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- Apr 26, 2014
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Did you know that LKY is till today the mastermind behind creating an elite class?
Did you know that the sole purpose of the elite class is to perpetuate the Lee family business?
Did you know that the headhunters of candidates for the top jobs of the cabinet and GLCs used to be handled by a very special department?
If you wish to know more, go buy the book "The ruling elite of Singapore: Networks of power and influence" by Michael Barr.
My friends recommended it to me and I hope you will do the same to your friends. More than 450 people have bought it and become enlightened (or disgusted) depending on how you look at it.
Excerpt #1
The centrality of Lee Kuan Yew’s personal-cum-professional connections to this group is significant to our study because the pattern of recruitment he was setting in place as a matter of expediency became established as the template for networking into the long term and, with significant modifications, is still in operation today. In the early years, personal, school and family friendships were grounds for recruiting someone into the Cabinet and simply being an acquaintance of someone near the top of the PAP was a sufficient basis on which to be invited into politics. Eddie Barker (an early Minister for Law) was an old school friend of Lee’s. Lim Kim San (an early Minister for Finance) was a school friend of Goh Keng Swee’s. Maurice Baker (an old friend of Lee’s) declined an appeal to join politics and the Cabinet, but ended up taking lesser roles. J.Y. Pillay was Goh Keng Swee’s friend from their days in London when he was brought into the civil service, whereupon he became an integral member of the administrative elite until well into the 1990s. When the PAP needed a candidate to run in a by-election in 1981 – more than a quarter of a century after the formation of the PAP – they chose a candidate who was unsuitable (and who was defeated), but who was Lim Kim San’s nephew. This personalised pattern of recruitment survives even today: in 2011, when the PAP wanted to appeal to young voters, it ran Tin Pei Ling, an embarrassing and disastrous candidate who was the wife of Prime Minister Lee’s Principal Private Secretary. A shadow version of this pattern of recruitment reached into the civil service as well, and many young men who were recruited into the junior rungs of the civil service team during this early period of old guard rule – people such as Hon Sui Sen, S. Dhanabalan, Goh Chok Tong, S.R. Nathan and Ngiam Tong Dow – were then invited into the inner circle of power after informal apprenticeships served in close physical and professional proximity to their patrons.
Excerpt #2
At the heart of the story is the highly secretive Directorship and Consultancy Appointments Council (DCAC), the existence of which was kept secret until 1985. Even today its membership is not known to the public and its existence is not acknowledged in the Singapore Government Directory. Yet until the mid-1990s, it had been in charge of making almost every appointment at board and executive levels across almost every GLC.
Did you know that the sole purpose of the elite class is to perpetuate the Lee family business?
Did you know that the headhunters of candidates for the top jobs of the cabinet and GLCs used to be handled by a very special department?
If you wish to know more, go buy the book "The ruling elite of Singapore: Networks of power and influence" by Michael Barr.
My friends recommended it to me and I hope you will do the same to your friends. More than 450 people have bought it and become enlightened (or disgusted) depending on how you look at it.
Excerpt #1
The centrality of Lee Kuan Yew’s personal-cum-professional connections to this group is significant to our study because the pattern of recruitment he was setting in place as a matter of expediency became established as the template for networking into the long term and, with significant modifications, is still in operation today. In the early years, personal, school and family friendships were grounds for recruiting someone into the Cabinet and simply being an acquaintance of someone near the top of the PAP was a sufficient basis on which to be invited into politics. Eddie Barker (an early Minister for Law) was an old school friend of Lee’s. Lim Kim San (an early Minister for Finance) was a school friend of Goh Keng Swee’s. Maurice Baker (an old friend of Lee’s) declined an appeal to join politics and the Cabinet, but ended up taking lesser roles. J.Y. Pillay was Goh Keng Swee’s friend from their days in London when he was brought into the civil service, whereupon he became an integral member of the administrative elite until well into the 1990s. When the PAP needed a candidate to run in a by-election in 1981 – more than a quarter of a century after the formation of the PAP – they chose a candidate who was unsuitable (and who was defeated), but who was Lim Kim San’s nephew. This personalised pattern of recruitment survives even today: in 2011, when the PAP wanted to appeal to young voters, it ran Tin Pei Ling, an embarrassing and disastrous candidate who was the wife of Prime Minister Lee’s Principal Private Secretary. A shadow version of this pattern of recruitment reached into the civil service as well, and many young men who were recruited into the junior rungs of the civil service team during this early period of old guard rule – people such as Hon Sui Sen, S. Dhanabalan, Goh Chok Tong, S.R. Nathan and Ngiam Tong Dow – were then invited into the inner circle of power after informal apprenticeships served in close physical and professional proximity to their patrons.
Excerpt #2
At the heart of the story is the highly secretive Directorship and Consultancy Appointments Council (DCAC), the existence of which was kept secret until 1985. Even today its membership is not known to the public and its existence is not acknowledged in the Singapore Government Directory. Yet until the mid-1990s, it had been in charge of making almost every appointment at board and executive levels across almost every GLC.
