Prologue

 

1 March 1985

 

Parliament sessions were televised for the first time in Singapore. Today in Parliament became such a hit on prime-time television that the Singapore Broadcasting Corporation subsequently extended its original half-hour running time to 45 minutes. “Politics, the ruling party and Government have been made human through television coverage,” a Straits Times report pronounced.1

“I don’t really trust the newspapers,” one viewer said. “On television, it’s warts and all. TV captures them in the raw, and there’s no retake.”2

“I didn’t watch every session on TV,” admitted one young professional. “But if I knew that Mr Chiam See Tong was going to speak, I’d watch because I want to know how he is performing.”3

Speaking to viewers, the Sunday Times found J. B. Jeyaretnam to be regarded as one of the particularly impressive speakers in the inaugural parliamentary broadcast. In equal measure, Jeyaretnam’s detractors thought that he had been given too much airtime.4

The sixth Parliament opened 25 February 1985 after an eventful general election had been fought the previous December. For the first time at a general election after Singapore’s independence, opposition politicians were elected. Moreover, this took place against the backdrop of an unprecedented swing of 12.5 per cent against the ruling PAP. J. B. Jeyaretnam of the Workers’ Party had been returned in Anson, against all odds and despite the PAP’s vow to “expose, demolish, and destroy” him.5 The other opposition Member of Parliament (MP) was Chiam See Tong, the secretary-general of the SDP, the party that he had founded in 1980. He was the lawyer who, when he first entered politics in the late 1970s, went around Singapore in his trademark Volkswagen Beetle with his loudhailer, telling Singaporeans that one-party rule was not their destiny.

The fierce debates between government and opposition in the chamber in the 1950s and early 60s had receded into the public’s memory, simply because there had been no opposition for most of the years since then. The days of the opposition Barisan Sosialis, and of fiery politicians like David Marshall, the first chief minister of Singapore, and Ong Eng Guan, the first mayor of Singapore and renegade member of the PAP, were long over.

The homogeneous make-up of Parliament since independence was not limited to party representation. There had also not been a single woman in the House since 1970, when Chan Choy Siong, the PAP MP for Delta, retired. The general election of 1984 broke that long spell with the election of Aline Wong, Dixie Tan and Yu-Foo Yee Shoon of the PAP.

As at the start of the first session of every Parliament, members debated the address of the President—then C. V. Devan Nair—to the House, delivered on behalf of the government as is the convention in Westminster parliamentary systems. Tan Cheng Bock, the MP for Ayer Rajah, who moved the motion for the debate in 1985, was known to have sparred with ministers a number of times in the previous Parliament on what he considered to be elitist policies.6 The party’s choice for him to kick off the debate seemed to hint at a recognition of the shifting political landscape. “Since 1963, the people have given this Government a blank cheque,” he boldly said. “But today, after 25 years of nation-building, there is an erosion in this faith and trust in the Government… Many Singaporeans felt left behind because they could not follow the pace of change, and they resented this.”7

Voters appeared to defy the ruling party by voting in two opposition MPs in 1984. This was in reaction to a raft of unpopular policies, such as the proposed delayed withdrawal of retirement savings, which were delivered by tough-talking ministers. At the opening of Parliament in 1985, there was a certain air of change, in anticipation of more debate to follow, not only from the two opposition MPs but also emboldened PAP backbenchers. It would have been foolhardy if the PAP had continued their tough talk. Doing so in the aftermath of their defeat in the 1981 Anson by-election only reinforced the trajectory of their dipping performance in the popular vote in the subsequent general election.

Yet the government’s decision to begin screening Parliament sessions on television was counterintuitive to some who believed that Chiam “won his parliamentary seat on television” when Chiam warned of the dangers of overly rapid economic development and of empty Central Provident Fund (CPF) accounts—the mandatory savings plan for Singaporeans.8 Why would the government afford Chiam more media exposure now? Surely it was an admission on the part of the government that television coverage, with its more visceral impact and its greater viewership numbers than newspaper circulation, was too important to ignore by now. Nonetheless, the definitive move to televise parliamentary sittings arose from a challenge Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew had made to Jeyaretnam in July the previous year, when Lee said that “no press man in the gallery can convey [Jeyaretnam’s] sloppy, slovenly, ill-prepared presentation.”9

Jeyaretnam, the leader of the Workers’ Party, had been in Parliament since 1981, initially as the sole opposition MP. He doggedly challenged the government on a range of issues. Immediately, from his maiden parliamentary speech in December 1981, Jeyaretnam and Lee Kuan Yew engaged in aggressive and ugly debates that earned each other’s intense dislike. Jeyaretnam thought Lee Kuan Yew dictatorial while Lee saw him as a “poseur, always seeking attention, good or bad.”10

A case in point would be the acerbic exchanges between the two men right from the start of the debate on the President’s Address that year. After Tan Cheng Bock, who moved the motion, Jeyaretnam was next to speak. When addressing constitutional rights, Jeyaretnam cited the case of Guyana and was immediately met by the caustic response from the Prime Minister, who said, “They have got all the fine, fundamental rights written into their Constitution. What kind of lives do their people live?”11

Jeyaretnam had been relegated to a back seat in the previous Parliament. It felt almost as if the PAP were still in denial that an opposition politician had made it into Parliament and were trying to conceal his presence. This time, however, he, along with Chiam, was given a prominent seat on the front bench across the government’s side, following the Westminster tradition of seating the opposition.

In another unprecedented move, President Devan Nair had invited both Chiam and Jeyaretnam to lunch in February 1985, before the new Parliament was sworn in.12 Back in the years he was in the heat of party politics, Nair was hard hitting against the opposition, particularly against those very two men who were the front runners of Singapore’s opposition. In fact, Nair’s seat of Anson, which he had held before his elevation to the presidency, had been won by Jeyaretnam at the 1981 by-election. At the time of that by-election, Nair appeared to have softened considerably towards the opposition. In later years, Nair recounted his lunch meeting with Lee Kuan Yew the day after the by-election, during which he had tried, unsuccessfully, to placate the furious Prime Minister by saying that the opposition still constituted no threat to the PAP government.13 Nair seemed to be striking a more conciliatory tone towards his former adversaries, especially now that he was technically above politics in the non-partisan, ceremonial head-of-state role of President. In his speech at the investiture of the new Cabinet early in 1985, he said he hoped that “the next Parliament will see positive signs from both sides of the House,” even remarking that “how Singapore’s parliamentary system will further develop depends first upon the way the government accepts the role of the loyal opposition.”14

As Nair’s demeanour towards the opposition softened, some other PAP figures became more vocal towards, or even outrightly critical of, the PAP government. The key figure in this regard was Toh Chin Chye, a founding member of the PAP and its former chairman, and also a former deputy prime minister, whom Lee Kuan Yew had dropped from the Cabinet after the 1980 general election. Lee’s stated motive for that was the renewal of the PAP leadership, though nothing could placate Toh’s very public disdain for a PAP that he felt was deviating from its socialist roots. In the lead-up to the 1984 general election, there were rumours, publicly acknowledged even by the tightly controlled press, that he would resign from the PAP and run as an independent candidate.15 This, it was suggested, was because his criticisms of the PAP and its policies had “allegedly exceeded the tolerance of the ruling party” and had become a “dissident to be ousted from his party.”16 In any case, that did not materialise, and Toh was re-elected in his seat of Rochore on the PAP ticket.

In the new Parliament of 1985, Chiam was assigned to be seated next to Toh Chin Chye in the front bench directly opposite the Cabinet ministers, almost as if in acknowledgement of the critical role Toh had played alongside Chiam and Jeyaretnam in challenging government policies since the early 1980s. Chiam remembered him as a “quiet, humble and reserved gentleman”17 whose personal exchanges with those around him in Parliament were kept to a minimum.

Once he took...