Decline
After Singapore's independence from Malaysia, the party's members of parliament began resigning one by one in 1966. Though the Barisan Sosialis' official position was to 'take the fight to the streets', its morale was already eroding due to its failure to stop the merger. In the by-elections for these vacant seats, the PAP had a clean sweep. Calls for blank ballots by the Barisan Sosialis went unheeded. By 1968, there were no opposition members of parliament and it was 13 years before an opposition party won a single seat during the Anson by-election of 1981.
In an election rally in 1980, party chairman Dr Lee Siew Choh apologised to the voters for Barisan Sosialis's actions in 1966. In 1988, the Barisan Sosialis was officially dissolved and its members, led by Dr Lee Siew Choh, joined the Workers' Party of Singapore.
Read more about this topic: Barisan Sosialis
Famous quotes containing the word decline:
“Our achievements speak for themselves. What we have to keep track of are our failures, discouragements, and doubts. We tend to forget the past difficulties, the many false starts, and the painful groping. We see our past achievements as the end result of a clean forward thrust, and our present difficulties as signs of decline and decay.”
—Eric Hoffer (1902–1983)
“I rather think the cinema will die. Look at the energy being exerted to revive it—yesterday it was color, today three dimensions. I don’t give it forty years more. Witness the decline of conversation. Only the Irish have remained incomparable conversationalists, maybe because technical progress has passed them by.”
—Orson Welles (1915–1984)
“I heard a Californian student in Heidelberg say, in one of his calmest moods, that he would rather decline two drinks than one German adjective.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)