Free to Stay Free

For 140 years the British had patiently and profitably toted the white man's burden at Asia's steaming crossroads. They built an uninhabited, swampy island into the Commonwealth's second largest port, complete with a stodgy Victorian city of velvet-lawned suburbs and restricted clubs, surrounded by a noisy Chinese city of more than a million. They governed well; free schools raised the literacy rate to 60%, thriving commerce made the Straits dollar the Swiss franc of the Orient and gave Singapore a per capita income of $400 a year, highest in all Asia.

Last week in London an all-party Singapore delegation and Colonial Secretary Alan Lennox-Boyd etched out the profile of the new autonomous state of Singapore that will replace the old crown colony before next March. Britain would retain responsibility for defense and external relations, including the right to garrison the island's huge fortress--hub of all Her Majesty's armed-forces activities from the Persian Gulf to Bering Strait. All internal administration would fall to an elected 51-member legislative assembly, a Malayan chief of state and his ministers.

The last stumbling block was Lennox-Boyd's insistence on a special clause forbidding anyone's holding office who has been detained for subversive activities. Chief Minister Lim Yew Hock accepted the clause under protest, though he privately knows it is designed to hinder his opponents. In the first election next fall, the well-organized leftish People's Action Party is expected to replace Lim Yew Hock's Labor Front in power. One of the P.A.P. leaders, Lim Chin Siong, is still in prison for his part in the 1956 riots, but British officials professed to feel assured that P.A.P. is already purging itself of Communists. Besides, the British retain emergency powers to suspend Singapore's constitution in case the new government proves unable to carry out its responsibilities. As one British official put it: "H.M.G. has no intention of allowing Singapore to go Communist."

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