GE2025: He’s a prize-winning singer and Pritam Singh’s legislative assistant. Now add ‘potential candidate for Tampines GRC’

As a young child, Mr Jimmy Tan felt inferior to other children his age because he was not as well-to-do. His childhood home in Chai Chee was a small one-room rental flat on the ground floor, which felt overcrowded when his parents and three siblings were all home.

New toys were a rare luxury and unlike other children who got to spend time playing, Mr Tan would walk around the neighbourhood with his siblings promoting his mother’s popsicles or Chinese desserts.

Mr Tan, a potential candidate for Tampines Group Representation Constituency (GRC) for the Workers’ Party (WP), said that selling these desserts helped the family of six make ends meet, supplementing the income of his father’s work as a school bus driver.

Although he has good memories of his childhood and his mother’s never-give-up entrepreneurial spirit shaped who he is today, Mr Tan admitted that those times were tough. 

“I felt I was one class lower than my friends growing up,” the 53-year-old sales manager said. “We lived in a flat where if you close your eyes, you can easily walk to the kitchen, toilet and bedroom. It was quite small.”

Now a grandfather of two, he is co-founder of Immanuel Engineering, a family-run business that sells process and explosion safety equipment.

He hopes to give back to society and create a bright future for other Singaporeans – through politics. 

During a nearly two-hour-long interview with CNA TODAY, Mr Tan spoke at length about his family, professional life, how he got involved with a political party, as well as his love for singing that clinched him a nationwide champion title.

He revealed that he became more interested in politics while watching Mr Low Thia Khiang, then the leader of WP, make a victory speech shortly after the People’s Action Party lost Aljunied GRC to the opposition in a watershed moment during the 2011 General Election.

However, his greater political awakening came later around 2017 when he felt the PAP government was able to easily pass a bill amending the constitution to adjust the eligibility criteria for presidential candidates, despite concerns raised by WP’s Members of Parliament.

These changes included raising the eligibility criteria for candidates to have experience comparable to running a company with S$500 million in shareholder equity for the most recent three year period, up from running a company with at least S$100 million in paid-up capital.

“So from then, I realised that single-party dominance should not be the way for a democratic country. I think we should have the active participation of a rational, responsible and respectable opposition party,” Mr Tan said.

“That was the year that really shook me from my political slumber to my political awakening,” he added.

Thus, in 2018, he began actively volunteering for WP.

SERVING WITH THE WORKERS’ PARTY

At 6.15pm on Monday, while I was observing his work as a WP member, Mr Tan walked me through his typical routine as he opened a storage room at the void deck of 672 Jalan Damai in the Bedok Reservoir neighbourhood.