Tulip Siddiq and the Labour government would like to think that her resignation as a minister earlier this week will end the controversy surrounding her and will result in a quick return to the front bench. ‘The door remains open you for going forward,’ Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, said of Siddiq in response to her resignation letter.
It is unlikely to be as straightforward as that. First, there is the letter written to the Prime Minister by Sir Laurie Magnus, the independent advisor on ministerial standards. In it, he sets out the findings of his ‘exercise to establish the facts’ – note, not an investigation – connected to ‘recent media allegations about Ms Siddiq’.
The Magnus letter will not bring an end to controversy around Siddiq’s properties
The letter is so vague as to be nearly useless. In relation to Siddiq’s decision in 2022 to move into a £2 million property, located around the corner from a well-regarded primary school, that had months earlier been purchased by an Awami League leader who subsequently received significant benefits from the Awami League government in Bangladesh, the letter provides no details at all.
It does not clarify when exactly Siddiq moved into the property or whether the property was purchased by the Awami League leader specifically for Siddiq at her request. Neither does it mention whether right from the start of living at the property Siddiq paid a commercial rent (and deposit), nor whether Siddiq can explain why the owner of the property received special VIP status in Bangladesh as a ‘Commercially Important Person’.
Magnus’s letter simply says that he ‘found no suggestion of any unusual financial arrangements’. Well, the facts in the public domain about Siddiq’s living arrangements do strongly suggest just that. These are not countermanded by Magnus’s very vague exoneration, unsupported by any new facts, and containing no answers to these questions.
Then there is the property Siddiq owned from 2004 in Kings Cross. When the Mail on Sunday asked her about this property in 2022, the Labour party said:
When Tulip’s parents separated over 20 years ago, they sold their family home and bought the King’s Cross flat with the proceeds. Any suggestion this money came from any other source is entirely wrong and defamatory.
When asked again a few months later about the family property that she had supposedly sold, a response from Siddiq’s parliamentary account stated: ‘The allegations you have set out are inaccurate and highly damaging. Tulip will not hesitate to take legal action if they are included in any article you plan to publish.’ She added: ‘As previously stated, Tulip Siddiq’s parents sold their family home and used the proceeds to buy the flat.’
However, the Financial Times discovered earlier this month that the property was a gift from a land developer with links to the Awami League. What does Magnus say about this?
He records that ‘despite having signed a land registry transfer form relating to the gift at the time’, Siddiq says she was ‘unaware of the origins of her ownership of her flat in Kings Cross’. Magnus then goes onto say that ‘Ms Siddiq remained under the impression that her parents had given the flat to her, having purchased it from the previous owner’. He then extraordinary concludes that ‘this was an unfortunate misunderstanding’ by Tulip.
Unfortunate misunderstanding, really? Magnus does not question the credibility of Siddiq’s response. Siddiq said to the Mail on Sunday that her parents sold their family home to finance the purchase of the flat. Magnus does not appear to have asked Siddiq anything about this property. He does not ask why her parents would buy a property, and then gift it to Siddiq, rather than just gifting her the money to buy the property? He does not seem to have inquired with Siddiq how she thought her parents, who had limited lawful income, could ever have afforded to buy a property for her.
In 2009, five years after Siddiq acquired the flat, her sister became the owner of a second flat. Did Magnus ask Siddiq what she knew about this purchase? This is relevant to Siddiq’s answers about her King’s Cross flat as it is now known, from Sunday Times reporting, that this was also another gift from another Awami League supporter. Did Siddiq think that her parents had also gifted this flat to her sister and if so, did she not wonder from where the money came? Surely the gifts of two flats by her parents would have raised questions in Siddiq’s mind about the source of the money to buy her Kings Cross property.
It is also clear that Magnus seems to have failed to appreciate the overall context of the ownership or occupation by Siddiq of various properties. Siddiq’s wider family in Bangladesh, including her aunt, the prime minister Sheikh Hasina, have been repeatedly accused of corruption over many years, and are now under investigation by the country’s authorities. This should have made Magnus far more inquisitive about how it came to be that Siddiq has lived in so many properties which are owned or gifted by Awami League leaders or supporters.
The Magnus letter leaves so many questions unanswered that it will not bring an end to controversy around Siddiq’s properties. But apart from his letter there are two other reasons why the former Treasury minister will not find a comeback easy. First, there is now a greater understanding of Siddiq’s significant moral failure in engaging with the issue of enforced disappearances in Bangladesh while at the very same time grandstanding for her constituent, Nazanin Zagari Radcliffe, arbitrarily detained in Iran on fabricated charges.
The coordinator of the voluntary group Maayer Daak – ‘Mothers’ Call’, comprising families of the disappeared in Bangladesh, stated as much in a 2022 letter to Siddiq, who was serving as a shadow Treasury minister at the time:
In the context of Bangladesh politics and because of the role your family has within it, if you speak out on our behalf about the 86 disappeared men listed by Human Rights Watch this could have a dramatic impact in pressuring the Bangladesh government to come clean, provide information on our disappeared relatives and free them.
Siddiq’s office replied that ‘parliamentary protocol dictates that MPs can only write on behalf of residents who live in their constituency’. All she did was pass the letter to the shadow foreign office minister covering Bangladesh and took no further action.
The second issue is her relationship with the UK branch of the Awami League. The Bangladesh party has not always been autocratic but by the end of the 2010s it had become highly authoritarian, preventing free and fair elections, controlling all key institutions including the judiciary and law enforcement authorities, and suppressing the opposition. But not only did Siddiq fail to dissociate herself from the Bangladesh party, she used its UK wing as a major part of her election campaigns.
Although the Labour leader would like to put all these issues about Siddiq in the past, it remains highly unlikely that others will. Her path back to the cabinet will not be easy.
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