WP to look into cadre member Daniel Goh's public questioning of party leaders' handling of Raeesah Khan case

• Workers’ Party chief Pritam Singh said that cadre members do not usually operate in the way Associate Professor Daniel Goh did
• Assoc Prof Goh has written on Facebook twice on the controversy surrounding Ms Raeesah Khan’s resignation 
• Mr Singh said this is an internal party matter that they will look into

SINGAPORE — The Workers’ Party (WP) will look into the actions of its cadre member Daniel Goh, who has been publicly vocal about the party’s handling of former Member of Parliament (MP) Raeesah Khan’s admission of lying in Parliament. 

At a press conference on Thursday (Dec 2) to address Ms Raeesah’s resignation, WP secretary-general Pritam Singh said that “cadre members don’t usually operate in the way Mr Goh did”.

“But this is an internal party matter that we will look into,” he said in response to a question from TODAY about his thoughts on Associate Professor Goh’s recent public posts on social media. 

When asked to respond to Mr Singh’s comments, Assoc Prof Goh told TODAY: “On matters of public concern, I have every right as a citizen to speak my views. There was no special communication to members that made me more informed than an ordinary citizen. This is in line with party values. 

“If the party sees fit to censure or sack me for asking pertinent questions that makes for a leadership accountable to the public, then so be it. It is a reflection on the leadership. By the way, I am not resigning.”

As recently as Wednesday — a day after Ms Raeesah resigned from the party and as an MP — Assoc Prof Goh said on Facebook that “ many inconvenient questions for the WP leadership remained unanswered”.

“In politics, these can become a sticky ugly scent eroding trust,” wrote the former Non-Constituency MP.

Assoc Prof Goh, a sociologist at the National University of Singapore, stepped down from his appointments in WP’s central executive committee last year to focus on recovering from an unspecified health condition. He was the party’s organising secretary and the chair of its media team. 

In a separate Facebook post last month, Assoc Prof Goh also urged the party’s disciplinary panel — which was tasked to look into Ms Raeesah’s admission of lying — not to “throw her under the bus”. 

Instead, he said that the party’s leadership should take some responsibility for “allowing this transgression to happen and persist over several months”. 

On Thursday, Mr Singh disclosed that party leaders knew that Ms Raeesah lied in her parliamentary speech a week after she delivered it and nearly three months before she set the record straight in the House.

However, the party did not act on it earlier because he wanted to give her time to talk to her family about the matter, and because she had to be the one to correct the untruth in Parliament.

On Nov 1, Ms Raeesah admitted in Parliament that she lied about the alleged experience of a sexual assault victim being treated insensitively at a police station.

She claimed in a parliamentary speech in August that she accompanied the victim there when she had not.

She merely heard about the alleged account at a women’s support group that she attended.

Ms Raeesah disclosed that she did not want to say then that she was attending the group session, because she was a survivor of a sexual assault and "did not have the courage to publicly admit” that she was part of it.

Leader of the House Indranee Rajah later referred Ms Raeesah’s conduct to Parliament's privileges committee, which looks into complaints alleging breaches of parliamentary privilege.

The clerk’s office of Parliament said on Wednesday that the committee’s work was still under way and it would present its report to Parliament in “due course”.