SINGAPORE: In the run-up to the General Election (GE) on May 3, the Workers’ Party’s (WP) Jamus Lim looked back at the last five years since he was elected Member of Parliament (MP) for Sengkang Group Representation Constituency (GRC) as a newbie to the political arena until Parliament was dissolved last week and the schedules for Nomination Day and Voting Day were announced.

Writing that he has just finished his final meet-the-people session, Assoc Prof Lim added that for him and the other first-time Sengkang MPs, He Ting Ru and Louis Chua, the last GE had been “a heady time, an era where our knowledge of the system was undeterred by the truth of our very long odds.”

He also pointed out that he is “not a natural-born politician.” By day, he is an Economics professor at ESSEC Business School, and he only joined the WP in September 2019, less than a year before the last election, although he had volunteered at grassroots activities before that.

Assoc Prof Lim added that, unlike many politicians who talk about their jobs in the context of their chances of getting re-elected, he “generally think(s) about the work I do from the perspective of taking responsibility for what I had been tasked to do, as a result of the election’s outcome.”

In other words, what voters, whom he referred to as representatives’ principal, want should be at the top of MPs’ minds, and they should consider whether their votes and actions reflect this.

Assoc Prof Lim further described his job as advocating for “sensible, evidence-based policies that will benefit Singapore and Singaporeans, but especially the people of Sengkang.” His guiding principle has been to represent the interests of all his constituents, not just those who voted for the WP. He added that his hope has been to leave behind an improved Sengkang.

“All the policies I espoused, the positions I adopted, and the practical steps I undertook; all were shaped by this underlying philosophy,” wrote the MP.

In this pursuit, Assoc Prod Lim has delivered 145 speeches and has been involved in 456 parliamentary questions since getting elected in 2020, doing so to put forth new ideas for how Singapore’s economy, polity, and society can be made better.

In hindsight, he added that not all of his ideas were “fantastic” as some had been either “too idealistic, or too niche, or could have been further refined,” although he added that this is the essence of...