Singapore on reflection?
When you first arrive in Singapore, you’ll probably be distracted by the various impressive structures around you (such as the world’s largest man-made indoor waterfall found in Changi Airport) and the amazing opportunities for food found in stalls filling the sprawling ‘hawker centres’. But if you look closer at life there, you might notice a certain philosophy that runs like a thread through many of the government decisions that shape the country.
For various reasons, I’ve not yet spoken about my trip to Singapore earlier this year. A good number of us from the UK were hosted by the Singapore Government as part of the International Conference on Cohesive Societies in June. It proved to be an interesting time as well as a great opportunity to meet with other delegates outside of the bustle of everyday life. Somewhat ironically, it also turned out to be a good chance to meet with some people who are based not a million miles away from where we work in London.
But then, why write about this trip now? Between the pressures of life and dealing with the ‘summer silly season’, I wanted some more time to chew over what I had learnt, not just from the conference, but from simply being in Singapore itself.
The focus of the conference was pretty familiar, and it was good to be able to hear from leading academics and policy-makers—including Prof. Mike Hardy, who I had met on a number of occasions and had contributed to my own Masters on Community Intergration. Despite the familiar subject matter, I think there were some important lessons for us to take back to the UK.
The conference was opened by the President of Singapore, and other key ministers made an appearance throughout. This engagement from the upper ranks of government highlights its deliberate focus on cohesion and integration. It has been at the root of various government policies for decades now and, whether you agree with the approach or even the aim, you cannot deny that it has been deliberate. And it is from this that I think we need to learn.
Singapore traces much of its modern history back to the British Empire. It has not developed into the city-state it is today organically—there has been an explicit choice to be Singaporean. But this conscious decision, this explicit policy direction, is what we may need to learn from. There was certainly a degree of pride on display at the conference, in what they believe they have achieved, and appearances seem to bear this out. Yet, I was not there to dig under the surface or to seek contrary opinions.
There were also many people from differing backgrounds, ethnicities, and religions present. In his keynote address, President of Singapore Tharman Shanmugaratnam talked about the importance of active choices and the active ‘weaving of society’. This ‘weaving’ is something that must be done not only by government, but by civil society, by faith, and by families. It is not something that will simply happen by chance. And he highlights that this only can work if we have shared hopes, shared purposes, and shared endeavour. Society should not be a zero-sum game—someone else ‘winning’ does not mean I myself am ‘losing’.
There is, of course, much talk in the UK at present of community tensions, immigration, rights, and welfare systems—yet little talk of integration. When the President Shanmugaratnam spoke of ‘active weaving’, this is what I believe he meant. A cohesive society is not one where people merely co-exist—it needs work. We should not aspire to the quilt, a patchwork of many parts stitched together which may tear at the seams in times of pressure, but to the tapestry, a single piece woven together from many threads of different colours and textures supporting each other. A nation at one with itself.
Responsibility for the nature of society lies with its members. For some time now, governments of all different hues have neglected this area of policy and failed to invest the time or effort to articulate or find consensus on what it actually means to integrate into the UK. Perhaps unwisely, we instead expect our society to simply absorb whatever comes our way.
Wherever your own concerns lie—the ideas found online, the differences between cultures or traditions, or even other approaches to etiquette or driving—there has never been a genuine discussion of what ‘Britishness’ means nor what we want it to be. Not like they’ve been having in Singapore.
Maybe it’s time for that to change.
