I came across this post on the Workers Party Facebook page by Lee Li Lian. According to her post, during a recent walkabout a resident of Punggol East shared with her a memory of buying a copy of the Hammer from my late father .

I wonder whether Lee Li Lian informed the woman that Low Thia Kiang (LTK) aided by his cronies and newly minted cadre members, forced JBJ out of the party in 2000 and took the Secretary General position.

For those who might not be familiar with the history, the Workers Party had up till then been virtually indistinguishable from JBJ.David Marshall may have founded the Workers Party  but by 1972, when my father took over as Secretary General, it was completely defunct. It was only through JBJ’s blood, sweat and tears and his sacrifices and those of his family, including my mother’s life, that the Workers Party became the only party that challenged the PAP’s totalitarian one-party rule. Without JBJ’s tireless challenging of the PAP and LKY, there would have been no victory for LTK in Hougang and without JBJ’s almost victory in Cheng San, only stopped by blatant intimidation and breaking of the Elections Act by the PAP, there would have been no Aljunied.

Did Ms Lee inform the woman she met that LTK was only able to take over because JBJ had been made a bankrupt after he was unable to pay the enormous damages the Singaporean courts awarded eleven Tamil “worthies”, including Jayakumar and another PAP MP, after they brought defamation suits against JBJ and the Workers Party.

The suits arose out of an article published in the Hammer and written in Tamil, a language JBJ could not read.  The Workers Party and its CEC, including LTK, who had by this time enjoyed several years of an MP’s salary,  was also a party to the lawsuits. They should have also paid at least one-third of the damages, but for some strange reason escaped liability altogether or were given lenient treatment by the plaintiffs and the PAP.

Anyway the end result was that JBJ’s bankruptcy paved the way for LTK to take over the Workers Party. My father often said that Lee Kuan Yew boasted about how pleased he was that LTK had got rid of JBJ. See this video of his press conference at the inauguration of the Reform Party in which he also says that people who are happy with the status quo should stick with LTK:

Of course none of the current WP MPs mention their leader’s shabby treatment of my father. They are happy to make use of him in a cynical and hypocritical manner to win votes and popularity. Lee Li Lian mentions JBJ frequently, including during the 2011 general election. Pritam Singh had the gall to refer to my father as his hero in the Workers Party television broadcast during the same campaign However none of them turned up for the JBJ Memorial event that I helped to organise that year, saying they were too busy or not even bothering to respond. This disgusting appropriation of the man they stabbed in the back has worked so well that when I and my colleagues do walkabouts, residents often seem puzzled because they think that JBJ was still a member of the Workers Party when he died.

Nothing could more clearly illustrate the difference between the new blood in the WP who are so keen to steal his popularity and my father than the different choices made by Lee Li Lian and JBJ. After JBJ qualified for an NCMP seat in 1997 the PAP, with their usual vindictive spitefulness reduced the NCMP allowance from 100% of an MP’s salary to 10%. My father still accepted this because he was motivated by a desire to serve the people who voted for him. In contrast Lee Li Lian, after she lost Punggol East in 2015 but still qualified for an NCMP seat, declined the seat because she said the money was not enough for the time and commitment required for the role, which would be similar to that for a full time MP.

My father would turn over in his grave if he knew that all the sacrifices he made, financial and personal, ending up with little more than the clothes on his back, had enabled LTK and his cronies and proteges to make millions in MP salaries and fees for managing the Town Council. His selfless desire to serve the people has become merely an obscene desire by his supplanters to enrich themselves. In the mistaken belief that not challenging the PAP will make them acceptable accomplices to a totalitarian regime,  they have perverted the role of the Opposition and done serious harm by allowing the Government to pretend Singapore is a kind of democracy.  It is time for the Workers Party to  have the decency to stop using JBJ’s name and to admit that they represent the opposite of everything he stood for,

Published by kjeyaretnam

I'm a Singaporean economist who became an opposition activist. I blog to provide an alternative to the porkies that the Pinkies tell. It just so happens that my alternative is the truth. That's why I've never been sued in any civil or criminal court no matter how hard hitting my criticism. I'm quoted and interviewed and asked to speak across the world but largely censored in Singapore in an effort to silence my political opinions. The left hate me because they think I split their vote and because I eschew their outmoded economic models. Models that don't work. The Right and the Conservatives hate me because I'm a liberal. I'm not sure what the middle think of me. I don't think there are more than a handful of people in the middle, here in Singapore. I'm a Singaporean born and bred, dual heritage, my parents Singaporean established here before the State of Singapore was created. I'm not Eurasian. I read economics at Cambridge and could be broadly described as from the Keynesian school but I believe in interventions. I was formerly a successful hedge fund manager. After economics and politics my greatest interests are history, film and Makan. I run but I run so I can eat like a Singaporean. View all posts by kjeyaretnam