Tony Blair: preference

Transcript context

…Let's go back to the topics discussed with foreign leaders at TBI. Take Lee Kuan Yew and his position in the 1960s and the Singapore he inherited. If you were advising Lee Kuan Yew with the advice you would likely give to a developing country now, would Singapore have been even more successful than it ended up? Would it have been less successful? What would the effect of your advice now have been on Singapore in the 1960s? With Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore it's the wrong way around. I learned so much from him. I first went to see him in Singapore back in the 1990s when I was leader of the Labour Party. The Labour Party had been really critical of Singapore. The first thing he said to me when I came into the room was, "why are you seeing me? Your party's always hated me. " I said, "I want to see you because I've watched what you do in government and I want to learn from it. " I don't think there's anything I could have told Lee Kuan Yew. He's a fascinating leader. This is the interesting thing about government. Don’t look upon government as a branch of politics. Look upon it as its own discipline, a professional discipline. You can learn lessons of what's worked and what doesn't work. The fascinating thing about Lee Kuan Yew is that right at the beginning he took three important decisions for Singapore. Each one of them now seems obvious. Each one at the time was deeply contested. Number one, he said, "everyone's going to speak English in Singapore." There were lots of people who said to him at the time, "no, we've been thrown out of Malaysia effectively. We're now a fledgling country, a city-state country. We need to have our own local language. We need to be true to our roots and everything." He said, "no, English is the language of the world and we're all going to speak English." Today that's what happens in Singapore. Secondly, he said, "we're going to get the best intellectual capital and management capital, from wherever it exists in the world, and we're going to bring it to Singapore." Again, people said, "no, we should stand on our own two feet" and "you're also bringing in the British who we've got all these disputes with." He said, "no, I'm going to bring in the best from wherever they are, and they're going to come to Singapore." Today, Singapore exports intellectual capital. The third thing he did was he said, "there's going to be no corruption. And one of the ways we're going to do that is we're going to make sure political leaders are well paid.” The Singaporean leaders are the best paid in the world by a factor of about 10 for the next person. And he said, “there's going to be zero tolerance of corruption, just zero tolerance of corruption.” Those are the three decisions that were instrumental in building Singapore today. If you could go to the UK or the US right now and narrow down the list to three key priorities, what could somebody in power do to fix them? Let’s say Starmer is elected in the UK. We’ll see whoever becomes president in the US. Do Western leaders have the power to enact what the equivalent would be for their societies right now? Or do you have all this inertia and you can't start fresh like Singapore could in the 1960s?…

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