Malaysia is a land of driving on the left, three-point British-style plugs and an elite with plummy English accents who can discourse knowledgeably on Boris Johnson’s career plans. There’s even still an ancient concrete cricket pitch on Merdeka Square, the spot in Kuala Lumpur where the Union Jack was lowered on the night of Malaysia’s independence in 1957. And the country’s prime minister, Najib Razak, is an old boy of Britain’s Malvern College and Nottingham University.
If Brexiters have a plan, it involves upwardly mobile former colonies such as Malaysia and Singapore. These are supposed to replace European countries as the UK’s key trading partners. Many Brexiters also imagine “global Britain” as a swashbuckling trade hub à la Singapore. Daniel Hannan, theorist of Brexit, launched his free-trading think-tank last month by saying, “I’m looking at [the] high commissioner of Singapore [in the front row]. They have gone from being half as rich as us to twice as rich. What was the magic formula? Just do it. They dropped their barriers.”
Can Southeast Asia save Brexit? Visiting the region last week, I asked local investors and officials what they thought. Certainly, Britons once dominated business there. “When I first came to Kuala Lumpur in 1968, the bus tickets were printed in London,” one retired businessman told me, “and the British trading houses were everything.” That’s over. Most Malaysian elites now regard the UK chiefly as a place to study, buy property and watch football. Today the UK is only Malaysia’s 17th largest trading partner.