New Times,
New Thinking.

  1. Politics
  2. UK Politics
14 January 2025

How damaging is the Tulip Siddiq affair for Labour?

MPs are privately frustrated that trust has been squandered so quickly.

By Will Dunn

The Treasury minister, Tulip Siddiq, has resigned from her ministerial position after a criminal case was filed against her and other members of her family by Bangladesh’s anti-corruption commission. Authorities in Bangladesh are investigating corruption and embezzlement allegations made against the country’s previous government, of which Siddiq’s aunt, Sheikh Hasina, had been the prime minister. Hasina fled Bangladesh last August after an uprising against her increasingly violent and autocratic regime.

Siddiq had referred herself to the independent adviser on ministerial standards, Laurie Magnus, who found that she had not acted improperly or breached the ministerial code. However, she had lived in more than one London property that appeared to have been linked financially to her aunt, including a flat that was originally bought by a trust incorporated in the British Virgin Islands and funded by two Bangladeshi businessmen, according to a Sunday Times report. It was then given as a gift to a lawyer who is reportedly a friend of Siddiq’s family.

Such arrangements do not make Siddiq personally guilty of wrongdoing, but shortly before she resigned, one Labour MP told me that if she had spent years living in a property that had been bought by an offshore trust without once asking who had really paid for it, they didn’t really see how she could continue in the position of City minister. “Any minister should be able to be clear that they’re not living in properties where the source of wealth could be in any way connected to corruption.”

The potential conflict of interest had also led the UK Anti-Corruption Coalition to call for Siddiq to stand down from the ministerial oversight of policy on economic crime and illicit finance that was part of her brief as City minister.

The disguise of property ownership through offshore trusts “is exactly the kind of behaviour that government is urging people in the financial sector to make suspicious activity reports about”, said Sue Hawley, executive director of the coalition member Spotlight on Corruption.

In private, many Labour MPs are profoundly frustrated that the opportunity to rebuild trust in politics appears to have been squandered so quickly. “Integrity and decency were significant factors in the election,” said one. Hawley agrees that the Siddiq scandal is “coupled with the some very slow action in relation to cleaning up politics”.

This government arrived in power through a “Ming vase” strategy of treading carefully and allowing the Conservatives to disgrace themselves, but it now appears that Keir Starmer has presided over a failure of due diligence.

Subscribe to The New Statesman today for only £1 per week

Siddiq is Starmer’s constituency neighbour and his friend. There is no way the Labour leadership was unaware that Siddiq’s aunt led an autocratic regime in Bangladesh that has repeatedly been ranked by Transparency International as suffering from very high levels of political corruption. A single phone call or an honest conversation would have established that Siddiq’s living arrangements were not appropriate to her ministerial role. The same could be said of the free clothes and concert tickets accepted by Starmer and other Labour politicians last year, or the mould-ridden flats rented out by the Labour MP Jas Athwal, or the spent conviction on the former transport secretary Louise Haigh’s record.

None of these issues are anything like as serious as some of the procurement scandals that emerged under the Conservatives. None of them involve as much money as, to pick one example from a long list, Robert Jenrick’s fast-tracked approval of a controversial property development planned by a Tory donor. But Starmer has failed to ask the right questions of his people, and so the questions have been asked in a much more public manner by the press, and Labour is starting to look almost as dodgy, to the average voter, as the chumocracy it replaced.

[See also: Inside the Lib Dems’ electoral strategy]


Listen to the New Statesman podcast

Content from our partners
Skills are the key to economic growth
Skills Transition is investing in UK skills and jobs
Turning the skills tide

Topics in this article : , ,