Simon Johnson
speaker
295 appearances
3 recordings
2 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 7 Jul
Simon Johnson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.
Appearances
So this is a big part of our point, which is there is long lasting effects of early institutions, including
oppression of local people when you arrive, but also the slaves that you brought.
And it's a big fight to get out of that.
And that leads me to the second question, which is, what's the role of democracy?
Now, I was actually in Hong Kong recently, Robert.
As you can imagine, the same question comes up in Hong Kong, talking about China.
And of course, Hong Kong's history grabs everyone's attention, along with Singapore, because these are places that are not primarily European.
And the strategy was not to bring so many Europeans there, but it was to build up a merchant class and it was to build up a hub of...
And that prosperity was actually shared with local people and local merchants rose up.
But the key point about British governance, which was not perfect in Hong Kong, and the governance now is, do you have the rule of law?
Equal treatment before the law, equal enough.
Do you have corruption under control?
What people regard as being fair and legitimate governance.
I don't think Hong Kong or Singapore would be regarded as democracy in a Western sense.
But, and I do think Singapore is quite an extraordinary place, very unusual, and other attempts to do this, to build something like this have not been quite so successful.
From the long-term historical record, Robert, most authoritarian regimes...
I mean, you can have good authoritarian rulers.
You can have authoritarian rulers who are very generous, they're very fair to people and so on.
But either they get old or they get cranky or the next one is not quite so inspired or they start fighting among themselves.
So actually this liberal Western democracy model, which I understand is, you know, gets plenty of, has attracted plenty of complaints over the years and is not,
Showing 101–120 of 295 · page 6 of 15
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