Do we like them?

Do we like Pritam Singh?

Our score: 4 out of 10. No harmful words or campaigns of his own turned up, but a upheld conviction for lying to a parliamentary committee, which he denies, drags the good-person side down.

Pritam Singh is the head of Singapore's Workers' Party, the main opposition force, and until January 2026 he held the formal title of Leader of the Opposition. He is an MP for Aljunied GRC and said in Parliament he would keep working there whatever the House decided. The early-life detail is thin in the reporting we could open, so this column is mostly about the last few years.

The story that defines him starts in 2021. Then WP MP Raeesah Khan told Parliament a made-up anecdote about a rape victim and police, and later admitted in Parliament that she had lied. A district court convicted Singh in February 2025 of two counts of lying to the Committee of Privileges about how he handled it. The High Court upheld that in December 2025 and kept the S$14,000 in fines, finding he had told Khan to take the untruth “to the grave” and had said “I will not judge you”.

Singh says he did nothing wrong. In Parliament in January 2026 he said, “My position is Khan was not told to lie, let alone guided to lie,” and that his conscience was clear. He did concede he should have done better in balancing sensitivity to Khan with correcting the record. Parliament still passed a motion calling him unsuitable as Leader of the Opposition, and the WP's 11 MPs voted against it.

On the harm check, nothing of his own turned up against LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants or the planet. On Section 377A, the party took no official position and members' views varied. Home Affairs Minister Shanmugam called that “not true democracy”. When the repeal came, Singh said the PAP lifting its whip was about not fettering MPs' votes, and six of nine WP MPs backed repeal. That is a cautious record rather than a champion's, hence the asterisk.

There is an older stain too. In the Aljunied-Hougang town council saga, the Court of Appeal in 2023 cleared Singh of liability for negligence in the payments process, because that claim was never brought against him. Two of his WP colleagues, Sylvia Lim and Low Thia Khiang, were found liable. So the court record there goes his way, but it is part of why the party's governance has been under the microscope.

Inside the party, he has come out ahead. A disciplinary panel finished its investigation in April 2026, and cadres then voted to keep him as secretary-general on 28 June, with reports of a supermajority after 25 cadres had asked him to step down. The WP also declined to nominate a replacement Leader of the Opposition. Whether you read that as loyalty or as closing ranks around a convicted leader is the call for you.