Society: LawSoc dissent

In 1986, Lee Kuan Yew’s government tabled a bill to restrict the sale or distribution of foreign publications that weren’t singing his tune. “Existing laws adequate, says Law Society [LawSoc]”, rang the rebuttal headline in The Straits Times (ST). LawSoc’s statement called the proposed amendments “ambiguous” and “superfluous”. Incensed, Lee organised a televised Select Committee Hearing, during which he grilled Francis Seow, LawSoc president, and junior lawyers Tang Fong Har and Teo Soh Lung. The media amendments passed, and so did a new bill neutering LawSoc, prohibiting it from commenting on existing or proposed legislations unless the government specifically called for its views. (In subsequent years all three, and many others, would be detained without trial, effectively quelling that 80s Spring.)

Since then, the role and independence of LawSoc has always been a little unclear, as events of the past week have shown. This episode’s genesis was in LawSoc’s council elections in October. Most of the 21-member council is elected by its 6,400 odd members. But the law minister, and the council itself, can each appoint up to three people to it. Edwin Tong’s chosen man, Dinesh Singh Dhillon, entered the council, stood for election to president, and apparently won by a single vote against Samuel Chacko, incumbent vice-president. He then became the first president-elect to be a statutory member appointed by the law minister.

Over 25 disgruntled lawyers submitted a formal requisition for an Extraordinary General Meeting (EGM), meeting the statutory threshold under Section 68 of the Legal Profession Act—which also stipulates that the council has 14 days to call a general meeting, failing which the requisitioners can convene one themselves. Which is precisely what happened. Boomer time followed: a senior lawyer apparently expressed “disgust” that the young and brave Luo Ling Ling took to social media to publicise the EGM. ST bizarrely reframed its narrative about the incident. It then published “What do we really expect from the Law Society?”, an editorial by Ben Chester Cheong, a young lawyer, which was roundly ridiculed by more experienced ones, including Michael Chia, outgoing treasurer. Ho Ching, the electrical-engineer-turned-general-know-it-all, took to social media to clarify LawSoc’s role. Her views, too, faced criticism from actual lawyers, including Chia.

With a potentially fractious EGM slated for December 22nd—one lawyer had suggested that council members against convening the EGM should be censured and asked to resign—there’s been furious mediation between the different factions over the past week. Dhillon first proposed to serve for just one of a two-year term, after which he’d stand for election to the council first, if he intended to run for president again. Presumably it wasn’t enough. On Wednesday he stepped aside all together. The council will nominate and elect Tan Cheng Han as the new president for 2026, and Dhillon as vice-president. A conciliatory statement affirmed, among other things, Dhillon’s competence and independence. Proposed new eligibility criteria include a minimum service period requirement on the council for office-bearers. The EGM on Monday has been transformed into a perfunctory damp squib—the consent resolution regarding Tan’s and Dhillon’s new roles is the only agenda item. Any perception of political interference has presumably been negated. No surprise, perhaps. This is the age of Lawrence, not Lee.

Society: Last straw for last-mile delivery workers

The math simply isn’t mathing. A courier earns roughly S$1 or even less for every parcel delivered. A late delivery can incur a penalty of S$20 to S$50. Lose a parcel, and they may be charged the price of the item plus a fine of up to S$125: at least 100 times the value of the job itself. “As good as one whole day’s salary gone,” a contractor told CNA. Fixed penalties like these fall disproportionately on low-wage gig workers, frequently pushing them into situations where they are effectively working at a loss. With little control over route allocation, weather, traffic, unrealistic time windows, lift breakdowns, or customers who don’t answer, such penalties are less incentives, more disciplinary tools. They pressure delivery drivers and last-mile workers to rush, skip breaks, work long hours, or quietly absorb losses. These risks might be defensible if couriers were paid more, guaranteed a minimum wage, or better protected against variables. In many cases, they are not. 

“Logistic firms are also rationalising costs after rapid expansion, and subcontracting structures allow cost pressures to be pushed down to workers,” explained Chua Yeow Hwee, assistant professor in Economics at Nanyang Technological University. It’s hardly surprising, then, that many have chosen to leave the sector altogether. In theory, a dwindling labour pool should push wages back up. In practice, foreign workers have been filling the gap, sometimes illegally, compromising the livelihoods of local workers, said the Manpower Ministry. This, and the fact that many firms use subcontractors who engage workers informally, has diluted the impact of Singapore’s Platform Workers Act, which came into force in January and allows for Central Provident Fund contributions, work injury compensation, and representation rights. Experts argue that the longer-term solution lies in formal employment contracts or direct hiring by platform companies; a handful have begun to improve pay structures and protections.

But at the root of it all is consumer behaviour. Before Covid, shopping involved time, travel, and visible costs. The idea that almost everything should arrive within hours, at no extra cost and with real-time tracking, was not yet culturally entrenched. Since then, speedy delivery and free shipping have become the norm. The real labour and logistical costs of moving goods have become obscured, folded into promises of “next-day” or “free” delivery. Online shopping needs a hard reset. Convenience shouldn’t come at the expense of another person’s dignity. Either retailers make customers pay the true price of having purchases delivered to their doorstep, and ensure delivery workers are compensated fairly. Or, if you really wanted that book yesterday, perhaps head to the store and pick it up yourself?

Earth: To free three birds from one cage

House crows, or corvus splendens, arrived in Singapore from Port Klang, where they were introduced at the turn of the last century to peck out caterpillars plaguing coffee plantations. Or, goes another theory, they travelled as shipborne stowaways from their native Indian and Sri Lankan habitats. 

In Singapore, the highly adaptable crow has learned quickly. A generalist by nature, it eats what the city leaves behind: fruit, grain, insects, small invertebrates, scraps abandoned on trays and bins. Its success has made it conspicuous. Between 2023 and 2024, the National Parks Board received nearly 7,000 crow-related complaints on noise, droppings, and sightings. Overpopulation of crows has been a persistent problem. There was a time when volunteer marksmen shot crows, until the licences quietly lapsed in the early 2010s. Since then, control has become more procedural: nests dismantled, trees pruned, mandatory tray returns in food courts, cages and traps set, effigies hung—dead birds posted as warnings. The methods have softened, but the premise remains intact: that the city is a human space, and other invasive species persist here on conditional terms.

This week, a 77-year-old man was charged for freeing crows that NParks had trapped. NParks have previously claimed that they take “a holistic and science-based approach” that ensures that “population control is carried out in a humane and safe manner”. Still, culling unsettles. It exposes a deeper discomfort—not only with crows, but with the limits of our authority over a landscape we have already so thoroughly altered.

Angry birds have attacked people in Bishan, along Orchard Road and most recently, in Tampines—described by residents as “retaliation” for NParks’ removal of nests. Last year, Baey Yam Keng, member of Parliament for Tampines GRC, called the birds “grudge-holding” while urging residents not to provoke them. Too often, we use language that readily anthropomorphises animals without considering the human–animal power asymmetry: birds reacting to the systematic dismantling of their nesting sites within an already diminished habitat.

While necessary to sustain a diverse urban avian population, lethal culling of invasive species is a contentious topic as assessments are inevitably biased—prioritising quick, cost-effective solutions over sustained ecological care. Complaints about the crows’ kawkaws coexist with quieter violences: habitats dismantled, nests destroyed, glossy windows that turn fatal on impact. As approaches to crow management evolve, so too should our ethical imagination—towards a co-becoming that recognises urban life as something that does not belong to humans alone.

Sport: Fragile. Handle with care

Singaporeans have been buying stakes in beloved European football clubs, a trend that has so far hewed closer to F Scott Fitzgerald’s observation of the ultra-rich in The Great Gatsby: “They were careless people. They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

In Spain, resentment continues to fester over the Lim family’s ownership of Valencia CF, with the presidency having been passed from patriarch Peter to his son, Kiat. The 32-year-old has claimed that year-round concerts and events will turn the club’s long delayed new stadium—scheduled to open in 2027—into a cash cow. “We’re going from fewer than 500 hospitality seats to more than 6,500…Nou Mestalla [the name of the new stadium] is not just bricks and seats—it’s the engine that will drive our next era of growth,” he said, striking just the unsentimental note supporters with generational ties to the club want to hear. 

Halfway across the Mediterranean, matters are bleaker still for Italy’s Sampdoria. Like Valencia in 2014, Sampdoria were in severe financial distress in 2023 when putative saviours arrived. Among them were Kickoff Ventures, owned by Singaporean Joseph Tey Wei Jin. Early optimism has curdled into anger. Five managers were fired in double quick time, and last season, the club avoided slipping into the third tier of Italian football thanks only to a sequence of events so improbable that it would have been dismissed as a lazy deus ex machina in a film. Sampdoria sit second from the bottom in Serie B. “They [the owners] talk about finances, marketing, branding but fans don’t care about branding,” responded an observer to a conciliatory open letter from the owner. It was a rare public intervention from a man who’s been linked to FUN88—an online betting site whose UK licence was revoked after it failed to “implement anti-money laundering controls”—and numerous other tax-haven shell companies. 

Plutocrats and their playthings, weary fans might conclude. But there are reasons to believe that Joseph Phua, millionaire entrepreneur, might be different. Turn Sports Investments, his firm, has just taken over King’s Lynn Town Football Club, which plays in the sixth tier of English football’s pyramid, in a town of 47,000, with a stadium that seats 1,200. Hardly a bauble to be flaunted and discarded. And Phua has already deepened local roots: recruiting players from the area, involving local businesses as sponsors and service providers, and turning fans from stakeholders to shareholders. His Medium posts on the club endear with their excitement and seeming sincerity. The real test will come if the gentle nurturing of a football club back to health rubs up against the demand for swift returns.

Arts: A cheesemonger, a baker, and a theatremaker...

...they don’t walk into a bar, but these Singaporeans are certainly setting the bar for unique career transitions. Syu Ai Ming of The Cheese Ark, Ewan Irwan of Le Fournil de Saint-Robert, and Julian Low of Wushiren Theatre each made headlines this year for pursuing unusual passions in the Singaporean context. Syu started out in advertising, Ewan was an engineer, and Low was halfway through a medical degree. In a country accustomed to drop-down menus of rigid job categories, each of these individuals represents a little jolt of category-defying possibility. The medieval French town of Saint-Robert regularly wakes to Malay rock music blasting from Ewan’s bakehouse, where his slabs of sourdough and shelves of viennoiserie feed both locals and tourists alike. The institution has existed since the 1940s, and 51-year-old Ewan, who inherited it almost 20 years ago from its previous owner, has no intention of leaving it. 

Syu’s arc, on the other hand, is changing still. In October, she announced that she would be shuttering her Ark after 12 years—to become a shepherd. The 53-year-old hopes to be in Europe by spring for the shepherding season, when grass is plentiful, before continuing the work in South America. The wiry dynamo has worked on over 20 cheese farms in Europe to understand the entire cheese-making ecosystem, from grazing sheep to ageing cheeses. She’s since acquired cheeses made just for her store, and some 3,000 loyal customers she stays in touch with over WhatsApp. Her imminent departure was mourned by diehard regulars and new fans. “You enhanced my cheese palette so much that I cannot accept anything low quality now lol!” went a response to her social media farewell. “Ming, The Cheese Whisperer!” went another, while one more simply shrieked: “NOoooooooooooooooooooooo 😢😢😢” Yet the tenor of every comment was consistently celebratory about her upcoming move. Others weren’t as lucky. 

Low, 28, was in his third year of medical school when he decided to pursue a career in the arts. His Singaporean father, an entrepreneur, and Belarusian mother, a piano teacher, couldn’t fathom his decision. “They were begging me not to treat my life so flippantly,” Low told CNA. He eventually moved out and rented a studio space. Their frigid relationship has only warmed in recent years, when they recognised his fulfilment in his new vocation. He’s since cofounded a theatre collective with his wife, Ranice Tay (of “Amoeba” fame), that blends physical theatre and tai chi, summoning objects and subject matter in ways that are often startlingly beautiful. In the group’s debut performance, “I am finally in love with the world”, a ukulele becomes a grandmother’s ghost, a telephone becomes a portal, and a flower becomes a promise. “The one thing I fear most, and where my courage comes from, is the fear of having one singular life,” Syu told ST. All three, it seems, have already lived several lives; more than some of us ever will.

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This week’s issue was written by Abhishek Mehrotra, Sakinah Safiee, Corrie Tan, Tsen-Waye Tay, and Sudhir Vadaketh.

Letters in response any blurb can be sent to sudhir@jom.media. All will be considered for publication on our “Letters to the editor” page.

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