Singapore is a (near) perfect country and a (near) perfect city – in most ways certainly the best among those in existence anywhere in the world. But did you know that it also was the birthplace of the perfect man?
Handsome and well-spoken, the leader of the Workers' Party is also smart and caring, and has never ever done any wrong. He's faultless.
Yes, yet again we have Pritam Singh refusing to take responsibility for his own failures as the party leader.
Unlike in the past, he refused to make a speech in the heat of the moment, after the votes were counted, opting instead to prepare his statements for the next day. And, oh boy, haven't we heard all of this before? Yes, yes, he started the day by blaming "gerrymandering", while praising his party for how it "responded" to it.
Yes, yes, the big, bad, evil EBRC tried to "box WP in", but the partly deftly dodged the trap and escaped into another constituency! Take that PAP!
Of course it didn't stop Pritam from celebrating the party's hold on Sengkang GRC – a constituency that was created by EBRC in 2020, out of bits entirely controlled by the PAP, which the Workers' Party immediately won.
Some years ago I thought Pritam Singh was a decent man. Wrong, but decent. Needless to say, I do not think so anymore.
Last year, when beginning his campaign of alleging gerrymandering he cherry-picked five examples of redrawn constituencies from the past which he alleged were modified because the opposition contested them closely in the previous General Elections.
What he didn't mention is that the total number of constituencies modified in the same period of time was 28 – yes, twenty-eight, including those that PAP won quite comfortably.
Gerrymandering is so terrible in Singapore that opposition constituencies have only barely been touched by EBRC – which only this year slightly modified Aljunied's borders due to new property developments.
It's so awful that the Workers' Party has never lost a constituency it won.
Can you imagine what this horrible PAP regime in charge is doing to democracy?
This lie is so cynical, so obvious that it makes me nauseous.
There are better ways of doing politics but Pritam Singh clearly is incapable of that. And it's nothing new either, as his track record of deflections of responsibility for his own failures has been put on public display in recent years.
Did he take responsibility for fielding Raeesah Khan? Did he take responsibility for her lies or at least for mishandling them, by sitting silent for more than 2 months, sending Singapore Police Force on a wild goose chase, while considering with Sylvia Lim – as per Low Thia Khiang's testimony – whether to reveal the truth at all?
Did he take responsibility for keeping the situation from the party's very own CEC? Which then convened a bogus disciplinary committee and threw Raeesah under the bus?
Did he take responsibility for not instructing her to tell the truth but simply leaving her with "it's your call"? And then trying to convince the Committee of Privileges that the phrase means something else than it does?
Did he take responsibility for his party's own housing proposals from 2019, which argued Singapore is at risk of housing oversupply and would soon see a dangerous glut of HDB apartments? Did he take responsibility for running a misleading narrative about expensive HDB, when his own MP reported as analyst to Credit Suisse that public housing in Singapore remained affordable?
Did he take responsibility for leading the only party which met with Islamic preachers ahead of the general election, after two years of leveraging the foreign conflict in Palestine to attract votes of those who may disagree with Singapore's official diplomatic position on the conflict?
Finally – is he going to take responsibility for running a failed electoral campaign, marked by indecisiveness, wasted resources and wasted potential of the candidates he recruited?
Is he going to prove his accountability to voters in Marine Parade, whom he spent two years convincing that the Workers' Party would represent them well in the future, before abandoning them at the very last minute for another constituency?
But, oh no, stabbing thousands of voters in the back isn't his fault – it's the EBRC!
Imagine that – to the Workers' Party some Singaporeans are more valuable than other Singaporeans.
Once the boundaries move slightly, WP is no longer interested in winning your vote, in catering to your needs, in representing you in the parliament.
WP, being the second largest party in Singapore, had FIVE YEARS, to promote itself to more than just a handful of districts in the city, while ignoring those which it didn't deem worthwhile.
And he has the gall to blame someone else for it?
Quickly, give me a bucket.
This is a shameless, monumental and completely unfounded manipulation by the man whose plans failed yet again, but who simply cannot accept responsibility for it, just like he tried to distance himself from Raeesah.
Dear Mr Singh, perhaps if you weren't recruiting people who wanted to represent Palestine not Singapore in the parliament, if you stuck to your promises to the voters, if you didn't try to exploit race and religion to divide Singaporeans and score political votes on the basis of the social conflict the flames of which you were fanning, then maybe, just maybe, more Singaporeans would vote for your party.
But this admission will never happen, as Pritam's only strategy for political survival is to repeat baseless allegations of political persecution.
Well, the only person who has ever hurt his political career is himself.
