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.
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