FRIDAY, March 29, 2024
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Never mind democracy, it’s the quality of governance that matters

Never mind democracy, it’s the quality of governance that matters

Re: “At least Singapore is honest about its dictators”, Have Your Say, yesterday.

I would like to take Mr Knobel’s thoughtful letter a step further. He cites the young Lee Kuan Yew as an example of a benign dictator. There are good and bad dictators (Lee Kuan Yew vs Idi Amin), and good and bad absolute monarchs (the previous King of Bhutan vs Henry VIII). As for democracy, some regard Norway as the best example, and most regard the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea as the laughable worst.
So is democracy really relevant? Or is it about the effectiveness of governance, whatever the system? I suggest that the three prime functions of government are as follows: 
1. To defend the country from invaders. 
2. To maintain law and order 
3. To empty the bins. 
Now let’s measure the democracies of, say, Thailand and the UK, against those yardsticks. 
Thailand’s rigorous immigration laws may be the bane of expats, but at least they work. The quotas of 100 immigrants per nationality per year compare with the millions allowed in to the UK under its race replacement policy (the latest figures show 627,000 for 2018), and Thailand has not suffered the concomitant catastrophes that have befallen health, housing, social cohesion and quality of life in the UK.
Next, law and order. Compared to the UK with its soaring crime rate (up a staggering 19 per cent last year), Thailand’s streets are safe – no epidemics of acid attacks, child rapes, knifings – and its police force has not yet been transformed into an Orwellian enforcer of liberal-fascist state policy.
Finally the bins. The UK has transformed this simple municipal function into a bureaucratic nightmare in which elderly people are taken to court for putting rubbish in the wrong-coloured bins, and in which the bins are emptied at steadily reducing frequency. This has caused an estimated 9 million tonnes of garbage to be fly-tipped into the countryside every year. Here in Thailand, I pay Bt30 a month for an excellent nightly service.
There is plenty wrong with Thai governance, but very little has changed over time. Thailand is still the nice, smiley, easy-going place it was when I first set foot here in 1979. When I step out of the airport into the third-world hellholes that UK’s towns and cities have become, resulting from policies that had no democratic mandate, I weep for my country.
Nigel Pike
Phang Nga 

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