An anti-corruption minister convicted for corruption is Starmerism summed up

Labour MP Tulip Siddiq – the niece of recently deposed Bangladeshi leader Sheikh Hasina – was last week sentenced to two years in jail in Bangladesh over corrupt property dealings with her aunt. When the allegations first came to light in January, Siddiq, the then ‘anti-corruption’ minister, resigned from the front bench. Yet on Monday, following her conviction, she carried on as the MP for Hampstead and Highgate with the full support of her party and UK prime minister Keir Starmer. If you went by No10’s reaction alone, you’d think Siddiq had been convicted for nothing more than an unpaid parking fine.

In fairness, Siddiq is right to suggest the conviction could be dodgy and politically motivated. Bangladeshi prosecutors claim that she pressured, or influenced, her aunt into acquiring multiple plots of land near the Bangladeshi capital of Dhaka, for herself and her family. But she was tried in absentia, and therefore wasn’t able to defend herself in person. It would of course have been highly risky to have flown to Bangladesh to face justice there, given the turbulent state of Bangladeshi politics and the widespread hatred for her aunt. Indeed, Hasina was only last month sentenced to death for ‘crimes against humanity’.

Even if Siddiq is completely innocent, as she claims, her position in the Labour Party and as a parliamentarian is still bordering on untenable. First, the Dhaka property dealings she has been convicted for are only one part of a wider corruption probe. Bangladeshi authorities claim that Siddiq’s family benefited from Hasina embezzling billions of pounds from a Russian nuclear power-plant project. They also claim that Siddiq’s north London home is connected to Hasina and her regime’s grifting. This isn’t to say she is guilty of these charges – politicians and public figures deserve due process as much as everyone else. But how can she seriously be expected to dedicate herself to working for her constituents, while fighting to clear her name from such serious charges, not least in a foreign country? Besides, had she not been a Labour MP, there is no doubt that Starmer and Co would have demanded her head at the first whiff of an allegation, let alone a conviction, however disputed.

Then there is the problem of Sheikh Hasina herself. There can be little doubt that she ruled Bangladesh like a tyrant during her 15 years in power. With her practice of ‘disappearing’ political opponents and crushing uprisings (the last crackdown led to the deaths of an estimated 2,000 students) she is precisely the kind of ruler that Starmer, under normal circumstances, would like to haul before the International Criminal Court. While some of the charges against Hasina may well be trumped up by opponents, dictators who amass sprawling property empires and vast fortunes rarely do so by the book.

No one chooses their family of course, but Siddiq is not merely being accused of ‘guilt by association’ here. She has been a staunch supporter of her aunt and her Awami League party. Soon after winning her Commons seat in 2015, Siddiq told an Awami League rally that she wouldn’t have been elected without the party’s help – a curious thing to say about a foreign political party. She has also appeared in photos with her aunt alongside Russian president Vladimir Putin as recently as 2013, when the two leaders signed off on the now infamous Russian-backed nuclear plant.

Having a powerful, dodgy aunt is not against the law, of course. But Starmer promised us his government would be beyond reproach – in his words, he would ‘restore honesty and integrity to government’. He promised to go above and beyond to stamp out even the perception of wrongdoing. It’s hard to see how the Tulip Siddiq scandal squares with this.

In fact, Starmer’s reluctance to sack Siddiq exposed his self-righteous posturing as cant. In January, when Siddiq was first charged, she was allowed to remain on as Labour’s anti-corruption minister. When she resigned as a result of growing public pressure, the prime minister insisted that the ‘door remain[ed] open’ for her return to the front bench.

It was a similar story in August, when homelessness minister Rushnara Ali was caught evicting four tenants from her property, before raising the rent by £700 pounds per month. He also stayed loyal to Angela Rayner to the bitter end in September, even though it was abundantly clear that Labour’s most vocal critic of tax avoidance had herself avoided £40,000 in stamp duty on a second home in Hove. It’s as if Starmer is so invested in the idea that his party is whiter than white, so much holier than the Tories, that he cannot see a Labour scandal when it’s staring him in the face.

A party that thinks it can do no wrong keeps getting itself in a hell of a lot of trouble.

Hugo Timms is an editorial assistant at spiked.