Raving Loonies? (Part 2)

So what is it that Singaporeans feel they need to be so reasonable about?  I’m not sure I have the smallest idea.  A. found it weirdly amusing (and, God knows, he does probably deserve to feel amused about something!) to refuse to tell me the first and even the fifth or six time I asked him who he cast his vote in favour of in 2006.  In the end, I believe, he looked at the personalities involved and voted for the guy he thought most likely to work to improve local residents’ quality of life.  As a voter in the UK, I wasn’t required to worry about what my MP was proposing to achieve in my constituency; improving local residents’ quality of life is a job for the local council and not for the people’s representative in parliament.  All I really had to decide was whether I would prefer to see the Conservative party or the Labour party form the next Government and, thereafter, vote for whichever local candidate seemed most likely to defeat the candidate from the party I didn’t want to see in power.  Under what is essentially a two-story system, provided the party I didn’t want could be defeated, the party I did want must inevitably come into power, you see? 

Another thing that makes it appear fairly easy for British voters to decide how to cast their votes is that the two dominant parties are each likely to be promoting a hugely different set of proposals.  For example, as long as the Labour party is proposing to use tax payers’ money to build more subsidised housing, its Conservative counterpart will be proposing to sell off any subsidising housing that’s owned by the state in order that tax payers might not have to pay so much tax.  Voters need to get used to the idea of voting against what they don’t want and not voting in favour of what they do want, that’s all.  In contrast, Singaporean voters appear to expect that opposing candidates should each be making more or less exactly the same promises to the electorate – to control the cost of living, create more jobs for Singaporeans, keep housing affordable, etc.  The only real difference is that the PAP doesn’t usually have very much to say about public accountability; it’s only the representatives in other parties who are inclined to bang on about that one…