Creating Value by Making Things Less Valuable

 Sometime in April of this year, I decided to write a piece on a quote by Prince Charles, the heir to the British Throne, which was entitled “ALL THE TIME I FEEL I MUST JUSTIFYMY EXISTENCE.” I felt that the quote was post-worthy because it summed up a fact of life and the fact that a man who didn’t have to worry about money was conscious of that was worthy of my few cents of comment.

The vast majority of us need to work to put food on the table. Work involves justifying one’s existence to a party paying the bills. Business people are always trying to prove that their product or service makes life better for customers. Employees constantly need to prove that they are of a value to the system. In a funny way, this is easier when you’re at the bottom of the food chain. If I take myself as an example, my value to my day-job boss is simple. I am strong enough to lift boxes of documents and I don’t have an issue traveling to industrial estates. To my restaurant job bosses, my value is simple – I’m the guy who brings food from the kitchen to the table.

I’m not terribly well paid because it’s been argued that the value of my job (particularly the night one), because the theory is that anyone can do the job I do, and probably at a cheaper price. Hence, to do the job I do, my value needs to be a little more than just moving dishes from point-to-point. Immigration laws protect me in as much as I have the right citizenship and employers need a certain number of locals on the payroll to hire “exploitable” labour. I also do things like I do my best to push booze sales so that I can tell my employers that I make them enough money to pay myself.

It’s easy for me justify my value because it’s easy to describe what I do. However, its also easy for my employers to remove me. They just need to feel that business has slowed and that they can get someone cheaper. Should that happen, removing me from my sources of income would be fairly easy.

However, it’s a different story as you climb higher up the food chain. What exactly does a CEO or a minister do to justify his or her existence to an organization? It’s hard to pin down the individual at the top’s efforts have a direct effect on anything in particular. However, the argument goes, that whatever people at the top are doing, its exceedingly valuable and the value they provide is something only they can bring and therefore worthy of a lot more pay than whatever people at the ground are making. We’ve used this argument for the longest time in Singapore whenever it comes to talking about government salaries.

The answer that the people at the top “create value,” which means that the rest of us have jobs to go to and therefore get to have a better life than we would have otherwise. In Singapore, the argument goes that we need to have the world’s highest paid ministers because we need to attract super competent people to run the show and we don’t want them to turn corrupt. We also argue that we need to share the brains between the public and private sector so that all sides of the economy benefit.

I’ve argued on many occasions that I don’t disagree with this on the surface. Why should the bright and brainy not enter public service and get well paid for it. Why can’t smart public servants be tapped to run public listed companies if they can deliver value?

Where I do question this policy is on two fronts. Firstly, are we really getting the best and brightest and what happens when they fail to deliver “value.”

Let’s take the “CEO’s” job as an example. Modern management theory has it that a CEO is appointed by shareholders to make them money. In the USA, this has led to the use of stock options, which are supposed to make a CEO’s interest aligned with the shareholders who have hired him (they’re usually men). This has created multimillionaires across the board and whenever someone talks about outrageous pay of CEO’s when compared to the average worker, the retort is that the bulk of the CEO’s pay is from stock options and the CEO is only taking a fair share of the wealth he helped to create for shareholders (which does include mutual and pension funds, which workers invest in).

Since, this has been the standard measurement of people at the top, let’s see if this applies to Singapore’s top brass. Have they created vast amounts of wealth that their American counterparts claim to have done?

Let’s take Mr. Ng Yat Chung, the CEO of Singapore Press Holdings (SPH), who is about to do his shareholders a service by selling the company to another Singapore government-controlled conglomerate called Keppel Corporation (Keppel). When the story broke on 2 August 2021, it was mentioned that the offer by Keppel provided SPH shareholders with a 40percent premium of the last traded share price of $1.50 per share. The report can be found at:

https://www.businesstimes.com.sg/companies-markets/keppel-makes-surprise-s22b-bid-to-privatise-sph

So, it looks like Mr. Ng has done what few imagined would be possible in the current market – he’s delivered “value” or “created wealth” for the shareholders who hired him. As a former Chief of Defense Force (CDF), you could argue that by creating “value” for SPH’s shareholders, Mr. Ng has proven the Singapore government’s point of the need to share “value-creating” brains between the public and private sector.

Unfortunately, if you look at things more closely, Mr. Ng hasn’t exactly done that. When Mr. Ng took over as CEO of SPH in September 2017, SPH’s shares were hovering at around $2.76 per share. At the time of the announcement of Keppel’s take over, the share price was hovering around $1.88 per share. If you look at the chart of SPH’s historical share price, it’s very noticeable that SPH’s share price has been on a gradual decline from the day Mr. Ng took over.

https://sginvestors.io/sgx/stock/t39-sph/share-price-history

 

Copyright SG Investors.io

If you look through the share price of SPH in the years that Mr. Ng took over, its very clear that what Mr. Ng has done has been to manage the decline of SPH rather than to create new value adding paths to prosperity for SPH.

One can argue that Mr. Ng was unlucky in the sense that the main business of SPH has been in the print media, which has been on the decline for over a decade. You could argue that it’s just an industry trend and Mr. Ng had bad luck. When the announcement came in May 2021 that SPH would be hiving off its media business into a non-profit company, the government came to his image repairing issue. Our Magically Unconflicted Writer and Enforcer of Laws went as far as to say that there was nothing wrong with governments helping out media businesses:

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/singapore/sph-media-restructure-government-help-shanmugam-umbrage-1350241

Unfortunately, Mr. Shanmugam is not exactly correct as can be seen by a comparative share price of some other media companies. Take News Corp, owned by Rupert Murdoch, which has seen its share price rise since 2017 when the share price hovered around US13 per share and at the time of writing now trades at around US$23 per share.

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/NWS/chart

 

Of course, News Corp has a variety of businesses and is an international company, so one can argue that its TV and radio business does offset whatever happens in the print business.

However, if you look at another company, whose business is to publish a news paper for a financial centre, you’ll also find that the picture does not favour Mr. Ng’s management of SPH. The New York Times Company Limited, which publishes the New York Times saw its share price go from roughly US$18 per share in September 2017 to roughly US$43 per share in its most recent trade.

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/NYT/chart?p

 

How did these companies expand and grow in tougher markets, whereas SPH failed to grow and in fact declined in its domestic market? There’s no way Mr. Ng could not have seen that his main flagship product was declining in a three-year period and that he could have taken some remedial action.

Are the people on the top really creating value for the rest of us or are they playing semantics to make us assume that some form of value is being created. It’s a question that we could all do well to consider.

In An Open Field

 

Let’s be perfect honest, the Tokyo Olympics have been pretty disappointing for Singapore’s athletes. After winning our first ever gold medal five years ago in Rio De Janeiro, the closest we came to getting a sniff of a medal came from Ms. Yu Mengyu, who reached the semi-finals but lost and then failed to get the bronze.

I guess you could say that there was bound to be a certain level of disappointment, particularly after the euphoria of winning our gold medal at the Rio games in 2016. If you take sports as a metaphor for life, you’ll understand that athletes have their good days and their bad days. The “best-in-the-world,” can falter on the world stage. Take the top three best male tennis players in the world, namely Roger Federer, Rafale Nadal and Novak Djokovic as examples. These men have won 20-grand slams each and chances are they’ll beat most of the guys that come up against them. However, as the Tokyo Olympics have shown, even Mr. Djokovic, who is currently the best player of the three, can lose to relative unknowns.

Any nation can produce a “world star.” However, not every nation can produce world stars consistently. The consistence is more often than not a question of the country that has the best available infrastructure to develop talent. In the old days, the Olympics was about who had the best system to consistently produce top class athletes as much as it was about the actual athletes. It was either the capitalist system of the USA or the state sponsored system of the USSR, which to a certain extent has been replaced by China.

Consistent success is also about management. New Zealand’s formidable All Black Rugby Union team is exceedingly well managed. The All Blacks have a 75 percent winning record against all major rivals and that is despite the fact that New Zealand only has a population of three over million. Manchester United used to dominate everything in the English Premier League when it had one good manager (Sir Alex Ferguson) and promptly slid down the ranks when he was succeeded by less competent managers.

At their very best, sports allow us to express our competitive energies into something peaceful. Nations can fight it out on a sports field rather than on the battlefield like the example of India-Pakistan cricket matches or England-Germany football matches (The English like to remind the Germans that they won both World Wars and the Germans point out that they’ve won four world cups to England’s one).

Unfortunately, just as sports has the ability to bring out the best in human nature, it also has the ability to bring out the worst in us. England’s football fans, for example, have the ability to behave in a way that negates any success that England’s football team may have on the pitch. Sports administrators have a talent for corruption, as has been seen in the ugly side of how host nations for big sporting events like the Olympics and FIFA World Cup are decided.

Politicians, are unfortunately, part of the sporting scene and have been known to be part of the worst aspects of sports and our politicians had a pretty disappointing Olympics in the same way that our athletes did.

Take Mr. Edwin Tong, our Minister for Community, Culture and Youth as an example. Mr. Tong came out to give some encouragement to our athletes. Told people not to get nasty in their criticism and even told all of us to give our former gold medal winner, Mr. Joseph Schooling, some space after failing to defend his crown.

He should have left it at that. However, Mr. Tong had to talk about "athletes do have a responsibility to be accountable" and went as far as to mention that "Of course, when they perform badly, I think they have to stand up for it and they have to explain.” The full report of Mr. Tong’s remarks can be seen at:

https://www.todayonline.com/singapore/some-very-encouraging-team-sg-performances-at-olympics

 

They were beaten in front of the world’s cameras – how much more accountable can you get? – Copyright Today/AFP

While Mr. Tong may not be wrong to talk about accountability, he was using the wrong people as examples.

Say what you like about our athletes but they are operating in a ruthless environment. For all the talk about “friendly” competition, our Olympians are competing against the best in the world instead of the best in Singapore or even the best in ASEAN.

The reality for our Olympic athletes is that every TV camera on the planet is focused on them. They perform for a global audience and every nitty-gritty detail of their performance is up for scrutiny. Each and everyone of our Olympic athletes has been held up to the most rigorous of standards. Sure, I’m not saying that all athletes are clean and honest. I’m old enough to remember how Canadian Sprinter Ben Johnson (who was once the fastest man ever) was disgraced in front of the world.

Mr. Tong’s message, should instead, have been aimed at another group – his fellow politicians. Politicians have certain luxuries that athletes don’t have. The measurements that politicians have to live up to, for example, are less stringent.

Do politicians have to face the “best-in-the-world?” The answer is never. Politicians argue that theirs is a “local” profession and only those who have the “local loyalties” can compete in politics. We all know that Joseph Schooling is a world-class swimmer because he beat Michael Phelps, who is considered to be the “Greatest-Ever.” Who does Lee Hsien Loong compete against to prove he is a world-class Prime Minister? Our first Prime Minister, Lee Kuan Yew, used to justify everything he did by the fact that he was “elected.” What he forgot to mention was that he was consistently fighting against an opposition that he had amputated and used every trick in the book to cripple. The results of a Singapore election are forgone, the opposition only fights to be opposition. The same cannot be said for a swimming or running race.

Are the world’s cameras focused on the performance of politicians? Did our politicians invite the cameras to show us how they were making the decision to bail out dormitory operators and to allow KTV lounges to “pivot” towards being food and beverage outlets?

The accounting standards of athletes is pretty obvious. When you do badly, your “fans” will show their obvious displeasure. Think of the Brazilian soccer team that was humiliated by Germany in the 2014 World Cup that was held in Brazil. Not only were they humiliated by having seven goals against them (could have been more, the Germans agreed at half time not to score too many more as a face-saving measure), they were booed off the pitch by 78,838 people in the Maracanã Stadium. Highlights from that match can be seen at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aE4BdIP6bvc

When our Covid-19 cases started to spike up again, did anyone boo the politicians? Sure, there were plenty of grumbles on the net but that was pretty much it. In fact, the Magically Unconflicted writer and enforcer of laws proceeded to dress down people who expected him to do his job.

What does a nation lose when there is a disappointment on the pitch? Perhaps national pride is hurt. But other than that, there’s no actual damage to the country. It’s not so when it comes to politicians who screw up. So, why is it such that we’re holding our athletes to higher standards than our politicians? Mr. Tong should spend less time asking our athletes to be accountable and more time trying to ensure that we have a culture where politicians are held to the same high standards as athletes.

It’s All in Your Mind

My first wife suffered from borderline personality disorder. The smallest things could set her off. She could be exceedingly sweet and then violent the next moment. Her streaks of violence reached a stage where she’d push me into a state where I’d be holding my clenched fist above her and she’d be egging me on to be a “real man” and put my first into her face. There was obviously a God out there who was looking out for me because at that moment I’d restrain myself. It goes without saying that the strain of dealing with her issues was such that I felt more joy on the day we were officially divorced than our actual marriage day.

I bring up this period of my life because the issue of mental health has become a major focus in Singapore and around the world. We’ve had two prominent athletes, namely Naomi Osaka and Simone Biles withdraw from major sporting events for the sake of their mental health. In “Anti-Violence” Singapore, we’ve had a case of a 16-year-old murdering 13-year-old for the sake of it. Thanks to Covid-19 and its effects of upending everything we considered normal, stress and mental wellbeing have become hot button issues for the simple reason that just about everyone has experienced some sort of mental issues.

 

 

Copyright Elle – Two Young Ladies Who Understood and Glory and Money were Not Worth the Mental Anguish.

In a strange way, the sudden focus on mental wellbeing is a step in the right direction. People with “mental issues” were once stigmatized. I remember during basic military training (around 1994-1995), my commanding officer (CO) would advise us not to attempt suicide because we would not want the shame of knowing that there was a “mental illness” gene in the family. Back in those days, we were imbued with a perverse sense of pride of being able to withstand stress, which meant being yelled at without giving into the urge to punch the guy yelling at you.

For my ex, there was the issue of her parents, who were supportive of her initially when she first told them that she had been diagnosed with clinical depression. They asked her to stay at home and told her not to worry about the need to work. However, when the psychiatrist bills started pilling up, their views changed a little. Father-in-law’s take on it was all in her mind and she needed to learn how to sing a few karaoke songs. His exact words were “It’s all in the mind.”

To be fair to my former father-in-law, he is correct. Mental health is about the mind. However, the main issue here is that the human mind is exceedingly powerful and plays and important role in our overall well-being. Whilst I do not have the medical qualification to make the diagnosis, I don’t believe I’d be far off the mark to make the statement that the reality we actually live, starts in the mind – hence every “success coach” starts by telling one to change our mindset. Mental well-being does affect our physical well-being – just think of the number of cardiac patients who worked “high-stress” jobs.

I’m not saying that stress is necessarily bad. Some of us do need the stress of needing to put food on the table to get moving. However, we need to ask if the current rat race and the need to be number one or champion red-dot is worth it.

I remember taking pride in the fact that I could work long hours in the office. It was like, I could brag about having “resilience” and the mental fortitude to go places “someday.” When I interned at Citibank, there was a thrill about being part of a “brand name” and it was cool to work like mad. This kind of worked in my first job. Although the agency in question was small, we had “sexy” clients like Absolut. I worked my guts out and was praised for it and it felt like I was going places.

However, I burned out in a matter of months and as I got older, I realized that “places” and “someday” were increasingly elusive. As often mentioned, in my last corporate job, I found myself leaving at seven – the am variety, on a major case. A sign that I was going places? Well, after a point, it was clear that I wasn’t going to anywhere I really wanted to be.

It’s easier to talk about walking away than actually doing it. I had to be forced out of that situation by my siblings and I ended up better for it. Still broke most of the time but I’m without the stress of having to prove all sorts of weird things to people. That is something money cannot buy. Material comforts are nice but we need to ask ourselves if those comforts are worth having crap dumped into our minds on a daily basis.    

How Heroes Wither

 

Joseph Schooling, the young man who won our first ever gold medal at the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro in 2016 has failed to defend his Olympic crown. Mr. Schooling finished last in the 100-meter butterfly heats and did not even qualify for the finals. Mr. Schooling has received a few nasty comments online but he’s also received words of encouragement from everybody from our president downwards.

While it may seem a little mean-spirited to talk about Mr. Schoolings failure, it’s worth analysing. Mr. Schooling’s life story provides plenty of guidelines for anyone in Singapore has aspirations beyond working in the conventional or government mandated paths. One of the better comments on Mr. Schooling’s recent ventures is the commentary written by the former sports correspondent for the Today Newspaper, Mr. Ian De Cotta. His commentary can be found at:

https://www.todayonline.com/commentary/commentary-singapore-sports-must-learn-lessons-schoolings-decline

 

Copyright Today and AFP.

What makes Mr. De Cotta’s commentary particularly interesting is that he mentions that he highlight’s the role of leaving Singapore in Mr. Schooling’s success and the role of returning to Singapore in his subsequent decline.

There is a funny parallel in Mr. Schooling’s story with the few who have made their name beyond Singapore’s shores. Writer Kevin Kwan (of Crazy Rich Asians Fame) and pianist Melvyn Tan, found space to develop their talents outside of Singapore. Both Singapore-born men are no longer Singaporean and thanks to our national service laws, neither is likely to ever set foot in Singapore. Both men continue to find success in their respective fields.

A more interesting and prominent example is Mr. Sim Woo Hong, founder and CEO of Creative Technologies, which was the sexy home-grown innovative technology company long before the government decided that Singapore needed to produce hot innovative technology companies. Like Mr. Schooling, Mr. Sim had to leave Singapore in order to get his technology off the ground. Like Mr. Schooling, Mr. Sim seems to have vanished off the radar upon coming back.

You can argue that we shouldn’t begrudge Mr. Schooling or Mr. Sim anything. In one moment, they’ve done more for the nation than many of us have in a lifetime. So, what, if Mr. Schooling never sets foot in a pool again, he’s won an Olympic Gold (which involved beating the world’s greatest swimmer ever), which only of few in the world can claim to have done (I’m happy I survive my nightly walks). Sure, Creative Zen has gone the way of Sony’s Betamax videos, but how many of us can claim to have invented and brought an “industry-disrupting” product to market?

Both Mr. Schooling and Mr. Sim succeeded in spite of Singapore. Hence, the glory of their success if for them to share with us as they see fit and the pain of their failures are theirs to learn from.

However, for the people who are now desperate to design eco-system to find the next sports champion and the next ground breaking start-up, the question remains, what is it about the Singapore system that brings world class people down. Singapore is a major financial centre, so there’s plenty of money floating around. We have “world-class” universities producing lots of clever people. So, it can’t be a lack of brain power. So, why is it that our “world-class” products have thus far been one hit wonders? In many cases, the taste of glory should be a spring board into better things but that hasn’t been the case for Mr. Schooling or Mr. Sim.

In his commentary, Mr. De Cotta alludes to the fact that Mr. Schooling stopped facing competition once he came back to Singapore. This is probably a major factor in the Singapore system. There’s plenty of competition climbing to the top but once you reach a certain level, you are effectively spared the need to compete or to be on your toes ever again.

How many world class companies has Singapore produced? There is only SIA, which is in an industry where being protected in the home market is pointless (I never knew domestic flights existed until I left Singapore) and since SIA has to compete is everyone else’s market as an outsider, it has to do things like evolve and innovate in order to stay competitive. Every other big home-grown company does not need to compete to survive. The banks, for example don’t need to fear competition from FinTech, because the regulators have made it such that FinTech can only exist to serve the banks.

In any other eco-system, everybody tries to challenge the champion. The champion needs to be on his or her toes all the time. Look at Apple, which had to compete with the PC makers, then the music industry and then the telco giants. Sure, Apple as a stock market capitalization larger than the GDP of all but the top six largest economies in the world, but it still faces intense competition. In the last two decades, Apple has given us the iPod, iMac, iPad, iPhone and iWatch. What has Creative Technologies brought to the world since Zen?

Hopefully, Mr. Schooling makes a comeback after the disappointment of the Tokyo Games. However, the powers that be need to ask how was it such that a talent had to leave Singapore to find success and then withered once he returned to the Singapore system? I believe that Mr. De Cotta got it right when he argued that the system needs to allow hungry competitors to constantly snap at the heels of the proverbial top dog. The question remains is whether the powers that be might actually choose to allow a situation that leads to constant innovation and dynamism even if it makes those at the top of their respective fields a little less comfortable.

Don’t Rely on Us (You Just Need to Remember Everything Needs to Go Through Us)

 

Mr. Ravi Menon, the Managing Director of the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) just concluded a four-part lecture series that was organized by the Institute of Public Studies (IPS). This four-part lecture series proved to be quite radical in as much as Mr. Menon touched on hot button issues like a minimum wage (he argued Singapore should have one – which goes against the grain of traditional Singapore government DNA) and he went as far as to suggests that a “wealth tax” might be helpful (venom to the minds of Singapore’s powers that be). Most interestingly, Mr. Menon concluded his series by suggesting that Singaporeans needed to rely less on the government and more on themselves. The full report of Mr. Menon’s lectures can be found at:

https://www.todayonline.com/singapore/society-mature-singaporeans-shouldnt-rely-too-much-government-solve-problems-mas-chief

 

If you read Mr. Menon on the surface of the words, there’s very little to disagree with. Singapore’s government has by any account made itself omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent in Singapore. I think of the “fail-proof” strategy that a former business partner used to propose for any Public Relations (PR) issue that all our clients had – get a government minister to grace the event and positive press coverage is assured.

If one looks carefully at things, this strategy that was applied to my early PR campaigns didn’t just apply to PR – it’s the basic problem-solving strategy to any given issue in Singapore. Solving problems in Singapore isn’t so much about solving problems but getting the government to realise that your problem could be its problem. It’s part of our national DNA, regardless of what the government or people tell you. The people expect the government to solve their issues and the government expects to be the exclusive solution to all issues.

I think of the time my favourite young politician (we’re talking about a die-hard devotee of the ruling party) tried to tell me that Gilbert Goh, one of our better-known social activists, was a trouble maker. His explanation was simple – “He goes round helping homeless people – this is causing trouble because there’s no need to do that because there is the government to take care of that.”

The second instance that comes to mind was from a time when I was trying to squeeze freelance work from the labour movement. I thought my story of surviving long term unemployment would be a good selling point as to why they should work with me. It wasn’t. They were utterly flabbergasted that in a decade of not having a full-time job, it never occurred to me to approach government to solve what I saw as a personal problem.

However, as Mr. Menon has argued in his lectures, this happy situation cannot go on. This is no longer the 1960s when it was just a problem of giving rice to a group of hungry people. Our problems are more complex and let’s face it, the government’s ability to solve “ALL ISSUES,” in a decisive manner isn’t what it was back then. One only needs to look at the number of lock downs and opening ups that we’ve been through in the last six months to understand how our government, which acts like it competes with God for the usual “omnis,” is simply unable to solve modern day problems in a decisive manner.

Mr. Menon rightfully pointed out that you need competing sources of ideas. In any other place, you get the rise of foundations, think-tanks, NGOs, religious organisations and so on, that will come up with a multitude of solutions to existing issues and all these solutions will be put into practice together. Government behaves more like a referee in a game rather than the only player in the game. You could say that it is at this point where a wise government should look to build a “strong society,” rather than a “strong government.”

Whilst Mr. Menon is right in what he says, there’s one slight snag. Our current system isn’t designed to allow anyone to solve any issues beyond their tying their shoe laces. In a funny way, the Singapore government of the current era is more tolerant of expression than its predecessors. I am definitely not alone is grousing about this and that on the net. I am merely different in as much as I do so under my actual name.

However, it’s a different story doing anything more than being a keyboard warrior. Let’s go back to the young politician’s comments about Gilbert Goh. As far as the government is concerned, Mr. Goh and his transitioning.org team are a group of trouble makers, whom they tolerate because crushing him would be bad PR. In any other society, Mr. Goh would be a candidate for sainthood.

Then, there’s Mr. Jolovan Wham, who has been in and out of the court system for the past decade. If you judged by the number of times Mr. Wham was on the wrong side of the legal system, you’d come to the conclusion that he was either trying out for “ISIS Idol,” or had a severe case of “kleptomania.”

This is not the case; Mr. Wham simply has the “unfortunate” habit of speaking out about the less than satisfactory living conditions of the likes of itinerant workers and his protest methods are as socially damaging as holding up smiley faces in public places. Even when Mr. Wham was proved right about the conditions in the worker’s dormitories after the massive break of Covid-19 cases, the authorities still continued treating him like the cause of Covid.

I don’t disagree with Mr. Menon’s point about Singaporeans needing to be less dependent on government. However, this is never going to change as long as government remains unable or unwilling to view self-reliant problem solvers like Mr. Goh and Mr. Wham as anything other than criminals. A contradictory message is being sent out here. Mr. Menon says we should be less dependent on government. However, when we try to do anything without government approval, we end up coming under fire for criminal activities like trying to help the helpless. Does anyone with half a brain cell expect change unless the powers that be allow it?

There is No Fancy Way of Saying. “I Have Sinned.” – Bill Clinton, Former President of the USA

 Singapore has returned to what is politically known as “phase 2” alerts, thanks to an outbreak of cases of Covid-19 in Karaoke joints and the fishery ports. I’ve effectively lost my restaurant side gigs, which had given me much needed pocket money to supplement my weekly income from corporate insolvency and it looks like things will be quiet for a while. A best friend’s mother and brother are down with the virus and life looks a little less promising than it did a few weeks ago.

In many ways, the return to these measures is a sign that our government, which the world perceives as being a model of super competence, is a little less than what its public image suggests. The government in particular has been facing plenty of brick bats thanks to the out break in karaoke lounges, which all of us have known were a polite euphemism for whore-joints.

I’ve argued on many occasions that Singapore has what one would call an enlightened approach to the vice-trade. Lee Kuan Yew famously stated in his book that a total ban on the trade would only force it underground, so it was better to keep in out in the open. Our red-light districts aren’t as famous as Thailand’s more obvious flesh markets but they’re not the crime infested dens that you see on Western dramas. The police do make their presence felt once in a while. It’s enough of a presence for the pimps and prostitutes to understand that they need to stay on the right side of law enforcement but not so much that business is actually affected.

Whilst this approach worked well in normal times, the point remains that these are not normal times. Bars, clubs and other night spots have all been shut down because, well, it’s been proven that the best way to spread this virus is at places where crowds gather. Singapore’s “vice-scene” has been no exception. Geylang, our most prominent spot for the vice trade has been transformed from a bustling spot of activity into a sleepy centre of not very much. Sure, in normal times its fine for the sexually deprived to have a place to relieve themselves but in normal times, you want to limit the places where people are likely to get something nasty.

So, many of us are questioning why the karaoke lounges were allowed to stay open and more importantly how was it such where they were able to do so under a legal loophole where they officially claimed that they would “pivot into food and beverage outlets.” What’s more annoying for the tax payers is the fact that those who claimed they were pivoting, helped themselves to a government grant of some $50,000. The pivot is best explained by the following cartoon in our mainstream news

 

What is perhaps far worse than the actual outbreak itself, has been the explanation provided by the government. Singapore’s most pugnacious fighter for truth and justice, our magically unconflicted writer and enforcer of laws, Mr. K Shanmugam proceeded to deliver the what can only be described as a tax-payer insulting, how dare you expect us to do the job you’re paying us to do speeches in parliament. Mr. Shanmugam’s speech can be found at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SI7hD7MI-Ic

 

One has to ask if Mr. Shanmugam is determined to provide Singaporeans with another reason not to vote for the ruling party? Why is it such that a ruling party with every advantage determined not to provide the voters with their one simple request – a little bit of humility.

Mr. Shanmugam should perhaps look at what Bill Clinton did after his was acquitted in his 1998 impeachment trial.  Mr. Clinton invited reporters to the rose garden and ensured that he looked suitably contrite for his role in subjecting the nation to an impeachment trial. He told the world, “There is no fancy way of saying, I have sinned.” Like him or loath him, Mr. Clinton’s contrition after that key moment in his presidency, played a role in ensuring that he saw his presidency as one of the most popular presidents around. People overlooked his indiscretions and obvious flaws and focused on his achievements.

This is something our politicians need to learn. The current situation has no precedent.  Nobody can expect perfection. However, what we do expect is greater accountability and while we can expect mistakes and oversight, we do expect leadership to own its mistakes. The dialogue should be, you made a mistake, now tell us what are you going to do about it. It should not be “How are you expect me to do my job.”

Stop Putting Brain in the Drain.

 I remember a local Tamil friend of mine was got a shock when he was asked “Are you from India,” at a corporate function. The man who at the time was head of Southeast Asia for a multinational aerospace company, was taken back because it seemed to imply that the multinational company assumed that if an Indian was qualified enough to hold a high-level job, he had to be from India. It was a bit of a shock to the man’s system to find that his employer seemed to assume that Indians from India were more qualified than the Singaporean ones.

This story is a cruel reflection on the reality of how the “big” companies that count view our much-valued human resources. Singapore tells the world that our economic miracle was due to the fact that we managed to make the maximise our “only” resource, which is the “human” one. Our line to the “foreign investors” as that while our costs are higher than our regional competitors, we offer a better-quality workforce. More importantly, we also make the point that we need the world’s highest paid ministers because we need to prevent the “top talents” from being snapped up by international organisations.

While this sounds good on paper, the reality is a little different. As at the time of writing, Singapore has with the exception of Lee Kuan Yew and perhaps Daren Tang, the head of the World Intellectual Property Office, there doesn’t seem to be a Singaporean who has gained any recognition from running anything beyond Singapore’s shores.

Sure, our international colleagues in the multinationals might say nice things about the good work we do in our domestic market but the reality is that any Singaporean would be lucky if they ever got promoted to a managerial role in the regional office (usually Southeast Asia but on accession Asia-Pacific.)

This is a sad record for a nation that makes such a song and dance about how it has maximized domestic talent. It seems that the only people who “make it” (defined as someone outside of Singapore would notice) are either politicians (Lee Kuan Yew claimed the role of single builder of modern Singapore, which helped in his post prime ministerial career as an international consultant and a writer for Forbes and his predecessors had the good fortune to be born tall so that they remained the only Asian leaders at international summits who didn’t have to look up to their Western counterparts) or civil servants (the type that coordinate international visits for foreign dignitaries)

Why is it such that we only seem to produce “leaders” in politics and how is it such that our “leaders” are never really required to shine on the international stage?

One answer might be the fact that they simply don’t have to. If you look at the scholarship system which has groomed plenty of our senior civil servants and ministers, you’ll note that they are never required to put their brain power to much use. A Ministry of Education Scholar for example will never have to teach in a school full of problematic kids and uncooperative parents. The definition of a “good” Singaporean is one who has the ability to memorise facts and to regurgitate them when required to do so. The best part about this is that they don’t even need to “find” the facts for themselves because there is inevitably an army of serfs to do the work. Scholars will inevitably be paid considerably more.

While I don’t disagree with the idea behind the scholarship system in theory (why shouldn’t smart people run the show), I disagree with the narrow definition of “good” and the way in which our scholars stop facing “challenges” the moment they leave the classroom. Unfortunately, the brain is like other muscles, you have to use it in order for it to develop.

For people outside of Singapore, the common saying is that the real learning is after you leave the classroom. While your actual degree may not be of much interest to anyone else, the skills you acquire (the ability to think) is. It’s a different story for our scholars. A degree becomes an badge of prestige that is supposed to remove the need to actually think at all. Hence while theory behind the system is sound (putting smart people in charge), the actual practice is not (ensuring that smart people don’t do smart things).

Once again, I return to the example of our military, which is a conscript force, which means that the military is effectively a microcosm of everything else. The Singapore Armed Forces (SAF) is inevitably commanded by people with great degrees. Our current chief of defense force, Lieutenant General Melvyn Ong is a good example. He went to Anglo-Chinese School (independent), National Junior College and then it was off to the LSE. His predecessor, Lieutenant Perry Lim went to Cambridge.

While I am not belittling high academic achievement, I don’t believe that academics should be the be all and end all of ones achievements. The problem for our generals is that they lack the most crucial ingredient in judging a solider – combat experience.

In a way, it’s a “happy problem,” in as much as nobody should actually want to go to war and have to deal with the horrors associated with it. However, soldiers, especially those leading troops in a potential life and death situation should probably have more than book knowledge about how to fight a war. Why, for example, would you trust a solider to fight and sacrifice his or her life if all they’ve ever done is to watch Rambo movies on TV if you would not trust a surgeon to operate on you if that surgeon had never operated on anyone else before?

To make up for the “lack of combat” experience, we do send troops on overseas international missions (which remains not the same as actual war). However, this clearly something that the system does not value.

Take the example of Mr. Bernard Miranda, who was a navy officer who actually commanded an international task force to conduct anti-piracy operations in the Gulf of Aden. Mr. Miranda was by all accounts pretty good at the job as can be seen in the report below:

https://www.mindef.gov.sg/web/portal/mindef/news-and-events/latest-releases/article-detail/2010/april/2010apr21-news-releases-01319/!ut/p/z1/vVJJUsMwEHwLBx8Vjbc45maWYqmYsASIdaEUe7yALRlbxPB7JgkcqCJQXNBJM-rp6ukWF3zBhZKrqpCm0krWVCdi_BDMjg5PwXMuZv7chuhuPp_6Bxdnt8GY33HBRZtWGU_S0EU_lxkLlp7NvNADNkEMmC3HmcR8CY501uhUmdaUPGkqlWHOUq0MKmNBqRu0QOHQM6kyhivq9hbU0mBvWIc1yh6p4YANFsi2q-ptQVfHZpvBTxQD27VDfv-bfEHPsONEQPNiA5ldeSe2B850Fl_7xBCGkzlcOnASfAB-4EhIQ7BbQ8DvVxUO_FbpriHHb_5o6Cnw842EH7akFJ0uPowLYpamZJXKNV-sreOLjY_bYrePRFA9Pj-LiNJbx_Vq-OIf4qPFilovt_8wUkt3Qht0mGOH3eilo3ZpTNvvW0Q4DMOo0LqocZTqxoLvRkrdk_CvSN42zcR9Y095fOx6Irmc5rHxk2jvHfU_hx8!/dz/d5/L2dBISEvZ0FBIS9nQSEh/?urile=wcm%3Apath%3A%2Fmindef-content%2Fhome%2Fnews-and-events%2Flatest-releases%2F2010%2Fapril%2F2010Apr21-News-Releases-01319

You would have imagined that success on an international level would have made Mr. Miranda a hero. Unfortunately, Mr. Miranda was the wrong colour (out of Singapore, the armed forces champion themselves as places where ethnic minorities can succeed) and more importantly not one of the chosen few.

His reward for a job well done was to be demoted (from one star admiral to colonel) and he was quickly retired. To be fair, he was given lucrative postings and will probably be remembered as a senior civil servant who got caught drunk driving.

 

The other example of wasted experiences is that of Tan Huck Gim, who commanded a task force in what was then called East Timor from 2002 to 2003. If there was an example of a Singapore General who did a job for Singapore, it was General Tan’s command in Timor Leste. His experiences have been turned into a case study on how little Singapore can use its troops to do something useful in the wider region:

https://www.mindef.gov.sg/oms/content/dam/imindef_media_library/graphics/pointer/PDF/2012/Vol.38%20No.3/5)%20V38N3_A%20UMISET%20Case%20Study.compressed.pdf

How did we reward General Tan for doing a good job? We demoted him, took away the extra star because the only two-star general allowed to exist in Singapore was the Chief of Army, which at that time was Major-General Ng Yat Chung, who would distinguish himself by becoming a Chief of Defense Force (CDF) that was mysteriously absent from all the events you’d expect the CDF to be at and then he would become a businessman who would run down not just one but two public listed companies.

I remember talking to someone in the Ministry of Defense about this. It didn’t make sense that an army that had never seen an unfriendly situation in its entire history was demoting a leader who had actually dealt with unfriendly situations. The reply was “But he’s OLD WHAT.”

 

Thank you for being a leader on an international stage – now please give us back the rank you actually earned and p*** off into obscurity

It doesn’t make sense to demote people who have proven themselves to be capable, particularly in a society that claims to worship meritocracy. So, what is he’s old – he’s shown that he’s good?

Yet, while there may be some sense to what I’ve said, it clearly doesn’t apply. It seems that “leadership” is about looking good on paper (right school, graduate from university, preferably from a family with some money, it helps if you’re the right colour, though we may need the odd token and you got to be the right age). Unfortunately, what looks good on paper doesn’t always prove to be so.

The world is going through a rough patch. We need competent leadership and the only way we are ever going to achieve it is by promoting people who have shown themselves competent in the here and now rather than what they did in a sheltered background two decades ago. We need to stop trying to check boxes made up by bureaucrats in a cubicle and judge people by what they do on the ground. Sure, I have nothing against scholars or scholarship. However, we need to challenge our scholars – give them the shitty problems. There’s no point in putting smart people in charge of things that don’t need to be solved. Getting scholars to avoid challenges is an act of putting brain in a drain.  

A General can make Beautiful Plans – But without Guys Like Us To Execute, Nothing happens – Retired Warrant Office Yeo Lay King

 

I have to confess that I had high hopes during national service. I had a strange fantasy of being an officer and then, somehow proving myself in a combat situation and climbing the ranks. I guess part of it was from growing up in the UK, where it was expected of any young man with A-levels entering as an officer if he chose the armed forces. Another part of it was from watching movies, where officers seemed to get a better life than the average grunt.

So, when I got to admit that I was a little disappointed that I didn’t make it to OCS and going to what was then called “School of Infantry Specialist” (SISPEC) felt like second best. However, as I was going through specialist training, I received an invaluable piece of advice from the then Weapon Wing second in command (2ic) in the School of Artillery. The then 1^st Warrant Officer, Yeo Lay King, told us, “Gentlemen, always remember, the generals on top can draw up the most beautiful plans – but without us to execute, nothing is going to happen.”

 

These Guys Are Brilliant at Drawing Things Up On Paper

 

But we need this guy to ensure their brilliant plans are more than just sheets of paper

I didn’t know it then, but he was giving us a pearl of wisdom, which I would soon realise, nobody followed much to the detriment of the rest of society. The Singapore Armed Forces (SAF), which as a citizen army, is a microcosm for the rest of society is a perfect example. In the word of my Uncle Andy, who was an officer in the SAF – “You know the army is going downhill when the officers get everything and the NCO’s, who are the backbone of the army, get nothing”

Back in my day (early nineties), the government spent a sinful amount to create the Singapore Armed Forces Training Institute – Military Institute or SAFTI MI. The idea was simple (and often repeated across the board) – it was to make Singapore the regional centre for training military officers. The facilities at SAFTI-MI are supposed to be based on West Point in the USA or Sandhurst in Britain. Officer Cadets lived like university students – two to a bunk. Food at SAFTI-MI was inevitably better than it was anywhere else in the military eco-system (there’s a direct correlation between the quality of food served in a camp and the number of colonels and above and SAFTI-MI had a hold of the number of colonels walking around).

While young officers were resting two to a bunk in SAFTI-MI, we at the other “commander school,” were living many, many people to a bunk. Although, we were treated relatively well (trainees get to take on various commander roles under supervision), it was quite clear that those of us in the old Pasir Labar camp were living off the scraps of the more glorious at SAFTI-MI next door.

The comparison between the officer and NCO (or specialist as we were rebranded in Singapore) continued throughout the rest of our national services careers. I do acknowledge the differences between the Officer and NCO class and I do believe that good officers are as important to the system as good NCOs. However, while the importance of the role of the NCO as much talked about, the reality was quite different. The best example comes from the fact that a third sergeant, which is an operational rank that comes with command responsibilities, pays a grand total of $900 a month. By comparison, an officer cadet, which is to all intents and purposes, a trainee with no actual responsibilities, is paid $40 a month less (at one stage officer cadets were paid more).  

If you want to put this into the commercial context, it means that a senior technician, in charge of actually fixing things, is paid only marginally higher than a student in engineering school.

Interestingly enough, the disparity between the officer class and NCO and enlisted men would also continue into later life. Singapore has the world’s highest paid ministers. Our Prime Minister, who runs a country that is barely a suburb of New York or LA, makes at least four times more than the US president. We’re constantly told that we need to “attract talent,” because Singapore’s success in just about everything comes from letting world class people run the show and you need to pay for talent.

It’s nice idea. However, does it actually work. Well, Singapore is well run on the surface, so much so that the people who don’t have to live through the system are inevitably the ones praising it. Dig a little deeper and the story is rather different.

Let’s look at the opposite end of the scale where the guys who ensure that our world class cleanliness is actually that, are paid wages that are just ahead of slave wages. The standard reply to any suggestion that people the lower end of the scale should earn a few cents extra was inevitably “Would you be willing to pay more for your ……” (which inevitably happened anyway, because the other main costs for business, which is controlled by the people in power – i.e. rent inevitably shot up, even in a recession.)

 

Singapore CEOs are good at drawing up plans

It took the Covid-19 pandemic for us to realise that we actually needed people to do things. Someone had to clear the trash. Someone had to get our food ready for us? How have we shown the people that make our life livable our appreciation? Well, there’s now some talk about how we’re going to have a “Progressive Wage model,” which will help the guys who actually do things to double their low salaries in five years. In the meantime, rents for businesses, especially the home-grown ones, have gone up in an instant.

A year after Covid, you have the usual bureaucrats trying to get people back to the office. The answer is simple, these are the clowns trying to help ensure the landlords have a large say in things. You have people insisting that their professional service providers up the bill by two thirds but at the same time insist that they are being screwed when logistics movers send the bill and insist on being paid up front.

Unfortunately, Covid has shown us that what we considered “normal,” was not actually normal. Nobody is saying that the people who do should be given as much as the people who talk on an overnight basis. However, it is clear that the people who do things have to be respected and valued. Talking, contrary to what most bureaucrats assume, is actually the easy part. Picking up a paper and walking to the end of the room on the other hand requires energy. If we are to progress as a nation, we need to rediscover the respect and value of the people who actually do things rather than to lavish it all on the people who talk about doing things.

 

Without these guys, our homes don’t get built, we’ll travel on potholed roads etc

 

Better Kneel in the Stadium than Riot in the Streets

 Call it indoctrination if you like but I was brought up to stand at attention whenever the national anthem was played. School children in Singapore start their day with a flag raising ceremony, which involves singing the national anthem and saying the national pledge. This was, for the better part of my early life, normal.

While Singapore remains the only country, I’ve lived in where the national anthem and the flag is a big part of your daily life (rituals like saying a national pledge or singing a national anthem were part of my school life in Spain, Germany or the UK), It was drilled into my head that the right reaction to the playing of any national anthem is to stand in attention.

So, I grew up in a system where the national anthem was something sacred. Reacting a certain way to the national anthem is something that is simply understood. Whenever you hear the national anthem in a public event, you simply cease everything and stand at attention.

So, how does someone who has been conditioned to act in a certain way towards a national anthem react when you read about the news of athletes who “take a knee” out of political protest. This was something that was first made famous by the former San Francisco 49ers Quarterback, Colin Kaepernick, who wanted to protest racism and police brutality. Mr. Kaepernick found his protest gaining a lot of publicity thanks to the former President, Donald Trump, who demanded that all any football player taking a knee be fired. As with anything involving Mr. Trump, the debate grew passionate.

What started in America has since moved to the “Old World,” where we had players from the England Squad taking a knee during the playing of “God Save the Queen.” Ironically, the British showed that anything American politicians could do, the British ones could do with a bit more panache. Instead of having a fat old white man make threats against a group of young and fit black men, we had Priti Patel, the home secretary and daughter of migrants dismiss another group of native-born black men as being “gesture politics.” More of taking a knee can be found at:

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/taking-knee-history-black-lives-matter-a4458816.html

While I’ve not been to the US or the UK for nearly two decades, I often wonder what would happen if something similar were to happen in Singapore. How would I, as a national service completed, Singaporean Chinese man feel if I saw our national soccer team, which made up mainly of Malay and Tamils “take a knee” upon the playing of “Majullah Singapura” to protest the treatment of ethnic minorities.

I am aware that based on the way things are at the moment, this is an implausible scenario. While we do have “racist vibes” in Singapore as does any other country, our race relations are pretty good and the government has conditioned us to automatically see any form of protest as something that will disrupt our cherished social order. In Singapore, we’ll grouse online but nobody will think of going onto the streets or doing anything that might embarrass the powers that be on the international stage. Most of us do not wish to end up paying fines or going to jail.

As this scenario is implausible, its worth imagining and using it to question ourselves. The sad is truth is that while I may not like Donald Trump or Boris Johnson’ s positions on this, my initial reactions to seeing a group of Singaporean soccer players take a knee during the national anthem is likely to be the same. From where I stand, racism in Singapore, between native born Singaporeans is limited to crude to jibes. Sure, our soccer players don’t make the millions that the athletes in the West make, but they’re not doing badly. Let’s also not forget that most people in Singapore have a roof over their head and no matter how small, there is some form of social assistance, which is something that cannot be said for many parts of the region.

So, yes, I can understand taking to cyberspace to vent. I’d find it hard to take that step to not do the “normal” thing on the international stage. “Disrespecting” the national anthem is not just an embarrassment to the government – it’s an embarrassment to me as an individual Singaporean.

Yet, feeling that way should that implausible scenario take place, is actually wrong. While I do have my grouses about life in Singapore, life is not bad and it could always be worse. Sure, I may not have built much of a “corporate career” but I will never be unable to make a living in my own country as long as I stay relatively healthy. I belong to the majority and nobody is going to question me too hard on certain things. If I enjoy a windfall and upgrade my government subsidized home, nobody is going question my right to be there. The assumption is I must have worked hard because I’m a Chinese Western Educated graduate working in a profession – I must be OK.

What applies to me, may not necessarily apply to my friends from ethnic minorities. What may seem OK for me, may not be for them. Sure, racial relations in Singapore are, as things stand, pretty good but we do need to keeping testing if our experiences are necessarily shared. When we see people protest, we can’t dismiss them as people who don’t know how good they have it.

Take Colin Kaepernick’s case as an example. Sure, Mr. Kaepernick is not living the life that his “Black Brother’s” live in Harlem. However, what he’s protesting against predated him. Let’s remember when a black man was beaten by the cops and sued, an all-white jury acquitted the cops despite seeing the obvious evidence of their guilt. Mr. Kaepernick took many years to protest the way black people are treated by the powers that be many years after the Rodney King riots. He was dismissed as an unpatriotic, ungrateful brat who didn’t know what was good for him. Several months later, the entire country erupted in the “Black Lives Matter” protest.

 

Copyright – Getty Images – He took a knee

 

Copyright – South China Morning Post – Perhaps they may not have had to take to the streets if he was listened to.

In England, we had black players taking a knee. They were booed by the fans and the home secretary and Prime Minister defended the guys booing them. If you believe the Prime Minister and Home Secretary, Black British people shouldn’t complain and racism doesn’t exist.  Well, despite helping the English squad to one their most successful outings in 50 years, the black guys ended up being the targets of racist abuse. The Financial Times (hardly a left leaning, do-gooder paper) reports that contrary to what Mr. Johnson and Ms. Patel would think, racial inequality in England has worsened. The report can be read at:

https://www.ft.com/stream/bd89df59-1c96-4bb4-856c-823bd4dcb4b1

Ms. Patel is now scrambling after being proven so dreadfully wrong. She says that racist abuse is wrong and the players are rightfully giving her the proverbial middle finger as can be seen from the following report:

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/7/13/englands-mings-slams-uks-home-secretary-over-racism-remarks

Thankfully leadership in the UK is not limited to Downing Street. Mr. Southgate has shown himself to be a leader and taken responsibility for failures on the pitch and defended his players as can be seen from the following vide:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OOo6soHW9w

 

Is he a future Prime Minister? It may not be a bad idea?

Life as it seems can be comfortable. However, what we experience may not be so for other people. When they protest, we have to find out if there’s something that’s driving them to do things so publicly. Dealing with an issue when its just athletes taking a knee during the national anthem on national TV is a lot easier than dealing with masses on the streets and ugly behavior being made globally famous.  

God Save the Queen ……..From Her Subjects

If there is a certainty that ranks along side with death and taxes, it is the certainty that the average England Football Fan will screw up England’s image at the very moment when global cameras are focused on England.

The recently concluded European Cup should have been a very proud moment for England. The English national team did exceptionally well, only losing in the final on a penalty shoot out and defeating strong teams like old rival, Germany on the way to the final. English soccer has never looked better. The much hyped “English Premier League,” (EPL) was looking like it was actually producing players that could go toe-to-toe with the best in the world.

It wasn’t always that way. When I was growing up in England back in the 1990s, English football was overhyped. Everyone bragged about the EPL and highly talented players like Paul Gascoine (Gazza), David Beckham and Wayne Rooney and yet the performance of the national team was barely worth mentioning. England once reached the semis in the 1990 World Cup but that was pretty much it.

This time, things seemed different. The English National Team reached the semi-finals in the 2018 World Cup in Russia and their run in the European Championship suggests that this was no fluke. England was showing the world that it had a national squad worth talking about. Like the World Cup winning French teams of 1998 and 2018, the current English squad is racially diverse and its recent successes should have been a showcase of a multiracial England showing its strength to the world.

Unfortunately, the fans had other ideas and the behavior of the fans is such that whatever the national squad does on the pitch is irrelevant. One of the most prominent moments was fans without tickets gate crashing Wembley Stadium (all of them not wearing mask – welcome super covid spreader) and then attacking Italian Fans after losing the final. The “black” players on the English squad have been racially abused and just to show off English hospitality at its best, there was “booing” of the national anthems of the other countries in the tournament. As for the “sportsmanship” that the British are so famous for, there was the incident of shinning a laser pointer into the eyes of the Danish goalkeeper on route to the final.

The “Good” manners of the England’s Football Fans can be seen at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxNUepxhY5I

 

England Football Fans behaving like Sewer Rats is nothing new. I’m old enough to remember watching people get crushed to death on TV during Hillsborough and the collapse of the Heysel Stadium is also within my living memory. It goes without saying that whenever England or English clubs went abroad to play, everyone else thought – “Good God – not them again, let’s make sure they f** off back to where they came from.” The only difference with the recent incidents is that it comes at a time when the England football squad is actually giving English fans every reason to be happy. You’d imagine that fans would be encouraging the team to go onto something better after a good showing.

What is interesting about England’s horrible football fans is that England is also the country that produced the ideal of what a man should be – well mannered, sporting and concerned about the welfare of others. The concept of the “English Gentleman,” has become the ideal of what high society in every part of the world should look like. If you look at “independence” leaders in the post-colonial world, many were produced by the system that produced English Gentlemen. Pakistan’s founder, Mohammad Jinnah, who famously said that he would rather be ruled by an Indian Terrorist than an English Gentleman, was also famous for ensuring that all his suites were made in Saville Row. Even when we in the colonies were trying to get rid of the English, we still looked up to the English as an ideal.

 

So, how is it such that the nation that produced the ideal of what a man should be, can also be the nation that produces the most horrible specimens of humanity at every football game?

As a matter of full and frank disclosure, I went to a public school (defined as the public that can pay). Churcher’s is a small school of no great significance. However, it’s still part of the “Public School” system in the United Kingdom, which plays a role in shaping many of the people who make the UK tick.

While I am a beneficiary of Public-School education, there is an intrinsic problem with its very existence. In the British context, the guys who go to public schools are usually from families that can afford to pay hefty school fees along with the taxes that are partially used to fund the school system provided by the state.

The guys I grew up with, were from what you’d call decent enough families. Sure, I didn’t grow up alongside the super elite who populated the more illustrious public schools. However, my friends were from pretty decent families. I grew up alongside the children of ICI executives and officers in the armed forces. The education was not just academic but social and learning good graces was part and parcel of growing up (as mentioned in previous postings, I actually encountered very few incidents of racism – helped that I was willing to do my part on the rugby pitch).

The state system in the UK functions rather differently. The kids who end up in the system are less well off and often have less resources at their disposal. Teachers struggle alongside unruly kids and less cooperative parents. While there have been success stories from the state system, the problem in the UK remains that as a rule of thumb, the better academic results, which translates into better university placements and therefore better jobs still come from the public school system.

Hence, the system that produces the English Gentleman coexists alongside a neglected system that produces the friendly people at football games. The guys who come from the system that produces the English Gentlemen know exactly how to manipulate the guys from the system that produces football fans. Both Boris Johnson (Old Etonian) and Nigel Farage (Dulwich College) are from the system that produces “Gentlemen.” Their manipulation of statistics on how EU money could be spent on the NHS is manifested by the racial abuse hurled at England’s black players.

Unfortunately, the only solution proposed comes from leftist politicians who will make a few public pronouncements about the public school system. Such pronouncements make good headlines but don’t solve the real issue, which is to raise the standard of the schools in the state system so that they can compete with those in the public-school sector (which was happening in Petersfield when I was leaving – the local comprehensive got themselves a dynamic headmistress who rebranded it the Petersfield School and gave Chucher’s a good run for its money). Very little of that actually happens and until the schools in the state sector are boosted, English Gentlemen will be produced alongside England’s well behaved football fans.

We in the colonies are also destined to follow the example of the mother land in keeping the majority less educated than they should be. In India, you have elite colleges like the Indian Institutes of Technology and Management, producing world class corporate leaders working alongside the colleges that are effectively printing qualifications. Here in Singapore, we have elite colleges like Raffles, Anglo-Chinese, Hwa Chong and Victoria running the entire system and the neighbourhood schools which can barely raise enough to buy an eraser and produce the academic results that somehow get forgotten about whenever the government wants to show the world how “educated” we are.

Whilst it is important to train up the elite, its not sustainable if the elite only comes from one group. If you want a nation to grow you need to improve basic education for the masses. You cannot have one system that produces the ideal of manhood and another that produces sewer rats.