The American journalist Tom Plate, whose column appears in The Straits Times, admires Singapore. In his book, Confessions of an American Media Man, he writes:
Sure, Singapore had its problems -- ethnic tension, excessive political uprightness, constant worries about unemployment. But they've done one heck of a job. The city state has one of the highest per capita incomes in the world. The environment is so clean that it is a Western environmentalist's paradise. There is no littering... The public education system consistently rates as one of the best in the world. The Singapore cabinet invariably fields a team whose collective IQ is at least equal to that of its neighbours' cabinets combined; its civil servants are paid well and its appointment process is, by and large merit-driven; and its much-maligned, if always pro-government, news media... serves all its ethnicities pretty well by not sensationalising frictions and counts one world-class daily newspaper, The Straits Times, among its holdings.
That's the only mention of The Straits Times, which sometime ago published this section of the book where Plate also writes about his interview with Lee Kuan Yew. When asked what was Singapore's biggest problem after independence in the 1960s, he writes,
Surprisingly, Lee said it wasn't the economy, national security nor public schools but rather the omnipresent, oppressive, lawless, marauding drug gangs who roamed the streets, terrorised the citizenry and kept the decent people of Singapore indoors at night...
I asked him what he did to combat the gangs.
"We had the army arrest them and put them in jail."
"So how did the trials go?"
"We had no trials," the senior statesman said reasonably...
"But that's preposterous!"
"Mr Plate, haven't you noticed? The streets of Singapore are safe."
He had me there. Years later, my spunky wife Andrea put this to me. I want to go away for a week, by myself... What, in your view, is the most interesting and safe place for a woman alone? Easy, I answered, Singapore. She went and mainly loved it.
