Worker's Party

There is this astounding statistic that the WP won more than half of the votes that it contested for. They contested for 21 seats and won 10. They were, far and away the most successful opposition party. The opposition landscape is beginning to shape up such that there are three tiers. On the top tier, there was only the WP. Then there was the SDP and the PSP on the second tier. And then everybody else on the third.

There was an interview where Brian Eno said that in music, it's less about the genius of the individual, and more about the genius of the entire scene. Looking at WP, I'd have to say that there's something about that. WP had gone from strength to strength. In the year 2001, the opposition parties were at their nadir. Singaporeans had rejected them completely. Apparently that was the time when it made the pivotal transition from JB Jeyaretnam being the leader to Low Thia Khiang. It was also around that time when Sylvia Lim was recruited.

2006 was a time when Sylvia Lim and Low Thia Khiang were the co-leaders of the party. We didn't know it yet, but there was a sea change. There were some opposition party members whose mentality was to get a seat and break the monopoly of the PAP system, and they had a more confrontational and adversarial style when dealing with the PAP. The old school opposition members Chee Soon Juan and JB Jeyaretnam were like that. Francis Seow was like that. Chiam See Tong and Low Thia Khiang were different, they were not in parliament mainly to oppose the PAP, but rather act as a constraint against some of its more extreme tendencies. They were quite happy to play ball a lot of the time, and they represented a more moderate style of politics.

In a way Low Thia Khiang represented a kind of a revolution in opposition party politics because he was some kind of a reset button, and at the same time, he was determined to push his party to evolve into a grassroots movement, rather than a rebel stronghold. Times were changing, and opposition parties were no longer treated like they were some kind of plague.

This evolution finally gained some traction during the 2011 election, when Worker's Party went from Low Thia Khiang being the only electable personality to having an all-star lineup for Aljunied. They got Pritam Singh and Chen Show Mao on board, and took a very calculated gamble that Hougang would always prove to be a Worker's Party stronghold. The Worker's Party eked out a narrow victory, but their opponents were heavyweights. On one hand, George Yeo, Lim Hwee Hua, Ong Ye Kung and Zainul Abidin Rasheed represented some of the finest the PAP had to offer, but all of this was rejected in favour of opposition representation.

There were a few others who were older, and who had been around the block. Maybe there was an element of bittersweet when all the people from the “old opposition” had to reckon with their mantle being taken over. There may have been an element of resentment from the elders towards the younger members, who tended to be from a more privileged background than the older generation. There may have been this undercurrent that the older batch were around during the lean and tough times when being an opposition party member made you a pariah. And yet when spring came, they weren't around to reap the benefits.

Well, this problem turned out to be relatively easy to fix. Worker's party was a place where everybody had to pay their dues before they got anywhere. Everybody had to volunteer and help out and do all the grunt work. Even Chen Show Mao, the closest example of a guy that Low Thia Khiang might have regretted recruiting, was shown helping out with random stuff during the 2020 campaign.

The Worker's Party focused ruthlessly on grassroots movement and solving its town council issues during these days. It hardly had anything to say about policy. The main idea was to get an army of volunteers to walk the ground, to focus on campaigning and getting in touch with the people. The idea was to achieve some kind of electoral success, and then leverage on that electoral success to attract the best people, but also the best people who were willing to devote massive amounts of time and effort to serve.

It helped that they had amongst their ranks a few ladies who were easy on the eye, but they definitely had character. It was unusual for the Worker's Party to take in somebody who had already made their name while in another party, but quite likely Nicole Seah fit into some kind of mould at the Worker's Party, plus she was young and willing to start from scratch. People had charisma. They were likeable, personable and relatable. They were open to new ideas, and yet at the same time they understood a little of what it meant to be hip and trendy. Many of them were millennials.

Perhaps the way that it absorbed Nicole Seah was instructive. Nicole Seah was a member of the Reform Party, and that was back when it seemed like Kenneth Jeyaretnam might be a great figure of the opposition the way that JB Jeyaretnam was. Apparently a large swarth of people cut ties with KJ a few months before the elections and the mass exodus landed up in National Solidarity Party, which fielded a large number of candidates in 2011, even though relatively few of them managed to distinguish themselves. Nicole Seah was one of the standout stars, and she proved to be a very talented campaigner, and very quickly became a political star. But her life after the elections had a lot of ups and downs. She made a mistake – albeit an understandable one – by endorsing Tan Jee Say for the presidential elections. It was a tragedy because he got involved in a four cornered fight and drew enough votes away from Tan Cheng Bock that he lost narrowly to Tony Tan. Then Nicole Seah disappeared to Bangkok, and later on, by her own account, had a breakdown, because she was trying to do too many things, and they were not successful. Or she had a few unhappy relationships. She wrote a note to her supporters, and told them that she had to go away from politics for the time being. A lot of us were disappointed at the time, but in hindsight, she did exactly the right thing. She needed some time away, she needed to live a normal life and grow up like a normal person.

And all these years, she had embedded herself into the Worker's Party system, going from being a big fish in the NSP pond to start from zero, in the rank and file of the Worker's Party, and working her way through the system. Of course she had the qualities to succeed, but she had to pay her dues to do so. And sometimes I wonder how much she contributed to the media savviness of the Worker's Party's 2020 elections. It was our pandemic election, and suddenly having a great social media campaign turned out to have a so much greater impact on the success on the entire campaign.

Because this was no longer 2011, when Facebook was just primed to take over the world. We are living in a time when social media was not merely some hobby that you had, but the way that a great many of us directly experience reality.

So you had various people who were groomed through the Worker's Party system. You had Leon Pereira and Gerald Giam, who always stood on the fringes of the system, serving terms as NCMP before they came in through the main door by taking the Aljunied places vacated by Chen Show Mao and Low Thia Khiang.

A cautionary word: Low Thia Khiang may have participated in all the general elections from 1988 to 2015, and then finished serving his term in 2020. But even he's not going to last forever. Being an opposition MP takes a lot out of you. Chiam See Tong became a shell of a man after suffering a stroke. Low Thia Khiang ended up in the ICU earlier this year. Careers at the Worker's Party don't tend to last very long. Yaw Shing Leong could have been a rising star, but he was outed as an adulterer. Daniel Goh and Lee Li Lian came and went. The upshot is that you could spend years to build up your name and reputation, but you might end up not staying the course. This is in stark contrast to PAP people who take senior positions in the government and make a lifelong career out of it while still being a member of parliament. It makes succession planning rather tricky in the case of WP.

Sometimes I wonder why the Worker's Party chose light blue for their uniform. I'm starting to understand. The PAP wore white, but that was an unfortunate colour. It was originally meant to symbolise purity and freedom from corruption. But there were other connotations to the colour white. It could represent collusion with the white men, considering that the PAP decided to steer Singapore so closely with the west. It could represent some form of regality. And given that white is also the colour of funeral garb in Chinese culture, there was this element of “don't fuck with us”. Since white was the school uniform of the most elite school in Singapore, Raffles Institution, it could represent association with the elite. Real Madrid's white uniform stood for regality. Leeds copied the white uniform, but it stood for a form of toughness.

On the other hand, light blue is a more friendly and welcoming colour. It could represent blue collar, as opposed to white collar, which appeals either to the champagne socialists amongst us, or the working class. I also noticed that they might have adopted “Ai Biah jia eh Yah” as their unofficial anthem. It sends a message – Worker, work ethic. “Ai Biah jia eh Yah” is almost universally regarded as the unofficial anthem of the working class in Singapore – you must fight / hustle to get ahead. It was either grim or inspiring, depending on how you saw it. Light blue was friendly, it was the same colour as the smurfs, or grover. It was a happy and calm colour.

When the Worker's Party revealed their introductory video, I wonder why they devoted an entire section to their photographer. And it turned out that his photography series was so crucial to the operation of their online campaign. And the strange thing about that video was that it included Cheryl Loh and Lee Li Lian, who ended up not campaigning. It included Kenneth Foo, who might have been a breakout star if not for the fact that Heng Swee Keat basically stamped out their hopes in East Coast GRC before the elections had even begun.

There's no doubt right now that the Worker's Party had run a brilliant campaign. I'm not sure what their campaign was like in 2015. They also ran a brilliant campaign in 2011. They introduced a few phrases that had become memorable. Their slogan was “towards a world class parliament”. They introduced the concept of Worker's Party being a co-driver, less an adversary than a friend with good intentions, who was there to slap the driver if he went astray. (The slap was an allusion to the infamous rumour that a younger and more impetuous Lee Hsien Loong had slapped a cabinet colleague, and infamously, his colleagues refused to debunk the rumour). The campaign began with an electrifying bait and switch: Low Thia Khiang had moved from Hougang to Aljunied to try and claim a GRC. He said, 明知山有虎，偏向虎山行.

I'm not sure what 2015 was like, but in retrospect, it was that most crucial of all elections. Notwithstanding that he was on a roll with triumphs in three straight elections – Aljunied in 2011, Hougang in 2012 and Punggol East in 2013, he knew that this was the time to lie low and dig in, and very crucially, he eked out a win in Aljunied.

In retrospect, this was crucial, because it gave him a platform on which Pritam Singh could steer the Worker's Party to greater heights in this 2020 election. Their triumph in this election has to be seen in this light, it can never be taken for granted, and their success was not certain because up till the reporting of the results, some people were still thinking that they could be “wiped out” ie, they could lose all their seats in parliament. I remember thinking that it would be a shame if they ran such a good campaign and they got wiped out. It turned out that they didn't.

Another way of looking at the election results was this: the Worker's Party polled more votes than the PAP when it was contesting. In essence this was a mini by-election where 4 GRCs and 2 SMCs were contested. The wards that the PAP won had Heng Swee Keat, Sun Xueling and Tan Chuan Jin to anchor them. And the PAP lost the other three.

Charles Chong could have been part of the Sengkang team, but he retired. Koh Poh Koon could have won Punggol East against Lee Li Lian, but he didn't. The PAP should have taken Sengkang more seriously, but they had this attitude that they were folding a district that was leaning WP (Punggol East) into more friendly PAP territory, which is not a good assumption to make. It's precisely that Sengkang GRC was created because Sengkang West was growing so rapidly, so you had no idea what was the political affiliation of all the new residents. And they were about to find out.

I don't know what Ng Chee Meng was like as a parliamentarian, or as the representative of his people, if he did go on walkabouts. There were mutterings, for sure. He was voted in for 2015, and parachuted in to be a new full minister. Weirdly enough, he was given half the transport portfolio and half the education portfolio, and they might have been fast tracking him to more senior positions. And equally weirdly, he was taken off both of these portfolios before two years was up, and assigned to NTUC labour chief. Which is kinda unsettling. Was this the guy that they wanted to defend Sengkang from the WP? In any case, he failed.

Perhaps people were sore at Lam Pin Min at his role in getting PMDs banned.

The WP team who made up the Sengkang slate were newbies, but they quickly became famous. There was a televised TV debate where Jamus stood up to Vivian Balakrishnan. (Some people were wondering why they sent a guy who was from the old guard in). He Tingru proved to be an adept campaigner and a likeable person, plus the story that she met Terence Tan when they were campaigning in GE 2015 and ended up marrying each other was a heartwarming story. Raeesah was just supposed to be your 20-something who had actually done something with her life, like setting up a foundation to help Rohingya refugees. Unexpectedly, she became the eye of a storm when one or two barbed comments she made on facebook 2 years earlier came to light. Pritam Singh decided to stand by her, correctly judging a mountain being made of a molehill in this incident, while the PAP desperately tried to attack her. The result was that #IStandWithRaeesah became a trending hashtag.

Perhaps the PAP were slow to recognise this, but the Sengkang campaign became the focal centre of the election, rather unexpectedly, considering that the WP slate of candidates there were relatively unknown. But WP seemed to understand that what social media campaigns do well – do very well is to make a group of young people very very famous in a very very short period of time. The PAP don't seem to have caught on to this. Nobody knows exactly whether Jamus is a brilliant economist, whether he's up to the level of a Yeoh Lam Keong or a Donald Low. But he's smarter than your average bear and smarter than you, and has an appealing enthusiasm. He Tingru is a Cambridge graduate and somehow it seems hardly necessary to hammer this point home.

To be sure, the WP strategy doesn't really scale up. You can concentrate all your fire on Sengkang. I think that's why they only decided to field 21 candidates. Unless you find some way of broadcasting a different social media campaign to people of different constituencies, the crude way is to train all your fire on one GRC, and it just seems to me that for whatever reason the WP chose Sengkang.

But now that they have Sengkang as well, it's different. There will be the mentality that Sengkang can be won back, just like Punggol East was won back quickly after it fell to the WP. The PAP will not treat Sengkang like a lost cause, a permanent concession to Aljunied or Hougang or Potong Pasir back in the day, a place to train up their B-listers for possible promotion to the first team should a by election come along.

The Sengkang town council can be sued for any irregularity, the Aljunied town council likewise. And I don't know if the office of the leader of the opposition comes with some hidden snares here or there.

One thing that is striking is the low number of candidates that the WP has. Maybe they recognise that they have an operation that doesn't scale up easily. What the WP did with Aljunied in 2011 and then Sengkang in 2020 can't be replicated on a larger scale. There will be a time when their strategy will hit its natural ceiling. They'll have to evolve, but for now, it worked brilliantly.

In fact, people were wondering why they let Jamus Lim have all the oxygen instead of Nicole Seah. The first answer, and the obvious one, was that Jamus was the economist, and probably the wonkiest of the lot. But the other answer is that any oxygen that Nicole Seah took up would be oxygen deprived to the Sengkang team. They had to train all their fire on Sengkang and let Nicole Seah be more low key for the time being, and count on Nicole Seah being gracious enough to take a hit for the team. It would not be great for her to lose East Coast GRC. But for WP to win GRC would provoke a controversy that would overshadow that triumph. It's one thing to unseat George Yeo, who's probably hit his ceiling with a foreign minister, who probably would ascent to deputy prime minister but no further. It's quite another thing to oust a designated successor to the prime minister and disrupt a national plan. Neutrals would be quite outraged.

If the WP were greedy, then they might pump for Marine Parade, but Tan Chuan Jin would be hard to unseat. Nicole Seah vs Sun Xueling would be an interesting duel, but Nicole Seah is actually better as part of a team. She could be the PR face and the other guys in her team are the people who have more heft, the serious bureaucrats who have more accomplished careers. It's tough running in an SMC. It's a very intriguing question why Nicole Seah wasn't sent to duel with Sun Xueling, but my gut feel is that the WP put an equal wager on East Coast and Sengkang. They were quite prepared to push both forward, but their East Coast plan was thwarted by Heng Swee Keat. Thereafter, their plan had to be, they wanted to win Sengkang and lose East Coast as narrowly as they possibly could. After that, I don't really know how they could generate more buzz for their candidates down the line.

In the elections, WP have usually prized quality over quantity. They are thought of as the most successful opposition party, but in 2011, NSP contested more seats and in this elections, PSP contested more seats. WP relies on volunteer work, but I don't really know how the execution and planning of the virtual campaigns will cost. I'm sure that the people behind these campaigns will make their name and move on – this is the classic example of “exposure”, and at least this is not just an excuse for an employer to lowball you because there's a good chance your work will be seen by the whole country.

It's only after Heng Swee Keat beat Nicole Seah and company in the East Coast GRC elections, that I realised that instead of it being a desperate move, it was a pretty good strategy. Tampines GRC seemed to be a stronghold when it was Heng Swee Keat's constituency, and maybe that's why the Worker's Party wouldn't impinge upon it. But now, it has to be seen to be up for grabs, and I'm sure that there will be quite a few interesting conversations between the WP and the NSP about whether Tampines could be ceded.

What's the strategy going forward for the WP? East Coast GRC has thrown a curve ball into their plans. But what we've learnt is that PAP politicians come and go. I recall that Tampines GRC was not competitive in 2011, when Heng Swee Keat was making his debut and the anchor guy there was Mah Bow Tan. Now there is Baey Yam Keng and Masagos Zukifli, and presumably the Worker's Party didn't want to make incursions in there because they thought that Heng Swee Keat was going to be there. And maybe in the next elections, the PAP's hold on Tampines could be shaky and it could be ripe for the taking again. Likewise, in Pasir Ris Punggol, nobody really knows how much longer Teo Chee Hean is going to serve. Jalan Besar was won handily by the PAP. It might even be a PAP stronghold, but Josephine Teo is the most senior minister in that ward, and that's why it looks a little shaky. And if the WP people didn't mind walking a little more, they could go check out Mountbatten. Toa Payoh and Potong Pasir are also adjacent to the Worker's Party empire.

So there's the problem with the Worker's Party: they could flip over the easy pickings near to their traditional northeast. They don't actually have the entire island-wide reach. The PAP could always strengthen the GRCs near to the northeast, and make it hard for the Worker's Party to expand, and the Worker's Party would have to reach out to areas that are crawled by other opposition parties and start persuading them to please let us have a go. Then again, it could be possible that the opposition parties might start dying off.

Or the WP might not even need to look for new turf, but simply look to hold on to their 2 GRCs – which is a difficult enough task – and double down on Marine Parade.

Now, thus far, I've been trying to outline how best WP can divide the turf for the next election round, but there are plenty of uncertainty. Certainly the 2015 GE was an elections which bucked quite a few trends. The Hougang and Punggol East by elections seemed to signify that the trend was shifting towards the WP, and that was misleading. And then it seemed that the situation was closer to 2006 rather than 2011... we were wrong again. So it behooves the WP to make a wide range of responses to a wide range of possibilities. At the same time, the thrust of this writeup is to talk about how WP could expand the number of seats won in parliament. There is the deeper question of whether a higher number of seats for the opposition is really a good thing, that happens for good reasons. That'll have to be addressed separately.

Another thing to note is this: the WP has grown from strength to strength from – to take a convenient baseline, 2001 or even 2011. 2001 was when the party control was passed from JBJ to Low Thia Khiang, and when LTK started to put his stamp on the party. In 2011, the sight that the party was more than just Low Thia Khiang seemed like a novelty. We were introduced to characters like Pritam Singh, Lee Li Lian, Chen Show Mao, Png Eng Huat, Yee Jenn Jong, Sylvia Lim (actually SL was already prominent in 2006) and Gerald Giam. This was a display of strength, because it wasn't just a rag tag bunch of Tom Dick and Harrys with some kind of axe to grind against the establishment. These were your regular middle class guys who might even have aspired to a PAP seat. But they lent their efforts to Worker's Party. Perhaps they felt that WP wouldn't shackle their range of movement the way that the PAP did. Perhaps they felt that the PAP were never going to change for the better the way they hoped that it would. The point is that the PAP used to have a huge advantage in recruiting politicians over the other opposition parties, and that advantage is being whittled away.

The myth that the opposition parties could not attract enough good people to run for parliament was busted in a big way. I would say that that was one of the big legacies of the 2011 election, and why it was considered a watershed. But there was more to come. In 2015, the Worker's Party were able to add Leon Perera, Daniel Goh, Terence Tan, Dennis Tan and He Tingru. And in the 2020, they added Nicole Seah, Raeesah Khan and Jamus Lim. In short, they don't seem to have a problem adding people to their roster. They've not had a major scandal since the Yaw Shin Leong incident, and it's just as well that Yaw Shin Leong has left town, because he's managed to turn both the PAP and the WP against him. It's true that the PAP has a tougher job of finding 93 good people, that's much much harder than finding 21 of them.

Basically, the opposition MPs are backbenchers. They have a higher profile than the PAP backbenchers because of their prominence, but they don't have to be office holders or ministers quite yet. That is truly the great leap forward. How do we know that they're going to be up to the task? We actually don't! Of course, one could say that Lee Kuan Yew and company did a really good job, considering they weren't experienced either. But they were taking over a country that was much smaller than it is today. The downside of a democracy is that a person running a dynasty is often groomed all his life to assume a role. The WP might not have that. I don't really know how much they'll be talking to the civil servants, at this rate.

It's nice to see all the scenes of jubilation. I think that the WP are still somewhat short of being able to run this country, obviously. Consider that Goh Chok Tong and Lee Hsien Loong had to be prepared for years... what if the leader of the opposition would one day come in as PM... it's going to be a truly rough ride.