Two oppositions, and why they don'

[Royal Canin Feline 32]

This is going to be the first of three articles. There is a sense that a general election is approaching and I am going to use this unhurried period to express some thoughts about the state of play and what I think the future holds. At the same time, I hope to introduce the analytical tools for assessing various political parties' positions when the shouting starts. Here, in this opening article, I will first explain what I mean by the "two oppositions" in my title. It is triggered by (but it is not about) a small spat going on in the pages of The Online Citizen (TOC) between Kenneth Jeyaretnam, the Secretary-General of the Reform Party, and the website's writer and editors.


It began with a story by TOC on the Youth Wing of the Workers' Party, which opened with these words:

Don’t expect rabble-rousing politics from the Worker’s Party of today. Unlike the late J B Jeyaretnam, who was nicknamed "The Tiger" for his unrestrained election rally speeches and rambunctious attacks on the PAP government, the party is set on treading the careful path.
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Kenneth Jeyaretnam, the elder son of J B Jeyaretnam, took issue with the way his father had been negatively characterised. He wrote, saying he was

gravely concerned that a write up of the Workers Party Youth Wing was used as an opportunity to attack JBJ and I believe, by association, the [Reform Party]




Read the full article at Yawning Bread

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[Royal Canin Feline 32]

From Yawning Bread:

<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="760"><tbody><tr><td align="left" valign="top" width="480">In my previous article, I presented a diagram showing the ruling People's Action Party's (PAP's) credo, and the chief baskets of grievances behind dissent. Readers may therefore expect that the next step in this analysis would be to identify which opposition party represents which basket, and how.


But that would be to miss the big picture, for the chief driver of opposition politics today is a dislike, a visceral dislike, of the PAP's style. They hate the PAP more than they disagree with its policies. This is unlike, say, 40 years ago, when the differences were primarily programmatic, even ideological.


Hence, I should add the cloud "Dislike" to my diagram thus:

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Having a visceral dislike of style as the main driving force has pros and cons. On the one hand, it means that there is little the PAP can realistically do to win over the opposition's core base. Hate, once engendered, is hard to dispel. On the other hand, it is difficult to grow opposition support so long as the rest of the voters do not share, as strongly, the same dislike. This probably accounts for the fact that vote-share for opposition parties tends to be stuck in the 25 – 40 percent range.
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Read the article at Yawning Bread