When Pritam Singh suggested mandatory English testing for new citizens of Singapore, little did we know that the inspiration must have come from within his own party.
Every few weeks now it turns out another one of its MPs tries to convince us all that what he said means something completely different than it clearly does.
Pritam himself argued that telling Raeesah "it's your call" was a direct order to tell the truth.
In the course of the same hearings, party's vice-chairman, Faisal Manap, clearly struggled to understand the COP questions and refused to answer one of them, landing himself in hot water that may cost him his mandate.
Recently Leon Perera claimed the party didn't say that it considered oversupply of HDB apartments to be a problem in its last policy white paper from 2019 - even though it directly called into question the need to build as many flats as the government had at the time.
Somewhere in between Jamus Lim attempted to convince us that Japan saw a "doubling" of inflation following GST increase, conveniently omitting the fact that the increase was lower than the tax hike, as Japan has had no inflation to speak of for nearly three decades.
And now we have Louis Chua, who responded to questions about his analysis for Credit Suisse published in January of 2023, defending it as a document for investors.
That is despite the fact that the paper explicitly states that housing affordability is healthy for the average household and that the best situation is found in the PUBLIC HOUSING market.
In other words, it was not an investment recommendation but a description of the market situation that millions of regular Singaporeans are in (providing a context to other data in the document).
To add a cherry on top, he is also clearly aware that local salaries are rising as quickly or even quicker than housing costs.
This is what he wrote just 3 months ago - of course not in his capacity as an MP, but a Credit Suisse employee.
I'm beginning to wonder if, perhaps, MPs should take mandatory English tests before they are allowed to run, because it seems to me that representatives of the Workers' Party appear to struggle with English comprehension.
Pritam Singh was "concerned" that new citizens may find it hard to assimilate but I think it's far worse when people whose role is to participate in creation of laws, do not understand very simple sentences.
Including, alarmingly, the ones they wrote or said themselves.
