SINGAPORE has never been short of admirers. Many leaders of developing countries respect Lee Kuan Yew, its founding father, for taking his city-state from third- to first-world status while resisting Western calls for greater political liberalisation. Paul Kagame, Rwanda’s iron-fisted president, hopes that his country will become “the Singapore of Africa”. Fans of Rodrigo Duterte compare the Philippine president to Lee: strong-willed and intolerant of crime and corruption.

Lately the rich world, too, has begun to look at the island. “Want to ditch Obamacare? Let’s copy Singapore’s health-care miracle,” chirped an opinion piece on the website of Fox News, a conservative American broadcaster, soon after the election of Donald Trump. It argued that the “miracle” rested on two features dear to Republican hearts—“empowering consumers and fostering competition”. Some of the more vocal Brexiteers dream of turning Britain into “Singapore-on-Thames”: a low-tax, lightly regulated haven for businesses eager to trade with Europe. Like the proverbial blind men describing an elephant by feeling just one part of the beast, each of these admirers gets something right about Singapore, but all miss the big picture.

Start with the Brexiteers. Britain’s 65m people are almost 12 times as numerous, and are scattered over a territory 337 times larger than Singapore’s. Britain is already lightly taxed and regulated by European standards, but compared with Singapore it is a behemoth. Britain’s top rate of income tax, now 45%, is double that of Singapore; and its government accounts for about 38% of GDP, about twice as much as the lean Singaporean one. Shrinking the British state much further would mean slashing spending and radically reshaping the National Health Service. Voters would punish any party that attempted such a thing.

Even assuming the EU were to give low-tax Britain easy access to its single market, the neighbourhood is completely different. South-East Asia is a booming region of 630m people, many of whom live in countries that are unstable, corrupt or have lousy infrastructure. Efficient Singapore gives firms easy access to those consumers while minimising risks. Europe, by contrast, may be stagnant but, populist threats notwithstanding, is politically stable and mostly well governed. It makes less sense for a company to set up in Britain to sell to Spaniards than for it to base itself in Singapore to cater to Indonesians—and trebly so if Britain loses unrestricted access to Europe, as it probably will after Brexit.

American conservatives, for their part, are right that Singapore’s health-care system achieves fine results by emphasising personal responsibility, competition and low public spending. Singaporeans pay for much of their health care out of their own pockets and enjoy among the world’s highest life expectancies and lowest infant-mortality rates. The country spends just 5% of GDP on health care, of which about 2% of GDP comes from the public purse. America spends much more, 17% and 8% of GDP respectively, yet its population is much less healthy.

However, Singapore’s system also features far more coercion and government intervention than Americans would plausibly accept. Most hospitals are state-run. Most hospices and nursing homes are private but government-funded. The government heavily subsidises acute care. It promotes competition by publishing hospital bills; American health-care providers, by contrast, make their prices as opaque as possible to discourage shopping around. The government compels Singaporeans to divert up to 10.5% of their wages into “Medisave” accounts (employers contribute, too). It also subsidises “cost-effective and essential” drugs; unapproved drugs, if available, can be prohibitively expensive.

Both the left and the right will find much to like about Singapore’s health-care system. But anyone who thought that Michelle Obama urging children to eat more apples was too nannyish will find it hard to stomach. As Kishore Mahbubani of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy puts it: “The ideology guiding Lee Kuan Yew was not Ayn Rand.”

A similar pattern—personal responsibility supported by coercion and a lean but robust safety net—applies across Singapore’s economy. More than 90% of Singaporeans own their own homes, but most are government-built flats bought at government-set prices, often with government-provided grants. Where Singaporeans can live depends in part on their ethnicity: to avoid racial ghettos, Singapore requires the composition of public-housing blocks to reflect the country’s racial make-up.

Hard bargain

Such social engineering would appal Western voters and be struck down by Western courts. Yet Singaporeans accept it. Paternalism has enforced racial calm. The country’s Chinese majority has been spared the atrocities visited on the Chinese diaspora in, say, Malaysia and Indonesia. More important, the trade-off that Lee Kuan Yew offered still holds: illiberal politics in exchange for good government and high living standards.

Singapore’s leaders vigorously defend their reputations with defamation suits, and gerrymander constituencies to help preserve the ruling party’s majority. But they deliver safe streets, first-rate health care, good public transport and a clean, responsive public administration. In distorted form, elections allow voters to affect policy: after the ruling party suffered its worst-ever performance in 2011, winning “just” 60% of the vote, it took a more populist line and won resoundingly four years later.

Lee’s bargain is hard to emulate. Both parts have been essential to Singapore’s success. Yet admirers such as Mr Duterte and Hun Sen, Cambodia’s strongman, are adept only at the authoritarian bit, without the clean government or wealth creation. Singapore’s rich-world admirers, meanwhile, lack the tame politics that allow Singapore’s rulers to set policy without worrying too much about the next election—or their citizens’ civil liberties.