Yes, LTK has made it clear. You fight your battle, we fight ours. It's his prerogative to reject unity. So be it.
I guess any opposition alliance in future will have to be between non-WP opposition parties. 3CF (oppo alliance vs WP vs PAP) will likely become a fixture of the political landscape hence.
I raised the analogy of section live firing because in a way the soldiers are co-operating, and in a way they are not on the same ground as each other, and they are not in close communication. But they are fighting the same battle, and they are allies. There is some co-ordination, but not a tight one, going on.
I don't think that LTK totally wants to shut out the other opposition, or they want to go to war with each other. They will want to avoid 3CF with other parties, although whether they succeed is another matter. For once,in 2011, they have almost completely avoided three corner fights, and it is possible for that to continue. I'm not convinced that WP wants to cannibalise other parties yet, one Kallang Moulmein notwithstanding. He said "if the opposition parties were to unite, Singapore today would not have so many opposition parties". In a way he's saying that other opposition parties have a right to exist, but a tighter unity can only be achieved by a single party. If the parties want to work together so much, they might as well merge.
And if you listen closely to what he is saying, it isn't so much "I don't give a shit about you", but rather it is "if I can have opposition parties working together, why not. But given their track record, they will only drag me down."
Sorry, I don't consider intra-party unity a form of opposition unity. It is a given that any organization, party or company needs unity to remain intact and grow. Every party leader naturally works hard for intra-party unity, has to. Are they all then proponents of 'opposition unity'?
Saying intra-party unity is opposition unity is like saying national unity is the same as family unity, that if you're for a united family, you're for national unity. Plain fallacy.
Opposition unity must have both components. If parties are not internally united, and all the opposition chiefs agree to have “opposition unity”, do you think it is possible? Factions can form between parties, they can form within parties, it doesn’t really matter. Factions are factions, unity is unity. Why is everybody making a big deal about whether the SDP is getting along with the WP, rather than making a big deal about why the SDA is not getting along with RP? Isn't this supposed to be a big issue since 1.) SDA and RP almost had a formal alliance and 2.) they are actually competing against each other for Punggol East? Everybody is talking about opposition unity with respect to WP because they are the ones who are unified internally, and the only ones who probably know how to make parties work together.
Well the PAP thinks that the family is a building block of society, and a part of national unity. Whether you think that interparty unity and intraparty unity are the same as each other is a matter of naming convention. But to me they are extremely similar. There are differences, because intraparty unity is supposed to be stronger, and unlike interparty unity, it matters that you have the same ideology. In a sense LTK alludes to this when he says that there can only be true unity when you agree. But even then, similarity in ideology is not even the most important thing. The most important thing is, "how much are you willing to biah for me, and how much am I willing to biah for you."
Anyway LTK is the only one with a proven track record in getting people to work together. He's the only one that I trust knows what he's saying when the talks about opposition unity. The other opposition parties should watch and learn from LTK's example of how to unite the factions of his party. If they can do that then LTK would have contributed more to "opposition unity" than anybody else.
