Will the UK really turn into 'Singapore-on-Thames' after Brexit?
he idea that London might have a post-Brexit future as a kind of deregulated “Singapore-on-Thames” is one of the more curious notions to have emerged in the three and a half years since the UK’s citizens voted narrowly to leave the EU in the fateful June 2016 referendum. In fact, at least as far as the financial sector is concerned, the bigger threat to European regulatory harmony could come from France. The phrase “Singapore-on-Thames” is shorthand for Britain becoming a low-tax, lightly regulated economy that can out-compete the sclerotic, over-regulated eurozone from a strategic position only 20 miles or so offshore. The general idea was first mooted a couple of years ago by Philip Hammond, then Britain’s chancellor of the exchequer, as a means of encouraging the EU to strike a friendly Brexit deal with the UK. Those who know Singapore well will quickly recognise that the analogy is far from perfect. True, Singapore has low tax rates (unless ...