From Third World to First The Singapore Story pdfdrive com

Part of the ceremony, a drive from Westminster to the Guildhall in a horse-
drawn carriage, was cancelled because a rail strike had caused traffic congestion.
Industrial problems continued to bedevil Britain. Margaret Thatcher’s clash with
the miners’ union was yet to come.
My long years in office and our historical ties with Britain gave me
opportunities to know successive British prime ministers from Harold
Macmillan to Tony Blair.
Harold Macmillan was of my father’s generation, an Edwardian grandee in

---

appearance and manner with a deceptively languid air and a lofty approach to
young colonials like me. Sir Alec Douglas-Home was the nicest of them all – a
real gentleman whose manner on television belied the shrewd geopolitical
thinker he was. He might have counted with matchsticks as he candidly
admitted, but he had more solid sense than many cerebral ministers on both front
benches.
The most politically skilful of them was Harold Wilson. It was my good
fortune that we were friends before he became prime minister. I was able to
persuade him to remain east of Suez for a few years longer. Those few years
made a difference because a residual British presence stayed on in Singapore
until mid-1975. This gave us time to sort out our relations with Indonesia
without making precipitate moves we might later regret. I personally owed much
to Wilson for his staunch support when we were in Malaysia and after, as I have
recounted earlier in my memoirs. The problems he faced in Britain were deep-
seated – lowered levels of education and skills, lower productivity because
unions were not cooperating with management. The Labour Party of the 1960s
and ’70s was dominated by the trade unions and could not tackle these basic
issues, hence Wilson was seen as going for quick fixes. To keep the party behind
him, he had to zigzag, making him appear wily and devious.
In marked contrast, I found Ted Heath reliable and steadfast. I first knew him
as Macmillan’s minister in charge of negotiating Britain’s entry into Europe and
had lobbied him to protect Singapore’s position. We became friends during his
time as leader of the opposition after Wilson won the 1964 election. Often when
I was in London, he would have me to lunch at his flat in Albany to talk about
Britain, Europe, America and the Commonwealth. He rated Europe more
important than America and the Commonwealth in Britain’s future. Once he had
decided on a policy, he did not lightly change his mind, and he believed in
Europe before he was prime minister. If I were asked to choose one person from
among the British prime ministers and ministers whom I knew to accompany me
on a dangerous mission, I would choose Ted Heath. He would stay to the end to
accomplish what he had set out to do. Unfortunately, he lacked the ability to
enthuse and move a people. One on one, he would get animated, but on
television he would appear wooden, a tremendous disadvantage in the age of
electronic media. We have remained good friends, meeting occasionally in
London, in Singapore and at international forums like Davos.

---

When Jim Callaghan spoke to the Cambridge University Labour Club in
1948 I was in the student audience. He was introduced as an ex-chief petty
officer in the Royal Navy who had become a junior minister. He spoke
confidently and well. I got to know him in the mid-1950s when attending
constitutional talks in London, and kept in touch over the years. Because he
became prime minister unexpectedly and rather late in life when Wilson
resigned in March 1976, he did not have his own political agenda. Indeed,
Britain was in such dire economic circumstances that the IMF had to be brought
in. So the agenda was set for him.
I had appealed to Jim Callaghan when he was prime minister to allow
Brunei, whose foreign affairs Britain still controlled, to permit our Singapore
Armed Forces to train in their jungles. The British foreign and Commonwealth
office had held up this decision to avoid involvement in our sensitive defence
relations with Malaysia. I argued that Britain would soon not be in charge and
we would be able to get this jungle training school anyway. Why not allow it
while Britain was in charge so that it would be part of the political landscape
when Brunei became independent? He agreed and we established our jungle
training school in late 1976.
Faced with interminable economic problems including unemployment,
Callaghan’s Labour government became protectionist. In April 1977 George
Thomson, by then a life peer and no longer a minister, came as Callaghan’s
personal envoy to ask if I intended to raise bilateral issues with British leaders
during the Commonwealth conference in June. I said it would not be appropriate
to raise bilateral complaints at the queen’s silver jubilee celebrations, but
protested that the British had persuaded the Germans to get the EEC to block the
entry of Singapore-made pocket calculators and monochrome television sets.
There had been no prior discussions with us. I pointed out that our pocket
calculators were sophisticated models made with high-level American
technology, well ahead of British technology. Stopping imports from Singapore
would mean Britons paying more for the same items from America. So also with
monochrome television sets built by Japanese companies in Singapore. Later the
trade barriers were lifted because they did not in fact preserve British jobs.
Callaghan once asked me, “What kind of people are these Japanese? They
work like ants, they keep increasing their exports but do not import.” He held the
Westerner’s stereotype of them, forged by inhuman Japanese behaviour during
World War II. He did not understand them. He did not see Japanese investments,
as Mrs Thatcher later did, as a way to reindustrialise Britain. He was more

---

interested in the Africans, Indians and other members of the Commonwealth.
His worldview was focused on king and empire. During the Commonwealth
Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM), he gave African leaders every
opportunity to air their views, especially on Rhodesia and South Africa’s
apartheid. He was the typical British Labour Party leader with a working-class
background, whose instincts were to stand up for the downtrodden and the
oppressed. However, he was also hard-headed when it came to tough decisions
like getting his Labour government to implement rigorous IMF conditions
attached to its rescue package for the sterling crisis.
Callaghan’s strength was his “steady as she goes” approach to problems. He
did not look for fancy solutions. He had deep loyalties to the trade unions, yet
his government was brought down by the unions.
Margaret Thatcher sat next to me at a dinner in 10 Downing Street in
October 1970 when Ted Heath was prime minister. She was then minister for
education, and we talked about the loss to Britain when it replaced grammar
schools with “comprehensives” (mixed ability schools). The bright students lost
out without any corresponding gains by the others.
When she was leader of the opposition, I asked George Thomas, then
Speaker of the House of Commons, what he thought of her. In his Welsh lilt, he
said, “She has great passion for Britain and would do the right things for Britain.
She wants to turn the country around and I believe she is the only one with the
will to do it.” And when I asked Jim Callaghan, who was then prime minister,
what he thought of her, his answer was, “She is the one with trousers on the front
bench.” These views from a Labour Speaker and a Labour prime minister
reinforced my own that she was indeed a “conviction politician”.
When Thatcher won the election in May 1979, I cheered for her. She was for
free competition in a free market. During her years in opposition, I met her in
London and on the several visits she made to Singapore, usually on her way to
Australia and New Zealand. In June 1979, a month after she became prime
minister, I had an hour’s discussion with her before lunch at 10 Downing Street.
She was brimming with ideas. In July 1980 she wrote as leader of the
Conservative Party to invite me to be its guest speaker, the first ever from the
Commonwealth, at the party conference in Brighton that October. I replied that I
could not accept the honour because of my long association with the Labour