Three decisions that made Singapore rich

In the 1990s, when he was leader of Britain's Labour Party, Tony Blair flew to Singapore to see Lee Kuan Yew. He told him why he had come: I have watched what you do in government, and I want to learn from it.

Lee gave him three decisions. Blair was still retelling them thirty years later. Every one of them was unpopular in Singapore at the time.

Blair remembers Lee putting it flatly: everyone in Singapore is going to speak English.

People pushed back. Singapore had just been thrown out of Malaysia, and a new country was supposed to have a language of its own.

What Lee did was narrower than the slogan. Malay is still the national language in the Constitution, one of four official languages. But English became the language of government and of the classroom. By 1987, nearly every school taught in English first.

The second decision, in Lee's words as Blair recalls them: we are going to get the best intellectual capital and management capital from wherever it exists in the world, and we are going to bring it to Singapore.

The objection was the obvious one. A young country should build up its own people, not import other countries' experts.

Singapore kept importing. At the end of 2025, about 1.44 million people were working there on a work pass, in a country of roughly six million.

The third decision was zero tolerance for corruption, and the method was counterintuitive. Pay political leaders enough that the private sector stops being a temptation, then take away every excuse.

Ministers are paid one clean wage. No car, no driver, no official housing, no pension. The number you see is the whole number.

Lee did not invent the enforcement side. The anti-corruption bureau was set up by the British in 1952. He kept it, gave it teeth, and had its director report straight to him.

On 8 September 2026, Singapore raised the prime minister's salary to 3.6 million Singapore dollars, about 2.85 million US. It is the first change to the formula since 2011, and it makes him the highest paid elected leader in the world.

The American president is paid 400,000 dollars. The British prime minister about 230,000.

The formula is public: the median income of Singapore's top 1,000 earners, minus 40 percent for public service.

Teach your children in someone else's language. Hire other countries' people. Pay politicians more than almost anyone else on earth. Each one was attacked when it was made.

Singapore finished third out of 182 countries on the 2025 corruption index, with a score of 84. Nobody in Asia scored higher.

Blair's summary, thirty years on: those are the three decisions that were instrumental in building Singapore today.