no, not suicide bombers….

but the highly controlled “nanny states” such as Singapore…..

Been reading a lot of those so-called “debates” on the BBC, the Have Your Say bits where the UK’s whingers get their 15 seconds of net.fame…

And I’ve lost count of the number of people who are obviously white Englishmen (at least by the names they give) living in Middle England, who chime in to debates on preventing crime by saying “why can’t England be more like Singapore?” They deal with crime robustly there (including public-school style canings!)

They often speak with experience. SG is a very popular holiday destination for Middle Englanders who want all the nice weather and environment of Asia, but in a controlled enviroment which removes all the squalor of the pockets of poverty and the risk of crime from the people living there who try and jack tourists ; not to mention the Islamic militants found in other countries in that region!

Its colonial past means they have a British-style system of public infrastructure and Government which UK tourists will be familiar with.

It is also a very efficient nation as far as Government is concerned.

Part of this is due to economies of scale (they pack in a population the size of Wales into a country the size of the Isle of Wight) – but their Civil Service (and by extension, their social control and law enforcement agencies) are also very effcient, as they have far tighter deadlines on “getting things done” (perhaps because they just do it and don’t have lots of consultations like here in Britain, and everyone is on a very robust citizens database?)

People who come to the UK from Singapore often bemoan why it takes 3 weeks or more to get public sector agencies to take action, when it can be done in hours or days there! For instance a citizen can check if their au-pair (or anyone else whose identity card number they can find) is an illegal immigrant on-line on a secure screen….

The country’s government is run on what appears to be a system of “British style Government with tradtional Chinese values”

But by and large though the frightening thing is that Singaporeans accept their lot. The country is economically very successful, Provided you don’t get on the wrong side of the authorities and are prepared to live your lifestyle within certain boundaries, life is relatively OK and people accept this.

And this is the attitude I am seeing coming from people in Great Britain on these debates, and from speaking to “normal” people in the streets!

However there appears to be no “alternative” culture scene or any dissenting voices in that country (even Malaysia and Indonesia have more diversity it seems). Although the bulk of people in Singapore are Chinese, thats not the entire reason, they have other races there as well, its just that its become globallly accepted that Singapores stability is kept by strict social control… (I think they virtually eliminated their rave scene two years after it started, and remaining events are merely highly commercialised exhibitions for sound equipment, and I would expect them to be heavily policed by CID)

Unfortunately it seems that particularly in the wake of bombs in London, many (mostly older) people in the UK just seem prepared to give up freedom (or other groups freedom to be precise) for a promise of “stability…” – a danger to the UK’s society?