Pitchforks

 

The great story on the 11^th day of 2022 concerns a car and a school. A Bentley driver was denied entry into a school because his car did not have the permit to enter. Instead of parking outside and trying to walk into the school, the driver of the said Bentley decided to ram his way into the school even though the security officer was standing in front of the car. A more complete report of what happened and has happened since can be found at:

https://sg.news.yahoo.com/moe-probe-bentley-driver-security-officer-red-swastika-075610443.html

 

This story could not come at a worse time for the government, as people worry about their livelihoods due to the uncertainty caused by Covid restrictions. The stark image of a very rich person (the Bentley is not cheap wherever in the world you are – it’s particularly expensive in Singapore where there are all sorts of costs to car ownership to ensure Singapore’s car owners pay at least three times what everyone else pays) trying to mow down a vulnerable person (security officer in Singapore is seen as a job of last resort) could not get any worse. This very image must have been particularly tough for a government that has struggled in recent memories to prove that it isn’t “anti-poor.”

Singapore has never been the most equal of places. We were set up to be a trading port by the British and many of our forefathers came to Singapore for the sole purpose of making their fortune. Most remained in poverty but a few great fortunes were made. Singapore is one of the great success stories of modern capitalist economy and if you dig deep enough, we were the example of a place where the rich got richer and the poor also got richer. Inequality was never an issue until recently. Why was that?

I believe that one of the key issues of inequality is not so much the disparity of wealth but the disparity of power. Its relatively easy to accept that if I am a truck driver, I am going to earn significantly less than the owner of the trucking company I work for. Its relatively easy to accept that because the other chap has more money than me, he’s going to have certain advantages in life. For example, I will go to the polyclinic and government hospitals whilst he will go to a private one. His kids will probably have a head start over mine because his wealth allows him to send them to elite schools. However, I accept that because that’s the way things are and if things turn out well, my kid could end up owning the truck company and his could end up driving trucks for mine.

What people find harder to accept is a situation where the rich don’t play by the same rules. The analogy is simple – think of someone ridding a two-cylinder moped everyday getting a speeding ticket but seeing the cops ignoring the Ferrari speeding past him every day. What makes this particularly hard for many people is the fact that this situation has been “intellectualized” into the national fabric. The intellectual argument is that because the Ferrari drivers have more money to spend on their vehicles, they are making the roads better for the rest of us and so, we need to give the Ferrari drivers some leeway and flexibility when it comes to enforcing the rules. Sure, I expect the Ferrari driver to pass me on the road, he’s in a Ferrari and I’m in a moped. However, I do expect the cops to enforce the same speed limits on the Ferrari as they do on me.

Now, in this case the Bentley driver has been arrested for obvious criminal behavior and the Minister of Education, Mr. Chan Chun Sing had a field day slamming the Bentley Driver for “unacceptable” behavior. One can only ask – what else could the police and the minister do. This was as they say, a little too obvious and any sign of the Bentley driver would get the pitchforks coming out.

However, one can argue that the Bentley driver got the idea that he could push his way despite the obvious rules, from the fact that there has been a growing example of proverbial Ferrari drivers being allowed to speed past the traffic police. Let’s start with National Service, the supposed “great equalizer” of Singapore. Here you have the concept of the “White Horse” system where sons of the famous are, in the words of Mr. Cedric Foo “Marked out so as to ensure nobody gives them special treatment.” I think one of a national service colleague who had been “disrupted” from an earlier batch who had admitted that he never did a single push up as punishment during his basic military treatment. Why was that? Well, he belonged to a “scholar platoon” that had been marked out to prevent “preferential” treatment. The chap got himself posted out quickly when he noticed that the guys in the unit were actually expected to do physical work.

There was TT Durai, who wrote his own appraisals, awarded himself a generous bonus and got the board of directors to sanction them at Singapore’s largest charity. For committing what most people would consider fraud, Mr. Durai was told to quietly sit in jail for three months and was then given an equally lucrative job in Dubai.

Then we can look at our policy on drugs. We proudly tell the world that we are strict and it works. We hang traffickers no questions asked. It’s just that by some coincidence, the traffickers are inevitably dark-skinned people from “s***hole” countries or countries that don’t protest when we hang their citizens.

There was Dr. Waffles Wu, cosmetic surgeon who actually got someone to take the fall for something that he did and despite the outcry, the Dr. Wu remained as free as a bird.

Let’s go back to the outbreak of Covid and our initial circuit breaker in 2020. The government could not move faster than to subsidise the people who had grown rich by housing people in Covid causing conditions and the only real benefit for the victims was a few noises of sympathy and they were then confined to the same places where the disease had spread. 

Not long after, we had the Parti Liyani case where the police were quick to lock up a maid earning less than $1,000 a month because her multimillionaire boss didn’t want to pay her for illegally giving her more work. If it were not for a dedicated lawyer working pro-bono, the police and the attorney general’s office

In fact, the only time where a rich person seems to get hit by the rules is when they have the audacity to take on anyone richer. I think of Dr. Susan Lim who sent a S$12 million bill for devoting her entire $30 million a year practice to the care of a single patient from Brunei for over four years. What was Dr. Lim’s sin in the issue? She sent a big bill to the one patient on the planet who could afford it. Somehow that was wrong and Dr. Lim, who managed to keep a woman with stage four cancer alive for four years, lost her medical license.

These instances of their own are isolated instances and I guess you could say the things that could happen anywhere in the world. However, if you start to look at them in a pattern, you can’t help but get the impression that there is a set of rules for the guys who are in the proverbial Ferraris and for guys in the mopeds on life’s proverbial roads. Are we surprised that the 61-year-old Bentley driver thought he was untouchable because, well he was a Bentley and how dare the plebs expect him to follow the rules?

You don’t need a situation like in China where all the Ferrari drivers are being made to drive with tires of three wheels. However, you don’t need a situation like in India or America where the Ferrari drivers are lifted off the road by the guys on mopeds so that the guys in the Ferraris don’t need to face on coming traffic.

What you do need is for the rules to be applied fairly. The guys in the Ferrari’s and the guys in the mopeds can co-exist on the same road as long as the rules are there and applied as they should be applied.