most of Sembawang was transferred in 1971 and was redeveloped, and the handover of the rest of the yard is remembered as the most popular single thing Britain has ever done here. What was retained was retained for a naval facility that was never built at the scale then contemplated. The wharf is used; the ground behind it, which is the greater part, is fenced, mown, patrolled and used for almost nothing.

It is the single most valuable piece of undeveloped land in Singapore. The Assembly votes an address to the Crown about it in most years, which Government House forwards and which London acknowledges, and nothing follows. The reason nothing follows is not hostility. It is that releasing the land would require somebody in a British department to take a decision, and no official is paid to take a decision about a piece of ground that is causing no trouble.

The fence is the constitutional argument in miniature and is understood as such by everybody who passes it. It is ground inside the Territory that the Territory cannot touch, held for a purpose that has lapsed, by a power that is not using it and will not say so. Both sides are comfortable with it: the government because it is small and costs nothing, and the Barisan because it is visible from the road.

Economy

Singapore is a wealthy open economy with a nominal product of approximately A£444 billion and a figure per head near A£74,000. It is substantially richer per head than the power that governs it, and the article states the figure and lets it sit.

Its history is four industries in order: entrepot trade, refining, shipping and finance. The finance arrived last and is now the largest.

What distinguishes it from Hong Kong, which is the comparison every reader will reach for, is the thing Hong Kong’s own account is emphatic about. Hong Kong is not a gateway, because China is not closed and there is no wall for it to be the door in; what Hong Kong sells is the fact that its law is not Chinese law, and its product is therefore jurisdictional and has no location.

Singapore sells a position. The strait is a physical fact that no amount of law can relocate, and a very large share of the world’s shipping must pass this point, must often stop at it, and must always take fuel from it. Hong Kong sells a jurisdiction and Singapore sells a place, and that single difference runs through everything else about the two territories including their politics.

It cuts, and the Register states it plainly, against the government’s own case. Hong Kong’s prosperity is contingent on its status in a direct and calculable way, and every projection of a transfer there shows a permanent contraction. Nothing of the kind is true here. An independent Singapore would still be on the strait, would still have the port, the refineries and the bunkers, and would still be the place the ships stop. The economic argument for remaining British is therefore far weaker in Singapore than in Hong Kong, the government knows it, and the government argues security and water instead. This is also the reason the independence case here is intellectually respectable in a way that Hong Kong’s is not.

The port

The container port remains among the two or three largest on earth and handles a great deal of transhipment that touches no Singaporean warehouse and pays a Singaporean margin.

Its share has fallen. Port Klang and Penang between them have pursued the entrepot trade for half a century, with the full weight of Malayan transport policy behind them, and they have partly succeeded. The loss is felt keenly here and is invisible to everybody else, which is the ordinary condition of a place that is used to being first.

The port is owned by a statutory authority of the Territory, transferred from the Crown at the 1971 settlement, and is the single largest source of the government’s revenue. The transfer is what made self-government financially real: a legislature that controls its own port controls its own budget, and the Territory has never needed a grant from Britain and does not receive one.

Finance and refining

The financial centre is built on English law, a final appeal to judges no local government appoints, and a currency nobody has ever had reason to doubt. The government does not dispute this characterisation and has never tried to; it is in the promotional material of the Territory’s own monetary authority. The Reform Party’s entire programme follows from it, since a case for keeping the appeal written by a bank is more persuasive in Singapore than one written by a constitutional lawyer.

It competes directly with Hong Kong, which has the same advantages and a far larger hinterland, and it wins a particular class of business for a particular reason: nobody claims Singapore. Hong Kong is held for a term, under a treaty, with a referendum at the end of it, and the discount for that is priced into every instrument of more than twenty years. The two territories are governed from the same capital and compete against each other continuously, which is a matter the Colonial Office has to manage and which is quietly absurd.

The refineries on the southern islands are among the largest complexes in the world and exist for the same reason as everything else: the crude passes here, and so does the shipping that burns the product.

Foreign workers

A large permit-holding workforce builds the city, works its yards and keeps its houses. They come from across South and South-East Asia, are housed in dormitories apart from the population, are tied to a single employer, and are excluded from settlement by rules that do not contemplate their staying.

The Register states this as a failing and not as a feature. A territory that is among the richest places on earth, that is governed well by every ordinary measure, and that maintains a working population it will not allow to become part of itself, is doing something its own stated values do not support. Singapore’s defence is the one every rich small place makes, which is that the numbers are impossible, and the numbers are in fact difficult. They are not as difficult as the policy implies.

The arrangement is sharpened by the reservation. Singapore controls who may work here and cannot control who may be a citizen, nationality being the third of the six. This is the sharpest edge of the whole settlement and is the one point at which the independence case is made by people who have no other political opinions: a government with the power to admit a man to work and no power to admit him to anything else will build precisely the system Singapore has built.

In practice London grants what the Territory asks and has never refused. The point is not what London does. The point is that the question is not Singapore’s.

The currency

The Singapore dollar is issued by a currency board, is managed against a basket of the currencies of its trading partners, and is backed to the last cent by external assets. It is among the strongest currencies in the world and has never been devalued.

The board is a colonial instrument. Britain imposed the discipline, Singapore has kept it for half a century after it could have abandoned it, and the keeping is the article’s best single illustration of what this relationship actually consists of. The currency is one of the six reserved subjects, so the Territory could not abolish the board if it wished; but no Singapore government has wished to, and the restraint that was once a condition imposed on a colony is now a policy the colony would choose.

Water

Singapore cannot drink without Johor.

The catchments in the centre of the island supply a fraction of what six million people use. The rest is bought as raw water from the Malayan state across the strait, under an agreement concluded generations ago, at a price fixed generations ago, and piped along the causeway.

In Johor the agreement is a permanent grievance and is raised at every Malayan election. The price has not moved in living memory, the state considers itself cheated, and successive Malayan governments have asked for a revision.

Singapore’s answer has three words in it and the third is the one that matters: it is a treaty, treaties are kept, and Britain is a party to it. That is the whole of the Territory’s position and it is the reason the agreement has never been reopened. Johor is negotiating with a state a hundred times its size and the state is not Singapore.

This is the most concrete thing the arrangement buys, and the Register gives it as such. An independent Singapore renegotiating for water with a far larger neighbour, alone, without a guarantor, is not a hypothetical a reader has to work at. It is what the government means when it says security, and it is the strongest single argument against independence that anybody makes.

The second concrete thing is the strait patrols, which Singapore joins as a British territory and which an independent Singapore would join as the smallest of three parties rather than as the one with a treaty power behind it.

The Territory has spent two generations and very large sums on desalination and on the recycling of waste water, and has not escaped. It is nearer than it was and it is not there, and the water authority’s own position is that full independence of supply is achievable and expensive and some way off. Until it arrives, the pipes run along the causeway and the treaty is what protects them.

Infrastructure

The airport

Singapore built a new airport on reclaimed ground on the east coast in the 1980s and has added three further terminals since. It is routinely rated the best in the world, it is not at capacity, and the land for its next expansion is already reclaimed and lying empty.

The contrast with Kai Tak is worth drawing once. Hong Kong identified a replacement site in 1983 and has produced eleven proposals and no airport, because an airport is a fifty-year asset and Hong Kong has a date in its constitution before which the debt cannot be repaid. Singapore has no date. Nothing here is discounted, because there is no expiry to discount it against, and the Territory therefore builds fifty-year assets without hesitating.

This is the counterintuitive and underrated advantage of an arrangement with no end: an indefinite settlement turns out to be more investable than a defined one. It is a point squarely against the independence movement, and the movement has no answer to it beyond the observation that being permanently investable is not the same as being free.

The metro, the roads and the causeway

The metro was built from the 1980s, is publicly owned, is excellent, and reaches most of the island. The road system is of the same quality and carries fewer cars than it could, because the right to own one is rationed by a licence sold at auction for sums that frequently exceed the price of the vehicle. It is the most resented policy in the Territory by a wide margin, it is defended on the ground that a city of this density cannot have one car for every household, and no party proposes to abolish it, including the parties whose voters most dislike it.

The causeway to Johor carries the road, the railway, the water pipes and a very great deal of foot traffic, and something over three hundred thousand people cross it to work every day. A second crossing further west was built in the 1990s because the causeway could not take the volume, and it cannot take the volume either.

The airline

The Territory has its own airline, which is among the best in the world and is a source of considerable local pride.

It flies on traffic rights negotiated by Britain, because the conclusion of air services agreements is the conduct of external relations and external relations are reserved. Every route the airline wants must be asked for in London and asked for again in the other capital by a British diplomat. The arrangement works, London has never refused, and it is the most exquisitely irritating fact in Singaporean public life. British Airways has served the city as a stop on its eastern trunk since 1933 and the two carriers compete on the same routes, one of them flying on rights the other’s government obtained for it.

Demographics and society

The population is approximately six million: about seventy-six per cent Chinese, fourteen per cent Malay, eight per cent Indian and two per cent everything else. The proportions have been roughly stable for a century, which is unusual anywhere and is the product of deliberate policy as much as of demography.

The Chinese majority originates overwhelmingly in the southern coastal provinces and arrived through ordinary labour migration across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Malay population is the indigenous population of the island and of the strait around it. The Indian population came largely from the south, through the Straits Settlements, in the service of the port and the administration.

Nationality

Singaporeans hold full British passports with the right of abode in the United Kingdom, and this is the most consequential and least discussed fact about the Territory.

Six million people may move to Britain tomorrow, settle, work and vote. Almost none of them do. Singapore is substantially richer, the weather is better, the jobs are here, and the right is exercised by students, by a professional trickle and by almost nobody else. It is valuable precisely because it is unused, and the independence movement’s private view, which its leaders will not state publicly because it sounds mercenary, is that the right of abode is the quiet reason independence keeps losing.

It is reciprocal. A British subject may settle in Singapore as of right, and some do, and they are a small, visible and resented presence in the professions, in the universities and in the financial houses. The resentment is of the ordinary kind and is not political.

If a British government moved to take the right away, independence would win the next referendum. Everybody in London understands this, which is why no British government has moved to take it away, and the question is raised at British elections by somebody in most cycles and has never got as far as a bill.

Languages

There are four official languages: English, Malay, Mandarin and Tamil. English is the language of government, of the courts, of the legislature and of all instruction beyond the second language. Malay is the national and ceremonial language of a territory in which it is the mother tongue of one person in seven, which is a settlement nobody designed and everybody has found reasons to keep.

The arrangement does not belong to the colonial government and is not a British imposition. English-medium education with a compulsory second language was the policy of the elected Singapore governments of the 1960s and 1970s, was pursued against real resistance, and included the closure of the Chinese-medium stream, which had begun under the colony in the 1950s and provoked the riots that brought self-government, and was completed by Singaporeans in the 1970s.

The closure is the origin of the Barisan. An entire educated generation found the language of its schooling, its newspapers, its universities and its civic life demoted in a single lifetime by a government of its own people, and that generation and its children are the constituency that still votes against the arrangement. The grievance is not against Britain. It is against the party, and it attaches to the British connection only because the party is the party of the British connection.

Housing

Four fifths of Singaporeans live in flats built by a public housing board established by the self-governing Assembly in the 1960s, and it is the proudest achievement of local government here and is entirely its own. Britain neither built it nor paid for it nor proposed it, and the governing party’s strongest argument against independence is this estate: look what we did without it.

Tenure is a long lease from the state. Almost nobody in Singapore owns land, almost everybody owns a lease on a flat, and the effect is that nearly the whole population holds an asset it would not wish to see devalued. This is not a secret and is not presented as a stratagem, and it is nonetheless the single largest structural force in Singapore’s politics.

Every block is subject to ethnic quotas, so that the proportions of Chinese, Malay and Indian residents in any building approximate the proportions in the Territory. The policy dates from the response to the violence of the 1960s and it has worked: there are no ethnic quarters in Singapore in the sense that there are in most cities, and nobody of any party proposes to end it.

It also means that no community can concentrate, and a community that cannot concentrate cannot deliver a ward. The quotas were designed to prevent ghettos and they also, as a matter of arithmetic that was understood at the time, prevent communal bloc voting in a first past the post system. The government has never denied this and has never been asked to.

Education

Education is compulsory, free, English-medium, and competitive to a degree that is itself the standing public argument. An examination at eleven or twelve directs children into streams that determine a great deal of what follows, the system sorts accurately, and the Territory states the social cost rather than pretending there is not one: a child’s result at eleven is substantially predicted by the household it was born into, and the service that governs Singapore is recruited from the top of a ladder whose first rung is climbed by children who were read to.

The universities are among the strongest in Asia. The scholarship system sends the best abroad on bond and brings them back.

The Malay minority

Malays are poorer than their neighbours on every measure the Territory publishes: income, housing type, examination results, university entry and professional representation. They are under-represented in the professions, in the senior civil service and in the financial sector, and over-represented in the police, the fire service and the lower grades of public employment.

The Register states this plainly as a failing of a government that is in other respects extremely competent, and the discomfort is sharpened by the fact that the Malays are the indigenous people of the island and are a seventh of its population. A Chinese city built on a Malay island in which the Malays are the poorest community is not a situation anybody chose, and it is also not one that sixty years of good government has fixed.

The constitution contains a clause requiring the government to have regard to the interests of the Malay community as the indigenous people of Singapore. It creates no right, confers no benefit, has never been litigated, and is pointed to constantly by every party including the government.

The community votes, by a clear majority, to remain British. The reasoning is stated openly by its own leaders and is not comfortable for anybody: an independent Singapore would be a Chinese state, a British territory is not, and the Crown, the Governor, the appeal to London and the reserved paragraph on internal security are what stands between a minority of fourteen per cent and a majority that would owe it nothing. The independence movement has never found an answer to this, and the answers it has tried have made things worse.

Religion

Religious practice is plural, is not established, and is in ordinary times unremarkable. The Chinese majority follows the usual southern combination of Buddhist, Taoist and ancestral observance. The Malays are Muslim almost without exception. There are substantial Christian denominations across all communities, a Hindu population among the Indians, and long-settled Jewish, Sikh and Parsi communities.

Religious harmony is enforced by law, through a statute permitting restraining orders against religious leaders who attack other faiths or mix religion with politics. It is effective, it is used perhaps once a decade, and it is illiberal, and the Register records all three.

Health

Health care is delivered through compulsory medical savings accounts with a catastrophic safety net and a subsidised public hospital system beneath it. It is not a national health service and was never intended to be.

This is the clearest case of the Territory legislating deliberately against metropolitan practice in a field Britain does not reserve. Britain built a service funded from taxation and free at the point of use; Singapore looked at it, decided against it in the 1980s on the stated ground that a service free at the point of use is a service consumed without limit, and built the opposite. The outcomes are excellent and the cost per head is about half Britain’s. Singaporeans of all parties cite it as the standing demonstration that self-government is real, and they are right to.

Culture and daily life

Singapore is a Chinese city with a Malay substrate, an Indian quarter, a British administration and an equatorial climate, and the mixture is not a metaphor. The food, the festivals, the family structures and the funerals are those of the southern Chinese diaspora, of the Malay world and of south India, side by side, in a place where everybody knows the shape of everybody else’s year.

Food is the national culture and is discussed with a seriousness that visitors find disproportionate until they have been here a week. The hawker centres, which are covered markets of individual cooked-food stalls under public management, are a creation of the government of the 1970s: the street vendors were cleared off the streets for reasons of hygiene and traffic, and were rehoused rather than suppressed. The policy preserved the food and killed the streets, and it is the government’s own favourite story about itself. The dispute with Malaya about which of them invented which dish is conducted on both sides with complete seriousness and is not a joke in either place.

The golden age of Malay cinema of the 1950s was centred on studios here, which is a fact that surprises visitors and is remembered on both sides of the causeway with some tenderness. The studios closed, nothing replaced them at that scale, and the Territory is now a consumer of other people’s culture which funds its own heavily and self-consciously, through grants, a national arts council and a great deal of new concrete. Its literature is preoccupied, to a degree its authors complain about in print, with the single subject of what Singapore is, which is the same subject Hong Kong’s literature cannot leave alone, and neither body of work has found a way through it.

Does the place feel British? In the institutions and nowhere else. The law, the civil service, the school certificates, the shape of the working week, the side of the road, the wigs in the courts and the Queen’s English of the senior service are all unmistakably British, and they sit on a Chinese city that owes Britain nothing culturally and has never pretended otherwise. A visitor expecting a tropical England finds an Asian city with English institutions, which is a different thing and is in some particulars more British than Britain, a fact that visitors find funny and that residents do not.

There is a national identity and it is strong, and the article’s observation about it is that it was formed against Malaya rather than against Britain. Singaporeans know with great precision what they are not, and what they are not is Malayan: not a place where one community holds a special position, not a place governed from a capital four hundred kilometres away, not a place that would have been theirs to shape. Three exclusions in 1946, 1957 and 1963 did more to make this city a community than anything Britain ever did to it, and the consequence is a people with a sharp sense of themselves and no particular quarrel with the flag over the building. Which is why the flag question here is so strange.

Singapore abroad

The Territory has no foreign policy and is represented by Britain, and it has nonetheless a substantial external presence.

It maintains trade commissions in a dozen cities which are embassies in everything but name and are in several cases better staffed than the embassies around them. They negotiate nothing and sign nothing, which is the one thing they cannot do.

It is not a member of the Commonwealth, not being a state, and it competes as a separate nation at the Commonwealth Games and at the Olympic Games, both of which took the view that geography beats sovereignty. These are the only occasions on which a Singapore flag is flown without the Union in the canton anywhere in the world.

The Commonwealth heads of government met in this city in 1971 and adopted the Declaration of Commonwealth Principles, which commits the association’s members to racial equality, to self-determination and to the rejection of colonial domination. It was signed in a British colony by an assembly of states none of whose delegates thought to remark on it, and it bears the city’s name.

The independence movement has quoted it back at Britain ever since, constantly, and the two phrases it uses are the two in the text. Britain has never had a good answer, and the answer it gives, which is that the declaration addresses domination and that Singapore is governed by consent repeatedly tested at the ballot, is the answer that was always going to be given and persuades the people it already persuaded. The hall where the declaration was signed is a place people are photographed.

There is no international forum in which Singapore’s status could be raised at all. The League’s Trusteeship Council is dormant, having supervised the former mandates to their conclusions, and was never given general jurisdiction over ordinary dependencies. The General Assembly’s decolonisation committee keeps a list of non-self-governing territories, and Britain has never put Singapore on it, on the ground that Singapore governs itself, so there is no annual report, no visiting mission and no petition that anybody is obliged to read. The movement has nowhere to go but the ballot, which is its standing grievance and is also the reason its grievance is answerable: a people who may vote on the question every time a third of their legislature asks for a vote are not being denied a hearing.

Relations with Malaya are the relationship that matters most and are the most difficult, and they are conducted by Britain on Singapore’s behalf with Singapore in the room. Kuala Lumpur maintains that it has always been open to Singapore joining the Federation. It does not want Singapore independent and has never said so aloud, and the reasons are plain enough: a British Singapore cannot arm itself, cannot ally with China, and cannot reopen the water agreement. The open door is maintained precisely because it will never be tested.

Relations with Indonesia are correct and wary. It is a vastly larger neighbour which has never claimed the island and whose confrontation with Malaya in the 1960s is the nearest thing to a threat Singapore has faced since the war. Sand is the standing irritation, and the irritation runs both ways.

Relations with Japan are commercially enormous and emotionally unresolved, and the Territory makes no attempt to reconcile the two. Japanese firms are among the largest investors here and Japanese shipping among the largest users of the port, and the massacre of 1942 is commemorated annually a mile from their offices. The payment made in the 1960s was described by both governments as a gift rather than as compensation, a formula Singapore accepted at the time because the alternative was nothing and resents permanently because a gift implies no wrong. Singapore cannot press the matter itself, having no foreign policy, so the grievance must be carried by Britain, which carries it without enthusiasm.

And the other British territories are closer to Singapore institutionally than any foreign state. Professional qualifications are shared, judges sit in more than one of them, senior civil servants transfer between them, and the Chief Ministers meet periodically at a gathering that has never acquired an agreed name because naming it would require deciding what it is. Hong Kong’s question falls due in 2047 and is watched here with enormous attention and almost no public comment at all.

The three referendums

Singapore has voted on its own status three times. Malta has also voted three times, and the comparison is instructive because the same instrument produced opposite results. Malta asked three times and settled the question. Singapore asked three times and unsettled it.

1962

Independence was put by the Chief Minister who believed in it, without a merger proposal attached, at a moment when the rest of the Empire was leaving.

It was rejected by 56.8 per cent to 43.2, on a turnout of 87 per cent.

The margin is narrow enough that the arguments are still rehearsed. The case for was dignity and the plain proposition that a city of this size and wealth should not be anybody’s possession. The case against was assembled from the base, which was a tenth of employment and was British money; from 1942, which was twenty years old and which the campaign against independence used without restraint and without needing to; and from a widespread sense that Lim Cheng-wah had not said what would happen afterwards.

The referendum was advisory. The government treated it as binding and resigned, which was not obvious at the time and which set the precedent that has governed every subsequent vote.

1984

Independence was put again by the Barisan, which had forced the ballot under the clause of the 1971 settlement, thirteen years after the Territory had come into existence.

It was rejected by 74 per cent to 26, on a turnout of 86 per cent, which is the heaviest defeat ever recorded for an independence proposition in a British territory outside Hong Kong.

The explanation generally accepted is that the vote was taken in the shadow of a region that looked dangerous and by an electorate a large part of which remembered the occupation personally. The governing party campaigned harder in 1984 than it has ever campaigned on anything.

2011

Independence was put a third time, again by the Barisan under the same clause, with the Reform Party campaigning for neither side on the ground that the question was the wrong one.

It was rejected by 66 per cent to 34, on a turnout of 81 per cent.

The margin had fallen by eight points in twenty-seven years and the turnout by five. The government won comfortably and was not pleased, and the three results together produced the shape that now governs Singaporean politics: narrow, then a landslide, then a decline.

What the three have settled

Nothing, and the difference from Malta could not be sharper.

In Malta the question is closed. Both parties treat it as decided, the polling has not moved in two decades, and a Maltese politician who raises independence is understood to be addressing his own faction rather than the constitution. In Singapore the question is open, the clause permitting a fourth referendum is in the constitution and has been used twice, and a third of the Assembly is not a high bar.

The reason the two diverged is not in the instruments, which are nearly identical. It is that Malta’s second defeat was heavier than its first and Singapore’s third was lighter than its second. A question that is losing by more each time is a question that has been answered. A question that is losing by less is a question that is being asked again.

The question of status

This is the longest argument in Singaporean public life, it has been running for seventy years, and the Register records it and takes no view.

The case for independence

It begins, and its best advocates begin here rather than with 1942, with the franchise.

Six million people have no say whatever in their own defence, their own foreign relations, their own nationality or the composition of their highest court. Those four subjects are decided by a parliament in which they have no member, by ministers for whom they cannot vote and cannot vote out, answerable to an electorate on the other side of the world which has never given any of it a moment’s thought. No amount of prosperity answers this, and the article does not pretend that it does. The ordinary reply, that the arrangement is consented to and the consent is tested at the ballot, meets the objection on paper and does not meet it in the stomach, because a people who may vote every so often on whether to continue being governed by somebody else are being offered a choice about the arrangement and not a share in it.

It continues with 1942. Britain built the largest naval base in the world here, told this city for twenty years that the base made it safe, lost the island in seven days to an attack delivered from behind, and left the population to be screened and shot. It could not defend Singapore then and it could not defend Singapore now, and the garrison’s own estimates say as much about a force that exists to show the flag. A security guarantee that both parties know to be unenforceable is a fiction maintained because it is convenient to both of them, and a territory whose whole case for dependency rests on protection should be asked who was protected in February 1942.

It continues with the absence of an end. Hong Kong has a date. Malta has an answer. Singapore has neither, and is asked to be a dependency indefinitely, which is a condition no one would design and no one has ever defended on the merits. The settlement of 1971 has stood unaltered while the comparable territories were renegotiated twice, and the only explanation anybody offers is that Singapore is too valuable to let go of, which is an argument for independence and not against it.

And it continues with the Declaration signed in this city, which commits the Commonwealth to self-determination and to the rejection of colonial domination, and which was signed by delegates standing on a colony.

The case for the arrangement

It begins with water, and the Register regards this as the strongest single argument in the file.

A city that cannot drink without its neighbour needs a treaty that its neighbour cannot renegotiate, and the only thing preventing renegotiation is that the treaty has a third party to it a hundred times Johor’s size. Every Singaporean of every party understands what an independent Singapore’s first negotiation would be about and whom it would be with.

It continues with the courts. A dominant party that has held office for sixty years, in a compact city, with a legislature it controls by nine tenths and a judiciary it would appoint, is a configuration the world has seen many times and has a vocabulary for. Singapore is not that, and the reason it is not that is a committee of judges five thousand miles away who cannot be removed, cannot be reached and once told a Singaporean minister that a remedy which removes a legislator is not a remedy. Independence means a Singapore court of final appeal, and the people who want independence most are the people who would be ruined first.

It continues with the Malays, who are a seventh of the Territory, are its indigenous people, are its poorest community, and vote to remain by a clear margin because a British territory is not a Chinese state. An independence won against the settled preference of the only group with an obvious reason to fear it would be a particular kind of beginning.

And it continues with the investability of having no date, which is not a slogan: the airport, the metro, the reclamation and the port exist at the scale they do because nobody in Singapore has ever had to discount a fifty-year asset against a constitutional expiry, and Hong Kong’s unbuilt airport is standing proof of what the alternative costs.

What neither side says

The governing party does not say that it has no plan to seek independence ever, because its own constitution still demands it, and so it says nothing and is attacked for nothing.

The Barisan does not say what it would do about the water.

The Reform Party does not say what happens if Britain simply declines to transfer the reserved subjects, which is the likeliest outcome and which its own programme has no answer to.

And no state in the world supports Singaporean independence. Not Malaya, not Indonesia, not China, not the Realm, not anybody, because every one of them would rather have a city on the strait that is neutral and British than a city on the strait that is aligned with one of the others. This is the loneliest fact in the article. The movement’s answer is that a people do not need permission, which is correct, and which is not a strategy.

The paradox

Hong Kong’s population has no founding trauma. It assembled over a century and a half out of ordinary wage-seeking, there was no flight, there is no year everybody’s grandparents talk about, and what Hong Kongers have in common is a legal system and a great deal of money. That territory votes to remain British by nineteen to one.

Singapore has February 1942, a memorial in the civic centre, a day in the calendar and fifty thousand dead. It votes to remain British by two to one and the margin is falling.

The territory with the trauma is the one whose attachment is weakening, which is the opposite of what anybody would predict, and the Register states the paradox and does not explain it.

The formulation

Maltese politics has a settled line about its own position and repeats it without embarrassment. Singapore has never produced one, and the nearest thing to a formulation that commands any agreement here is not a defence of anything.

It is that Singapore has never been asked to choose between being rich and being free, and does not know which it would choose, because nothing has ever made it choose.

Symbols

The flag is a blue ensign defaced with the territorial badge: the Union in the canton, a blue field, and the badge on the fly.

The badge is a lion, from the name, standing on a white disc. It is the oldest colonial badge still in use anywhere in the world and has never been redesigned, having survived the conversion of the colony into the Territory in 1971 when every other British possession that changed its status took the opportunity to change its emblem. Two competitions to replace it were held and both were abandoned, for the same reason that Hong Kong cannot agree an anthem: a new emblem would have to say what the place is.

The badge is flown alone, on its own field, without the Union, at the Olympic and Commonwealth Games, which are the only occasions on which it lawfully may be. The independence movement flies the same thing year round, which is legal, is common in certain districts, and is understood by everybody without a word being said.

The arms date from the nineteenth century, were granted to the Colony, and have never been regranted. The supporters are a lion and a tiger, the tiger being the Malay tiger, which was shot out on the island in the 1930s and survives only on the shield. The Latin motto has never been changed, for the same reason as the badge: changing it would require agreeing a new one.

There is no territorial anthem. The Royal Anthem is played on state occasions and is the only anthem Singapore has, which the Barisan describes as its best recruiting sergeant and which no government has moved to supplement. Proposals have been made at intervals and have failed at the point at which somebody has to write a line about what the country is.

National day is 3 June, the grant of self-government in 1959. It is a public holiday and is kept with a parade on a scale that visitors find startling, and the awkwardness of a nation celebrating the anniversary of a concession made to it is felt by everybody and is mentioned by nobody in an official capacity.

Assessment

Singapore is the richest, largest and longest-held of the British territories, and it is the least sovereign of them.

That is not an accident and it is not an oversight. Its settlement was made in 1971 in a hurry, in the same year that Britain closed the base that employed a tenth of its people, and it has never been reopened, while Malta’s and Hong Kong’s were renegotiated by governments that had no choice. Nobody has ever given a public reason for the difference. The reason generally understood here, and the Register finds it persuasive, is that Malta is a small island in a quiet sea and Singapore sits on the Strait of Malacca, and that the more valuable a place is, the less of it a power will devolve.

What holds the arrangement together is water, courts, and a minority that is afraid. Each of those is real, each is stated honestly by the people who rely on it, and none of them is an argument about belonging. What holds Malta is a base and a decoration, which is to say an interest and a memory. What holds Singapore is an interest, a safeguard and a fear, and there is no memory in the list at all.

The thing the arrangement rests on is a generation. Each cohort is less attached than the one before it, the margin has fallen by eight points in twenty-seven years, and nothing in the Territory’s circumstances explains it. The arrangement is not losing an argument, because the arguments have not changed and the answers to them have not improved. It is losing a cohort, and no argument can be made to people who have not been born.

The Register makes no prediction about what follows from that, and neither does anybody in Singapore, where the subject is discussed constantly and where nobody will say in public what the arithmetic plainly indicates.

Trivia

See also

• The United Kingdom of Great Britain, the sovereign power, which holds the six reserved subjects
• The Federation of Malaya, across the causeway, which kept Singapore out three times and sells it its water
• Hong Kong, the other great British city in Asia, which gave up the London appeal that Singapore keeps
• Malta, which reserves four subjects instead of six, runs its own foreign policy, and settled by referendum the question Singapore has unsettled by referendum
• Gibraltar, the last Crown Colony, and what Singapore was until 1971
• The Empire of Japan, which occupied the island from 1942 to 1945
• The Commonwealth of Nations, whose declaration against colonial domination bears this city’s name and which this city cannot join
• British Airways, which has served Singapore as a stop on its eastern trunk since 1933
• Kittyhawk, the loss of the King, which the Governor proclaimed here

Singapore · British Territory · Malaya · Foreign Nations · Unresolved Questions · The Strait of Malacca