The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew (43 page)

Raja, ever the idealist and the ideologue, was in favour of our forming a strong opposition. Keng Swee and Kenny, both administrators, were convinced we had to form the government. They argued that the corruption would spread from the ministers into the civil service itself, and that if we sat out another five-year term under Lim Yew Hock, there would no longer be an effective administration to implement our policies. Unlike the communists, we had no cadre of our own with which to replace it. By February, we had decided to fight to win, and in preparation, Keng Swee and Kenny both resigned from their government posts under a special law that allowed former senior civil servants to contest elections and continue to receive their pensions. Our chief adversary would be the Singapore People’s Alliance (SPA), a coalition of the Labour Front and the Liberal Socialists that Lim Yew Hock had put together the previous November.

We drafted policy papers on economics, education, housing, health, rural development, labour and women’s rights, which we published in a series of pamphlets entitled “The Tasks Ahead”.

We launched our election campaign on Sunday, 15 February, with a pre-election rally at Hong Lim Green, at which Chin Chye disclosed that the Americans had given $500,000 to the SPA:

“It is an open secret that income tax investigation into a half-million dollar account at the National City Bank of New York in the name of a minister was quite quickly and properly choked off because this money, being a political gift, was not liable to income tax.”

It was a bombshell.

The SPA denounced the accusation as a lie. The US consulate-general issued a statement denying that the US government had made any contribution to the SPA – it was not US policy to interfere in the political affairs of other nations. So, on 18 February, I gave notice of a motion in the Assembly in which I named Chew Swee Kee as the person who had the account and called for a commission of inquiry. As the motion was about to be debated on 4 March, Chew resigned from his post as minister for education and from the Assembly. In a written statement, he said, “I want to clear the SPA’s name … I have nothing to hide.”

In the debate, I said that in 1957, Chew had received $300,000 for his party, some of it for the City Council election, and in 1958, a further $500,000, also for political purposes. I revealed that I had the permission of Francis Thomas to say that it was he who had told me that Chew had received the $300,000. As I spoke, Thomas left the government benches and crossed the floor to sit with the opposition. He later explained to the press that he had not disclosed the matter at the time since it would have wrecked the Labour Party and probably the government, which for all its faults was doing a good job. In the middle of 1958, however, it had become obvious to him that the Front was not going to be cleaned up, and he had told me about the money, asking me to keep it confidential (which I did). By then, he had resigned as minister.

Having achieved our political purpose of discrediting the SPA for taking money from the Americans, I offered to withdraw my motion. Lim Yew Hock unwisely refused. He declared that the government had nothing to hide and that he wanted the commission of inquiry to find out, not if the charges were true, but how the information had been leaked from the Income Tax Department. The commission opened its inquiry on 6 April, under Mr Justice Murray Buttrose, an Australian who had served with the British armed forces in the war, and I appeared on behalf of Kenny and Chin Chye. The details then disclosed did further damage to the SPA government. Chew admitted that, with the $800,000
in question, he had bought a house in Ipoh in the name of his wife for $51,000, invested $250,000 in the Perak Mining Enterprise Ltd in the name of a Mr Chong, a trusted member of his party, and was considering an investment of $30,000 in another mining company in Ipoh with Chong as nominee. He had also given $50,000 worth of shares in the mining company to Mrs Hamid Jumat, wife of the UMNO minister for local government. The representative of the National City Bank of New York refused to name the donor publicly, but wrote his name on a piece of paper and handed it to the commissioner, who did not reveal it.

The findings of the commission released on 25 May substantially confirmed what Chin Chye had revealed in his rally speech. The report was published in the press on 27 May, two days before polling day. It only confirmed what voters already knew – that Lim Yew Hock’s government was corrupt, and worse, that it was now in the pay of the Americans.

As I expected, the opposition parties were a shambles when nomination day approached. I knew Lim Yew Hock wanted UMNO and the MCA to be in his SPA along with the Labour Front and the Liberal Socialist Party. He was anxious to prevent a repetition of the split in the moderate vote that had occurred in the City Council election. But it was not to be. The disaster of the Chew Swee Kee affair and the unfavourable fallout from the commission of inquiry had put voters off. Meanwhile, general dissension among the Liberal Socialists had led to total confusion as all its assemblymen and many of its ordinary members left it. Instead of merging into the SPA as they had earlier agreed, the Liberal Socialists went into the election on their own.

On nomination day, 25 April 1959, the SPA put up candidates for 39 seats, the Liberal Socialists for 32, and there were 34 independents. The PAP contested all 51 seats with 34 Chinese candidates, 10 Malays, six Indians and one Eurasian. We had proportionately more Malays and Indians than in the population ratio, but we thought it good for the morale of the minorities.

We held six mass rallies and between 60 and 100 street meetings in the 33 days of campaigning, at the start of which the bookies were already taking bets on the number of seats we would win by, which was a good sign. The other parties knew this, were demoralised, and did not put up a vigorous or coherent campaign. On the other hand, PAP election workers displayed tremendous energy. Many of our candidates were under 30, and their speeches generated great enthusiasm among the younger voters. We had broken Chinese tradition by fielding three Chinese barbers – in Imperial China barbers, together with actors and butchers, were not even eligible to sit for the imperial examinations. We represented the new order that would do away with such feudal attitudes.

In the midst of this hectic, at times hilarious, campaign, I sensed that the Tunku and his colleagues in Kuala Lumpur did not view the prospect of a “non-communist” PAP victory in Singapore kindly. Hamid Jumat told an UMNO rally in Geylang Serai that Malaya was anti-communist while the PAP was non-communist. The Malays never liked people who sat on the fence, and merger with Malaya was therefore a daydream. The next day, after I called this talk “wild”, he pressed me to be explicitly anti-communist. This was unlike Hamid, and I believed he had been stiffened by messages from Kuala Lumpur. It was clear which side the Tunku favoured.

On Sunday, 22 March, Keng Swee had delivered his speech “On Economic Policy”, as part of the “Tasks Ahead” series, and explained the necessity for cooperation between Singapore and Malaya. “In return for a common market we can offer the Federation joint control of our port, which handles so much of its foreign trade.” But Tan Siew Sin, now the Federation minister for commerce and industry, declared, “The PAP does not know what it is talking about. The idea of a common market is not practicable. The PAP should realise that one cannot have a free port and a common market at the same time. You must choose one or the other.”

At the time, I thought he was only trying to help the other side in the election. Only much later did I realise how strongly he held these views. Keng Swee was Tan’s cousin, but Tan was never going to give anything away to Singapore, as we were to find out. The atmosphere in Kuala Lumpur then was generally hostile to the PAP. The Tunku had elevated Lim Yew Hock with the title of “Tun”, the highest award in Malaya, and said that although he would not take part in the election campaign, he would help UMNO from behind the scenes. He was in favour of the anti-PAP line-up, and had warned any pro-PAP members in UMNO that they would be expelled if they stood as independents.

The US government did not favour the PAP either. The
Straits Times
reported the Commerce Department’s
Foreign Commerce Weekly’s
prediction that Singapore might swing left and abandon its tradition of private enterprise. “This possibility makes it impossible to estimate the city’s economic outlook and trade prospects,” it continued. Singapore’s financial situation was sound, but “in contrast with the Federation, the investment climate in Singapore continues to deteriorate despite the government’s announced desire to attract foreign investments”.

Inevitably, the English-language press was virulently anti-PAP, unlike the Chinese and Malay newspapers, which were friendly. That animosity had provoked a battle when I fired my first salvo on 15 April:

“It is an open secret (that if the PAP won) the
Straits Times
editorial staff would scoot to Kuala Lumpur. Those who have followed the paper’s views should also scoot with them. (For) If you read what you see in the paper, you will think we are extremists and wild men.”

This was at a lunchtime rally at Fullerton Square in the heart of the city, next to the General Post Office, near the big British banks around Raffles Place. The audience consisted mainly of white-collar English-speaking workers. I pointed to an article with bold headlines reporting that the police had refused to allow the PAP to hold a rally at Empress
Place, and then to the last paragraph, where in small type it added the meeting would take place where we now were. I compared this with a prominent report about an SPA rally. This was flagrant bias. “If people try to harm us,” I warned, “we will give them as hard as they give us.”

At our next rally, Raja followed up with an attack on the
Singapore Standard
. They talked of freedom of the press, but stifled the views of those they did not agree with, he said. He was well-qualified to speak. An associate editor of the paper from 1950 to 1954, he had been told to change his policy or quit. He quit – and the paper turned anti-PAP. One week later, he rounded on the
Straits Times
, for which he had worked after he left the
Standard
. He knew who ran the paper and named the four men, all white, including A.C. Simmons, in day-to-day control. Simmons realised that Raja and I were not joking when we said that if we formed the government, we would take them on. They were already making preparations to move the company and key staff to Kuala Lumpur because they feared a PAP victory. I had no doubts that they were determined to fight us from the federal capital. As I wrote to them:

“If locally owned newspapers criticise us we know that their criticism, however wrong or right, is bona fide criticism, because they must stay and take the consequences of any foolish policies or causes they may have advocated. Not so the birds of passage who run the
Straits Times
. They have to run to the Federation, from whose safety they boldly proclaim they will die for the freedom of Singapore.”

The editor, Leslie Hoffman, replied the same day:

“I am no bird of passage. I, who am responsible for the policy and editorial content of this newspaper, intend to remain in Singapore, even if Mr Lee and the People’s Action Party come to power, and even if they use the Preservation of Public Security Ordinance against me. … My home will be in Singapore.”

But he left for Kuala Lumpur before the election was over.

Five days before polling, Hoffman told the International Press Institute, at its annual assembly in West Berlin of newspapermen, editors and publishers, that our threats could be read as “the outpourings of a group of power-mad politicians”. The
Straits Times
, on the other hand, was “written, produced and controlled by Malayans who were born there, who had been there all their lives, and who are genuine in their nationalism and loyalty to their country”. He would not admit that it was his British masters who owned the paper and who directed its policies.

Simmons knew he was vulnerable. So he had briefed Hoffman, a Eurasian, to put his case to the IPI. “In this sense it is unique that it gives this assembly the opportunity to stop once and for all an attempt by a party to get popular support and backing for its declared intention to curtail press freedom,” Hoffman continued. But that was exactly what the PAP intended to do – to get public support for our policy that the press was not to be owned by foreigners to purvey their line. Hoffman quoted what I had said on 18 May:

“Any newspaper that tries to sour up or strain relations between the Federation of Malaya and Singapore after May 30 will go in for subversion. Any editor, leader writer, subeditor or reporter who goes along this line will be taken in under the Preservation of Public Security Ordinance. We will put him in and keep him in.”

The attitude of the
Straits Times
was all the more unjustified because we, the non-communists in the PAP, were in firm control of the election campaign, a source of great satisfaction to me. We settled the agenda, decided on the themes, made the big speeches. No organised crowds were brought to our rallies by the left-wing union leaders. Although the pro-communists were running around the party branches and some might have become candidates, Pang Boon and I had minimised the risk by selecting our Chinese-educated nominees with great care. There was no Lim Chin Siong to sway the crowds.

Ong Eng Guan was not a bad substitute for Lim Chin Siong as a Hokkien speaker for our rallies. But Pang Boon was also fluent in Hokkien as well as in Mandarin, and my Mandarin had improved; although it was not good enough for a flight of rhetoric, it was now adequate to express my thoughts without any script. I might be repeating what I had said in English or Malay in a less elegant way in Mandarin, but I won the respect of the Chinese-speaking for working hard at their language. The same was true of Chin Chye, a small man of five foot two, but lively on stage. His Mandarin was weaker than mine but he was game, and the crowds cheered us, pleased that we were making the effort to reach out to them.