Journal of Research in Peace, Gender and Development Vol. 1(4) pp. 138-154, May 2011
Available online http://www.interesjournals.org/JRPGD
Copyright © 2011 International Research Journals
Review
“Poverty in Paradise City: When the Jester has a
broken Heart”
Kieran James1*, Rex Walsh2 and Bligh Grant3
1,2
School of Accounting, Economics and Finance, Faculty of Business, University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba
Qld. 4350, Australia.
3
Department of Business, Economics and Public Policy, University of New England, Armidale NSW 2351,
Australia.
Accepted 19 May, 2011
Via detailed personal interviews, this paper canvasses the views of leading Singapore opposition
politicians and grassroots activists about poverty and income inequality in Singapore society. The
role of opposition internet activism is also explored. Semi-structured personal and group interviews,
with politicians and grassroots activists; literature search; and attendance at opposition party
functions. The opposition in general and Singapore Democratic Party (SDP) and National Solidarity
Party (NSP) in particular have repeatedly highlighted the growing income inequality and poverty in
the country. Pictures in the SDP’s promotional literature skillfully and dialectically present wealth
and poverty in Singapore within the same pictorial image. Interviewees speak of the Dickensian
living conditions in the one-room rental flats in Bukit Merah, just a taxi ride from Changi Airport, in
the Minister Mentor Harry Lee Kuan Yew’s constituency of Tanjong Pagar GRC. The SDP’s
Alternative Economic Programme It’s about You (2010) outlines the Party’s proposals for minimum
wage and unemployment insurance. The researchers obtain direct and personal access to
Singapore’s grassroots opposition community, including people that are not party leaders and who
are difficult to access. The views of this community have rarely been heard because of the Singapore
Government’s hegemonic control of mainstream media within the country.
Key words: Grassroots activism, Income inequality, Internet activism, National Solidarity Party, Poverty,
Singapore politics, Singapore opposition parties, Singapore Democratic Party.
INTRODUCTION
This paper explores, using interview-based qualitative
research, the ongoing problem of income inequality and
poverty in the city-state of Singapore (Singapore, a
former British colony, gained full independence in 1965. It
has been ruled by the People’s Action Party (PAP)
Government continuously since independence. The
country is a multi-ethnic one with 76.8% Chinese, 13.9%
Malay, 7.9% Indian, and 1.4% Other (Singapore 2000
Census, cited at CIA World Fact Book Singapore page at
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-worldfactbook/geos/us.html, accessed 4 May 2011). George
*Corresponding Author E-mail: jamesk@usq.edu.au; Tel: 61 7
46311456
(2000, p. 175) points out that: “Administrators, continuing
a tradition started by British colonialists, apply stark
categories that caricature people’s ethnic heritage, and
equate ethnicity with both culture and language in ways
that fail to reflect the cultural diversity and richness on the
ground”). Singapore now has the sixth highest GDP per
capita in the world but capitalism, ever since the days of
Karl Marx (1968, 1975, 1976a, 1976b, 1978a, 1981),
Friedrich Engels (1976, 1987, 2004), and The Communist
Manifesto (Marx and Engels, 1994), has been notorious
as a mode of production for producing both wealth and
poverty on ever-increasing scales (It should be
unnecessary to point out that citation of Lenin and Stalin
does not mean that we agree with every policy or action
of the Government of the former Soviet Union during the
period 1917-91). It is not unusual for rising income
James et al. 139
inequality, as measured by the Gini Coefficient, to
accompany rising GDP per capita as the economy
develops effectively two speeds, one for the managers
and senior workers in the most profitable industries and
one for the remainder of the population. The Singaporean
NGO and civil society activist Roderick Chia has
commented about a growing class division in Singapore
(personal interview, 4 March 2010). Empirically this is the
case. Singapore Democratic Party (SDP) (2010) reports
that the Gini Coefficient for employed households in
Singapore (a coefficient measuring inequality with 1.000
indicating complete inequality) has risen from 0.444 in
2000 to 0.481 in 2008 and the ratio of average income of
the top 20% to lowest 20% of employed households has
risen from 10.1 to 13.0 over the same period. The 2009
Gini Coefficient of 0.479 puts Singapore 29th in the world
according to CIA World Fact Book, i.e. 29th highest
income inequality (See URL cited in Footnote 1[accessed
4 May 2011]). In early 2009 6,500 households were in
arrears on their government flat mortgage payments by
two years or more while in June 2008 13,700 households
had been put on pre-paid metering for electricity due to
the risk of disconnection, up from 11,900 households
eighteen months previously (da Cunha, 2010, pp. 34, 35).
Even the Establishment Singaporean author Bilveer
Singh (1992, p. 137) stated as long ago as 1992 that “the
country was now confronted with a clear class problem”.
Vladimir Lenin (1965a) produced an original ground
breaking argument in 1916 in Imperialism: the Highest
Stage of Capitalism where he argued that global
companies will increasingly export capital to the
developing world and repatriate profits and dividends
rather than the earlier system of imperialism-capitalism
where foreign markets where used only to sell products
and to source raw materials. Joseph Stalin’s (1965) The
Foundations of Leninism deals specifically, from the
orthodox Leninist perspective, with the impact of
imperialism-capitalism on pre-revolutionary Russia.
Lenin’s arguments are especially prescient for Singapore
which has placed attracting global capital investment as
one of its highest economic priorities in the 46 years
since independence (de Cunha, 2010; King, 2008). Derek
da Cunha (2010, p. 11) even poses the question
“whether Singapore is a ‘nation-state’ in both the letter
and spirit of the term, or whether Singapore has evolved
to being purely an economic entity in its functionality and
character”. Singapore would appear to be near perfect
fulfillment of the Marxist-Leninist argument that the
bourgeois state exists to safeguard and promote capital
accumulation (see, for example, Lenin, 1965b; Marx,
1966, 1972, 1978b).
We also consider the rise of the “Facebook
generation” who have taken opposition politics in
Singapore into the internet age and provided younger
Singaporeans dissatisfied with the ruling People’s Action
Party (人民行動黨)(PAP) Government a healthy forum
where they can network, express frustrations, and
communicate ideas. Internet activism is vital to improve
Government accountability on social and economic
issues impacting upon the working-class. Firstly, in a
society where the Government and its meritocratic elite
have hegemonic control over the mainstream media
(George, 2000, p. 199), the internet allows for alternative
voices to be heard and the opposition to hold the
Government to account. Secondly, internet activism may
contribute to the pro-opposition vote at elections and the
number of opposition MPs in the Parliament thus
indirectly improving the ability of the opposition to put
forward its opinions. The Workers’ Party of Singapore
(新加坡工人党) (WP) 2011 Election Manifesto was
entitled “Towards a First World Parliament” suggesting
that first-world parliaments are two- or multi-party
systems where the elected opposition can provide checks
and balances upon the ruling party. Page 7 of the WP’s
Manifesto states as follows:
“A First World Parliament is able to balance a strong
executive government if there is a credible and
responsible opposition with a mandate from the
electorate. This will generate a culture of accountability
and enable citizens of different political stripes to
contribute to nation building and policy formulation in a
vital Organ of State” [The Workers’ Party of Singapore,
2011, p. 7].
The opposition in general, and the Singapore
Democratic Party (新加坡工人党) (SDP) and National
Solidarity Party (新加坡工人党) (NSP) in particular, have
repeatedly highlighted the growing income inequality and
poverty in the country. The SDP and NSP’s championing
of the cause of the poor, and especially the elderly poor,
the most obvious victims of Singapore’s hyper-capitalist
expansion of the past 50 years, is unusual and refreshing
for liberal parties. Pictures in the SDP’s promotional
literature skillfully and dialectically present wealth and
poverty in Singapore within the same pictorial image. This
study’s interviewees speak of the Dickensian living
conditions in the one-room rental flats in Bukit Merah, just
a 25-minute taxi ride from Changi Airport, in the Minister
Mentor Harry Lee Kuan Yew’s constituency of Tanjong
Pagar GRC (A Group Representative Constituency
(GRC) is a large electoral area where teams of four, five
or six opposition candidates compete against the same
number of PAP candidates. The GRC system, introduced
in 1988, was ostensibly designed to allow for minority
ethnic group representation in Parliament as each GRC
team had to comprise at least one member of
Singapore’s ethnic minority communities (designated as
“Malay”, “Indian” or “Other” by the PAP Government). The
remaining electorates are smaller SMCs (or Single
Member Constituencies). The Singapore Constitution
requires that at least nine seats be SMCs, recently
increased to twelve. Commentators argue that GRCs
favour PAP since the statistical “law of large numbers”
140 J. Res. Peace Gend. Dev.
applies (da Cunha, 1997). For example, if the vote is 60%
pro-PAP across the whole of Singapore then the larger
the electorate area is the closer the pro-PAP vote there
will be to 60% (George, 2000, p. 88). In smaller SMCs of
around 20,000 voters (as opposed to between 100,000
and 200,000 voters in GRCs) the chance of an opposition
candidate polling over 50.1% of votes increases
especially as the small size of the SMC may allow that
candidate to reach out successfully to voters at a
grassroots level). The SDP’s Alternative Economic
Programme It’s about You (2010) outlines the Party’s
proposals for minimum wage and unemployment
insurance, generous policies directly aimed at poverty
alleviation. The new and minor Reform Party (RP) also
supports a minimum wage. Interestingly, the SDP, a
liberal-democratic party, has more radical pro-worker
policies than the traditional labour party, the WP. This is
not altogether surprising. The traditional Chinese left-wing
of the 1960s, of which the WP is the modern living
descendant, was concerned with Chinese language and
cultural causes, in a post-colonial Singapore where
English was still pushed as the number one language of
education and business, as much as it was concerned
with traditional labour issues (Eric Tan, personal
interview, 3 March 2010). The SDP’s strong pushes for
poverty to be addressed in radical fashion, and its
ideological commitment to the confrontational politics of
the Westminster two-party system, mean that the Party is
rarely given legitimate space to fully air its views in
Singapore and it is not regarded as positively by the PAP
Government as the more moderate WP or Singapore
People’s Party (新加坡人民党) (SPP).
We also find that Dr Chee Soon Juan’s SDP has been
the most committed in encouraging active use of the
internet by its political activists on a day-to-day basis
outside of election campaigns (In this paper we follow the
standard Singaporean convention for Chinese names by
placing the family name first). The Party has a dedicated
group of young volunteers in their twenties who have
been very active in making political posts on the SDP
website www.yoursdp.org, blogs, and Facebook. This
group has the ability to overcome the “tainted brand”
factor relating to Dr Chee Soon Juan (徐顺全) himself
following his much-publicized public confrontation with
the then PM Mr Goh Chok Tong (吴作栋) during the 2001
GE campaign (Roderick Chia, personal interview, 4
March 2010).
The NSP’s Secretary-General Mr Goh Meng Seng
also discusses his reason for leaving the WP – that
Party’s conservative attitude towards internet activism. As
an illustration of the WP’s perspective on this topic, Mr
Low Thia Khiang (刘程强), the WP Secretary-General,
the former long-serving member for Hougang SMC, and
current MP for Aljunied GRC, speaks as follows: “My
facebook account is updated by someone else. I am not
accustomed to online interaction. I am more traditional. I
prefer face to face interaction. Social networking is more
suitable for use between friends” (cited in Ye, 2011 as
translated by Tan). In between the 2006 and 7 May 2011
GEs, the WP lost three key faces from its moderately
successful 2006 election campaign – Mr Chia Ti Lik (to
Socialist Front), Mr Goh Meng Seng (to the NSP), and Mr
James Gomez (to the SDP). Although 2006 WP
candidate Ms Glenda Han is working in Hong Kong and
has sold her Singapore pub, Les Chameaux at Robertson
Quay, she informed the first-mentioned researcher
(personal e-mail communication, 24 March 2011) that she
would contest the 7 May 2011 General Election in East
Coast GRC on a WP ticket. Meanwhile, Goh Meng Seng
(personal interview, 15 October 2010) expresses a desire
to make more effective use of the internet in the future for
political purposes. Goh has his own Facebook page
where he has been active in the last three years since
joining the NSP. The NSP’s relatively strong performance
at the 7 May 2011 GE may be partially due to Goh’s
internet activism.
The 7 May 2011 GE was the first in which candidates
were
permitted
to
campaign
online through Facebook, Youtube and Twitter. PM Lee
Hsien Loong held a one hour Facebook chat with internet
users where he was inundated with 5,000 comments
(Tay, 2011, p. 2). In the battle of the attractive female
candidates in Marine Parade GRC, 24-year-old
advertising executive Ms Nicole Seah of the NSP was
favourably received on Facebook while the PAP’s 27year-old business consultant Ms Tin Pei Ling was
unpopular on the new medium with even PAP supporters
joining the “I do not want Tin Pei Ling in Parliament”
page. This page had 44,000 “likes” as at 9 May 2011
(Chow, 2011). By contrast, Seah had 93,000 Facebook
“likes” as at 9 May 2011 making her the most popular
Singaporean politician online (Tay, 2011). The PAP’s
team leader in Marine Parade, the Senior Minister (SM)
Goh Chok Tong, agreed that the Seah and Tin factors
affected the final result in Marine Parade where the NSP
lost by a smaller margin than generally expected (Chow,
2011). More generally younger voters discussed the
election online among their friends through Facebook
comments and Facebook “likes” and “dislikes” (Dr Mark
Cenite of Nanyang Technological University, cited in Tay,
2011, p. 4) rendering null, void and obsolete to a large
extent the PAP’s hegemonic control over mainstream
media. The PAP was increasingly seen as fighting
obsolete battles with obsolete weapons (Daniel Yap,
Letter to the Editor, The Straits Times, 10 May 2011, p.
A22). Internet activism among younger voters may well
be partly responsible for the victory by the WP in Aljunied
GRC and the pro-PAP vote in contested constituencies
falling to a historic low of 60.1%.
We provide short case studies where the interviewees
reflect upon poverty and income inequality in Singapore,
opposition internet activism, and what is needed to
increase the opposition presence within the Singapore
James et al. 141
Parliament. As at the dates of the interviews, the
combined opposition held two seats in Parliament,
Potong Pasir SMC held by Mr Chiam See Tong of the
SPP and Hougang SMC held by Mr Low Thia Khiang of
the WP. The 7 May 2011 GE saw Mr Low shift ground to
Aljunied GRC where his five-person team was the first
opposition team in Singaporean history to ever win a
GRC (Kor and Ong, 2011). Low’s designated successor,
Mr Yaw Shin Leong, recaptured Hougang SMC for the
WP, with a two percentage point swing in his favour (Kor
and Chong, 2011). Mr Chiam contested for the SPP in
Bishan-Toa Payoh GRC while his wife, Madam Lina Low,
contested in Potong Pasir SMC. Ultimately both Chiams
were unsuccessful in their respective contests with
Potong Pasir SMC being returned to the PAP
Government by a mere 114 votes (7,859 for the SPP
versus 7,973 for the PAP) (Au Young and Durai, 2011;
Hussain, 2011) (Voting results for the 7 May 2011 GE are
taken from The Sunday Times (Singapore), 8 May 2011
(noon edition), pp. H9-H12).
The research questions posed to all of this study’s
interviewees are as follows:
1. What are your perceptions about income
inequality and poverty in Singapore?
2. What specific proposals have the opposition
parties put forward recently that will address the problem
of poverty?
3. Do you perceive that internet activism can
successfully alert more people to problems in and
resulting from the Singaporean system?
RESEARCH METHOD
The data sources for the present study are: literature
search; participant-observation; and semi-structured
interviews (with sixteen people in person, two of those
interviewed twice, and seven interview responses sent
and returned by e-mail). Participant-observation includes
th
the first-mentioned author’s attendance at the SDP’s 30
Anniversary Dinner held on 27 February 2010 and its 31st
Anniversary Dinner held on 19 February 2011 as well as
several research-oriented/ social visits to the SDP’s
offices in Jalan Gelenggang (just off Upper Thomson
Road in Singapore’s north). This author also attended the
election night count and press conference with SDP
politicians and supporters held at the Quality Hotel in
Balestier Road, Singapore, on the night of 7-8 May 2011.
In regards participant-observation, before the formal
commencement of the research project, this firstmentioned author worked in Singapore for four years,
1993-94 and 2001-02, in three Singaporean-owned
companies in the auditing, ship-repair, and education
industries.
The sampling method used to select interviewees for
this study was “purposeful” sampling (Facio, 1993, p. 76;
James and Otsuka, 2009; Kim, 2004, p. 104; Patton,
1990, p. 169), rather than random sampling, as this was
felt to be more appropriate for the cultural context of
Singaporean opposition politics where established
friendship networks are important and trust must be
slowly earned. It was also our prior hope to interview
people of different ages and genders and associated with
different opposition parties. We have been able to
achieve this goal to some degree.
The first-mentioned author first contacted the SDP
through its official website asking for assistance in
researching this topic. After a favourable e-mail response
was received from the SDP’s Dr Chee Soon Juan, the
researcher made a trip to Singapore in September 2009
where he was introduced to members of the SDP’s
leadership and several of the Party’s women and youth
activists including Jaslyn Go, Jarrod Luo, and Seelan
Palay. This researcher made a second trip to Singapore
in February-March 2010 where he was introduced to
various other people at the SDP’s 30th Anniversary
Dinner. He then interviewed the contacts he met at the
dinner in singles or in pairs in the week following the
dinner. An additional interview, with the WP’s Treasurer
Mr Eric Tan Heng Chong (陈恩忠), was arranged with the
assistance of the SDP activist Dr Wong Wee Nam. The
researcher made a third research trip to Singapore in
October 2010 when he interviewed several other
prominent opposition politicians and activists. During this
October trip, he interviewed the NSP’s Secretary-General
Goh Meng Seng after first arranging the interview through
Goh’s Facebook page. He also interviewed opposition
activist 65-year-old Mr Patrick Lee Song Juan who was
part of the unsuccessful Singapore Democratic Alliance
(新加坡民主联盟) (SDA) team which contested the Pasir
Ris-Punggol GRC at the 7 May 2011 GE.
Interviews were all conducted at times and places
chosen by the interviewees. The researcher took detailed
shorthand notes during the interviews. Interviews were
not tape-recorded. On the evenings after each interview
the researcher studied his interview notes and, if
necessary, asked the interviewees for clarification, by email or in person, if any notes were unclear in their
meaning or required amplification. After each research
trip, the researcher used the following iterative method to
analyze the interview data: Firstly, interview notes were
read through in their entirety, and key themes were
identified. Secondly, he returned to the notes and
highlighted sections that related to each research
question and other important themes. Thirdly, for each
key research question or other theme/interviewee
combination, responses were aggregated and then, if
necessary, edited before final inclusion in the paper. The
researchers decided to present interview responses in
this paper for each interviewee rather than for each
theme with the interviewees chosen being those who
gave the most insightful or relevant responses according
to the researchers’ subjective judgement. The two
142 J. Res. Peace Gend. Dev.
interviewees chosen, Dr Leong Seong Kwok and Ms
Jaslyn Go are both activists associated with the SDP but,
importantly, they differ in terms of age and gender. As
such, the paper canvasses views and opinions shared by
all or most opposition activists as well as those which are
more age- and/or gender-specific. As Jaslyn was
interviewed by the researcher as part of a group interview
with Seelan Palay and Jarrod Luo, those two
respondents’ comments are also included in Jaslyn Go’s
sub-section of the paper. Jarrod Luo contested with the
SDP team in Sembawang GRC at the 7 May 2011 GE.
Interview responses from other respondents, where
perceived to be especially insightful or relevant, are also
included and commented upon at various places in the
paper. Ongoing online communication was maintained
with most of the interviewees after their formal interview
which was especially important given that the researchers
wanted to be kept continually informed of news events
and “ground sentiment” in the lead up to the 7 May 2011
GE. Although all interviewees were advised that they
could choose to use a fictitious name for publication
purposes, only one of our interviewees, 14-year-old
Renarda Yoch (name changed), elected to suppress his
real name. Renarda was interviewed by the researcher
with the permission of his parents and in the presence of
his 17-year-old friend.
For the present study the first-mentioned researcher
interviewed the following individuals: political activist Dr
Leong Seong Kwok (one-hour personal interview); SDP
activist and Women’s Wing member Ms Jaslyn Go (30minute group interview and subsequent e-mail
communications); SDP internet activists Mr Seelan Palay
and Mr Jarrod Luo (30-minute group interview and
subsequent e-mail communications); SDP Assistant
Secretary-General Mr John Tan (two personal interviews
of 30 minutes each); current SDP activist and NSP
candidate at the 1997 GE Dr Wong Wee Nam (one-hour
personal
interview
and
subsequent
e-mail
communications); WP Treasurer and 2006 and 2011 WP
candidate Mr Eric Tan Heng Chong (two-hour personal
interview); political activist and NGO employee Mr
Roderick Chia (one-hour personal interview and
subsequent e-mail and informal conversations); political
activists 17-year-old Mr Yap Puay Tong and 14-year-old
Mr Renarda Yoch (name changed) (two-hour group
interview and subsequent e-mail communications);
Monash University lecturer and SDP candidate Mr James
Gomez (one-hour personal interview and subsequent
informal conversations), NSP Secretary-General Mr Goh
Meng Seng (two-hour personal interview); SDP
Secretary-General Dr Chee Soon Juan (one hour
personal
interview
and
subsequent
informal
conversations); SDP leader and candidate Ms Chee Siok
Chin (one group interview of 30 minutes and subsequent
informal conversations); political activist and SDA
candidate Mr Patrick Lee Song Juan (three-hour personal
interview); political activist and deaf community
representative Mr Wong U-Wen (one-hour exchange of
written notes); WP Secretary-General and MP for
Aljunied GRC Mr Low Thia Khiang (e-mail responses);
WP candidate and the member for Hougang SMC Mr
Yaw Shin Leong (e-mail responses); former WP
candidate and now Socialist Front leader Mr Chia Ti Lik
(e-mail responses); pro-China Facebook activist Mr
Edward Tan (e-mail responses); NSP candidate and
NCMP (Non-Constituency Member of Parliament) The
NCMP scheme provides a fixed number of seats in
parliament to the best losing opposition candidates. They
cannot vote on certain bills and they do not represent a
physical constituency. Because of this latter fact,
government authorities are not obliged to respond to their
requests for information. Ms Sylvia Lim, WP Chairperson,
was NCMP from 2006-11) 2001-06 Mr Steve Chia (e-mail
responses); SDP activist Mr Vincent Liaw; and Ms
Glenda Han, 2006 WP candidate for Ang Mo Kio GRC
and 2011 WP candidate for East Coast GRC (e-mail
responses and subsequent e-mail communications).
Voices from the heartlands: opposition activists’
perceptions on the research questions
Dr Leong Seong Kwok (ex-PAP supporter and current
SDP activist)
Our first interviewee, Dr Leong Seong Kwok (aged
around 60), is 1997 NSP Hong Kah GRC candidate Dr
Wong Wee Nam’s college friend of 40 years ago. Both
men attended the SDP’s 30th Anniversary Dinner held on
27 February 2010 and both were introduced to the firstmentioned researcher by Jaslyn Go. Dr Leong is a
member of the generation of Singaporeans now aged in
their 60s who were initially PAP supporters but, sometime
during the 1970s and/or 1980s, became disenchanted
with some of the ruling party’s policies. As Mr Kevin Teo
wrote on Facebook recently:
“The government has lost its heart, it used to have a
true lion heart that was true to its citizens. Not anymore,
tody [sic], with a bunch of detached-from-ground-truth
ministers, we have lost our identity and our pride, and the
govt
has
gained
Shame!”
(http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000706032
385&v=wall&story_fbid=129348797110315#!/?ref=logo
[posted 8 August 2010, accessed 8 August 2010].
1
The Graduate Mother Scheme is widely held to be a
major reason for the sharp drop in the pro-PAP
percentage of the valid votes from 75.55% at the 1980
GE to 62.94% at the 1984 GE (Singh, 1992, pp. 16, 9495 and Figure )
Dr Leong’s questioning attitude with respect to specific
policies led him on a personal journey that has ended
with him becoming an opposition supporter and an
occasional participant in SDP demonstrations. Dr Leong’s
main objections to PAP policies were in relation to the
financial squeeze being placed on the working-class by
James et al. 143
the Government and by the Government’s increasing
involvement in many spheres of business activity. He
objected to the tendering process for the tendering out of
stalls at Government-owned hawker centres (food-courts)
and to the Government’s control of most residential and
industrial properties in the country. Dr Leong was also
personally offended by the ideology of eugenics behind
the controversial “Graduate Mother Scheme” which was
launched in April of 1984 (Lydgate, 2003, p. 125; Singh,
1992, pp. 16, 94-5). Under this scheme, a dating agency,
the Social Development Unit (SDU), was set up for
graduates only and graduate mothers were given priority
allocations of their children to preferred primary schools.
Non-graduate mothers were offered grants of SGD10,000
if they agreed to sterilization after the birth of their first
two children (Lydgate, 2003, p. 125). Journalist Chris
Lydgate (2003, p. 125) has termed this policy “almost
Darwinian” (The Graduate Mother Scheme is widely held
to be a major reason for the sharp drop in the pro-PAP
percentage of the valid votes from 75.55% at the 1980
GE to 62.94% at the 1984 GE (Singh, 1992, pp. 16, 94-5
and Figure 2, p. 5). George (2000, p. 94) writes that
“there is no denying the significance of the 13-point crash
that occurred in 1984”. The 1984 GE also saw the
number of opposition MPs increase to two, namely the
WP’s J. B. (Joshua Benjamin) Jeyaretnam in Anson SMC
and Chiam See Tong, then of the SDP and now of the
SPP, in Potong Pasir SMC (George, 2000, p. 83)).
Likewise, Dr Leong could not accept, in his words, “the
encouraging of one particular group” and could also not
accept, presumably, the ideology of the nation’s first postindependence PM Mr Harry Lee Kuan Yew that
intelligence is a fixed and innate trait perfectly handed
down from one generation to the next. It is Harry Lee’s
steadfast belief in eugenics that underpins, even today,
the ideology of meritocracy in modern Singapore (Barr,
2009; Barr and Skrbis, 2008). Facebook activist and SDA
candidate Patrick Lee Song Juan, also of the senior
generation (age 65), writes as follows of Harry Lee’s “stop
at two” policy:
“in amodern [sic] society like S’pore [sic], family
bonding and cohesion is important. With LKY's policy of
stopping at two, it forever changed the demographic
pattern of family life. Smaall [sic] families are deemed not
as warm in terms of family celebration. My parents has
[sic] 9 siblings and it is a great affair when we celebrate
family
occasions”
(http://www.facebook.com/leesjuan#!/?ref=logo [posted 7
July 2010, accessed 7 July 2010]).
Dr Leong also comments that the Government’s
ventures into business, such as the National Trade
Unions Congress (NTUC) supermarket, were begun with
“good intentions”. NTUC was originally designed to be a
low-cost alternative supermarket but now the dialectic of
history has progressed too far and the NTUC has, in Dr
Leong’s words, “become giants by themselves”.
Furthermore, in many cases you cannot get Government
contracts unless you partner with Government firms. A
former Straits Times (Singapore) journalist Rodney King
(2008) also documents the PAP’s ownership of key
businesses in nearly every sphere of economic activity
which caters for cronyism, encourages inefficiencies and
poor decision-making, and crowds out the local privatesector SMEs which are then routinely castigated for their
poor performances. King (2008) argues convincingly that,
as in the former Soviet Union during the Stalin era, the
Singaporean “economic miracle” since independence is
largely the result of the application of more and more
factors of production (labour and capital) to Singapore
rather than the result of increased productive efficiency
per unit of input. Productivity in the construction sector,
which is strongly reliant on foreign labour, is particularly
poor compared to the largely unionized construction
industry in Australia (King, 2008, pp. 58-61) (See Leung
and James (2010, pp. 14-23) and Leung et al. (2010, pp.
489-92) for historical overviews of trade unionism within
the Australian construction industry). The CIA World Fact
Book states that Singapore’s overall productivity growth
rate has been a troubling 1% per year for the past
decade (See URL cited in Footnote 1 [accessed 4 May
2011]).
Dr Leong now perceives himself to be a committed
opposition supporter who is attracted to the ideas and the
political demonstrations of the SDP. He lives in the
Potong Pasir SMC where Mr Chiam See Tong (詹时中),
formerly of the SDP and now of the SPP, held the seat for
the 27-year period from the 1984 GE until 7 May 2011. Dr
Leong attended court on the Monday following our
Tuesday interview (2 March 2010) for illegal assembly
protest in front of Parliament House with the SDP.
Now, after having introduced Dr Leong to readers, we
move on to a discussion of the topic of poverty in
Singapore (Research Question 1). Dr Leong had nothing
specific to say regarding opposition party policies on
poverty since election campaign policies had not yet
been announced as at March 2010 (Research Question
2). Perhaps partly because of his age, Dr Leong could be
said to socially conservative in relation to certain issues.
For example, he supports the PAP’s stance on using
social engineering mechanisms to prevent the
development of “ethnic enclaves” in the city-state, for
example, upper and lower prescribed percentages of
each ethnic group permitted to live in a block of flats or
neighbourhood. Despite this, Dr Leong qualifies for
inclusion in this paper as an opposition activist as he is
very concerned about the poverty issue in Singapore and
he has a strong working-class consciousness. When our
interview was nearly over, the researcher asked him for
his view on the PAP’s dominant ideology that Harry Lee
and his first-generation cabinet colleagues (such as Goh
Keng Swee, Toh Chin Chye, and S. Rajaratnam, George,
2000, p. 29) deserve the credit for building up modern
Singapore. Very quickly, Dr Leong responded that it was
144 J. Res. Peace Gend. Dev.
the forgotten Chinese labourers of 100 years ago, those
men who carried ship cargoes on their backs at what is
now the restaurant precinct of Boat Quay, who truly built
up modern Singapore. Fourteen-year-old activist Renarda
Yoch (name changed) made a similar comment (group
interview, 4 March 2010), referring to the “samsui” or
Chinese construction workers in Singapore before World
War II as those foreign workers who “really came and
built up Singapore”. As the first-mentioned author has
been strongly influenced by Karl Marx’s “labour theory of
value” (Marx, 1976a, chaps. 6-9), or, as accounting
professor Tony Tinker (1999) of the City University of
New York calls it, the “value theory of labour”, Dr Leong’s
and Renarda Yoch’s words struck a chord with him. In Dr
Leong’s words:
“The working-class is very affected by vote-buying,
bonuses, etc. They legalize it, we ‘share wealth’, but I call
it pure vote-buying. The older ones still believe in LKY
[Harry Lee Kuan Yew] ‘setting up Singapore’. I stopped
believing in it, I saw people slog their hearts out and PAP
says: ‘They don’t save money’. Ideology is propagated in
the schools. People work for a few cents. Singapore
prosperity is built on the backs of those unloading
cargoes on their backs in what is now Boat Quay. These
are the people that really built Singapore”.
Da Cunha (2010, p. 163) makes it clear that,
regardless of one’s opinion on the Marxist labour theory
of value, “Singaporeans owe a considerable debt of
gratitude to foreign workers for doing jobs largely spurned
by Singaporeans”.
We now move on to discuss the issue of internet
activism (Research Question 3). Dr Leong is very
supportive of the younger generation of Facebook
internet activists associated mostly with the SDP’s Youth
Wing. For example, Mr Chong Kai Xiong, a self-declared
“anarchist” (in personal conversation with the firstmentioned researcher, 30 February 2010), and 25-yearold Mr Seelan Palay (who served short prison terms for
political activities in 2010-11) are young internet activists,
associated with the SDP, who communicate its ideas
online and network with various interested parties
through Facebook. A day does not go past without Kai
Xiong and/or Seelan and/or Jarrod Luo and/or Rachel
Zeng and/or Martyn See posting at least one political post
on Facebook. A room with three computers is set up in
the SDP’s offices, located in an upstairs shophouse in
suburban Jalan Gelenggang (just off Upper Thomson
Road in Singapore’s north), for this specific purpose. Dr
Leong admits to not having had much personal contact
with this young SDP group because of the, in his words,
“generation gap”. However, he admires them from a
distance. He says to the researcher (personal interview, 2
March 2010) that he himself is “tainted goods” within
Singapore because he is known to be an opposition
supporter. He implies that this “tainting” may be partly
responsible for his present unemployed status (although
he works part-time as a security guard). He
admits that: “Even me, I don’t dare to say I am SDP”. The
PAP tactic is, in Dr Leong’s words: “They send people
overseas who are a threat to them, they sent Tommy Koh
as Ambassador to the UN; they neutralize you, give you
an offer you can’t refuse” (Tommy Koh and his
Ambassadorship to the United Nations as well as other
details of his iconoclastic and colourful career are
referred to in George (2000, pp. 116-7)).
Dr Leong suggests that young voters were
responsible for increasing marginally Chiam See Tong’s
share of the vote in Potong Pasir SMC at the 2006 GE
(up from 52.43% or 8,107 votes out of 15,463 to 55.82%
or 8,245 out of 14,772) (For 2001 GE result see
http://www.singapore-elections.com/parl-2001-ge/potongpasir.html
and
for
2006
GE
result
see
http://www.singapore-elections.com/parl-2006-ge/potongpasir.html [both accessed 5 August 2010]). This is the
same GE that the WP’s book Days of being Wild has
called Singapore’s first “internet election” (Lam, 2006, p.
24). Dr Leong cites the one percentage-point increase in
votes won by Chiam at the 2006 GE (in actual fact the
increase was over two percentage-points). He claims that
this increase, while small, is important because it reflects
“younger ones coming of age” in an electorate which
actually lost registered voters between 2001 (16,616) and
2006 (15,888). Dr Leong mentions that, prior to GE 2006:
“I was worried where [i.e. who for] the younger ones will
vote”.
The key question, for Dr Leong and for his lifelong
friend Dr Wong Wee Nam, is whether the opposition’s
online support will translate into more pro-opposition
votes in coming elections. No-one the researcher spoke
to claims to have an answer to this question as yet. Dr
Leong and another of this study’s interviewees, the 35year-old NGO and civil society activist Roderick Chia, put
forward the view, yet to be confirmed by empirical
evidence, that the “new Singaporeans”, mostly from
China and India, are a pro-PAP demographic. Dr Leong
comments that: “The Government is trying to target this
group and get them involved [in politics]”. The former
NCMP Mr Steve Chia of the NSP posted online about his
house visits in Pioneer SMC in the lead up to the 7 May
2011 GE: “From my house visits of around 100 blocks
now in Pioneer since beginning of March [2011], I can
confidently say that there is at least 20% new citizen[s]
from China. Also, 1 out of 2 households I speak to
request me to speak in Chinese, Teochew or Hokkien
[rather than in English, the business language of
Singapore]”
(For
2001
GE
result
see
http://www.singapore-elections.com/parl-2001-ge/potongpasir.html
and
for
2006
GE
result
see
http://www.singapore-elections.com/parl-2006-ge/potongpasir.html [both accessed 5 August 2010]). These new
immigrants are generally quick to offer support to the
PAP Government that granted them admittance into the
country. Furthermore, the Chinese immigrants are
familiar with a neo-Confucian authoritarian state in China
James et al. 145
(Deng Xiao Ping’s Selected Works Volume 3 indicates his
view that economic development should be the number
one priority for post-Mao China and, according to Deng’s
ideology, social and political stability are necessary for
this goal to be achieved (Weil, 2006, pp. 223-30). This is
a very similar view to PAP ideology in Singapore. For
example, the PAP’s veteran Wong Kan Seng has said:
“Our experience is that economic growth is the necessary
foundation of any system that claims to advance human
dignity, and that order and stability are essential for
development” (cited in George, 2000, p. 50)). The
opposition parties cannot depend on the mainland
Chinese migrants for support as the mainland Chinese
have not been a naturally left-wing demographic since
the era of Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai (who both passed
away in 1976). Rather than market themselves to the
“new Singaporeans”, the opposition parties have decided
to aim to win over the younger generation of internet
users who may become increasingly politicized over the
internet.
Dr Leong remarks that 20% of voters are with the
opposition “for sure” while he gives a figure of “at least
50%” as “hardcore PAP” supporters. Other interviewees
give a lower figure (Eric Tan suggests 30%) and it must
be said that 50% is a somewhat depressing statistic, from
an opposition perspective, as it suggests that the
combined opposition will never win another seat or do so
only by the most slender of margins. The WP did win
Aljunied GRC with an impressive 54.71% of the vote at
the 7 May 2011 GC (72,165 out of 131,897 valid votes)
and the WP’s share of votes in Hougang SMC increased
from 62.74% to 64.81%. George (2000, pp. 38, 92, 95)
talks of a hardcore opposition support of 25%, hardcore
PAP support of 30% “at most”, and swinging voters of
45%. The hardcore opposition support is now more likely
around 35%. Then Dr Leong says that “[t]he next 20% will
give you a chance”, referring to the second 20% most
likely to vote for the opposition. He adds that: “The fight is
for the next 10%”, i.e. 20% plus 20% plus 10%. Dr Leong
reminds us of the so-called “shouting match” between the
SDP’s Chee Soon Juan and the PAP’s Goh Chok Tong
during the 2001 GE campaign. The mainstream media
used this incident to yet again demonize Chee. As Dr
Leong recalls, many voters “thought it [Chee’s behaviour]
was very rude, and they still remember this”. A large
number of voters, especially those from the senior
generation, felt that it was important that an enthusiastic
young challenger such as Dr Chee demonstrate public
respect for the more senior incumbent Goh Chok Tong.
The reaction to this incident reinforces the point that, on
balance, Singapore remains a socially conservative
Chinese majority society (da Cunha, 2010, p. 85). Dr
Leong concludes that “[t]he [second] 20% are still not
impressed by his sincerity [referring to Dr Chee], let alone
the 10%”. Dr Leong points to the 2001 GE result in
Jurong GRC where Chee’s team scored only 20.25% or
21,511 votes out of 106,253, suggesting that no-one
but the rusted-on hardcore opposition/ SDP support was
willing to vote for the SDP on this occasion (Dr Leong
cites Hong Kah GRC but his memory fails him here. Dr
Chee stood in Jurong GRC in 2001 but the pro-SDP vote
was between 20% and 25% in both GRCs. This proopposition vote is fairly low by modern Singaporean
standards). Dr Leong goes on to offer his perspective on
the SDP as follows:
“SDP has very small numbers. Because of Dr Chee’s
ideas people do not understand him. The press has
vilified him and this [vilification] is what people believe.
They think he is a clown, he is professing on small parts
of the Constitution that are being whittled away, for
example freedom of speech. … Dr Chee can win over
young Chinese-educated, but the older ones no”.
Younger SDP supporters are generally more upbeat
about the SDP’s ability to win over the socially
conservative Chinese-educated electorate (although
Roderick Chia is an exception). The SDP did reasonably
well at the 7 May 2011 GE scoring 36.8% of the votes in
constituencies it contested which included Bukit Panjang
SMC, Holland-Bukit Timah GRC, Sembawang GRC, and
Yuhua SMC. The large percentage of upper middle-class
and English-educated voters in Holland-Bukit Timah GRC
suggests that the SDP is finally making better choices as
to where it should contest. The Party ultimate secured
39.90% of the vote in Holland-Bukit Timah GRC (32,322
out of 81,004 valid votes). Dr Chee’s non-involvement as
a candidate and his low public profile during the election
campaign may well also have been factors that ultimately
worked in the SDP’s favour. Holland-Bukit Timah GRC
contestant 35-year-old school teacher Michelle Lee is an
example of an upper middle-class SDP contestant most
suitable for the battle in that particular constituency. She
has stated that a return by the SDP to its previous
agenda of illegal protest activities would see her leave
the Party (Peh, 2011). The Party is now trying to shed its
“civil disobedience” image although the leaders see this
as a pragmatic shift in the area of methods rather than a
shift in fundamental ideology. Dr Leong’s comments on
the internet community and the internet vote are also
worth quoting here:
“The opposition in general has a very small group of
th
activists, SDP youth at [30 Anniversary] dinner just ten
or fifteen, other parties the same; the WP has just around
40 activists [total] who dare to stand up to say ‘I’m WP’.
… What I have been told here is that the WP does its
own quiet activities. Here the mainstream media vilifies
you. … SDP is very strong with the internet. Within the
internet community there will be a transfer of votes
[towards the opposition] but will that go into the general
community? It is hard to say. Not many of us are on the
political net. If it is 20% and they are the donkeys
[hardcore opposition supporters] it’s no use. My concern
is can we touch the [next] 20% plus 10%? When I talk to
other people they all still say: ‘Shhhh, there are
Government people around’. What you see on the net will
146 J. Res. Peace Gend. Dev.
not [directly] transfer to votes. There was euphoria that
we can repeat Anwar [in Malaysia]. … Old-timers fail to
see [next] 10% are the elitist votes, the best educated.
The dissatisfied people are the educated people. As for
people who can appeal to this group, I’m willing to sit
back and let the younger ones run it. Probably young
voters voted for Chiam in Potong Pasir [at GE 06].”
Dr Leong looks around the working-class, middleaged and elderly crowd of people eating early lunches
this Tuesday morning at Tiong Bahru Food Court. He tells
the researcher that “these are PAP people but in Potong
Pasir [SMC] these types support Chiam See Tong”. Dr
Leong speaks of his own local MP Chiam as follows
(speaking prior to the news that Chiam’s wife, Madam
Lina Low, would contest the seat at the 7 May 2011 GE
for the SPP):
“My MP, I’m very worried about him. He had strokes,
I’m worried about him; his plan to put someone in that
seat is a good idea. If he dies in a seat it will be absorbed
into a GRC. After JBJ [Jeyaretnam] was removed in
Anson the seat ceased to exist. There is a talk the wife
will come in as a successor; no-one is opening their cards
yet. It’s time to build up the succession. Tragic if he dies
in office and the PAP will not hold a by-election. PAP
interprets it [death in office] as [meaning] they don’t need
to hold a by-election”.
The ongoing and committed grassroots support that
Chiam received in Potong Pasir SMC and that Low Thia
Khiang received in Hougang SMC are legendary but it
has so far proved impossible for the combined opposition
to replicate this level of support in other parts of the citystate (This comment arguably no longer holds after the 7
May 2011 GE to the extent that Mr Yaw won Hougang
SMC for the WP after Mr Low had gone over to Aljunied
GRC to lead his ultimately winning team in that contest).
This fact remains the enduring enigma of Singapore
politics for not only the authors of this paper but for Dr
Leong and the WP’s Eric Tan. When pressed about the
reasons for the success of Low in Hougang SMC, the
WP’s Treasurer, Central Executive Council (CEC)
member (The members of the fifteen-person WP’s CEC
can be found on the WP’s official website at the following
link:
http://wp.sg/our-organisation/executive-council/
[accessed 22 April 2011]), and 2006 and 2011 GE East
Coast GRC candidate Eric Tan (personal interview, 3
March 2010) points to Low, firstly, getting into the system
before the system had turned further against the
opposition due to the increase in the number of GRCs
relative to SMCs. As an earlier footnote has pointed out, it
is easier for an opposition ticket to win in an SMC than in
a GRC. Secondly, Eric refers to the Teochew (as in
dialect group) Low attending 90% of funerals in Hougang
SMC. According to Eric (personal interview, 3 March
2010), the largely Teochew electorate in Hougang has
been deeply impressed by this since, in traditional
Chinese culture, attending funerals is associated with bad
luck.
Thirdly, Eric (personal interview, 3 March 2010)
suggests that Low is seen by his heartland in the northeast part of Singapore as being the last link in an
oppositional chain going back to 1960s left-wing activist
Lim Chin Siong, pro-China businessman Tan Lark Sye,
the Barisan Sosialis party (The Barisan Sosialis (Malay
language meaning “Socialist Front”) is not connected to
the new Socialist Front formed recently by Chia Ti Lik.
However, old-time left-wing activists would appreciate the
resurrection of the name. The original Barisan merged
with the WP in 1988), and the socially and politically
radical Chinese-medium Nanyang University which was
closed down forcibly by the Government in 1981 (Mr Tan
Lark Sye was a Hokkien businessman whose citizenship
was revoked by the Singaporean Government in
September 1963 because he was felt to be too close to
the People’s Republic of China and was, therefore, a
“front man for the communists” in Harry Lee’s words
(Visscher, 2007, pp. 154-6). The WP’s Low Thia Khiang
in 2011 spoke of the Nanyang University closure as
follows (Ye, 2011, translated by Tan): “Media bias-ness
[sic] is one key reason why I am in politics. When the
PAP government first announced its plan to shut down
Nanyang University, we wrote in a lot of letters to the
media about it, but none of the letters were published.
How do [sic] one not feel sceptical [sic] about the Media
after that experience?”). George (2000, p. 90) writes
about Low Thia Khiang as follows: “Low, by all accounts,
was hardworking and effective at the grass-roots, as well
as sharp and quick-witted in parliament, where he was a
master of the follow-up question”.
At our interview, Dr Leong remarked that the younger
generation has no memory of Operation Cold Store
(1963) or the detention of left-wing radicals without trial
for years that resulted from it (Operation Cold Store took
place on the night of 2 February 1963. It resulted in 115
arrests (Visscher, 2007, p. 152). Visscher (2007, p. 152)
comments that: “The action removed some of the ablest
and most experienced left wing leaders, including Lim
Chin Siong and 23 Barisan [Sosialis] members from the
scene”). As a result they do not live in the same fear of
the PAP Government as do their seniors. He concludes
by stating: “The future of Singapore politics still depends
on the Old Man [Harry Lee]. His threats still carry a lot of
weight especially amongst the older ones”. Regarding the
7 May 2011 GE, Dr Leong expressed his hope to the
researcher (on 2 October 2010) that the combined
opposition could win ten seats, i.e. two GRCs,
presumably in addition to the two SMCs that they already
held, making the total twelve elected opposition MPs. The
opposition did well but was unable to reach this target,
falling short by six MPs.
Ms Jaslyn Go (SDP activist)
If WP candidate at the 2006 GE in Ang Mo Kio GRC,
Glenda Han, is or was the glamour woman of the WP,
then Jaslyn Go must fulfil this role for the SDP (but Jaslyn
goes far beyond the provision of glamour) (Glenda Han’s
James et al. 147
profile can be found on the WP’s official website at the
following link: http://wp.sg/our-organisation/executivecouncil/glenda-han/ [accessed 22 April 2011]). Jaslyn, a
37-year-old married mother-of-two, is a committed SDP
supporter and activist who has been a regular participant
at SDP protest activities since World Consumer Day, 15
March 2008. Jaslyn has been charged and given the
option of a substantial fine or a short jail term for illegal
protests in a public place, on more than one occasion,
alongside other SDP leaders Chee Soon Juan, Gandhi
Ambalam, Chee Siok Chin, and John Tan. She is
associated with the SDP Women’s Wing. Jaslyn was one
of the speakers at the SDP’s (legal) rally at Hong Lim
Park on 13 November 2010 and presented the Party’s
official Chinese New Year message which appeared on
the SDP’s website www.yoursdp.org in February 2011.
Jaslyn is very interested in the ongoing problem of
poverty in Singapore, especially among the working-class
and elderly, and in this sub-section she discusses her
experiences growing up in a poor family in the Bukit
Merah district of Singapore in the 1970s. Jaslyn’s parents
were among the first generation of government flat
residents following the PAP Government’s physical
demolition of the organic village “kampongs” as a result of
which the former village residents received sub-par
compensation for the seizure of their homes and land
(Jarrod Luo, group interview, 22 September 2009). Li
(2011) even suggests that lingering discontent over the
forced demolition of the kampongs may have been a
factor behind the WP’s 7 May 2011 victory in Aljunied
GRC. Government flats, administered then and now by
the Housing Development Board (HDB), were mostly
rented out in the early years but the balance shifted in
favour of “purchases” (actually 99-year leases) in the
period 1971 to 1975-76 (SDP, 2010, Table 10, p. 42).
We now move on to discussion of Jaslyn, Jarrod, and
Seelan’s responses to Research Question 1, perceptions
about poverty and income inequality in Singapore. Jaslyn
explains (group interview at the SDP’s offices with Jarrod
Luo, Seelan Palay, and the first-mentioned author, 22
September 2009) how she developed a social and
political consciousness at a early age by growing up in a
poor family which was “alienated from” (Marx, 1975) the
fruits of the city-state’s growing prosperity (Jarrod Luo
contested as part of the SDP team in Sembawang GRC
at the 7 May 2011 GE. This team, which consisted of
John Tan, James Gomez, Mohamed Isa Abdul Aziz,
Sadasivam Veriyah, and Jarrod Luo, scored 47,578 out
of 131,763 valid votes or 36.11%). Jaslyn became very
aware of income inequality while still very young and she
began to view the elite as people with privileges,
privileges that were not being shared fairly with the
working-class. Poverty was very evident although the
PAP Government tended to focus its attention on the
needs and desires of the elite and the business
community while denying that poverty remained a
problem in the country. This continues to be the case as
Minister Mentor Harry Lee denies that there are beggars
in Singapore (according to Mr Yap Puay Tong, group
interview, 4 March 2010) when in fact there are beggars
in his own inner-city constituency of Tanjong Pagar GRC.
Hyper-capitalism, as practised by the PAP Government
since independence, certainly has produced its own
discontents. Jaslyn was perceptive enough as a pre-teen
to observe that the Government’s official discourse was
not necessarily the reality as experienced by the workingclass or by Karl Marx’s “lumpenproletariat” (For Marx on
“lumpenproletariat”, also termed “dangerous classes”,
see Marx (1976a, p. 797)). Jaslyn describes her
childhood years as follows, unconsciously slipping into
the present tense for dramatic effect and perhaps
because the memories still remain vivid (group interview,
22 September 2009):
“I grew up in a very poor family; we stay in a one room
flat. There are six of us in the family; [we] stay with
Grandma as well. Our place is very cramped with so
many people living under one roof. I grew up sleeping on
the floor without a mattress. Because my parents could
not afford electricity; me [sic] and my sister went to the
Community Centre to have a bath. It was an HDB rental
flat, most of the citizens lived in a rental flat, this was the
1970s. My father was on and off working, he was a
compulsive gambler. There were many families in this
situation. ... All my neighbours were living in these
conditions, all staying in one-room flat[s]. ... We saw a lot
of quarrelling at that time – mostly it is due to the money
or the lack thereof”.
Jaslyn explains that one factor that led to her early
politicization was the sight of the legendary opposition
politician JBJ (i.e. J. B. Jeyaretnam) JBJ won the seat of
Anson on a WP ticket in a 1981 by-election, the first
opposition MP to be elected in the country since 1963
and the first to sit in Parliament since 1968 (Lydgate,
2003, pp. 87-97). He won the seat again in the 1984 GE
(Lydgate, 2003, pp. 124-9)) selling political newspapers
in the bus interchange and hawker centres (again Jaslyn
slips into the present tense here):
“I live near where JBJ lived; the [grassroots]
opposition sentiment for JBJ was quite strong. I saw him
at the interchange selling books and newspapers. This
was the 1970s/ early-1980s. I remember seeing him in
the train station. Even though we were very poor my
mother tried to dig up money to buy a newspaper from
him”.
Jaslyn then went on to describe her schooling years
and the part-time jobs she took to support herself through
school:
“I was even too poor to go to school. I was very fearful
in regards paying school fees as I was afraid my teacher
would ask for school fees. My school was far from my
place. Walking to school took 30 to 40 minutes. Public
transport was out of the question. I had to walk through
the factories and was chased by dogs. In my secondary
years, I had to support myself. I worked as waitress [and]
148 J. Res. Peace Gend. Dev.
in factories and McDonald’s. I worked six to eight hours a
day, seven days a week. Whenever I went to school I
was always tired. I remember in school that none of my
friends went through what I had gone through. They
seemed to have no problems buying in the canteen. They
are seriously not as poor as me. I was just surviving”.
Moving on to today’s Singapore, Jaslyn, Jarrod, and
Seelan contrast the one-room rental flats and the fiveroom flats that stand opposite each other physically in
Bukit Merah but which represent a vast social divide.
SDP activist Seelan Palay describes living conditions
today in the one-room rental apartments in Bukit Merah
(group interview, 22 September 2009):
“It’s very depressing. There are no walls; it is eight
metres by six metres. There are two different worlds
[standing opposite each other in Bukit Merah]. When the
loan sharks want to target you, they throw the red paint
on the door. Many [flats] have red paint on their doors.
Just opposite are the expensive HDB flats. You can see
how unjust it is. You can see each other from each
other’s windows. Grandma, father, girl, mother, [and] two
boys [might] live in a room six metres by seven metres.
You can survive; they have a roof over their heads. What
about the kids? They will think study is no good for them
[i.e. because of their harsh living conditions and lack of
prospects]; many social problems multiply from there.
This is [Harry] Lee Kuan Yew’s constituency. He said
‘show me a beggar’; [well] this is Tanjong Pagar GRC”.
These are living conditions in modern Singapore
where the country’s Gross Domestic Product has reached
USD57,200 per capita (2010 estimate), sixth highest in
the world, and higher than many developed nations
including the United States (USD47,400), Australia
(USD41,300), and New Zealand (USD28,000) (CIA World
Factbook,
2011)
(https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-worldfactbook/geos/sn.html, Singapore, Australia, and New
Zealand pages [all accessed 18 March 2011] and the
United States page [accessed 4 May 2011]). However,
14-year-old opposition activist Renarda Yoch comments
perceptively that: “True standard of living, where
everyone has proper housing, is more important than
GDP per capita” (group interview, 4 March 2010). One
lesson of the 7 May 2011 GE, even acknowledged by
Straits Times journalists, is that many people believe that
the PAP’s traditional (economic) “growth-at-all-costs”
strategy should be replaced by a more inclusive growth
policy where growth is balanced against other social
objectives (see, for example, Chan, 2011a and Chia Tok
Whee, Letter to the Editor, The Straits Times, 10 May
2011, p. A22). Paragraph 8 of the NSP’s 2011 Election
Manifesto states: “The focus of our economic policies is
not so much GDP growth, but wage growth and better
quality of life. In our pursuit of economic growth, we need
to
pay
due
attention
to
social
costs”
(http://www.scribd.com/doc/53562332/National-SolidarityParty-Manifesto-2011 [accessed 13 May 2011]). Seelan
Palay’s above description, whilst not wanting to overdramatize, brings to remembrance the passages
describing 19th century Manchester and London in
Friedrich Engels’ (1987) The Condition of the Working
Class in England, Karl Marx’s (1976a) Capital Volume 1
(see especially Chapters 10 and 15), and Jack London’s
(n/d) The People of the Abyss. Singapore’s mega-city
that is Changi International Airport frequently wins awards
for world’s best airport and yet, only 25 to 30 kilometres
away, the poorest of the poor live in Dickensian living
conditions, a world away from prosperity, in Harry Lee’s
Tanjong Pagar GRC. Jack London in The People of the
Abyss wrote similarly about the massive poverty he
observed in the East End of London in 1902 and
contrasted it with the wealth and power of the then mighty
British Empire (of which Singapore was then a remote
outpost):
“From the slimy, spittle-drenched, sidewalk, they ...
picked up stray bits of bread the size of peas, apple cores
so black and dirty one would not take them to be apple
cores, and these things these two men took into their
mouths, and chewed them, and swallowed them; and
this, between six and seven o’clock in the evening of
August 20, year of our Lord 1902, in the heart of the
greatest, wealthiest, and most powerful empire the world
has ever seen” [London, n/d, p. 48].
The poor citizens of the Bukit Merah one room rental
flats also have not been able to cast their votes with the
constituency (now called Tanjong Pagar GRC) not having
been contested for the past four general elections. The
opposition in 1991 was partly to blame for this because of
their collective implementation of the “by-election
strategy” (George, 2000, pp. 86, 93; Lydgate, 2003;
Singh, 1992) whereby the opposition agreed to contest
fewer than half the seats so that the PAP could be
returned to power on Nomination Day, leaving
discontented people free to lodge a protest vote without
inadvertently voting out the Government. The by-election
strategy was strongly criticized at that time by opposition
figurehead the late J. B. Jeyaretnam (the WP Member for
Anson SMC 1981-86).
Jaslyn bemoans the way that the elderly poor and the
homeless are marginalized, forgotten, and put, in Jarrod
Luo’s words, “out of sight [and] out of mind” in modern
Singapore with its emphasis on career success, upward
mobility, and consumerism. George (2000, p. 23) writes
that: “Today, most Singaporeans judge people,
institutions and policies on their bottom-line contributions
to material wellbeing”. The same author also states that:
“Similarly, policy-makers looking through the filters of the
Asian values debate tend to be unsympathetic to appeals
for state welfare from down-and-out Singaporeans –
since Asians are supposed to believe in self-reliance”
(George, 2000, p. 55). Jaslyn believes that there is little
gratitude paid to the senior citizens for their role in
building up modern Singapore in the 46 years that have
passed since independence. On this point, the SDP’s Ms
James et al. 149
Chee Siok Chin, sister of Dr Chee Soon Juan, political
candidate, and Central Executive Committee (CEC)
member (The members of the SDP’s twelve-person CEC
can be found on the SDP’s official website at the
following link: http://yoursdp.org/index.php/the-party/whowe-are [accessed 22 April 2011]), has written (in personal
e-mail communication with Jaslyn Go dated 20 May 2010
and forwarded to the first-mentioned author) that:
“There’s not just little gratitude paid to senior citizens.
The govt continues to use them by not returning them the
full CPF [Central Provident Fund], increases the
retirement age, [and] is implicit [i.e. complicit] in their
being hired to clean toilets, clean tables at food centres,
and other menial jobs”.
In almost dialectical Marxist fashion, the SDP’s
promotional
literature
brilliantly
highlights
the
contradictions inherent in Singaporean hyper-capitalism
as many of its photos depict smiling PAP politicians on
advertising billboards or modern city street scenes with
the photographs shared by impoverished elderly persons
selling cheap goods on the footpath, looking in dumpsters
for food or pushing makeshift carts. Jaslyn states (group
interview, 22 September 2009):
“It pains me to see old people treated like that. I can’t
forgive the Government for treating our elderly [in] this
way. They are the ones who built the country up. We
went to a nursing home and it is sad to see some of them
living like that – forgotten. The elderly in Singapore are
not living with any type of dignity. Is that how we reward
our elderly? This should not be the way”.
Jaslyn made the following comments about poverty
during our group interview at the SDP’s Jalan
Gelenggang offices on 22 September 2009: “In
Singapore, the poor are the forgotten ones. Every day I
see poor people in my neighbourhood [Bukit Merah]”.
Jarrod Luo added at this point, turning the topic from
poverty in general to homelessness:
“It is more of a case of out of sight, out of mind.
Homeless people are actively rounded up. Recently one
guy was arrested and fined SGD800 for sleeping on the
beach. Our social justice here is totally lacking. ... Now, in
order to stop people sleeping on the [park] bench, they
put handles, pretending to be armrests ... although it is
public property. They redesigned the benches so [that]
no-one could sleep on them. ... Some [people] say the
Government is doing right, ‘homeless are a blight on
society’. The whole society has been decompassionized
[Jarrod admitted that he has invented a new word here],
brainwashed. They [the homeless] are disenfranchised.
Singaporeans don’t question what causes led them to
become homeless”.
The reference to putting armrests in the middle of
benches to prevent the homeless sleeping on them
reminds us that the British Government in Jack London’s
era had a policy of erecting sharp spiked-iron fencing
around all public parks (such as at the park, which still
exists today, next to Christ’s Church in Commercial
Street, Spitalfields, in London’s East End) so as to
prevent the homeless from sleeping in the parks at night
(London, n/d, p. 39). Harry Lee spent some time in the
UK as a young man and the impressions he took with him
back to South East Asia regarding how to administrate a
country may not have been the most balanced.
Seventeen-year-old opposition activist Yap Puay Tong
(group interview, 4 March 2010) comments: “The
homeless people in Singapore do not want to see PAP
screw their life up again, they cannot vote as they have
no address[es]”.
Jaslyn supports and identifies with the SDP’s proactive political activism which includes peaceful protests
and demonstrations. She has strong relationships with
the twenty-somethings in the SDP’s Youth Wing including
the Facebook activists mentioned earlier. When asked
about her motivations for being politically active, Jaslyn
refers to leaving behind a better country for her two
children. If we can summarize her political position, the
conclusion is that she is most obviously against the
“culture of cruelty or indifference” that has been an
inevitable by-product of the PAP’s elitist eugenics
ideology and myopic economic development emphasis.
Her views could be described as centre-left humanitarian.
Like the SDP’s leadership, she is in favour of workers’
rights but sees the issue within the broader context of civil
rights and the right to freedom of association. She is a
liberal-democrat rather than a socialist. Jaslyn discusses
her introduction to activism and her female perspective as
to why the PAP, by focusing on the rich and successful,
has created a culture where the working-class get little
financial or moral assistance and are generally blamed
for their own predicament:
“Even though now I’m not that poor – but not rich
either – I remember the poor days and what I went
through. I hope the children of our future will not go
through what I went through. ... I am quite an accidental
activist. I protest against the rising cost of living in
Singapore. Since I brought up children I realized that
bringing up children is not cheap in Singapore, my first
child cost SGD12,000 to deliver him. The support is
lacking for new mothers. ... Not much is given to first-time
mums, nothing is done for you. Confinement nanny/
midwife – Chinese cultural thing – costs SGD2,000 of
salary plus confinement levy. No assistance at all is
given. ... The Government subsidy is so miserable for
child-care, it is a paltry sum, it costs SGD500 per month;
the Government pays SGD150 per month if [mother is]
not working and SGD300 if working. ... Being a mother
made me realize that bringing up a kid is not really cheap
in Singapore. The Government does not give enough
help and still blame the problem. When SDP had a rally, I
was charged in court and facing a lawsuit. It was 15
March 2008, World Consumer Day. That was my maiden
protest”.
Jaslyn’s two children, then aged five and four, were
involved in the SDP’s demonstration and were “among
150 J. Res. Peace Gend. Dev.
the youngest protestors” (Jaslyn Go, group interview, 22
September 2009). Jaslyn states that: “I was not arrested
on the spot because my children were there” (group
interview, 22 September 2009) and Jarrod Luo added
that “it would cost too much politically to do so [i.e. to
arrest Jaslyn on the spot]” (group interview, 22
September 2009). Jaslyn states that her family were very
anxious on reading of her court troubles for political
demonstrations but she has found a new support network
in the SDP activist community:
“Last time I did not know SDP that well. I was being
charged [and] it gave me an opportunity to know them
better. I think SDP are voices for the people [and they]
raise issues that concern us. ... My family are not very
supportive still [of my activism] but I try to reassure them
that I know what I am doing. I start my children young,
one is four, [and] one is five [as at 22 September 2009].
... Because they charge us together, there is a certain
bond among us [SDP community]. It gives us the
opportunity to know each other better. Before the protest,
I did not know them very well. Now I know them very well
- on the personal level very well - as an activist, a
politician, and a friend”.
We now move on to a discussion of Research
Question 2, opposition responses to the poverty problem.
This sub-section does not further explore Research
Question 3, the role of internet activism, other than to
briefly note Jaslyn’s strong relationships with the twentysomething SDP internet activists including Jarrod and
Seelan. SDP policy includes a minimum wage and
unemployment insurance as well as certain other
measures designed to tackle the extant poverty problem
(SDP, 2010). New and minor opposition party the RP,
which contested only in Ang Mo Kio GRC and West
Coast GRC at the 7 May 2011 GE, also supports a
minimum wage (Chua, 2011). At the press conference on
election night 7 May 2011 at Singapore’s Quality Hotel in
Balestier Road, Dr Vincent Wijeysingha, who contested
with the SDP’s team in Holland-Bukit Timah GRC,
pointed out clearly and forcefully that the SDP will
continue to remember the poor regardless of results in
the current or any other election. The PAP’s granting of
two casino licences also suggest that the Government
has allowed its Chinese majority social conservatism to
take second place to its neo-liberal economic rationalism
and money-making prerogatives (da Cunha, 2010).
The SDP’s Jarrod Luo says that: “It is a huge loss of
self-esteem to know you are jobless. There are huge
social disincentives to be unemployed [in Singapore] so
you cannot say that giving unemployment benefits leads
to laziness” (group interview, 22 September 2009). Jaslyn
adds that: “Singaporeans are brought up in such a way
that unemployed people are [perceived to be] lazy.
Unemployment is not by choice in the current situation.
People don’t choose to be unemployed. There is social
pressure to work. Here the social pressure to work is very
strong” (group interview, 22 September 2009). The
social pressure to work suggests that unemployment
benefits will not create a widespread culture of laziness in
the city-state as the PAP leadership fears. The SDP has
proposed a minimum wage of SGD6.80 per hour or its
equivalent of SGD300 per week for a standard working
week (SDP, 2010, pp. 23-4). This proposed minimum
wage may not seem like much compared to the extent
levels of AUD14.31 in Australia or GBP5.80 in the UK but
it is important for the SDP to start somewhere.
Furthermore, living costs, apart from housing and motor
vehicle costs, are generally lower in Singapore than in
those other two countries.
The SDP’s proposed retrenchment entitlements are
generous at a proposed 75% of last drawn salary for the
first six months, reduced to 50% for the second six
months, and then to 25% for the third six months before
the benefits cease. A cap will be placed on maximum
entitlements (SDP, 2010, p. 25). If the cap is fairly high,
then the first six month benefit may be higher than
Australians would receive if they had no retrenchment
payouts from their ex-employer (for example, where a
period of casual employment ceases or a graduate looks
for her or his first job immediately after graduation).
However, an Australian is entitled to unemployment
benefits in perpetuity if she/he continues to actively look
for work and participates in “work for the dole” and/or
community service programmes (Nevile and Nevile
(2003) provide a detailed critical analysis of Australia’s
“work for the dole” programme). The WP also favours an
unemployment insurance scheme. Point five of the
“Income” section of Labour Policy in the 2011 Manifesto
states as follows:
“5. An unemployment insurance scheme should be
introduced to help workers cope during the difficult period
of unemployment and retraining while seeking a new job.
The premiums can be covered by both the employer and
employee contributing a percentage of the workers’
monthly income. The insurance funds should be
managed by third-party corporations. Employees will be
eligible to make a claim if they are retrenched. The
payout will be a proportion (e.g., 75%) of their last drawn
salary. This would be reduced by 7.5% each month until
the payout is zero” [The Workers’ Party of Singapore,
2011, p. 47].
It is important to note that under the WP proposal the
employee pays part of her or his own future retrenchment
benefits.
The NSP contested the 7 May 2011 GE with HDB flats
as a main campaign priority. The NSP’s SecretaryGeneral Goh Meng Seng argued that new flats should be
sold by the Government using the “cost plus profit”
method with the profit margin being small instead of the
current PAP Government practice of selling the new flats
at market value minus a discount. Paragraphs 12 to 15 of
the NSP’s 2011 Election Manifesto deal specifically with
housing issues and they are reproduced in full here:
James et al. 151
“12. Discounts to be given to first time buyers of new
HDB flats so that they pay slightly above the cost of
building the flats plus a discounted land price. More HDB
flats needs to be built to support the growing population,
and to shorten the waiting time for new flats. High prices
of HDB flats and long waiting time directly impact our total
fertility rate (TFR) by delaying marriages and having
children. Due consideration must be given to the social
cost of maintaining high HDB prices and the longer term
economic cost of a rapidly aging population.
13. A total review of HDB rules and regulations that
make it difficult for Singaporeans to continue to have a
roof over their heads when they run into problems
financially, or their families break up.
14. PRs [Permanent Residents of Singapore] must
hold their HDB flats for a minimum period of 8 years. If
they wish to sell before that, they must sell their HDB flats
back to HDB at prices based on the lower of market price
or cost price (the price at which they bought the flats) plus
interest.
15. Upgrading of HDB flats to be delinked from votes.
It is highly unethical to use public funds to gain political
advantage. Our party’s interest is subservient to
Singaporeans’ interest. Upgrading decisions should be
made based on the condition of the building”.
The PAP’s Mr Mah Bow Tan, whose team narrowly
defeated Goh’s team in Tampines GRC at 7 May 2011
GE, failed to provide strong or logical answers to the NSP
proposal. Mah’s response that “cost-plus-profit” would
mean that all flats would have to be built the same and
that top-floor flats could not then command higher prices
was nonsensical and failed to address the spirit of the
NSP’s concerns. Mah’s assumption that rapidly rising
HDB flat prices is unambiguously a good thing is naïve
and offensive since people buying flats to live in them are
more interested in entry than in exit prices. Peh (2011, p.
A7) is also clearly wrong when he claims that the NSP
had “no clear platform” during the 2011 GE campaign.
Goh specifically chose both to challenge Mah in
Tampines GRC and base his campaign there around
housing issues because Mah is the minister responsible
for HDB housing as the Minister for National
Development
(Mah’s
Wikipedia
entry
is
at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mah_Bow_Tan [accessed 15
May 2011]). The NSP’s relatively unknown team (apart
from M.-S. Goh) of Goh Meng Seng, Syafarin Sarif,
Raymond Lim, Gilbert Goh, and Reno Fong scored
54,337 out of 127,001 valid votes in Tampines GRC or
42.78%. Mah had told The Straits Times that he hoped to
score above the national average pro-PAP vote (Chan,
2011b). The fact that his team scored only 57.22%,
compared to the national pro-PAP average of 60.1%,
suggests both that Mah failed on his own terms and that
HDB housing remains an issue of discontent in
Tampines. To regain standing among the 43% of
Tampines GRC residents who voted for the NSP, Mah
will certainly need to heed his own advice as follows:
“Whether it’s public housing or social policies or physical
infrastructure, there’s always something better that we
can do and we will do” (cited in da Cunha, 2010, p. 170).
The WP proposes that flats prices should be pegged
to median income levels of those households eligible to
buy HDB flats. The first two of the ten points listed by the
WP in its 2011 Manifesto in relation to the housing issue
are reproduced in full here as well as point eight:
1.The prices of new HDB flats should not be pegged
to the resale market price and then discounted to take
into account overall median salaries, as is the current
practice. This formula fuels inflation as resale prices
climb. Instead, the prices of new flats should be pegged
to median incomes of Singaporean households who
qualify to buy HDB flats. This will ensure that new flats
are always affordable for the majority of Singaporeans.
2. The price of new HDB flats should be affordable
enough to enable most lessees to pay off their loans in
20 years rather than 30 years.
8. As our society has now attained a level of multiracial integration, the ethnic quotas governing home
ownership of HDB flats should be removed to allow all
Singaporeans freedom of choice of home locations,
regardless of race. The ethnic quota system also
contradicts the policy of encouraging young families to
live close to their parents, and can prevent young Malay
and Indian families from buying homes close to their
parents” [The Workers’ Party of Singapore, 2011, pp. 3940].
Point eight does suggest that the WP is keen to move
away from the PAP’s obsession with racial classification
and race-based policies. This move will be very popular
among younger Singaporeans especially and is also the
worldview and approach of the SDP. Point eight makes
clear that the racial quotas in HDB estates actually harm
the Malays and Indians because they very often cannot
buy flats from or sell flats to Chinese owners. Being only
7% of the population, Indians are especially adversely
affected by the racial quotas as often they can sell only to
other Indians (George, 2000, p. 173).
Homelessness and poverty are key topics discussed
by the SDP people when you meet them in person and/or
when you read the Party’s promotional literature. This is
somewhat surprising and refreshing for a liberaldemocratic party as traditionally it has been trade
unionists, socialists, and communists who have displayed
the most systematic concern for the poor. Ideologically
speaking, the SDP sees workers’ rights as part of the
broader issue of human rights with freedom of speech
and freedom of assembly clearly being issues
fundamental to both workplace and non-workplace
settings. John Tan (personal interview, 22 September
2009) advocates minimum wage because it “help[s] ... the
people to be able to stand on their own two feet”; this
empowerment argument is clearly compatible with the
liberal-democratic perspective (Interestingly, in Singapore
today, it is the liberal-democratic SDP which advocates
152 J. Res. Peace Gend. Dev.
minimum wage while the traditional labour party, the WP,
does not). John was a Christian bible college student and
missionary in his former life and concern for the poor may
well be a value that John has brought into the SDP,
perhaps in part unconsciously, from his Christian
heritage. Dr Chee and John Tan see the SDP as a liberal
party in the traditions of 19th century liberalism and the
modern-day Liberal-Democratic Party in the UK. John
(personal interview, 22 September 2009) has said that
the Party leaders see the Party as “liberal” but the word
“democratic” is preferred in Party discourses by Dr Chee
and Chee Siok Chin because “liberal” is a word with
negative connotations in conservative Chinese majority
societies. John Tan states that the words “confront”,
“protest”, and “liberal” “all have become [demonized] dirty
words” (personal interview, 22 September 2009) in the
Singaporean political discourse. Because of this, these
words will no longer be used by the Party within
Singapore (but the Party still strongly believes in the
concepts which underpin the words). In the spirit of J. B.
Jeyaretnam and the British tradition, the SDP leaders
believe in a two-party state and confrontational politics.
However, illegal protest activity may well become a thing
of the past as far as the SDP is concerned.
People like Jaslyn give the opposition movement
focus and drive as well as badly needed maturity. Like
Roderick Chia, she is a member of that oft-ignored
“middle generation”, Generation X, which can link the
older opposition party leaderships to the younger twentysomething members of the Facebook generation.
Jaslyn’s political and social beliefs have been forged
during half a lifetime of personal experiences and
reflections and they are unlikely to change overnight.
Roderick Chia comments that “the opposition needs
people like Jaslyn” (personal conversation with firstmentioned researcher, 9 May 2011). Jaslyn might not
recognize the name, in this era when Nelson Mandela
and Aung San Suu Kyi are the world’s most visible and
high-profile democratic heroes, but she is the “Rosa
Luxemburg” of the SDP.
CONCLUSIONS
Using detailed personal interviews as the primary data
source, this qualitative research study has canvassed the
views of leading Singapore opposition politicians and
grassroots activists about poverty and income inequality
in Singapore society. The role of opposition internet
activism has also been explored.
The opposition in general and the Singapore
Democratic Party (SDP) and National Solidarity Party
(NSP) in particular have repeatedly highlighted the
growing income inequality and poverty in the country.
Pictures in the SDP’s promotional literature skillfully and
dialectically present wealth and poverty in Singapore
within the same pictorial image. Our interviewees speak
of the Dickensian living conditions in the one-room rental
flats in Bukit Merah, just a 25-minute taxi ride from
Changi Airport, in the Minister Mentor Harry Lee’s
constituency of Tanjong Pagar GRC. The SDP’s
Alternative Economic Programme It’s about You (2010)
outlines the Party’s proposals for minimum wage and
unemployment insurance, generous policies directly
aimed at poverty alleviation. Interestingly, the SDP, a
liberal-democratic party, has more radical pro-worker
policies than the traditional labour party, the Workers’
Party of Singapore (WP). This is not altogether surprising.
The traditional Chinese left-wing of the 1960s, of which
the WP is the modern living descendant, was concerned
with Chinese language and cultural causes, in a postcolonial Singapore where English was still pushed as the
number-one language of education and business, as
much as it was concerned with traditional labour issues
(Eric Tan, personal interview, 3 March 2010). The SDP’s
strong pushes for poverty to be addressed in radical
fashion, and its ideological commitment to the
confrontational politics of the Westminster two-party
model, mean that the Party is rarely given legitimate
space to fully air its views and it is not regarded as
positively by the PAP Government as the more moderate
WP and SPP. The understanding of how a “loyal
opposition” should operate in practice is one area where
the PAP and the SDP will surely continue to disagree.
The SDP is now attracting strong candidates such as
Michelle Lim who are more “mainstream” in their personal
and political orientation and who do not want the SDP to
go back to its traditional “civil disobedience” approach.
The SDP and the NSP will continue to bring
Singaporeans’ attention to the fact that, whilst GDP
growth rate statistics are impressive, the nation’s
working-class is increasingly dispirited since its incomes
have risen only slightly but the cost-of-living,
incorporating the various Government fees and charges
especially in relation to housing and motor vehicle costs,
remains high. The younger married professional and
supervisory middle-class, in outer-suburban estates such
as Tampines (where the NSP team was only narrowly
defeated by the PAP at GE 7 May 2011), may well be
another demographic that feels financially squeezed and
voiceless which opposition parties can reach out to
during future election campaigns. The upper middle-class
in private housing generally seems to be now largely proopposition which is confirmed by the strong SDP result in
Holland-Bukit Timah GRC. Furthermore, WP newcomer
and local resident Mr Yee Jenn Jong lost by only 382
votes or 2% in Joo Chiat SMC (9,248 votes versus
Charles Chong of PAP’s 9,630 votes), a ward which is
100% private housing. Likewise, private housing
residents in Potong Pasir SMC, a group which includes
our interviewee Roderick Chia, tend to be largely proSPP. Roderick Chia speaks of a “corridor of malcontents”
that roughly tracks the North-East MRT (subway) line
from the city which passes through both Potong Pasir and
James et al. 153
Hougang on its way to Punggol (personal conversation
with first-mentioned researcher, 9 May 2011).
The “malcontented” and swinging voters are likely for
the most part to be internet-savvy and the SDP and
NSP’s internet strategies should continue to bear fruit
over the longer term. However, unfortunately, the elderly
working-class in the housing estates in Tanjong Pagar
GRC again did not get the chance to vote, a democratic
right which they have been unable to exercise for the
past twenty years because of the combined opposition’s
inability and/or unwillingness to field teams in the Minister
Mentor Harry Lee’s constituency. On Nomination Day for
the 7 May 2011 GE, the SDA team was a mere 35
seconds late in submitting its nomination forms and
hence it was not eligible to contest.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The authors would like to thank Chee Siok Chin and
Bryan Ti for helpful comments; all our interviewees;
Jaslyn Go, Wong Wee Nam, Jarrod Luo, and Patrick Lee
Song Juan for helping in the arrangement of interviews;
Leong Pei Ying for her dedicated research assistance;
and Dr and Dr Chee Soon Juan, James Gomez, Roderick
Chia, Curtis Lee, and Tammy Ng for constant
encouragement and friendship. We also thank
participants at a research seminar at Centre for SouthEast Asian Studies, Monash University, Melbourne,
Australia (31 March 2011) for their valuable constructive
feedback on a related paper by the same authors.
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