The recent scenes of violence and rioting in the UK have been so horrific that Malaysia, Indonesia, Australia, Nigeria, the UAE and India have all sent out travel alerts, warning their nationals living in or visiting the country to be vigilant and avoid areas where demonstrations may take place. The anti-immigrant animus is clearly focussed on one community in particular, with the monitoring group Tell Mama recording that threats to Muslims have increased fivefold in the week up to August 2 year on year.
The moderate majority of Britons may find it comforting to blame all this on a tiny minority of far-right activists, but that would be false. A chilling new poll by YouGov found that one in three surveyed actually supported the protests. Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer is to be commended for the tough line he has taken, but locking up a few hundred thugs will not address the deep divisions and rising Islamophobia that have been stoked by politicians on both the left and right in the UK for years. Britain needs to look far and wide for a new approach to race and faith relations.
Two countries it might consider are Malaysia and Singapore, both multiethnic, multifaith former colonies that suffered devastating race riots around and shortly after their independence from Britain, in 1964 in Singapore and in both states in 1969. The violence was chiefly between ethnic Malays, who are a minority in Singapore and the majority in Malaysia, and ethnic Chinese, the majority in Singapore and a minority in Malaysia.
Hundreds lost their lives, and hundreds more were severely injured. In both countries (which had briefly been united in one state from 1963-65), one of the main issues was the rights of the Muslim Malays. They feared the economic dominance of the Chinese, a people that many Malays still saw as “immigrants”, no matter how many generations they had been there. And in both, while the importance of cross-community relations had been recognised from the start, there was a renewed realisation that a peaceful future would not just come about naturally – it would have to be worked for, very hard.
Singapore took a top-down approach, establishing the Presidential Council for Minority Rights (the city-state has many ethnic Indians and others as well) in 1970, and later an Ethnic Integration Policy in its public housing, with quotas to ensure a balanced racial mix. In 1990 it passed a Maintenance of Religious Harmony Act, with a subsequent amendment guarding against malign foreign influence and introducing restraining orders to prevent any breach of peace and public order.
As ever, ministers from the ruling People’s Action Party were unapologetic about any diminution of civil liberties under these laws. “We draw lines in the sand. We reinforce positive norms, and they make our society stronger,” said K Shanmugam, the Minister for Home Affairs, at the time of the amendment in 2019. Everything was in pursuit of the goal the country’s founding father, Lee Kuan Yew, had pledged at independence. The aim was to build “a multiracial nation where every community…can integrate fully, yet have maximum space to maintain their identities and practise their faiths, customs and way of life”.
From the start Singapore’s approach was not to absorb minorities in some new creation, but that of the “four circles”, comprising Chinese, Malays, Indians and others, the aim being to maximise the overlapping areas between the circles to embed shared beliefs and norms.
Something similar to the four circles has long been the model in Malaysia. Even before independence in 1957, communities formed their own political parties. The Alliance Party, consisting of the United Malays National Organisation, the Malayan Chinese Association and the Malayan Indian Congress, fought and won the 1955 legislative elections, and went on to win – with more partners of still more races – every single national poll until 2018. Again, after the 1969 riots it was fully acknowledged that something radical was needed. The New Economic Policy of 1971 was specifically formulated to achieve national unity, harmony and integrity through socio-economic restructuring (largely in favour of the Malays, who held only 3 per cent of the country’s wealth in the late 1960s), and to minimise poverty among all races.
Sensitive issues, especially those involving race, religion and royalty, are vigorously policed. They are already covered by the country’s Sedition Act, but the current government is also mulling a State and Nation Act that will be similar to the Maintenance of Racial Harmony Bill that is going to be introduced in Singapore.
In both countries, there is near unanimity that governments cannot move too fast – which is why neither has had a prime minister who is not from the majority ethnic group so far. “Don’t spook the Malays,” Malaysian PM Anwar Ibrahim was well-known for saying a few years ago. He knows that change can be disconcerting, the benefits of diversity have to be spelled out – although some will still cleave to their own – and reaffirming a national identity in a multiracial state is a work always in progress.
Neither Malaysia nor Singapore are perfect. You can find plenty of instances where the positive stories both tell about their mixes of races and religions are undermined by ugly behaviour. But the scenes the world has recently witnessed in the UK are impossible to imagine in Malaysia and Singapore.
The rise of an array of people of colour to the very top of British politics in recent years has been both astonishing and heartening. But if the UK is a country where rioters stop cars to ask if the drivers are “white and English” and women in hijabs are afraid to go out on the streets, there is a lot of work to be done.
The Singaporean public intellectual Kishore Mahbubani has a hard truth that Britons need to be reminded of, and perhaps never truly knew. “It is not normal for multi-ethnic, multicultural and multi-religious societies to live in relative harmony,” he once wrote. “In some areas of life, there are no easy solutions. There may only be solutions that require vision, courage and wisdom to implement.”
Very difficult questions must be asked in the UK, and asked now. And Britain would be wise to look beyond itself in its search for answers.
