Workers' Party former NCMP between 2011 and 2015, and recent candidate in East Coast GRC, Yee Jenn Jong was plenty upset about my article characterising Workers' Party's choice of Tampines NCMP as abandonment of the Muslim voters and pursuit of the Mandarin speakers.
As per his words in a Facebook post, he "was alerted to this trash and I could not believe what he was reading."
I'm embedding it in full below, but if you can't see it in your email inbox please just click through the link I highlighted above.
In the post Mr Yee, defends Faisal Manap's absence, as he concludes he was sure that WP vice-chairman would not take the NCMP seat, just like others in the past declined it too. He then denies any links behind the decision to issues of race or religion.
Well, let's examine his claims.
Workers’ Party has so many "good talents" that Yee Jenn Jong had to come out of his "retirement"
After shamelessly plugging his books he finally begins his retort by arguing that: "Given WP's progress and the availability of good talents around, there is no need for a former WP parliamentarian to take up the post, especially when it is offered to a GRC and there are other candidates in the team."
He claims that there are so many good talents around that there's no need for the 49 year old vice-chairman of the party to come back to the parliament.
I'm sorry, but what talents?
The sheer fact that Yee Jenn Jong broke his word about retiring from politics after 2020 shows that Workers' Party had a very limited pool of talent to choose from. Out of a nation of 3.5 million citizens it managed to cobble together only 26 names, enough to contest 8 constituencies out of 33.
Some of them, like Eileen Chong, were recruited within the past year. In fact, Eileen herself joined only six months ago.
YJJ's sudden reappearance suggests that he was pulled out of the closet to contest East Coast because WP needed someone to complete the team. If they had any more candidates they would have been fielded. If not in GRCs then at least individual SMCs.
They weren't because they did not exist.
WP hates the NCMP scheme so much that it continues to use it to its advantage
We've all heard the Workers' Party criticise the NCMP scheme in the past, calling for its abolishment. And yet despite all of these calls the party itself has only once rejected a seat – 40 years ago.
Yes, some candidates may have passed up on the opportunity, though we can never really know their motivations, and they were replaced by someone else.
This is an excellent example of how WP likes to pretend it criticises something, while quietly taking advantage of it five seconds later.
The same sort of cherry-picking is evident whenever Pritam Singh comes out to complain about alleged gerrymandering, despite the fact that his very own party benefited from the creation of new constituencies. Or when he carefully omits numerous examples of constituencies dominated by the PAP in past elections, which have been abolished, divided or absorbed.
Workers' Party has a penchant for peddling half-truths about everything, clearly believing its electorate is dumb enough to gobble it up without second thoughts (and, let's be honest, it kinda does).
In the history of the NCMP scheme the Workers' Party left a vacant NCMP seat only once – in 1984, when the scheme was introduced and J.B. Jeyaretnam was still in charge.
Under Low Thia Khiang, who liked to make a big deal about abolishing it, it has never happened.
WP would make a noise about it and then promptly take up the available seats anyway.
Sounds rather hypocritical, doesn't it? If you believe that losers should lose, then you should reject the privilege and accept the basic results of the vote. That's what the result would be without NCMP.
Let’s talk about race & religion again
Finally, let's talk about the party's gambles with race and religion in this GE. I'm sure that must have ruffled Mr Yee's feathers the most, especially given how explosive a topic it is in Singapore.
But we have all seen the incessant pandering of the party to one particular minority group, by introducing the war in Gaza into domestic politics in Singapore.
I'm really tired of repeating this but I can't allow them to get away with repeating lies, so let's stick to the truth:
- Who resisted to call Hamas' attack on October 7 "terrorism" and instead used the term "military operation" to describe indiscriminate butchery of Israeli civilians?
- Who recruited an MP candidate who explicitly said she joined because she was upset about how the government explains the conflict in Palestine to students and WP brought up her complaints in the parliament?
- Who added recognition of the State of Palestine to their political manifesto right before the election?
- Who met with Islamic preachers ahead of the vote and why would they even do that?
And then that very same party sent its Malay vice-chairman, outspoken in the past about importance of religion and even refusing to separate his beliefs from politics, to contest Tampines GRC, known for the highest concentration of Malay voters in the country.
How more obvious can you be?
And now you're telling me that his disappearance from the parliament has nothing to do with the fact that he lost and the party decided to change course and opted for a female candidate fluent in Mandarin, who represented the party in the Mandarin roundtable before the GE, that WP had to abandon in 2020 since it had no suitable candidates at the time?
No, oh no, identity, language, race, gender and religion I'm sure had absolutely nothing to do with any of these! It's all just a remarkable coincidence.
Well, what can we expect from a party whose leader once tried to gaslight the entire nation that "your call" means something else than it actually does?
