One day in 1964 Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s founding prime minister, looked out of his office in City Hall and was horrified to see several cows grazing outside. A few days later, a lawyer driving on a nearby road hit one of the cows and died. Lee decided to act. Owners of cows and goats were given a few months to pen their animals. Stray beasts would be slaughtered.
The incident is typical of Singapore’s founding father, and of the city state itself, which has mostly eschewed ideology in favour of practical solutions to practical problems. In a chapter on “greening Singapore” in From Third World To First, Lee detailed how he cleaned up unhygienic hawkers’ stalls, led anti-spitting campaigns, banned dangerous fireworks at Chinese lunar new year and started a methodical tree-planting and maintenance effort that has left Singapore one of the greenest cities in the world.
Lee, who died in March aged 91, knew that even centuries of custom could be nudged or bullied out of existence. What comes across most strongly in his memoir is just how practical and non-ideological he was. For Lee, a former socialist who became an enforcer of state-guided capitalism and even more guided democracy, the main preoccupation was not to create a utopian society but rather one that worked and prospered. The “improbable country” he helped build, which this weekend celebrates its 50th anniversary, is above all a pragmatic state. To adapt a phrase coined by Lee, who said the young nation could not afford the luxury of poetry, Singapore is a creation written in prose.