The Progress Singapore Party are led by highly intelligent, highly educated people.
Dr Tan Cheng Bock is a medical doctor and former PAP MP.
Leong Mun Wai was a RI boy, and an overseas scholar to one of the top universities in Japan. He was also former Managing Director of OCBC securities.
Hazel Poa was at Hwa Chong and then an overseas scholar at Cambridge.
They are definitely not stupid nor illiterate.
Which leaves me with the only other possible conclusion : they are pretending to be.
Taking the far-right populist position isn’t easy as you need to lie consistently to people. You need to ignore the facts.
You need to be able to play to emotions.
LMW is an economist by training. He knows that a 10,000 minimum salary for employment pass holders makes zero sense.
Yet he proposed it.
Why? Because the PSP knows people who have less understanding of business and finance will immediately react emotionally to it.
This is the same as Trump, a Wharton alumni. He isn’t stupid. Yet he speaks like he is, because that’s what his base understands.
Similarly during Brexit , Boris Johnson , an Oxford-educated man, made outlandish and false claims, telling outright lies about numbers.
They both won.
The PSP is obviously doing the same thing.
Highly educated elite pretending to fight for the people who lost out, by feeding them lies they want to hear.
This is very dangerous.
It would be foolish for their opponents to think of them as stupid or illiterate.
They are cynical, deliberate and intelligent populists.
This needs to be known.