My first Singapore National Day

There are fireworks going off somewhere south of here and I can't see a single one of them. I can hear them coming in over the top of the television, and underneath them there's clapping and cheering carrying across from a few streets away. This is my first National Day, and I'm watching it with my wife and her family.

Three months in and this is the first thing that's made me stop and think about home properly. Not in a homesick way. It's more that watching a country be openly, uncomplicatedly glad about itself turns out to be a strange experience when you've come from somewhere that stopped doing that.

I should say up front that National Day is a bit much in places. There are songs, and a lot of red and white, and children waving flags in coordinated blocks, and a fair amount of the sort of sentiment that a British person is trained from birth to find cringe. I spent the first half hour being aware of that reflex and the second half hour noticing that nobody around me has it, and that they're enjoying the whole thing without any of that running underneath it.

Lawrence Wong opened it. He talked about where the country is going and sounded like he believed it, and then he was fairly direct about the things that aren't working, the cost of living, the pressure on housing, the things people are genuinely worried about, and what the government intends to do about them. It's an odd combination to a British ear, a leader being confident and self-critical in the same speech, without either half cancelling the other out.

The thing that stayed with me is what the parade opens with. Before any of the singing, it's people marching. Uniformed contingents, rank after rank of them, and the whole country watches them come past first. Singapore has national service, every man serves at eighteen, and plenty of women volunteer alongside them, and it includes the sons of permanent residents who were born here to parents who weren't. It's uncomfortable to think about in the abstract, especially from Britain, two years of a young person's life handed over to the state, and it's also a fairly honest reading of the world as it currently is. What the marching says, before anybody sings anything, is that this place costs something and here are the people who pay for it.

Then there's the pledge, which children here recite every morning with a fist held over the heart. We, the citizens of Singapore, pledge ourselves as one united people, regardless of race, language or religion. Every school, every day, in a country that is roughly three quarters Chinese, thirteen per cent Malay and nine per cent Indian. They say the line about race out loud, deliberately, at eight in the morning, to a hall of children who are visibly not the same as each other.

What I hadn't understood before I got here is that none of this works by pretending the differences aren't there. Singapore is not remotely shy about race. It's on your identity card. The state funds mother tongue teaching, and the festivals, and the community organisations, and everyone gets their public holidays, and nobody is asked to be less Malay or less Tamil or less anything else. The difference is administered rather than tactfully ignored.

The management of it is far more direct than anything I'd have expected. Public housing blocks have ethnic quotas, so you cannot form an enclave here even if you set out to, because the corridor you live on has been mixed on purpose by the government. Everyone eats in the same hawker centres because the food is cheap enough that there's no reason not to. Everyone learns in the same language and then keeps their own alongside it. None of it is left to sort itself out.

Sitting underneath all of it is one rule that isn't up for negotiation, which is the order things come in. Be whatever you are, keep it, be proud of it, and be Singaporean first. Race second. Religion second. Nobody is being asked to give anything up, the country has just been completely clear about what sits on top, and it built the housing policy and the schooling and the national service to keep it that way rather than hoping it would hold. I think now I see where we went wrong.

We had a version of this once, and I want to be careful about how I put it, because it was not a gift and nobody handed it down graciously. England spent centuries trying to grind the Welsh and the Irish out of existence, the language, the law, the land, the lot. Yma o Hyd counts it from the Romans leaving, sixteen hundred years of being told you're finished and still being here anyway. What eventually emerged, four nations with their own languages and churches and in places their own legal systems, sitting under something shared, was not designed by anyone. It was fought for, mostly by the people on the losing end of it, and then it worked.

I've stood in the Principality and sung it with sixty thousand other people and not one second of that was in tension with anything else. Nobody ever asked me to be less Welsh. That was the whole trick, and we were extremely good at it by the end, and it cost far more to arrive at than most people remember.

The comparison isn't exact and I'm not going to pretend it is. Ours took a thousand years, an enormous amount of blood, and nobody sat down and designed a minute of it. Singapore did the same job from a standing start in sixty-one, deliberately, with a population that had a great deal less in common to begin with than four nations who had been stuck with each other since the Romans left. That's the part that should sting, and it does.

People have taken to calling London 2012 the peak of Britain, and I can't help agreeing with them. The industrial chimneys coming up out of the grass, the beds and the nurses, Rowan Atkinson at the piano, the Queen and James Bond going out of a helicopter. Danny Boyle put the entire country on a stage and made it enjoy itself, and twenty-seven million of us sat down and watched the same thing at the same time on the same evening, which was not quite the whole country but was as close as we have got in my lifetime, and would be close to impossible to arrange now.

That was fourteen years ago.

I came out here thinking National Day would be a curiosity, a slightly kitsch national birthday I'd enjoy and not think about again. What it's actually been is a bit uncomfortable, because the cringe isn't decoration sitting on top of a country that happens to get along. The parade and the pledge and the children with the flags are part of the thing that produces it. That's the machinery, in public, where everyone can see it.

Which makes standing back from it the wrong instinct. If you move somewhere you take the place on, all of it, rather than observing politely from the edge and reserving the right to find bits of it silly.

I'm just wondering when being glad about your own country turned into something we can't do as easily, or in the same way. Nobody out there tonight is claiming to be better than anyone else. They're pleased with what they've built and they see no reason to keep quiet about it, and I can't for the life of me work out what's supposed to be wrong with that.