At The Wrong Side of History, Ed West continues his review of Lee Kuan Yew’s autobiography, detailing the difficult period after the British withdrawal from overseas military commitments “East of Suez”, including the vast naval base in Singapore and the Royal Air Force’s Changi air base:
October 31, 1971, and the British are saying goodbye to their military base in Singapore, the city where the empire endured its greatest humiliation. Three years earlier, an increasingly straitened former imperial power had announced its immediate closure as part of their withdraw east of Suez. For the recently independent city-state, this was a disaster, and prime minister Lee Kuan Yew had done his best to postpone the big day. The city already suffered from high unemployment, and Britain’s military accounted for 20 per cent of Singapore’s GDP, providing 30,000 direct jobs and 40,000 in support.
Yet retreat was inevitable, and when the day came British forces were given a ceremonial send-off, Lee writes in his memoir, the withdrawal carried out with “good intentions, goodwill and good faith”. After 150 years in the Strait, the British were gone, handing over the airbase to the colony they created for the symbolic fee of one dollar.
Lee had cut his teeth in the independence movement, but the city-state could not survive without protection. As with many small countries which had depended on the British, Singapore now shifted its allegiances to its successor state, the United States of America.
The imperial retreat presented a huge financial headache for the former anti-colonial activist, but increasingly a more personal sense of unease. “I feared that slowly but inexorably British influence would decline”, he writes: “and American influence expand. For my generation born and bred in empire, it was not an easy change. I had to come to terms with American power without a British buffer. The British had enforced their will with a certain civility. The Americans were different, as I could see from the way they dealt with South Vietnamese leaders, and even with Thai and Filipino leaders who were not in as parlous a position as those in Saigon. America was a power on the ascendant, with bulging muscles and a habit of flexing them.”
Lee had built up a good relationship with both Harold Wilson and Edward Heath, and used this to delay the withdrawal for as long as possible. He had less luck in getting the British to help Singapore train their army, something they had done with Malaysia where the threat of communist insurgency necessitated it. Neither were most of the other newly independent states willing to help: Egypt’s Nasser recognised Singapore and sent good wishes, but ignored his requests for military aid. India’s prime minister Lal Bahadur Shastri also said no, so he turned to another small post-colonial nation surrounded by hostile neighbours. When a small group of Israelis arrived in November 1965, they had to keep their existence a secret to prevent unrest from the Malay minority. “To disguise their presence, we called them ‘Mexicans'”, he recalls: “They looked swarthy enough”.
The Chinese here traditionally shunned military service, “a historical legacy of the predatory habits of soldiers during the years of rebellions and warlords in China”. As trading people they looked down on the military as a career choices, and he quotes the Chinese saying “a good lad does not become a soldier, good steel does not become nails”.
Lee also had to negotiate the problem of “representation” which mars all multicultural societies. Under the British, the city had been policed by Malays, often recruited from Malaysia itself, as well as the more neutral Gurkhas. Now “we had to find some way to induct more Chinese and Indians into the police and armed forces to reflect their population mix”, otherwise they would not be accepted as legitimate. “We wanted the people to regard our soldiers as their protectors – a reversal from the days when army and police uniforms aroused fear and resentment as symbols of colonial coercion”.
Conscription, unpopular under the British, was reintroduced, and the authorities even set up military cadet corps in all secondary schools, although his colleague Goh Keng Swee reflected that “the Spartan approach to life does not come about naturally in a community that lives by buying and selling”. As with Israel, another small state formed by a market-dominant minority, they were forced to adapt their way of life to survive; yet rather than become the new Sparta, Singapore focussed on becoming the new Corinth, a commercial centre where great fortunes could be made. When the British finally withdrew, RAF Changi Air Base became Changi Airport, a transport hub which came to epitomise the city’s commercial success.
