Tag Archives: Singapore

29 April 2024: Welcome to my day – reminiscences of the Doctor…

By Mark Valladares | Mon 29th April 2024 - 7:30 am

The news that Dr Dan Poulter, the now ex-Conservative MP for Central Suffolk and North Ipswich, has defected to Labour has come as a bit of a shock to many – and let’s face it, how on Earth could it have taken him so long to realise that the current Conservative leadership have no real interest in public services? – but I ought now to admit that the evidence was there as far back as 2010.

As the brand new MP for the constituency, elected that year, he came to the village as part of his “getting to know the patch” efforts – he was an “incomer” from Reigate and Banstead – and I had the opportunity to find out more about his politics. And, in truth, nothing he said then suggested that he would be any less at home in a Clegg-led Liberal Democrat party than in a Cameron-led Conservative Party.

What might have surprised me was that, with an obvious professional alternative – he’ll earn far more working for the NHS and, possibly, in private practice, than he ever would as an MP – he stuck it out in an increasingly alien Conservative Party. And not only that, he voted through a whole plethora of legislation that should surely have troubled him had he remained true to his supposed principles.

Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged Conservative chaos, defection and governance | 9 Comments

Singapore, do the Conservatives know what they are asking for?

By David Chadwick | Wed 11th March 2020 - 8:45 am

Singapore is often depicted as an authoritarian dictatorship come economic paradise. Conservatives like to fantasise about Singapore, seeing it as the prime example of a small state, low-tax, low-regulation economy that they would like to emulate.

But Singapore’s success has been driven by an idea that is antithetical to the Conservative mind: that the state can be as efficient and effective as the market.

Singapore is not the neoliberal paradise it has been heralded as below are four policy areas we could learn from: –

A sovereign wealth fund to accompany fiscal policy: the Singaporean state asserts its primacy in the island-state’s economy. Compulsory purchase-orders are common; the state frequently buys private turf for the public good. Singapore has built one of the world’s richest sovereign wealth funds, Temasek, which is accountable to Singapore’s Ministry of Finance. It helps to finance the state’s long-term infrastructure projects and, in many ways, resembles the UK’s Green Investment Bank, which the Conservatives sold off in 2015.

Posted in Op-eds | 6 Comments

The Singapore Delusion: Why Brexit Will Fail, part 3

By Richard Flowers | Fri 29th November 2019 - 5:04 pm

In this third part of the series (part one is here, and part two here), Richard looks at the Singapore-on-Thames concept…

Singapore has seen extraordinary levels of growth over the last decades.

Where Western countries have long-term average growth rates in GDP per capita of around 2% a year, Singapore saw nearly a decade of real gdp growth of 12.7% per year from 1965-1973.

Who could not want that, the average citizen seeing their income double every six years, above inflation. Even the worst off would see substantial increases in income, services, wellbeing…

But the idea that a mature economy like the …

Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged liberal values | 8 Comments

Out of the haze

By Merlene Emerson | Fri 27th September 2019 - 2:53 pm

You may have seen images in the news of Indonesia with blood red skies and mired in choking smoke, looking more like Mars than on earth.

Runaway forest fires in Indonesia has been a recurring problem, and the cause of the “haze” in Singapore and Malaysia, depending on which way the wind blows. The fires can rage on for days and weeks in the carbon-rich peat forests, and has so far affected an estimated 69 million people in the region. We can’t even begin to count the cost to the wildlife.

Each day in Singapore we look …

Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged air pollution and ASEAN | 8 Comments