"Singapore-on-Thames", sometimes "Singapore-upon-Thames", was a hypothetical new model for the British economy after Brexit. Under it, the United Kingdom would greatly diverge from its neighbours in the European Union (EU), offering businesses low tax rates and a much lighter regulatory climate as an alternative, much like Singapore does within its region of Asia. The term arose in the media as a characterisation of remarks made by Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond to a German newspaper in early 2017, to the effect that if the EU refused access to its single market on terms favourable to the UK then the UK would necessarily have to change its economic system to one less like EU countries in order to remain globally competitive, an outcome he did not want.
The idea is believed to have originated with Margaret Thatcher's 1989 Bruges speech deploring the increasing regulatory sprawl of what was then still known as the European Economic Community. It inspired some younger members of her Conservative Party to become Eurosceptics, not all of whom initially advocated for Britain's departure from the EU in order to deregulate; some even proposed instead that the EU as a whole should deregulate. Many of those who desired that approach believed until just prior to the 2016 referendum that it was possible for the UK to achieve it while remaining within the EU. It is most popular today among those Brexit supporters with libertarian leanings.
The EU has sought to prevent this in its trade negotiations with the UK, insisting on a "level playing field" provision in any trade agreement between the two that would prevent the UK from exploiting jurisdictional arbitrage this way. The idea also has critics in Britain, who point out that Singapore has achieved its economic success and high standard of living as much through government intervention and subsidisation as it has through light regulation, and argue that the real goal of proponents is to lessen worker and consumer protections. Skeptics also note that there are many aspects of Singaporean prosperity which are unique to it and cannot be replicated easily in the UK.
The trade agreement between the UK and the EU reached at the end of 2020, just before the former's departure date from the EU, allowed for the EU to take protective measures such as tariffs if the UK tried to gain an advantage through substantial deregulation. Those provisions, and promises from the government of Boris Johnson said it that while it might choose a different model for its labour and employment laws than what it previously had, it would not reduce them from their current level, have been interpreted as rejecting, at least in the near term, the Singapore-on-Thames model. After Liz Truss, Johnson's successor, attempted to introduce low-tax and deregulatory policies in accordance with the model in September 2022, the pound and British government debt fell to new lows in financial markets, the latter so seriously that the Bank of England had to step in to stabilise them. Truss was forced to back away from many of her proposals, causing such chaos in government that she resigned as prime minister forty-five days into the job, the shortest premiership ever; in the aftermath of that development, any future push for Singapore-on-Thames was seen as unlikely. However, in 2025 the newly elected Labour government showed interest in deregulating to help the AI sector, and Jeremy Hunt, Chancellor of the Exchequer in Truss' government, continues to advocate for it.
History Frustration with the effect of EU regulation on the British economy dates to the late 1980s; efforts to find carve-outs for the UK only began in the 2010s and did not originally foresee leaving the EU as a necessary step for this.
1988–1993: Conservative discontent
To Jill Rutter of the Institute for Government think tank, the Singapore-on-Thames idea originates long before Brexit during Margaret Thatcher's government. In her 1988 "Bruges speech" to the College of Europe, Rutter notes at the Economic and Social Research Council's UK in a Changing Europe website, Thatcher warned against the increasing centralisation of power in what has become the EU. "We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain," she said, "only to see them re-imposed at a European level with a European super-state exercising a new dominance from Brussels."
Two years earlier, Thatcher had helped to frame, and signed, the Single European Act that led to the creation of the European Single Market, a goal of the majority of her Conservative Party, who were alarmed by her apparent reservations. A minority of Conservatives who had been less certain that greater and greater ongoing European integration was in the UK's long-term interests were encouraged by Thatcher's publicly expressed reservations, and began organising.
The Bruges Group, considered the seminal Eurosceptic think tank, was established in February 1989, within five months of Thatcher's speech. Euroscepticism found receptive ears among the upper-class Oxford undergraduates from elite public schools, such as Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg, who joined the Bullingdon Club and Oxford Union, expecting to one day serve in Conservative cabinets. One, Daniel Hannan, later president of the Oxford University Conservative Association, founded the Oxford Campaign for an Independent Britain, one of the earliest organisations advocating for British withdrawal from the EU, in 1991, while still an undergraduate; in his later life he became a prominent Eurosceptic MEP and later founded Vote Leave.
By 1993 Eurosceptic Conservative MPs who became known as the Maastricht Rebels were holding up efforts by Thatcher's successor, John Major, to ratify that treaty on further European integration, nearly bringing down his government on more than one occasion, even though the treaty contained a number of opt-outs for the UK. In the early 21st century, amidst 12 years of Conservative opposition to Tony Blair's New Labour government, the Open Europe (OE) think tank was launched, criticising excessive EU regulation and bureaucracy but calling for radical deregulation, including the abolition of the Common Agricultural Policy and lowering or eliminating external trade barriers, across the entire EU rather than the UK's departure. "We think the EU needs a radical change of direction if it is to survive", said founding chairman Rodney Leach.
1994–2012: Euroscepticism and founding of think tanks
In 2011, with the European debt crisis still unresolved, and the Conservatives back in government, OE published a paper by director Mats Persson and Anthony Browne calling for Britain to lead other EU countries in promoting 'localism' and subsidiarity as a counterbalance to the bloc's increasing integrationism, a subject of criticism in many other member states beside Britain. "Britain should make clear that it has no desire to leave the EU in the short-term," they wrote, an option Browne had counseled against a few months earlier, citing the likelihood of national rancor and division during the referendum process and lengthy, drawn-out negotiations afterward.
Stephen Booth, OE's research director, argued two months later that the UK should seek extensive further opt-outs from the Social Chapter of EU treaties, which chiefly governs labour and employment law; he singled out the Working Time Directive in particular as being unduly burdensome to British employers, particularly hospitals. Cutting those regulations and the costs associated with them could, Booth argued, add 140,000 new jobs and £4.3 billion to economic output. Later that month Booth, with others, suggested that if the UK could not negotiate further opt-outs but still wanted to repatriate some or all of its authority over social legislation, Parliament should simply declare it had that authority and see how the infringement procedure played out, noting that at the time Sweden was still refusing to implement the EU Data Retention Directive from five years earlier without facing any of the fines the EU threatened.
At the end of the year the EU went ahead with the Stability and Growth Pact (later succeeded by the European Fiscal Compact) to resolve the debt crisis despite Prime Minister David Cameron's veto over proposed changes to financial regulations, the first time the UK had exercised it, which to the Eurosceptics cast doubt on the validity of the pact's enactment. Earlier that year, Cameron had told the 1922 Committee he saw in the crisis "opportunities for Britain to maximise what we want in terms of our engagement with Europe" in return for its acquiescence in the resolution. But in October German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble told Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne that there would be no repatriation of the EU's social and labour law authority. It was reported that while Schäuble was not opposed to such a move in principle, he was upset with Cameron for speaking about the possibility so publicly at such a difficult time for the eurozone. But Benedict Brogan reported in the Daily Telegraph that, in addition to staffers Steve Hilton and Oliver Letwin, three members of Cameron's cabinet were so frustrated with EU labour regulation as an obstacle to the government's efforts to revive the British economy in the wake of the Great Recession that they would find a way to leave it if they could.
That year Conservative MP Andrea Leadsom, working in conjunction with OE, founded the Fresh Start Group in Parliament, attracting 124 other Conservative members to its first meeting, to seek the same changes in the UK–EU relationship. At the time, she recalled later, all involved "shared the presumption that we would remain in the EU"; while she ultimately campaigned for Brexit, at the Hansard Society's 2013 annual parliamentary affairs lecture she opposed leaving the EU, saying it would be "a disaster for our economy". In July Fresh Start put forth its views in a green paper, 'Options for Change', citing the EU's impact on "the regulation of working hours or the financial markets, centralised environmental policies", among other policy areas, and while again stressing Fresh Start's desire not to leave the EU suggesting a referendum with voters given the option of taking that route.
The Global Vision think tank also put forth a similarly themed report in 2012. Authors Ruth Lea and Conservative MP Brian Binley bemoaned "extensive employment regulation" from the EU such as the Agency Workers Directive and financial regulation such as the Alternative Investment Fund Managers Directive, which had brought investment vehicles such as hedge funds, private equity under EU regulations the year before; such was the danger to the British financial sector from further regulation that, they wrote, "[i]n order to maintain the pre-eminence of the City, the UK really has no choice but to leave the Single Market." They advocated for first, the UK "withdrawing from the Customs Union, from the Single Market and de facto and de jure from the EU itself. But afterwards, they, too, found the idea of trading under World Trade Organization (WTO) rules governing trade 'unnecessarily "isolationist"'. Instead they looked to the EU-Switzerland relationship as the ideal model.
2013–2015: Embrace by Conservative leadership