SINGAPORE - Former Workers’ Party (WP) Non-Constituency MP (NCMP) Daniel Goh has been expelled from the party over Facebook posts he made about the way its leadership handled former Sengkang GRC MP Raeesah Khan’s resignation.
In a Facebook post on Thursday night, Associate Professor Goh, who was a WP cadre member, posted a redacted picture of a letter from the party dated May 26 confirming his expulsion with immediate effect. His retirement from politics “is complete”, he said.
“Since the central executive committee requested nicely that I not disclose the correspondence due to information about the ‘inner workings’ of the party, I won’t. Though, ironically, that is the very reason given for the expulsion,” he wrote.
“Got (to) update my CV to say I was expelled from WP for calling out the leadership,” added Prof Goh.
He said he will focus on serving Singapore through his work at the National University of Singapore, where he is the associate provost of undergraduate education and teaches at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology.
The WP declined to comment on Prof Goh’s expulsion.
In September 2022, Prof Goh said on Facebook that the WP leadership had convened a disciplinary committee to look into his posts about Ms Khan, who resigned from the WP and as an MP for Sengkang GRC in November 2021 after she admitted to lying in Parliament.
He had said in a Facebook post before her resignation that the party’s leadership must take some responsibility for allowing Ms Khan’s transgression to persist.
He also related his own experience in which speeches were shared, reviewed and debated among MPs, and if a mistake was made, it was rectified immediately.
In a December 2021 post, he posed several questions regarding Ms Khan’s resignation and said that it had left “many inconvenient questions” for the WP leadership unanswered.
Prof Goh said in his September 2022 post that he had declined to be interviewed by the disciplinary committee, which had asked to hear the rationale behind his public statements.
He added that the committee said his posts had revealed the inner workings of the parliamentary caucus of the WP MPs, allowed political opponents to have an inside understanding of how the WP operates, and cast a cloud over the character of the leadership of the party.
On Thursday, Prof Goh confirmed that his expulsion was in relation to these Facebook posts.
He told The Straits Times he was not shocked at all by the sacking. He added: “I won’t say happy, it is more a sense of relief, a closure to a very disappointing experience.”
Asked why he chose not to resign earlier, he said: “It is my responsibility to stay with the party I have contributed to for so many years to build up.”
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Prof Goh said he does not intend to join other political parties.
He started volunteering with the WP in the 2011 General Election and joined as a party member in 2013.
He contested in East Coast GRC in the 2015 General Election, and served as an NCMP between 2016 and 2020 after the WP’s Lee Li Lian, who lost the Punggol East ward to Mr Charles Chong from the People’s Action Party, declined to take up the seat.
Political observers had at one point regarded him and his then fellow NCMPs Leon Perera and Dennis Tan as possible successors to former WP chief Low Thia Khiang, though Prof Goh publicly ruled himself out of the running.
Prof Goh stepped down from his party posts prior to the general election in 2020, citing health reasons.
This article was first published in The Straits Times. Permission required for reproduction.