Professor Tommy Koh, one of our longest serving and senior
diplomats (and a former neighbor of Dad’s) has just given a speech in which he
called for Singapore to become a less unequal society and stated that it was “angry
voters” who propelled the UK to leave the EU and for the current occupant on
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to be plonked into his seat of power. The details of
Professor Koh’s speech can be found in the following report:
Much is going to be said about what the good professor has said,
so I’ll leave going into leave the wider debate for the moment. However, I will
try and discuss is what Professor Koh called the “Angry Voter “– or namely the
voter that is pissed of with the way things are going.
We saw this back in 2016 in both the Brexit Referendum and
the election of Donald in America. The party that voted to leave the UK and the
voters who backed the Donald were very pissed of with the status quo and were
looking at something to blame. While I personally think both the “leave” party
of Brexit and Donald are nothing better than secondhand con-jobs, they managed
to find a proverbial “sweet-spot” in the resentment of their audiences and won
the vote.
One of the biggest problems with angry voters is that they
want to lash out and when someone provides a convenient target, they’re willing
to believe it. They also have a way of getting upset when the so called “elite”
tries to feed them statistics that don’t gel with the reality of their daily
lives. Look at the “NHS” bus that the “leave” campaign sent round the British
Isles, stating that the UK was sending hundreds of millions of pounds to the
EU, which could have been spent on the NHS (the UK’s persistently troubled
health system).The fact peddled by the leave campaign wasn’t true but it didn’t
matter. Or look at everything said by the Donald. Mexico and China do not steal
American jobs (and tariffs on Made in China goods are paid by American
consumers not Chinese manufacturers) but hey there is someone to blame for your
shitty lot in life.
Could the Singapore government be facing the same thing that
the British and Americans faced in 2016? On the surface of things, the answer
would be no. Singapore has not seen the levels of government corruption that Malaysia
saw a year ago. Furthermore, while the “opposition” has grained credibility
with the likes of former presidential candidate, Dr. Tan Cheng Bok, forming a
new political party, the opposition is for the moment fragmented and to full of
characters enjoying chatting about grand things rather than winning seats.
Having said that, the government needs to be careful in how
it approaches voters. There are issues that have hurt the ordinary citizen. I
take the example of my elderly aunt, who is a retired civil servant, and would
never think of voting for anyone else other than the PAP. However, she’s been
hit by huge medical bills that don’t seem to address her health concerns. This
is a woman who goes to government hospitals for treatment and when she comes
back feeling frustrated that she’s paid money she doesn’t have to a hospital
run by the government for something she doesn’t see addressing her issues, nobody
is going to blame her for not being happy with the status quo.
This is just one example of what the ordinary people are feeling.
Housing, as always, remains prohibitively expensive as are cars. It wouldn’t be
so bad if the public transport ran as it should (a place where rich people take
public transport) but it isn’t. OK, to be fair, the MRT (subway) system is
breaking down less under the current CEO than his predecessor, but the fare we
pay is also going up.
The problem this government faces is the fact that its
senior members are paid exceedingly well. If the list of best paid politicians
wasn’t fixated on heads of state and government, the top ten would all be from
Singapore. The list isn’t limited to ministers. The last CEO of the SMRT Corporation
was paid in excess of SG$2,000,000 a year (an executive engineer in SMRT makes
around a tenth of this).
Singapore’s
government appears to be spectacularly tone deaf to the sentiments on the ground
and persist in trying out solutions that worked best in the 60s (look at the
way it tries to sue online media in the same way it tried and succeeded with
traditional media) and it forgets that the modern electorate is more vocal and has
options that the 1960s electorate did not.
Michael More once described Donald as a “political Molotov cocktail”
that angry voters had thrown. We don’t need it in Singapore, or we shouldn’t
need it. Government doesn’t appear to be threated but it needs to move fast and
at the very least appear to be listening to grievances because political defeat
is possible.
Appeal
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