the week: on Lee Hsien Loong

Former Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong gives an interview about his two decades as PM; Lawrence Wong is sworn in as Prime Minister

Only history can judge how well Lee Hsien Loong has done as Prime Minister. He’s had his share of successes, having more than doubled Singapore's GDP per capita in his twenty years as Prime Minister, and completing the city state’s transformation into the jewel of the east. But his tenure has also seen housing prices rising at record levels, far out stripping real wage growth, a mental health crisis that has culminated in the highest suicide rates in decades, and a total fertility rate (TFR) that has dipped below 1 for the first time. The paradox of Singapore is that we are increasingly prosperous, yet increasingly unhappy.

But regardless of how one thinks about Lee Hsien Loong’s legacy, we should still be thankful for his service. He has sacrificed much to serve this country, and for that I am grateful. Having been groomed by his father his entire life for succession - first in the military as the youngest general in Singapore history, and then pushed into politics and the cabinet, he had impossibly large shoes to fill. In another life he could have had a career as an exceptional mathematician, but alas in this life he was born Lee Kuan Yew’s son.

Lee Hsien Loong caps off his two decades as Prime Minister with an exit interview: as much a retrospective as his prospective on the way forward, the interview captured his thoughts on the past and future of Singapore. As I listened to the interview, I often find myself agreeing with what he said, the principles he espoused and the philosophy which guided his leadership, which makes it all the more frustrating when I think back on his term, because I don’t think his actions match his words. What I mean is this:

On foreign policy

Let me run through some of the key points of his interview. Singapore’s foreign policy has been consistent throughout the years: be bamboo - bend but not break. As a small nation there is not a lot of wiggle room for foreign policy, you have to bend with the winds of change as bigger countries vie for their own national interests while ensuring that your own interests do not get crushed beneath the weight of their ambitions. In this Singapore has been pretty successful at playing friend to everyone - anyone from the United States to China and even North Korea feel welcome here. At the same time there is a need for Singapore to stand her ground against blatant attacks on her sovereign rights, case in point going to the International Court against Malaysia over ownership of Pedro Blanca. I think the Singapore Government by and large has done a very good job¹ of positioning Singapore on the global stage, if anything most of my disagreements with the PAP Government concern local rather than international issues.²

On the youth and their future

And so we run into one such local issue. At this point of the interview, it becomes somewhat clear that the media aren’t just throwing softballs at SM Lee, in many instances they’re actively batting on his team. This is a continuing theme I’ve talked about before, where the local media provide constant cover for the PAP and their policies effectively acting as a Government mouthpiece rather than the objective fourth estate. Melissa Manuel from Seithi (the Tamil arm of Mediacorp) asks “how can [the youngsters] actually build confidence that they are actually doing better than the previous generations”. Already built into the question is the assumption that the youth today is doing better than previous generations, rather than asking the question are the youth today doing better. And she of course avoids asking the most important question: are the youth of today better off at the end of SM Lee’s term than at the start of his term 20 years ago.

SM Lee of course affirms that the youth today had it better than his generation did. I should hope so, he was born in pre-independence Singapore in 1952. If we’re doing worse today than a teen in 1960s I should hope that the PAP would have been voted out long ago. Of course life is better today, and I doubt the PAP can claim credit for everything though they will most certainly try. In my lifetime I have seen the evolution of the personal computer and internet to the point where everyone now has a computer that far surpasses the one NASA used to put a man on the moon in their pockets, a point SM Lee acknowledges when he says “you grow up learning to swipe the iPad before you learn to speak”. People who have experienced the comforts that technology has afforded us today will not want to go back to the past. The end of the 20th century and the start of the 21st century saw the fastest decline in world poverty in world history ever. These technological and economical advances are felt the world over, and is not exclusive to Singapore.

So it is disingenuous when SM Lee tries to brush off the question with university graduate statistics of his generation, of which only 3-4% went to university to the 50% of today, never mind that when he took office 20 years ago in 2004 the numbers were already at 50%. Or when he talks about making a living as a competitive gamer (or e-sports trainer as he called it) or as a social media influencer, jobs which he says our generation is lucky to have as he never had them, never mind that those jobs did exist and were just as rare - the equivalent job in his time would be a professional soccer or NBA player or an actor or celebrity. Those jobs have always existed and they are just as difficult to get and coveted as they were in his time. What I’m interested in and the question he does not have to answer because the media refuses to ask is whether the average youth today (one who is not a professional gamer or social media influencer) feels better off than they would have been 20 years ago at the beginning of his term, and not for things which he cannot claim credit for, like having an iPad or an iPhone, but for things which his Government can control: have wages kept up with the increase in housing prices? Have wages kept up with inflation? Can you afford to raise a family on a single income if one spouse wishes to stay home to raise the children?

I’m not sure that by any of those metrics the youth of today are doing better than the youth of 20 years ago. When you realise that as a young person entering the housing market today you are essentially paying for the capital gains of previous generations, can you say that you are doing better today than the previous generations? But if the youth of today are feeling that way, then it is for the Government and the media to tell us we are wrong for feeling that way. Cue the clip of Principal Skinner: it’s the children who are wrong. That’s how we get Melissa from Seithi essentially asking “how can the youth of today be confident that they are doing better today than previous generations” and Tham Yuen-C of The Straits Times asking how the Government can convince young people not to look at financial gains of previous generations.

On welfare

One of the more confusing things about the Singapore Government is that although it is very much socially conservative, they have many policies which are generally associated with what we would call the liberal left in countries like the USA or UK. We used to have the best public housing policy in the world, before the Goh Chok Tong Government decided to open it up to free market forces, and we also have routine hand outs by the Government in the form of GST rebates or CDC vouchers.

In the interview, SM Lee claims that Singaporeans have no stomach for a political party which wants to cut both taxes and welfare. Maybe that is true. But I think there is room for a party which advocates for small government, a party which wants to cut government spending to make up for the shortfall of revenue without touching welfare expenditure. Some of the ways of distributing welfare is notoriously inefficient and inconsistent in its application. Many welfare programs like GST vouchers only go to those who live in HDB flats, despite the fact that there can be incredibly wealthy people living in HDB flats and retirees who might need a little extra living in private property. CDC vouchers on the other hand go to every Singaporean household, and a family of 5 who needs more money would receive the same amount as a single person household. There is no consistency in philosophy in the distribution of welfare, and there is huge waste in the distribution. Not only is the Government developing parallel ways of distributing funds to Singaporeans ala LifeSG for NS vouchers and a separate website for CDC vouchers, they have also hired personnel in the CDC who distribute physical CDC vouchers to Singaporeans who are not as technologically savvy.

All this is to say there is tremendous waste and inefficiencies in the system (something which anyone who has ever served National Service can attest to). Why is there no party campaigning on cutting this waste out? I’d like to see a party which campaigns on dismantling the CDC and removing the S$660,000 mayors³, advocating for a full audit on Government waste, some kind of welfare reform where the many welfare programs gets condensed into one with a more efficient distribution of cash directly into people’s accounts (the technology is there, we have had assurance packages paid directly into our bank accounts if it is linked to our NRIC). I’m not sure if Singaporeans have the stomach for a party advocating for smaller government, which takes less from the people and gives them more control over their lives. Maybe Singaporeans prefer that the Government makes decisions for them rather than being captains of their own lives.

On the separation of powers

SM Lee makes the case that the Government has to forever be involved in legislating social change, especially when it comes to sensitive issues like wearing the tudung for nurses or striking s377A from the books. According to him, “if the Government does not make it, it is not going to happen or it is going to happen in a very chaotic and very contentious way”. He’s right in the most pedantic fashion - the tudung was previously banned under the uniform policy of the Ministry of Health, and s377A was in the penal code of Singapore, so logically only the Government could undo policies and laws they had inflicted. What he’s wrong about is that the changes in both instances weren’t initiated by the Government - there had been plenty of agitation on the ground before the Government even considered changing the laws.

What is more interesting is SM Lee’s elaboration on his point. He draws on the example of Roe v. Wade in America, where the courts in an act of judicial activism had gone over and beyond their powers and taken it upon themselves decide on abortion rights in the United States. As SM Lee rightfully points out, this was a matter for the legislature (Congress) rather than the judiciary (Supreme Court) to decide, as it concerned one of the fundamental principles that both Singapore’s and the USA’s democracies are built on: the separation of powers. The idea that each body of government (the judiciary, the executive and the legislature) had their own sphere of competence where they each reigned supreme and could therefore act as a check on any other body of government to ensure that no body of government would accrue and abuse power is paramount to our systems of democracy. So I was in full agreement when SM Lee acknowledged the separation of powers and the importance allowing the right government body perform its function. Now what is disappointing is that during his tenure SM Lee had very little respect for the separation of powers. The 2 major incidents that come to mind would be the s377A issue and the fight over 38 Oxley Road.

The s377A issue was a largely confused affair. For those unfamiliar with this controversial law, s377A is a colonial holdover which in simple terms criminalized gay sex. This archaic law was kept on the books until 2023 when it would be finally repealed, long after our former colonisers made gay sex legal in 1967, and losing out to even India (where we inherited s377A from) which repealed it in 2018.⁴ I will not argue to the morality of such a law, but from a legal perspective the laws could have stayed on the books (having survived multiple constitutional challenges in which our courts found the law to be constitutional) without breaching any principles of the rule of law or separation of powers had the Government not in 2018 decided to announce (in what I can only assume as a way to test the waters) that s377A would not be proactively enforced. Of course this caused a plethora of other issues.

If you’re confused about what it means for s377A not to be proactively enforced, don’t worry, you’re in good company: former attorney-generals Walter Woon and VK Rajah weren’t sure either. Both of them were of the opinion that the executive would breach the separation of powers as the power to prosecute lies in the Attorney-General’s Chambers (AGC) under s35(8) of the constitution. The AGC immediately pounced on this and released this statement: the AGC as Public Prosecutor retained full prosecutorial discretion under s35(8) with regard to s377A, and as an addendum how dare Walter Woon suggest any kind of impropriety on the part of the Government. You see, it was the Police which the executive had directed not to proactively enforce s377A, not the AGC which still retained prosecutorial discretion, and while the AGC will not prosecute s377A for consenting adults of legal age, s377A would still be enforced by the AGC to catch the occasional pedo (never mind that s376A-s376EE would be better suited for this purpose, and also now that s377A has been repealed are all these pedos now finally free from the law?). If only mental gymnastics were an Olympic sport; Singapore would have more than one gold medal by now.

To me the problem is far more fundamental than whether the executive had directed the AGC or the Police not to proactively enforce s377A, the mere fact that the executive had decided which laws were enforceable strikes me as a breach of the separation of powers. Where there is a law on the books and it is not deemed unconstitutional by the courts (as s377A had been), then it is the will of Parliament and by extension the people that the law is enforced. The only way to get rid of that law is to repeal it in Parliament, as SM Lee had noted above it is not for an activist judiciary or executive to subvert the will of the legislature, and if that is true in the USA then what is good for the goose must be good for the gander, and the same should be true in Singapore as well.⁵ And this is what I mean when I say that SM Lee espouses principles which I agree with but then acts in a completely different way.

The Oxley Road incident is by far the more egregious example of this behaviour. The crux of the issue was essentially a dispute over the will of Lee Kuan Yew by the Lee siblings: then Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, his brother Lee Hsien Yang, and his sister Lee Wei Ling. The point of dispute was that the will clearly stated that their family home Oxley road was to be demolished, but SM Lee later decided he was against the demolition, citing: 1) he doubted the veracity of the will and whether Lee Kuan Yew had in fact signed the will; 2) the house should be gazetted as a national monument. In response his siblings disparaged his character and intentions on social media, accusations which had they been made by anyone other than his siblings would surely have landed the accuser in court.

I’ve made this point before, and it is relevant here as well: there is an old legal maxim “Justice must not only be done, but must also be seen to be done”. What is essentially a private dispute over a private will should be resolved privately in court. Instead, SM Lee decides to convene a ministerial committee chaired by Minister Teo Chee Hean, and comprising Ministers Grace Fu, K Shanmugam and Lawrence Wong. This all culminates in a Parliamentary session in which SM Lee lifted the whip and encouraged all members of the house to clarify the issue in some kind of free for all Netflix special The Roast of Lee Hsien Loong. After which, Lee Hsien Loong then decides he is somehow exonerated of all wrongs.

Do you notice what’s missing? That’s right, his accusers Lee Hsien Yang and Lee Wei Ling are not present in any part of the process to give their side of the story, not only that what should have been a matter for the judiciary to decide is now being aired out in the legislative chamber and decided by the executive. This is a pure overreach of Government powers, if you were a private citizen would you want a precedent set where the Government could interfere with private affairs? If this had happened in any other country, where an outcome of a private legal dispute had been decided without one of the parties even present or involved in the process we would have shaken our heads at their “third world” justice system. Once again, the separation of powers were not adhered to.

So when SM Lee talks about understanding the differences between political and judicial issues and using the right branch of Government for the right purpose, I just don’t believe he actually means what he says. There is a word for people who say a thing but act another way.

On race issues

Singapore is a unique country in that, on the surface, we have a racially harmonious population. When I say on the surface, I don’t mean to say that everyone is secretly racist on the inside, what I mean is that this racial harmony is brought about by incredibly strict laws, such that I’m unsure if the harmony we see is only superficial, and people in Singapore are just racially tolerant instead of racially harmonious. Case in point would be an incident where a man had confronted a biracial couple telling them to date their “own race”.

Racial policy in Singapore is incredibly strict and pervasive, it permeates every facet of life, starting from when you are born when you need to register your race on your birth certificate, to when you wish to apply for a HDB flat and find out some flats are reserved for minorities only. SM Lee acknowledges this in the interview, he goes as far as to call these policies a form of “indoctrination”. And yet when pressed about racism in Singapore, he says there is a need for some moderation in handling incidents of racism, and he disparages what he calls a “movement called Wokeness” in the West. In this we are in agreement, that while “woke” was originally a slang term originating from African-American Vernacular English to mean an awareness to racial prejudice and discrimination, it has now been co-opted to be awareness of any kind of injustice, so much so that any inequality between different groups in society is immediately seen as evidence of a systemic injustice. In this SM Lee is right, we cannot allow that kind of identity politics to enter Singapore.

But once again despite espousing such beliefs, SM Lee and his Government does not act accordingly. One of the offshoots of “woke” politics is the tendency to view the world through the lens of race, and every problem racial groups face is then a problem tied to their race. In Singapore the problem is amplified when people are sorted by race the moment they are born. It is evident in the interview when just a couple of questions before SM Lee’s anti-woke statement the interviewers saw it fit to ask about how the Malay-Muslim and Indian communities are doing (notice no one thinks to ask about the Chinese community given that they are the majority).

It is my view that the racial policies in Singapore are good at preserving a racially tolerant society, but to be a truly racially harmonious society we have to do away with any race based policies, including registration of race at birth, to public housing eligibility based on race, and having a guaranteed minority candidate in Group Representation Constituencies (GRCs) (and while we’re at that abolish GRCs altogether). In order to have a racially harmonious society we should move towards a colour blind society. The term colour blind is often ridiculed as ignoring the realities of race and the struggles that different races face, but I think it is just the opposite. There is an interview that Coleman Hughes does on The View that explains this philosophy: colour blindness is not about not seeing race (and the bias and discrimination that might come with that), it is about trying our best not to see race in our personal lives and public policy. If you think that the Malay-Muslim community is disproportionately doing worse economically than their other counterparts in Singapore, then a policy that helps the poor in Singapore would disproportionately benefit the Malay-Muslim community. Are there no poor Chinese in Singapore? Of course there are. What good is telling a Chinese person living in a HDB rental flat struggling to hold a job to make ends meet that they have some sort of “Chinese privilege”? They certainly don’t feel privileged, and this inadvertently worsens race relations in Singapore when they are told again and again that they are. The only way to make Singaporeans truly colour blind to race is to adopt colour blind policies.

So despite SM Lee’s rejection of “Wokeness”, his administration has done little in the way to remove these targeted racial policies, instead he has added new ones. The introduction of the Reserved Elections was a sore point amongst Singaporeans, and might have been the single most damaging policy he and his Government had put up. That Tharman Shanmugaratnam was elected in a non-reserved election right after Halimah Yacob’s term was proof that such a policy was not about ensuring that minorities would be represented in Singapore, the insinuation that the Singapore people were somehow so racist that they would never elect a minority without the Government to tell them to do so was clearly a false narrative perpetuated by the Government. Instead of slowly breaking down the racial policies to foster a more racially harmonious society, SM Lee had in the form of the Reserved Elections raised the biggest middle finger to racial equality: the idea that for a minority to reach the highest office in the land they needed a leg up in their very own special elections. And again SM Lee fails to practice what he preached.

On free riders

SM Lee once again reiterated his stance on the “free rider” problem, but this time he was careful not to use the term. The term was used by SM Lee to describe Singaporeans who wanted the PAP to form the Government, but voted for the Opposition because they wished to see more alternative voices in Parliament. The term was largely unpopular with Singaporeans, so it was wise of SM Lee not to bring it up again. Calling about 40% of your citizens “free riders” was insulting and would once again show how out of touch SM Lee and the PAP was with the electorate.

I don’t agree with the “free rider” moniker that SM Lee chose (he should really fire whoever came up with it), but I understand and agree with the underlying idea. I too like SM Lee think that people should vote for the Government they want, not just use their vote as a protest. This is not to say that people cannot vote however they want, you can vote for any reason, you could vote for someone because you prefer how they look or how they speak, far be it for me to stop you from exercising your right to vote. But don’t claim to be some kind of “enlightened voter” when you vote for the Opposition just because you want to give the PAP some kind of “check and balance”. I think either you draw the line in the sand and say you’re prepared to vote out the PAP in order to try a different party’s vision for Singapore, or you accept that the PAP vision of Singapore is actually how you want Singapore to be, that maybe you’re unhappy with some of the policies that are enacted but by and large you like how things are and you want it to continue.

But I don’t blame the people for this. The irony is that this is a creation of the PAP, so SM Lee only has himself to blame for this problem. The constant quashing of the Opposition in Singapore by the PAP has led to an incredibly infantile Opposition, one that is still struggling to find its feet. The by-election strategy by Mr Chiam See Tong (described here by SM Lee) is now the blueprint for the Workers’ Party’s “check and balance” strategy. As SM Lee himself had said, “you must win the politics, otherwise the policies cannot run”. And so the PAP has created a perverse incentive for the people to vote for the Opposition. I suspect that the people have no actual stomach for a non PAP Government, and why would they? The people of Singapore have been for decades through our education system and environment trained to become extremely risk adverse. The prevailing logic is given that the Opposition is as yet untested as Government, we cannot trust that they will do a good job as Government. Of course by this logic it also means that the Opposition can never be trusted to form Government.

The PAP could put an end to their “free rider” problem altogether. What the people want to see is more accountability on the part of the PAP. All they need to do is to become more transparent and release more figures and let the people see more of what is inside the black box to alleviate the people’s concerns. Of course, the PAP will never do that, any attempt at transparency necessarily gives the Opposition more information to work with, and the information asymmetry is one of the biggest advantages the PAP has.

SM Lee could also easily avoid the problem he describes, where an incompetent Opposition wins too many votes and ousts the PAP out of Government. All he needs to do is allow for a smoother transition of power should the PAP ever lose an election by creating a shadow cabinet. A shadow cabinet would allow members of the Opposition to understand and scrutinize decisions made by the Government, and give them a better understanding of how Singapore’s Government functions. This would allay the people’s fears that should the Opposition ever win an election they would not be incompetent at forming Government. But of course the PAP would never do, despite the fact that it is in the country’s best interest. The best they can do is create the “Leader of the Opposition”, which as far as I’m aware has changed nothing except cost the Singaporean tax payer more money.

On the Opposition

The end of the interview was certainly the most illuminating part, it reveals the mindset that SM Lee and by extension the PAP have towards the Opposition and the electorate. One of the biggest problems with the PAP is that they believe that they and they alone have the answers to the problems that Singapore face. This is despite the fact that they know they make mistakes, SM Lee having apologised before on behalf of the Government for mistakes they had made in 2011. It is impossible for anyone to be right all the time, no matter how competent you are, which is why diversity in viewpoints is important. There is a condescension that betrays SM Lee’s feelings about the opposition, for example when he says:

“And the Opposition will chip in ideas and sometimes if you close your ears, close your eyes it sounds it could have been made by somebody wearing white and white.”

To him, the PAP has a monopoly on good ideas. It becomes even more apparent when he later says:

“You have to deal with them, you have to rebut it. But I think if we spend more and more time thinking up clever arguments and rebutting clever arguments, we will have less and less time thinking up good ideas and implementing good ideas.”

Any and all ideas the Opposition puts out are merely “clever arguments” to be dismissed, they are, by virtue of coming from the Opposition, necessarily bad. Only the PAP can ever think up of good ideas and implement good ideas, and the Opposition is in the way of that. SM Lee and the PAP begin every debate with the Opposition with the conclusion in mind so much so that no matter how convincing the arguments are, it always ends the same way: Opposition bad.

To SM Lee it is inconceivable the Opposition might be better than the PAP. According to him, if the Opposition were to win, maybe the PAP have failed and the Opposition are now the better option. Or maybe, just maybe, the “political system has malfunctioned”, because the Singapore people in their unfathomable folly have voted in so many Opposition members that “the Government was less able to govern well and therefore lost the support and there is nobody else there who is going to be able to do better”. And this is the mindset: that the Singapore people don’t know any better, that if we vote in Opposition it will only ever weaken the Government. Is the PAP so weak? Will they fold to the slightest questioning by the Opposition? Does SM Lee have so little faith in his policies (which according to him are right by virtue of being PAP policies)?

Maybe when you get so used to always having your way, to having the media cover for you, that the slightest whisper of an objection is enough to blow down the house of cards. The solution to the Singapore people voting in the Opposition is not doubling down and stubbornly insisting you’re always right, it is coming up with better policies so people will continue to vote you in. This goes back to a speech made by SM Lee in 2006, where he actually says the quiet part out loud:

“Then instead of spending my time thinking of what is the right policy for Singapore, I'm going to spend all my time, I have to spend all my time thinking what is the right way to fix them, what is the right way to buy my own supporters over.”

Today almost 20 years later SM Lee is more polished, and he no longer says the quiet part out loud. But he is still the same person as he was then, and PAP is still the same party.

On Lawrence Wong

An end of an era. As Lawrence Wong takes on the helm as Singapore’s Prime Minister, I wish him the best, for his sake and ours. If Singapore is to prosper for the next 50 years, his leadership would play no small part in that. If my criticisms above seem harsh, know that I want PM Wong, and by extension Singapore, to succeed as much as any Singaporean. I say all that I do out of love, not hate, after all, “Every criticism, judgment, diagnosis, and expression of anger is the tragic expression of an unmet need.”

1. It’s good to know that at 72 years of age, SM Lee still possesses great flexibility, being limber enough to repeatedly pat himself on his back - no one is better at thanking the PAP of doing a good job than the PAP themselves. When speaking of the preparedness of Singapore’s foreign dignitaries, he had this to say: “And then we work, we go there, we are prepared, and we talk. And I think we do have a bit of a reputation for that, and it is a good reputation. Sometimes, of course, people say, ‘Wow, you are so well prepared, I better be careful, am I really ready to talk to you or not.’ So that is a bit of a hurdle we have to cross.”

2. I have made my disagreements with Singapore’s stance on Israel clear, but I have also said I can understand the Government’s position on the issue given our Muslim population and the fact that our 2 closest neighbours are Muslim majority countries. I still think that even if Singapore does not wish to be seen openly supporting Israel, the right thing is to abstain from commenting on the issue, though I suspect that the performative aspect is just too enticing for the PAP, so they must sound out in all the sound and fury to appease the pro Palestinian crowd in Singapore.

3. There is a Channel News Asia piece on mayors in 2020 highlighting what a mayor does in a day. I’d rather know what they actually do in terms of planning the distribution of welfare or creation of policies because if all they do is make photo-op appearances in schools to teach children how to wash their hands or physically hand out care packages to residents, someone else can be doing that job for a lot less money.

4. I will say that s377A should never have been a law in the first place. Regardless of where you stand on the morality of homosexuality, morality and the law are two different things. Where there is clearly no harm being done to either party, the state has no business legislating what happens behind closed doors between two consenting adults. On this issue I think it is the clearest divergence from the party of Lee “We decide what is right. Never mind what the people think.” Kuan Yew whose PAP was defined by making unpopular but correct decisions, contrasted with Lee “monitor the situation” Hsien Loong whose PAP was defined by waiting at the sidelines till absolutely certain that their decisions would have no political consequences. The PAP under Lee Hsien Loong started a review of s377A in 2007, brought up not by his own party but by an Nominated Member of Parliament, who then decided to take the most fence sitting action I have ever seen: to leave the law on the books to appease the party base but declare in Parliament that the law would not be enforced to appease the social progressives (some might call it having your cake and eating it (twice)).

5. Perhaps having had control of both the executive and the legislature for so long the PAP now views them as one as the same. Maybe it is understandable that they think that way, given that their party members virtually always vote along party lines, with or without a whip. It is so rare that a PAP member votes against the party line that it is the exception that proves the rule (case in point Tan Cheng Bock who later quit the party to form his own).