Two hundred years after Stamford Raffles arrived in Singapore and transformed it into a free port, we hear about "Singapore on the Thames". Google the phrase, and you get more than 13 million results.

It started as a rhetorical battle cry by Brexiter ultras who believe that leaving the European Union will somehow deliver the United Kingdom into some kind of unregulated, free-trading, low-tax economic paradise, for which Singapore is inaccurately designated as the role model.