Lee Kuan Yew as Educator
In the second decade of the 21st century, it became possible, for the first time, that intellectually curious young men could place themselves beyond ‘left-wing’ and ‘right-wing’. A number of sources contributed to this phenomenon, one of them is the Wikipedia page for ‘Otto von Bismarck’ the other is the existence of a country called ‘Singapore’. Singapore is justly popular as a model and inspiration for all those who labour under however a vague standard of ‘Progress’ in the benighted Western democracies. To discover that there is a country, vaguely sceptical of ‘Democracy’, yet outside the dominion of the Red Alert 3 OST Nasrahllah Death March, is the route to intellectual emancipation for so many. Singapore and Lee Kuan Yew must be defended.
Today, the principle foes of Singapore in Britain are not the detractors but support from the wrong places. There’s a cringe aesthetic which has grown up around Lee Kuan Yew, and Singapore generally, among centre-right commentators in Britain which risks turning people off the very real admirable traits of both. Mr. Lee’s British admirers see him as, basically, a kind of macho Harold MacMillan whose accrediting innovation was to “use the State” as if this were some kind of novelty in human history. SORRY, THE SECTARIANISM WILL STOP. Significantly, the achievement of Singapore is not to be found in its ruthlessly selective education system, its economic growth or civil service but rather in the fact it “makes multiculturalism work”. This is rather like suggesting the principle achievement of Winston Churchill was introducing “a comprehensive system of food rationing”.
LKY is too-often invoked as part of a spurious distinction between pragmatic, technocratic politics and “populism”. He serves as a symbol, like Charles de Gaulle, or Salazar of Portugal, of a hallucinated third way ‘beyond politics’ which absolves, by its supposed radicalism, the person who invokes him from caring about plebian concerns like replacement migration or Lockdown Debt. When authoritarian futurism is invoked in the British context, it is always accompanied by these wearying aesthetics of the government pulling-up-its-sleeves and mustering forces it apparently already possesses. It is about the existing order using emergency measures to defend itself, it is never explored whether the British state and its institutions (like the Monarchy) are themselves the primary obstacles to ‘progress’. Sorry, the paedophile blackmail networks will STOP.
An example of the inconsistency with which Singapore is so often invoked is education policy. If one were to seriously emulate Singapore, the bare basics ought to be a vociferous campaign for selective education. As selective education is associated with “grammar schools”, half-pay colonels, provincial white people and the Hated Peter Hitchens in British policy circles, practically nobody is prepared to break the omerta. It is fascinating how even Reform have now abandoned what was once the stapel policy of Middle England for a tepid defence of the decaying minor private schools. A true victory of New Labour if there ever was one. The man most associated with a technocratic, LKYist perspective in British politics, Dominic Cummings, has written extensively on education, and is prepared to advocate for the cognitive elite; yet something as simple as the 11+ exam is still too dark for Dark Dom. His one contribution to education policy remains the Cameronite farce of ‘free schools’, very much in the mainstream Toryboy libertarian tradition rather than anything from Singapore. The point being that much good in Singapore can be found in our own ideological canon but is never taken up because it is associated with ‘the wrong sort of people’. If you want LKY, you must make your peace with Norman Tebbit.
Mr. Lee himself was not an especially ‘technocratic’ man by persuasion. He left economic policy, housing and finance to more specialised talents. For a brief period, he actually struggled in school. His degree was in Law, the well-trodden pathway to colonial politics in that era, rather than economics or Mathematics. His great skill was as a demagogue, and he excelled at it in multiple languages; teaching himself reasonable Japanese a few months after occupation, speaking better Malay than many Malay politicians, learning Cantonese by intense preparation and of course giving us one of the finest political speeches in his native English.
Much is made in the ‘130 IQ Anglo’sphere of Mr. Lee’s impressions of Britain as a ‘high trust society’. England, did, indeed influence LKY but not quite in such banal terms. In 1948, the fact one could leave people to pay for their own newspapers was a triviality one could find in most Western countries. What LKY found in Britain was a tradition, now dead, of anti-democratic Liberalism. He came to England to study at the London School of Economics, founded two decades previously under the direction of that great believer in “complete and permanent loss of all citizen rights” for dysgenic individuals, Sir William Beveridge. Mr. Lee, at the time, was not part of this tradition. He moved to Fitzwilliam college where he participated in the Labour club and the Fabian Society; and, by this point, at least among undergraduates, Darwinism had been thoroughly separated from anything ‘Social’ in the Labour Party but Mr. Lee would’ve inevitably moved in circles, and heard talks from speakers, of the older generation for whom George Bernard Shaw’s lethal chambers were still the last word on the topic. The curriculum, the ‘air’ and the books would’ve still been products of the heroic age of Fabianism; even if Mr. Lee devoted his time, quite understandably, to colonial politics and trivial Labour agitation.