Secrets of Singapore

They learned from us – now we need to learn from them

The last time I visited Singapore, I stayed at the charmingly run-down, distinctly colonial Raffles Hotel. I drank a Singapore Sling in the Long Bar, contemplated a well-fed cockroach in my room and fancied myself to be following in the footsteps of Somerset Maugham. It was more than 30 years ago. I felt like Milord Anglais, making my tour around the still pretty exotic Far East.

Well, that’s all gone. Visiting again earlier this month I found a Singapore so prosperous that any possible sense of effortless and, of course, undeserved superiority has been replaced by something close to the opposite. The place is so successful, in so many ways, that I felt like a visitor from a decadent old country on a trip to one that had surged ahead.

I can’t afford the Raffles any more. It has been spruced up and is out of my league. I stayed in a hotel slightly away from the best part of town and still winced at the cost.

Just flying across the country gives you the first indication of what has happened. The port is now enormous, with hundreds of stacks of containers across a vast area that look like part of some computer game: Build-a-port, perhaps. Singapore is one of the three biggest ports in the world, vying with Rotterdam and Shanghai.

Its GDP per capita has overtaken that of Britain according to the World Bank, the IMF and the CIA World Factbook, each of which has a different way of measuring. Yet still it grows. Last year it was up another 5 per cent. Meanwhile Britain desperately tries to avoid a double-dip recession. The contrast is stark.