Civic nationalism needs civic pragmatism
Muscular values can't survive rapid demographic change.
Otium Den recap:
Do entrepreneurs need democracy?
Pro-natalism doesn’t work. Communities do.
Britain needs muscular citizenship
40% of births in Britain are to foreign-born parents. Naive hopes that assimilation is possible through so-called “muscular values” flounder because values are ultimately downstream of people. I look to Singapore as a counterexample to argue that social cohesion rests on social continuity.
Singapore’s 1950 riot over a Dutch girl
Maria Hertogh was born in the Dutch East Indies in 1937 to a Dutch father and Eurasian mother. Her parents were interned by invading Japanese forces in the 1940s. Maria was entrusted to a local woman who raised Maria – a baptised Roman Catholic – as a Muslim.
Freed after the war, Maria’s biological parents tracked her down in British Malaya. But she did not share their joy at the reunion. A bitter legal battle followed in Singapore and the court eventually ordered Maria’s return to her birth family. It also annulled her Islamic marriage at age 13 to an older man.
The ruling sparked riots across Singapore. Muslims attacked Europeans and vandalised their property. Order was only restored through military intervention and a two-week curfew. It made a strong impression on then 27-year-old Lee Kuan Yew, a formative episode in Singapore’s founding Prime Minister’s pragmatic approach to social cohesion.
Lee’s cynicism about values-led cohesion
It taught Lee that society must be actively managed. He was sceptical of the Western assumption that shared values alone could unite multi-religious and multi-racial nations. Communities would not abandon deeply held identities or beliefs. Instead, the state had to establish conditions in which common civic norms could prevail. Building strong institutions to enforce those required physical integration and demographic balance to prevent political fragmentation into identity blocs.
Singapore’s demography is a legacy of British colonialism. Lee was part of the Chinese majority who comprise around 75% of the population. His great grandfather migrated from southeast China after Stamford Raffles established the trading post in 1819. Indians arrived under the same auspices of Singapore’s British foundations and make up just under 10%. Malays, recognised as Singapore’s indigenous people in its constitution and overwhelmingly Muslim, account for around 15%.
Superficially harmonious, community tensions still surface on social media and in Reddit forums beyond the control of Singapore’s state-owned press. Resentment lingers in Malay and Indian communities at the perceived privileges of the more prosperous and politically dominant Chinese. But the state prevents latent discontent mobilising into grievance-driven politics. One of its most effective tools for doing so is the Ethnic Integration Policy (EIP), which ensures each neighbourhood broadly mirrors national demographics in its cultural and ethnic mix.
One former civil servant told me this stopped Singapore’s perceived support for Israel becoming a significant issue in last year’s election. Muslim anger was dispersed as its vote was not concentrated in certain constituencies. Lee himself was acutely aware of the sensitivity of the Israel relationship. When the Israeli Defence Force helped train Singapore’s military in the 1960s, Lee claimed these swarthy visiting generals were “Mexicans” to avoid inflaming local tensions.
Any strengthening of civic nationalism is a welcome consequence of this physical integration rather than its primary purpose. Singapore also mandates state education and National Service for all males. But Lee never assumed these common experiences would rear a society that views its Singaporean identity as primary. The EIP is there, first and foremost, to guard against identity politics.
Britain’s identity politics
Contrast that to Britain where the Greens’ Deputy Leader Mothin Ali declared his local election victory in 2024 a “win for the people of Gaza.” 40 per cent of his ward of Gipton and Harehills are Muslim and over 60 per cent are from ethnic minority backgrounds. Ali’s sectarian rhetoric echoed in the five independent MPs who triumphed in the 2024 General Election, running on Muslim-identity platforms.
Singapore enforces integration but is realistic about its limitations.
Britain enables segregation while naively assuming those identities will dissolve into a common civic culture. Conservatives have been complicit in this outcome, believing Britain could replicate something like America’s ideological framework to unite communities. But it never tried to engineer the same civic pride through big public rituals. Nor does it share the same revolutionary foundations that put values at the heart of a national project.
Britain’s own context looks more like Singapore than America. Its contemporary demography is similarly an accident of history and geography with once imperial citizens arriving in pragmatic circumstances. Like the Chinese and Indians who moved to Singapore in the 19th Century, Britain’s post-1945 immigration was driven by temporary economic opportunity, rather than idealism.
Decades of grasping for exactly what Britain stands for has yielded little. Coming up with better definitions than the fatuous “tolerance”, or Rachel Reeves’ latest effort, “politeness”, may be futile anyway. Because ultimately values change under the pressure of people. The NHS spends £130,000 a day translating materials into 120 languages because the demand is there. The DWP pays benefits (which have recently increased) to additional spouses in polygamous households because the demand is there. If enough people want something, they tend to get it.
Values are downstream of people
In other words, this kind of institutional debasement isn’t purely a product of woke public service indulgence. Imagine you run an NHS trust where almost half of patients don’t speak English as a main language. You offer translation because it makes everyone’s job easier. Over time, doing so comes to seem normal. Because we are all products of our immediate influences.
I don’t pretend to know what the optimum demographic picture looks like in Britain. But it requires a proper conversation.
If institutions adapt to its people, rather than vice versa, then demographics matter. David Coleman predicts white Britons will be a minority by the 2060s. That is a monumental and rapid change. A Briton like me, born in 1992, would grow up in a country that is almost 95 per cent white and die in a very different one.
Singapore understands that any compelling notion of civic nationalism starts with civic pragmatism. Its community composition is deliberately unchanged since 1965. It has managed immigration to ensure society looks continuously familiar. That provides the bedrock for consistent norms in language, law and custom.
Maria Hertogh’s foster mother Aminah was a friend of Maria’s biological grandmother.
The families could happily co-exist in the same place despite different beliefs and heritages. But Maria could not reconcile a coherent identity when she was abruptly moved from one environment to another. Just as Britain cannot survive on so-called muscular values if external factors are constantly in flux.
Like Singapore, Britain needs a vision of what it looks like to decide what it stands for.