Singapore on Thames
Could Britain do things to become as rich as Singapore or pre-Communist Hong Kong? The gap is stark. Singapore's GDP per capita PPP sits at around $150,000, ranking second globally, while the UK's is roughly $60,000, ranking 32nd. That's a 2.5x gap in real living standards.
The first thing to establish is what Singapore and pre-handover Hong Kong actually were. They were not ordinary countries that happened to have good policies. They were city-states, entrepôts commanding strategic geography, with captive trading roles, no agricultural hinterland to subsidise, no legacy heavy industry to protect, and populations small enough to manage with deliberate intent. Britain is 68 million people spread over a country with all the institutional barnacles of a thousand-year-old state. The comparison is instructive but not straightforwardly imitable. That said, the policy lessons are real.
Singapore's government spending runs at roughly 17% of GDP. Britain's is 44%. That is not a marginal difference, it is a different theory of what the state is for. Singapore provides public goods efficiently and gets out of the way. Britain provides public goods inefficiently and crowds out private activity while doing it. To close the gap, Britain would need to cut public spending to something in the 25-30% range at most, which means genuinely abolishing entire departments and programmes, not trimming at the margins.
Singapore's top income tax rate is 22%, Britain's is 45%. Add National Insurance and you exceed 50% at the margin. Capital gains, inheritance, stamp duty, business rates, and corporation tax pile further on. Singapore taxes consumption lightly, income moderately, and capital almost not at all. Britain does the reverse. The effect on investment, entrepreneurship, and the retention of talented people is exactly what one would predict. A Britain serious about Singapore-level prosperity would need a flat or near-flat income tax below 25%, the abolition of inheritance tax and stamp duty, and a corporate rate competitive with Ireland or below.
Singapore builds housing with a vigour that Britain finds conceptually alarming. Pre-Communist Hong Kong had virtually no planning restrictions. Britain's planning system, a legacy of the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act, is probably the single greatest structural drag on its economy. It inflates land costs, prevents labour mobility, destroys household balance sheets in the process of enriching existing owners, and makes it almost impossible to build the dense urban environments where productivity actually grows. Full liberalization, street-by-street consent replaced by zonal permissions, green belt unwound, and local vetoes removed, would be necessary.
Both Singapore and Hong Kong ran with essentially zero tariffs and welcomed foreign capital unconditionally. Britain post-Brexit has the theoretical freedom to do this but has chosen instead to replicate much of the EU's trade policy caution. Unilateral free trade, aggressive bilateral deals, and a genuine open-door to foreign direct investment would be required, together with the regulatory simplicity that makes companies want to domicile here rather than merely tolerate doing business here.
Singapore has a highly flexible labour market with strong incentives to work and contribute to the Central Provident Fund (CPF), a compulsory savings scheme rather than a redistributive pension. Hong Kong had virtually no employment regulation by Western standards. Britain has accumulated four decades of EU-derived employment law on top of its own, creating a litigation risk that suppresses hiring, particularly of younger and less experienced workers. The minimum wage set at economy-pricing levels, restrictions on dismissal, IR35-style complexity, all of these reduce the efficiency of labour allocation.
Singapore's CPF is the crucial mechanism that allows low state spending without mass poverty. Citizens accumulate their own retirement, healthcare, and housing savings through mandatory contributions, with a genuine link between contribution and benefit. Britain's welfare state encourages dependency, discourages saving, and creates enormous fiscal obligations. Transitioning to a CPF-style model would be generationally complex but is the structural answer to how one can sustain low public spending without abandoning people to destitution.
Both Singapore and Hong Kong became wealthy partly as safe harbours, places where contracts were enforced, property rights were absolute, and the courts were beyond political interference. Britain has this reputation in law but has been eroding it in practice through retrospective taxation, arbitrary regulatory changes, and the instability of successive governments rewriting the rules. Restoring and reinforcing that reputation, codified protections for investment, and statutory commitments on regulatory stability, would signal to global capital that Britain means it.
Singapore is ruthlessly meritocratic in education and actively imports global talent at the high end. Hong Kong was a magnet for entrepreneurial Chinese capital. Britain's universities are world-class but sit atop a school system that has been captured by progressive pedagogy and produces mediocre numeracy. Immigration policy simultaneously keeps out the people Britain needs, such as high-skilled workers, entrepreneurs, and investors, while failing to control the flows that stress public services. A Singapore-style points system weighted heavily toward economic contribution, combined with serious school reform, would over a generation transform the human capital base.
Singapore and Hong Kong had advantages Britain cannot replicate. These include geographic centrality in growing trade routes, smallness permitting genuine administrative coherence, and, in Singapore's case, a founding generation of leaders with unusual clarity of purpose and freedom from democratic constraint. Lee Kuan Yew governed in ways a British Prime Minister never could, and the CPF was politically possible in 1955 in a way it might not be in 2026.
But the policy analysis is not obscure or contested. Britain knows what prosperity requires. The barriers are not analytical, they are political. It has incumbent interests in high public spending, landowners who benefit from planning restriction, a civil service with no incentive for efficiency, and an electorate that has been taught to regard the welfare state as a moral achievement rather than an economic cost.
The programme above would work. The key question whether it is politically possible. The answer to that is not without a generation of political leadership unusual enough to push it through despite the opposition. Kindly wait.
Madsen Pirie