KNOW UR HISTORY: S'PORE WAS A MULTI-PARTY DEMOCRACY IN 1965

<Facebook post by Thum Pingtjin>

Regrettable and shocking ignorance of Singapore's history. We WERE a multi-party democracy in 1965. In 1963 General Election, the PAP won 37 seats and 46.9% of the vote; the Barisan Sosialis won 13 seats and 33.2% of the vote; and the United People's Party won 1 seat and 8.4% of the vote. Between 1966-67, arrests, detentions, and resignations steadily reduced the opposition presence in Parliament, leading to the first PAP sweep of Parliament in the 1968 elections. If not for multi-party democracy, Singaporeans would not have had the opportunity to elect the great first generation of PAP leaders in 1959; and as Lee Kuan Yew himself admitted in his autobiography, the PAP left-wing (who subsequently became the opposition Barisan Sosialis) forced his team to raise their game and to hold themselves to a higher moral and professional standard. Our success was founded in our period of vigorous multi-party democracy in 1955-65.