Multiculturalism in Singapore, part 2

Multicultural meritocracy at the ballot box

A rally for the centre-left Workers’ Party, Singapore’s leading opposition party, in advance of the 2011 General Election. (Image credits: NewNation.sg, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0.)

This is the second part of a two-part series. You can read the first article, which discusses the character of Singapore’s three state-forming groups, the Malays, Chinese, and Indians, here.

Multiculturalism and the ballot box

In Britain, multiculturalism has increasingly led to ethnic gerrymandering. It remains a mystery why the Conservative Party, even from a purely strategic standpoint, would actively facilitate its own voter base’s relative demographic decline, given that over 80%, and sometimes even over 90%, of certain ethnic minority groups — e.g., Africans, Afro-Caribbeans, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis — will reliably vote Labour, or at least anti-Tory, in what often functions as a ‘democratic’ (read: demographic) redistributive transfer from a still mostly white, mostly private sector tax base to themselves. This became more blatant than ever with the emergence of the so-called ‘Gaza Independents’ in certain heavily Muslim constituencies at the 2024 General Election.

Is there any kind of similar phenomenon in Singapore? Singapore is, after all, only around three-quarters Chinese, just as Britain is now only around three-quarters white British; it is far from a homogeneous society. While no race-based polling or electoral data exists, or even demographic data on individual constituencies — the Singaporean state has a strong interest in preventing communal voting blocs from forming, meaning that no official statistics are published — there are some indirect clues for us.

Singapore uses a Group Representation Constituency (GRC) system, which assigns multiple MPs (either four or five as of 2025) to a single larger constituency. It is mandated that parties contest multi-member constituencies as a team, a move that disadvantages resource-poor opposition parties and even further exaggerates the majoritarian element of FPTP to the benefit of the incumbents. But as well as disadvantaging the opposition, the GRC system was also designed to safeguard against racially polarised voting. It was believed that, left unchecked, Singaporeans would vote along ethnic lines. By requiring parties to field multi-ethnic teams in GRCs, with at least one minority candidate per team, the PAP sought to pre-empt communal bloc voting. As Lee Kuan Yew put it, ‘No Chinese voter would vote for a Malay, and no Malay voter would vote for a Chinese.’ (Along with the 18 GRCs, which elect a total of 82 MPs, there are also 15 Single Member Constituencies (SMCs), resulting in a total of 97 MPs in Singapore’s unicameral legislature.)

But do voting patterns still show ethnic undercurrents, despite Lee Kuan Yew’s great efforts to prevent this? Holland-Bukit Timah GRC, which is probably a disproportionately Chinese constituency, has returned overwhelming PAP majorities, with the PAP winning nearly four-fifths of the vote in in 2025. Meanwhile, Aljunied GRC, which probably has a Malay population somewhat larger than the national average, has been held by the opposition Workers’ Party since 2011.

However, this analysis, which will probably be attractive to most Pimlico Journal readers based on their own experiences in Western countries, must be seriously qualified. Firstly, ethnically-driven voting behaviour seems to be by party, rather than by candidate (at least in part thanks to the GRC system). Secondly, and more importantly, this apparent correlation may be partly, or even mostly, class-driven — the PAP’s base is wealthier and older — rather than merely ethnically-driven, though naturally these two factors are inherently difficult to untangle. This means that Malays, with their higher fertility, lower incomes, and a younger population profile, should be structurally more anti-PAP than the Chinese due to age and economic status alone, even if ethnicity does indeed play a role. I am unsure about Indians, but it should be noted that the main opposition leader today, Pritam Singh of the centre-left Workers’ Party, is of Sikh origin, though there have been plenty of leading Chinese opposition figures too.

The most fascinating electoral outlier, which stands to prove the great importance of factors beyond ethnicity in modern Singaporean politics, is Hougang SMC. At the 2025 General Election, which was otherwise a rout in which the PAP won nearly two-thirds of the vote, the WP won 62% of the vote here. Yet Hougang, long the seat of opposition stalwart Low Thia Khiang and held continuously by the WP since 1991, is probably a solidly (if not overwhelmingly) Chinese constituency. The voting behaviour here can seemingly be explained traditional class-based political cleavages, not by any ethnic dynamics.

Singapore is arguably the most genuinely middle-class country in the world, and political cleavages along cultural lines are only now beginning to form. This, far more than the alleged existence of brutal repression of the opposition (a complete anachronism peddled by people who don't know what they are talking about), is the main reason for the continued strength of the PAP. If Singapore somehow became significantly more proletarian, the PAP would not be nearly so successful. It is genuinely remarkable and a testament to Lee Kuan Yew’s success how difficult it is to untangle ethnic voting trends in Singapore, as compared to the West, given how potentially fractious Singaporean democracy could be if mishandled.

Meritocracy and multiculturalism

Singapore’s political elite is the closest modern realisation of the technocratic ideal. Ministers are not career politicians in the Western sense, but the culmination of an institutionalised pipeline that identifies and cultivates talent from adolescence. The process begins with the Public Service Commission (PSC) scholarships, awarded to the top few students in national pre-university examinations — mostly from elite schools such as Raffles Institution or Hwa Chong Institution — to study at the world’s best universities, nearly always abroad, and typically Cambridge (curiously, following Lee Kuan Yew’s footsteps, it is always Cambridge, and not Oxford) or an elite university in the United States. Upon graduation, these scholars are bonded to the civil service, where they enter fast-track administrative positions in the Administrative Service or the Singapore Armed Forces (SAF).

From there, the best of the best are invited to join the People’s Action Party (PAP) and stand for election. Many are promoted directly to ministerial rank upon entry: figures like Ng Eng Hen, a surgical oncologist who served as Minister of Defence from 2015 to 2025, or Vivian Balakrishnan, an esteemed ophthalmologist who is the current Minister of Foreign Affairs, are good examples of the calibre of Singapore’s ministers. They genuinely embody what Lee Kuan Yew described as the ‘best brains’ of the nation. These individuals often take substantial pay cuts to enter government, sometimes forfeiting multi-million-dollar private sector pay packages after receiving what is framed as the ‘call of the nation’. In return for their loyalty, Singapore maintains the world’s highest ministerial salaries, pegged to the earnings of top private sector professionals in the country, a policy designed to institutionalise anti-corruption and attract talent that could otherwise command significant compensation. Such obvious competence has been the PAP’s enduring source of legitimacy, its political capital. This system, while undeniably elitist, has also been remarkably self-sustaining.

In Britain, it is increasingly common to blame the relatively ‘low’ salaries of MPs and Ministers for the poor quality of our political class: £150,000 for MPs and, depending on seniority, £650,000-£1,000,000 for ministers in Singapore, against £93,000 and, for a Cabinet Minister, £160,000 in the UK. So long as we pay MPs and Ministers millions of pounds a year, so the argument goes, we will suddenly raise a cadre of excellent politicians because the opportunity cost of working in the public sector is greatly lowered. But this completely misdiagnoses the issue. For one, Singaporean MPs are not actually that much more well-paid than British MPs; only ministers are. But more significantly, Singapore relies on far more than just labour market mechanics in obtaining high-calibre ministers. High salaries is not what the PAP’s talent pipeline hinges on: the salaries merely reinforce a much bigger and more ambitious system.

The deeper problem in Britain lies in how political parties choose their candidates. The Labour Party, for example, increasingly selects for representatives from its various client groups: trade unions, ethnic minorities, and so on. The problems with the Conservative Party’s selection mechanisms are more complex. But what unites both parties, and in stark contrast to the PAP, is a shared disinterest in merit as a selection criterion. Increasing salaries would not solve any of this: it would just give more of our tax money to the manifestly incompetent, most of whom wouldn’t have been capable of earning much in the private sector anyway.

Instead of attaching their self-worth and public legitimacy to their competence, most British MPs lean very heavily on personal identity or group affiliation. Racial, sexual, regional, and class identities become political brands, and the job of an MP becomes less about serving the nation and more about serving their chosen client group. This much is obvious with the Labour Party, but with their twee localism, the Liberal Democrats and many Tories are very much guilty of this too. The conceit of asking a question at PMQs about the closure of your local constituency’s community centre rather than the systematic rape of hundreds of thousands of British girls and its coverup must not be ignored.

Stakeholderism is a genuinely alien concept in Singapore. This is not simply because Singapore is much smaller, especially geographically. With a British-inspired FPTP system, MPs in Singapore do have local responsibilities, notably through the biweekly/monthly ‘meet the people’ sessions with local constituents. However, the burden of these responsibilities, in the GRCs at least, is given to the junior MPs in the four- or five-member team, another often overlooked benefit of the system. Ministers, by contrast, can concern themselves with governing.

Britain’s failure to select on merit has undermined not only government competence, but the very possibility of a genuinely national politics, despite having one of the most centralised concentrations of political power in the world. The party system has incentivised particularism, not just in the more legitimate sense of representing local constituents, but also in the directly corrosive sense of substituting identity for ability. The trend is self-reinforcing: as quality drops, so too does confidence, and as confidence drops, the temptation to fall back on particularism increases. In Singapore, this appears largely absent: because politicians are competent, they do not need to ‘find their group’. Their legitimacy comes from proven ability and this, in turn, allows multiculturalism to function without descending into tribalism.

When people say that politicians should be from different walks of life, I only agree insofar as they were actually any good at whatever they do. That Singaporean politicians are mostly former ‘out-of-touch’ civil servants doesn’t matter: they are competent. Politicians, fundamentally, should be independent vessels, not beholden to either anyone else or their own insecurities. This cannot be forced by convention or constitution: it is straightforwardly about personnel, and personnel only. Preventing the election of mediocrities would therefore go some way to mitigating the worst excesses of multiculturalism in Britain.

Multiculturalism, the economy, and society

Singapore, like much of East Asia, is ultimately a self-regulating society. Consider, by analogy, Japan’s largely non-mandated but widely obeyed lockdown guidelines and the wearing of masks during the COVID period. The older generation in Singapore still recalls a time of public urination in lifts, routing spitting in the streets, unregulated gambling, and gang-based public disorder. The country continued to earn its nickname of ‘Sin-galore’ well into the middle of the twentieth century. That such a place has become one of the cleanest and most orderly cities in the world is less a miracle than a case study in political will. Singapore’s transformation was one of shock treatment: Lee Kuan Yew’s Government used the full weight of state power — fines, canings, shamings, and yes, the death penalty — to enforce a new social contract.

Yet this aggressive style of governance was transitional. Today, the $2,000 fines and warning signs persist, but enforcement is surprisingly light-touch. Canings and the death penalty are still there, but they aren’t what maintains order. Much of Singapore’s orderliness now endures through social norms rather than surveillance or the threat of direct punishment. Indeed, widespread CCTV coverage is a relatively recent phenomenon, and crime was already very low before its proliferation. What happened instead was that habits that were once imposed by force were gradually internalised; social contagion and expectations did the rest.

The police themselves, contrary to the expectations of most foreigners, are soft-spoken and unthreatening. Many, especially military police with impressive weaponry, are 18-, 19- or 20-year-old national servicemen. Their job is not to mete out thuggish intimidation on behalf of the state, but to discharge their service obligations as frictionlessly as possible. They tend to be courteous, conflict-averse, and keen to avoid escalation. There is no culture of ‘policing the public’ in an adversarial sense; the police are part of the public, and are rotated regularly. The winner’s high from a successful arrest does not accumulate the way it does in the West, where repeated confrontation with easy targets — ethnic minorities, for instance, largely cannot be confronted despite being responsible for much crime — provides personal satisfaction amidst a collectively depressing national mood.

In fact, the contrast with Britain is utterly jarring. In Britain, police sirens are not reassuring in the slightest. Their very frequency puts you on alert without necessarily knowing it. Encounters with the law often feel arbitrary, a symptom of a diverse, free-for-all environment. In Singapore, the opposite is true. The police are so unthreatening that you feel entirely at ease, for instance, when approaching them for directions — a standard once proposed by no less than Peter Hitchens as the true test of a civilised society.

These civic norms don’t emerge in a vacuum. Another key element here, and this somehow took me years to realise, is the absence of a bloated welfare state — not even temporary unemployment benefits. The result is a self-respecting, tax-paying citizenry with little tolerance for indolence, and crucially, no resentment that their contributions are being siphoned off to fund the idle. Foreigners, seeing that locals pull their weight, are expected to do the same, which creates an automatic selection bias for better types. There are no ‘bennies’ here.

And because there is no dole to abuse, the state can afford to be open: foreign workers are brought in on short contracts to staff construction sites, clean hotels, and maintain households. The low unemployment rate (around 2%), which is aided by the lack of a minimum wage, means there is no native underclass to displace. Meanwhile, automation continues apace, from tray return systems in coffee shops to robotic cleaners in MRT (metro) stations. Bear in mind that this is a country whose government expenditure accounts for ≈15% of GDP, compared to ≈45% in Britain. Even after accounting for the distortions created in Singaporean GDP because it is a low-tax maritime and financial hub, Singapore’s figure should still easily be less than half of Britain’s.

This model even works for groups traditionally associated with lower economic attainment. Malays, despite being overrepresented in lower-skilled jobs, are paid decently. This is not because of affirmative action, but because the labour market is tight, competition is strong, and the state does not interfere in ways that distort incentives.

Is this replicable in Britain? The short answer is no, at least not without a clearing out of the entire regime and the deportation (or at a minimum, ‘guest worker’ visa conversion) of the vast majority of Britain’s fiscally-negative foreigners, totalling in the millions. Britain’s welfare state — bloated, indiscriminate, and increasingly unaccountable — has meant that we now tolerate idleness. Tens of billions are shifted out of the productive private sector into the hands of not just the workshy, but also a vast parasitic class of public sector intermediaries living on ‘white-collar welfare’ — bureaucrats, civil servants, local government administrators, human rights lawyers — who exist largely to manage the dysfunction their own policies and functions help create.

The moment Singapore makes the fateful decision to introduce jobless welfare, as new Prime Minister Lawrence Wong floated before the 2025 General Election, this culture will start to unravel; the social contract will, in turn, dissolve. The moment people can live without working, others will ask why they must work at all, and the common conceit, that ‘Lee Kuan Yew was a great man of his time, but not this time’, will prove to be completely and utterly wrong. But this is perhaps a topic for another time.

Conclusion

Besides the existence of the welfare state, the ethnic groups that constitute the nation, and the sheer political will of Lee Kuan Yew himself, God rest his soul, and its effects, arguably the most important difference between Singapore and Britain lies in how multiculturalism itself came to be.

As noted in the comments of my last article, Singapore was born multicultural; the product of overlapping diasporas forged into a single state. It never had the luxury of imagining itself otherwise, and its institutions, incentives, and ideology were designed from the outset to manage that reality. Britain was not. It was an island nation shaped by centuries of relatively stable demography, forged through shared struggles and a long, organic process of national identity formation. Here, large-scale multiculturalism undemocratically arose in the latter decades of the twentieth century, without popular consent being given, or even sought, and thus was doomed from the start.

Unlike in Singapore, British multiculturalism carries the stench of imposition; a top-down experiment whose costs are borne unevenly, and whose benefits are loudly asserted, but rarely felt. For the price of thousands of pounds more each year paid in taxes, the average taxpaying Brit or productive foreigner gets a country that is less safe, less unified, and less trusting. Transplanting the Singapore model wholesale into Britain would not only fail: it would obscure the root of the problem. The issue is not that Britain lacks civic capacity, but that it was never asked whether it wanted to become multicultural, and yet is being unconvincingly told that it always was. No fines, quotas, or imported policies can plaster over a foundation built on that lie, and nor can they atone for the treachery being committed against the British people. For this basic reason, seeking to copy the Singaporean model wholesale in an attempt to manage multiculturalism is nonsensical.

But this needn’t be a reason to despair. Even if we can’t simply copy Singapore, it can still help us design an immigration policy that benefits the British people through an uncompromising approach to public policy.

The focus should be, above all else, removing those who are a net drain on the state. Much as in Singapore, we must immediately cut off universal welfare entitlements for non-citizens, which would in itself likely trigger voluntary emigration among some of those dependent on state support. There is not any number of years of working that should ‘qualify’ a non-native for welfare. Citizens would have to be weaned off welfare more gradually, but this is only marginally less important than removing parasitic foreigners. It should also go without saying that any criminal migrant should also be immediately deported. It should be made clear who is in charge of the state.

Additionally, non-citizens should pay for their own non-subsidised healthcare, as all foreigners in Singapore do. If they have chronic health problems which they cannot pay for without a subsidy, tough luck. That’s not our problem. In Singapore, immigrants must prove they do not have chronic or transmissible conditions (such as HIV and TB) to prove they will not be a permanent burden or public health risk, and it seems to be working. Compare that to Britain where both diseases are increasing significantly, and by roughly the same amount.

Non-citizens should be banned from working in any bureaucratic or administrative role within the state. That we have foreigners working as paper-pushers for national and local government is a total disgrace. Foreigners should only work in highly-skilled or technical state sectors that have immediate public benefit, such as in public works and infrastructure. Soft jobs, insofar as they must exist (and they must exist to some extent in any modern state), should be reserved for natives.

We should also consider retrospectively downgrading the visas that non-citizens currently hold and their privileges: for instance, the removal of the right for ‘Commonwealth citizens’ to vote in our elections, which even permanent residents cannot do in Singapore, despite it taking twenty or more years to acquire this status. The process of acquiring permanent residency and naturalisation, much like in Singapore, should be dramatically tightened. Exactly how much it should be tightened is a question for another article.

All of this will prevent an endless stream of people arriving to reinforce segregated communities with particular interests that are parasitic on the state. The worst people who are already here will be strongly encouraged to leave. This will reduce native resentment against the smaller number of immigrants that we do allow to stay in the country, who will be genuine contributors, thus making Britain’s growing ethnic tensions more manageable. It will also discourage ethnic bloc voting by homogenising economic interests between all groups.

The above policies could certainly be implemented by the next right-wing government in Britain. Much more challenging — but ultimately necessary if the British state wishes to remain competitive — would be the institution of meritocratic selection across the civil service and political parties in order to end the practice of identity-based representation (whether on a class, localist, or ethnic basis). Whilst reforming civil service selection and opening applications to the outside is plausible, improving selection mechanisms for political parties would be far harder. Whether Reform will follow through on their promises to select better MPs than the Conservatives and Labour is yet to be seen.

Regardless, what is required is not just a change of policy and attitude among the political class, but a change in perceptions among the public at large. The biggest difference between Singaporean and British political culture is that, in Singapore, the principal expectation that citizens have for government is that it will effectively administer the state. Until British citizens care more about a prospective MP’s abilities than whether they were born just down the road, we will never enjoy the benefits of a truly national government.

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This article was written by Harry Yew, a Pimlico Journal contributor who lives and works in Singapore. Have a pitch? Send it to pimlicojournal@substack.com.

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