Britons `ran from Japanese'

Singapore - Britain's flight in the face of advancing Japanese forces in South-East Asia sealed the fate of its empire be cause its subjects lost respect for their rulers, according to the former Singaporean prime minister, Mr Lee Kuan Yew. "They packed up," he said in one of a series of extracts from a biography by three local journalists about to be released. "We were supposed - the local population was supposed - to panic when the bombs fell, but we found they panicked more than we did, so it was no longer the old relationship," he is quoted as saying in Lee Kuan Yew: The Man and His Ideas.