Former Opposition MP Chiam See Tong’s reputation over the years has been recast to one of an elder statesman, well-respected by the ruling party and the opposition alike.
One observed how Chiam is respectfully treated by the Prime Ministers this year.
Chiam is indeed a politician of his time. As founding Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew observed in his memoirs, Chiam took the “shrewder line than Jeyaretnam, was more in tune with the sentiments of the population, that the PAP was doing a fair job, but could do better and should listen more to criticism”.
Now there is a book that will set his life on paper.
Let The People Have Him, a book by academic Loke Hoe Yeong that traces Chiam’s birth to his winning of the Potong Pasir seat in 1984, is a reminder that Chiam’s rise as a national opposition is no easy feat.
Below are ten revelations from Chiam’s biography that will interest every well-informed Singaporeans about 1970s/1980s politics.
1. Then PM Lee Kuan Yew compared the ‘O’ Level results of the two candidates for Potong Pasir – Mah Bow Tan and Chiam.
Lee said, “Mah Bow Tan, age 16, took his ‘O’ Levels – six distinctions, two credits.
Mr Chiam, age 18 – six credits, one pass.”
The residents of Potong Pasir chose Chiam. Chiam won 60.28% of the votes, compared to Mah’s 39.72% in the 1984 General Elections.
2. Staffers from the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) apologised to Chiam for an error Mr Lee Kuan Yew made in a 1984 GE rally speech.
The PMO also conveyed an apology from Lee himself for the error. Chiam had gotten seven, not six credits in his ‘O’-Level results.
3. Chiam sued then Foreign Minister S. Dhanabalan and Defence Minister Howe Yoon Chong for defamation.
Then Workers’ Party Sec-Gen and MP JB Jeyaretnam represented Chiam in filing a writ in the High Court seeking damages for slander made in the election speeches by Dhanabalan and Howe.
Dhanabalan called Chiam “a two-bit lawyer orchestrating a three-piece band whose members only appear once every four or five years”.
Howe called Chiam “a twice unsuccessful lawyer” and “a lawyer who is not even very good at law”.
4. Both Foreign Minister S. Dhanabalan and Defence Minister Howe Yoon Chong apologised to Chiam.
Howe: “I, Howe Yoong Chong, hereby unreservedly withdraw all imputations against the professional capacity and competence of Mr Chiam See Tong made by me on December 21 1980 and published in the issue of this newspaper on December 22 1980.” Business Times, 13 Feb, 1981.
Dhanabalan: “I acknowledge that there was no foundation for any of the imputations and I sincerely apologise to Mr Chiam for having made them”. Business Times, 28, 1981.
Chiam accepted the apologies and withdrew his lawsuits against them.
5. The origin of Chiam’s name.
The name See Tong roughly translates from Teochew Chinese as “timely” or “punctual”, given to him by his paternal grandfather.
6. You are never too old for public life.
In December 1976, Chiam entered politics at the age of 41.
7. The distant family relationship between Chiam and Lee Kuan Yew
Chiam has never met Lee in person until he was sworn into Parliament in 1985.
However, other members of Chiam’s extended family were on cordial terms with Lee’s extended family. This relationship stemmed from the marriage of Chiam’s maternal grandfather Lim Liang Quee’s daughter to a member of the Kwa family, from which Lee’s wife was.
8. Chiam thought of giving up politics.
After losing three elections, Chiam entertained the thought of giving up politics. His friends and relatives had been coaxing him that he would be able to live a contented life as a lawyer.
9. Chiam successfully sued the mainstream media for damages.
Chiam sued the now defunct Singapore Monitor for damages when it ran a headline on its frontpage: “Chiam See Tong charged with criminal trespass”.
10. When Chiam first met Lee.
Chiam (extending his hand): “Mr Prime Minister, may I congratulate the PAP on winning the elections”.
Lee (firm handshake): “See you in Parliament”.
“Let The People Have Him – Chiam See Tong: The Early Years” is available for purchase online at Epigram Books. Check out Mothership.sg’ interview with author Loke Hoe Yeong tomorrow.
WP MP Faisal Manap raises some concerns of Muslims, as expressed in the Suara Musyawarah Report, in Parliament.
Instead of addressing the issue head-on, PAP Muslim MPs tries to corner Faisal into taking a stand on the issue (which he didn’t, and i think he should have). Later, the MPs were either silent on the issue or tried to skirt it, or even deny it.
Now i have a few questions for the Muslim MPs:
1) Is the Suara Musyawarah Report not commissioned by the government? If so, what is the follow-up?
2) What is the attitude of the Muslim MPs towards the report? Take what you like from it, and ignore what you don’t?
3) If the latter is the case, why have the report in the first place?
4) Even IF those things stated are not true, those are indeed the perceptions of many Muslims. Will you address those perceptions with facts and figures, and reasoned argumentation? Or will those just be dismissed or ignored?
I call upon them to take a stand on these issues/questions, in the name of constructive politics.
Walid Jumblatt Abdullah, a public-spirited individual, is an ongoing Political Science student of the National University of Singapore (NUS). He is a three-times award recipient of the Graduate Student Teaching (GSTA) Award Honour Roll in 2012. In the recent NUS Commencement Week, he was also selected as the Valedictorian of his cohort.
EDITOR’S NOTE
Seems like both parties cranked up their engines harder this time round with fancy new measures and proposals. The announcement on setting up of WP Malay/Muslim committee to oversee concerns faced by the community should have been done way much earlier. Nevertheless, it’s better late than never. We applaud WP to help the community alongside PAP. Having two different approaches and perspectives to issues will definitely result in expedited progress, only if sole focus is on the community, and not about the respective parties and what’s important to them.
We are glad that more and more Muslims are speaking up for what’s good for their community. This is our country and in a significant way, we have the right to decide our future. As long that discussions are not baseless and no vulgarities involved, someday somehow someone will hear us.
Mr Low: Madam, I wish to clarify a few points. First of all, the reason why I decided to focus my speech on constructive politics, because I thought that was an important issue that we should look at. As what I say in my speech, Singapore is becoming more diversified, there will be different views. And moving forward, how the Government will deal and accommodate different views and different perspective of Singaporeans is important for us to move forward together as one united people. And the other MPs from the Workers’ Party will be talking about different issues. They will cover, I mean ranging from social issues, social safety net to foreign affairs, national security. They will cover the full range of areas, and thereby we split our job, I will focus on constructive politics. I thought it was an important issue and of course it’s important to also understand what is the perspective of the PAP in terms of constructive politics. And from what the Prime Minister has said, it seems to me that it is more constructive dictated on the term of the PAP, rather than constructive politics in terms of the society that is moving forward. And I have affirmed my endorsement to what the President has said that we should look at the outcome of constructive politics – that is, that we should be able to move forward together despite the differences. Next, he’s talking about the Workers’ Party flip-flopping on foreign workers issue. I said again I don’t think we have flip-flopped. I have explained in this House of some misunderstanding of the speeches I have made. And in any case I also noted that when the PAP have to make a policy U-turn, they called it policy shift. I don’t know whether that is a shift or is a flip-flop.
Mr Lee: I think the record will speak for itself. When we make a shift, we acknowledge the shift. When the Workers’ Party changes position, they pretend they haven’t. That is the difference. Now, as for delegating responsibility for different parts of the Budget speech to different MPs, that’s entirely within Mr Low Khia Thiang’s prerogative. It’s not for me to suggest how he should conduct his affairs in the Workers’ Party. But as a leader, you do have a responsibility to state where does the party stand on the big issue. Somebody can look after health care. Somebody can take care of transport. Somebody can spend all his time marking Minister Heng Swee Keat on education. But where do you stand on what the Government is doing? Is the Government doing right, is it doing wrong, do you agree with the Government, do you have a better view or do you abstain or do you abstain from abstaining?
Mr Low: Well, I think opposition is quite clear on many of these issues. If the Prime Minister wanted my view on what the Government has been doing and whether he has done well, I’ll say, well, he has solved some of the problems, what the Prime Minister has mentioned, and the Workers Party MPs also acknowledged it in their speech but also pointed out there are things that is still work in progress and the Government will have to focus on and to make it better and to improve. So that is the position and I don’t see the need for me to totally sum up, I think the MPs should be able to do in their own view and to give their view and their assessment and at the same time, wherever possible, offer certain views and alternative suggestions to improve the policies.
Mr Lee: Madam Speaker, I’m very grateful for the extremely reasonable explanation from the member. I hope he takes an equally reasonable approach when he comes to election rallies because the Workers’ Party approach has been to be extremely reasonable, indeed low profile in Parliament but come election time to turn into tigers and heroes.
Mr Low: Madam Speaker, I thank the prime minister for praising the Workers Party’s ability to fight in the elections. We have no intention to hide ourselves in Parliament. We seek the mandate for people to come to Parliament to check against the Government and we have done it honestly and sincerely, we have not turned this place into a theatre, that shows we are responsible and we will behave continuously as a rational and responsible party and members should, I believe members will agree that the Workers Party has been rational. We have not come here with some wild policies or wild suggestions. We debate the policies, we came out with some suggestions but these are not bankrupting the Government coffers or suggesting to use the reserves. Election – I think we are also rational, we don’t accuse the PAP of something that we cannot substantiate or I know we’ll get sued. So I think we are fair. And elections is elections and I think the prime minister for noting that we can fight elections. I’m sure the PAP can too. You are the Government and you have been the governing party for 50 years and you’ve got more, much people, talented people than the Workers’ Party! How can you say that we are tigers and we are something else in Parliament? I’m sure the PAP can equally be tigers or lions.
Mr Lee: It’s an eloquent explanation for why the Workers Party has been inarticulate about many things. In a serious Parliament, the Government presents its policies, the opposition presents its alternatives, the Workers Party may not have alternatives on every issue, you may not have a full range of all the complexities of designing an HDB scheme or a MediShield scheme, you do have a responsibility to say which direction are we going and that direction has to be set clearly, not to explain to the PAP but to explain to Singaporeans what you stand for. And what you stand for cannot be what the PAP is doing and a little better. That means you have no stand. Whatever the PAP’s standing, ask them to do better. That’s easy, I can do that too. But where do you stand? Where are we totally wrong? Where do you think this is a completely different way to do things better? Where do you think in principle we do not want Singapore to be like this? These are big issues which deserve to be debated and not elided over and avoided in the House. And that is what a First World Parliament should be about.
Mr Low: Madam Speaker, again, I’ll like to say that the Prime Minister is reasonable to say that the Workers Party may not have come out, able to come with all the alternative policies, that’s true, but to say that the Workers Party has no position on major issues, that is not true. I think we did state our position in Parliament, we debated major policies vigorously, we don’t oppose all the policies but where we think that there is a need for us to oppose and be concerned of the future of Singapore like the Population White paper, we did so. So we state our position on important issues and we didn’t oppose for things that we think are doing right. Is that not enough?
Mr Lee: I think it probably is useful to bring it down to something very specific. Let’s come back to the Population White Paper. During the debate the position taken by the Workers Party is that enough is enough, zero growth. We have continued to grow, I have not heard the Workers Party demand zero growth today. Do you still demand that or do you now think that we should allow SMEs to survive in Singapore?
Mr Low: We have made a calculation at the point in time of debating the Population White Paper and that if you continue to allow the foreign workers to grow, it will be untenable in the future generation, future population growth and thereby we decided that we need to keep the population number in check and one way of doing it, of course, is to freeze the foreign workers growth in number. Our calculation was that probably within that existing number of the foreign workers, you can still move around with some sectors there will be no need so much of foreign workers and thereby you can still get by with zero foreign workers growth. We understand perfectly the possibility and the trade-off, that is our position at that point in time. We had not objected subsequently or grilled the Government for why we are not doing it because that’s our view that it should have zero population growth but the Government decided otherwise, there’s a way of doing it, we have said our piece but we have to respect the decision of the Government to move on but our message has got across. We cannot sustain continuously the kind of population growth plan the Government is planning. And I’m glad to hear today that, you know, Prime Minister saying that the Government is taking a very serious view of tightening and watching the growth of population.
Mr Lee: Madam Speaker, after all this complicated explanation, I don’t know whether Mr Low Thia Khiang still stands by what we said in Parliament in the White Paper debate last year because if he really does after all the explanation, he should say: We have too many foreign workers now, send home 70,000, then we will know where he stands. But after telling me that you can massage this and some people can do less and others can do, and will need more, that’s easy to say. Who’s going to do the massaging? Of course the Government. And that is the mark of a substandard opposition.
Mr Low: Madam Speaker, I disagree. This is not the mark of a substandard opposition, this is the mark of a responsible opposition not to jam up the Government, allowing the Government after giving our view, debating it, allowing the Government to move forward, not to jam up the Government, so it is a mark of responsible government and a mark of First World Parliament.
Mr Lee: Madam Speaker, we have to call a spade a spade. If you have changed the position and your previous position was wrong, say so. If you hold by your position, have your guts to reaffirm it and take the consequences. But to weasel away, play with words, avoid the issue and then claim to be responsible, that is what we fear can drive Singapore’s politics into the same place where many other countries have gone.
