The corruption scandal around Labour minister Tulip Siddiq reveals much about the Party’s priorities and class interests, argues Kevin Crane

The ousting, under extreme pressure, of an anti-corruption minister after she was herself accused of corruption was yet another serious headache for Keir Starmer. The way this government is racking up scandals and blunders so soon after a major election win is definitely some sort of new record. What stands out about the Tulip Siddiq controversy, though, is that it is not actually related to the hullabaloo of other crises going on at the same time.

The accusations are pretty wild in terms of both sheer scale, and brazen disregard for being seen to be doing the right thing. The first major allegation to come from the present government of Bangladesh has been that, in 2013, she travelled with the authoritarian then-leader of the country – her maternal aunt Sheikh  Hasina – to Russia on a state visit. There, a grossly inflated contract for the construction of a nuclear power plant by the Russians was negotiated, only for Hasina’s family to embezzle £4 billion out of the deal.

Tulip herself can be seen in the official publicity photos for the trip, beaming with pride as she stands beside her aunty and Vladimir Putin. This may have been nearly a decade before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but was still five years after they’d invaded Georgia and it is remarkable in hindsight that this woman could go from being seen with the already much-vilified Putin to being selected and then elected as a Labour MP just two years later.

The subsequent allegations are just as crazy. Siddiq and other family members, investigators now claim, had all been living in enormous luxury houses that they had either been allowed to live in rent-free or even just been given as gifts! The homes had been bought by Bangladeshi businessmen with ties to Sheikh Hasina’s government, and at least six such properties have been identified so far.

If all or part of this is true, then Siddiq has not been caught out now as a result of the economic disaster, or far-right-led controversies, or British government support for war and genocide. Her fall is one that was a long time coming and that has its roots in the way that the Labour Party has been making use of postcolonial politics to suit its own purposes. The timing has also been not determined by any political machinations in Britain but by the struggle for justice of ordinary people halfway around the world.

Dictatorship is such an ugly word

Bangladesh is a large former British colony that, possibly uniquely, declared independence three times in the twentieth century: first from the British Empire, then from the decolonised India to become part of Pakistan, and then finally from Pakistan to become the present country in 1971. Its postcolonial existence has, however, been roughly standard for a lot of countries in similar circumstances.

In particular, like a lot of newly independent countries, politics in Bangladesh ended up being dominated by a political party that claimed the legacy of national liberation for its own. These parties can develop into deeply authoritarian institutions that serve elites, not the people, of which Zimbabwe’s Zanu-PF is probably the most infamous example. In Bangladesh, this role was mostly filled by the Awami League party.

As leader of the Awami League, Sheikh Hasina ran the country for two fifteen-year stints, one from 1996 to 2001 and another from 2009 until last year – with the eight-year interval being a stint of rule by Awami’s (notionally more conservative) rivals in the Bangladesh Nationalist Party. Both Awami and the Nationalists accuse each other of being corrupt, elitist and undemocratic, and it is one of the few times both parties are assuredly telling the truth.

Hasina’s second premiership was, however, considered miserable even by the low standards that the country had been suffering from previously. Despite a huge manufacturing sector, the country was failing to grow due to massive levels of grift and corruption, recently estimated to account for as much as US$150 billion in misappropriated funds by 2024. The Bangladeshi working class were effectively subjected to multi-layered exploitation, as their already modest wages were squeezed by high inflation, appalling services and infrastructure, and systemic banking irregularities. The middle classes weren’t fairing much better, as there was massive youth unemployment.

To keep a lid on discontent, the Awami League government had resorted to increasingly direct political repression: elections were being rigged, the media was being silenced, and government critics were frequently disappearing or being found dead. By the 2020s, Bangladesh could quite simply not be classed as a democracy of any kind, and it was only the fact that other key governments – notably those of Britain and India – saw Sheikh Hasina as a reliable ally that she was shielded from wider condemnation.

Revolution and Colonial Blowback

The breaking point finally came in July last year. As part of a long-standing scheme to ensure that their party functionaries and circle of cronies would be able to retain plum jobs and dominant positions in the state, the Awami League supported legislation to award public-sector jobs to ‘the descendants of freedom fighters’, which of course meant Awami politicians and their families, since the League claims Bangladeshi independence as its own.

This was a huge problem for growing numbers of students and graduates in Bangladesh who were being actively, and utterly arbitrarily, disadvantaged in getting work, and a controversy about job quotas had raged for years. In 2024, the establishment reasserted the hated system, and in response, a new generation of activists formed ‘Students Against Discrimination’ to organise a new wave of protests beginning that summer. They probably thought that they were in for a long campaign, but they got the complete opposite of this.

The government could have attempted to wait out this new round of protests, demonstrations and rallies, or attempted to engage them in a protracted process of negotiation. They decided instead to perform an immediate, and bloody, crackdown. Protestors came under attack both from police and paramilitary thugs from the Awami League’s youth and student sections, in a series of shockingly violent confrontations that ran from mid-July to early August, and resulted in a probable thousand or more deaths, with tens of thousands injured by the time the conflict ended.

If Hasina had assumed that this was going to move her away, then she got a nasty shock. Public frustration with her government turned to rage when people saw the violence being meted out to the student movement, and massive campaigns of civil disobedience followed. The government now panicked and resorted to desperate measures like internet shutdowns, but it was now far too late.

By 5 August, Hasina had been informed by the police that lethal force was not working, and by the military that she no longer had their confidence. She fled the country, and a provisional government was formed three days later.

Bangladesh has had a revolution, and one that is not meaningfully over since many decades of injustice are not something that any society simply rectifies overnight. Whether the country can finally develop a political system free of oligarchical political parties remains to be seen, but there are undoubtedly efforts to determine what has happened to the vast wealth that was looted from the state recently. It is the search for all that money that led the Bangladeshi provisional government to start pointing the finger at Tulip Siddiq.

Labour’s diversity of elites

There are something like 650,000 people of Bangladeshi origin in Britain, and half of them live in London, so they make up a highly significant community in the city. Like most British Muslims, they are also a solidly working-class community and have traditionally strongly supported the Labour Party in elections. It makes complete sense, therefore, that Labour would seek to get Bangladeshi candidates elected to represent this large section of their base. There is no doubt that there are thousands of Bangladeshi Londoners with excellent experience as trade unionists and activists who’d make very good representatives, but that’s not who Labour put into a safe seat in north London. They put the daughter of an elite political dynasty in that position, despite the fact that the only sort of red flag you could associate with her was the warning kind.

Siddiq’s eyebrow-raising associations were never a secret. As mentioned, it was already known before she became an MP that she had been a roving assistant to her aunt, visiting some very controversial international partners. In 2017, Channel 4 did an investigation into Siddiq’s relationship with her aunt, in which she directly lied about having worked for the Bangladesh government (she was in fact registered with the United Nations as a representative of it!) and made a disgusting threat against a journalist when challenged about the disappearance of a dissident Bangladeshi-British lawyer.

Even without the allegations of serious human rights abuses, there was always something very anomalous about having a member of a ruling political dynasty in one country serving as a lawmaker in another. It was a truly bizarre escalation for that same person to become a government minister, sitting in confidential meetings with senior civil servants. It is pure happenstance that Siddiq was only in the unique role of serving in two sovereign governments for a mere six months.

The thing to understand about this absurdity is that Siddiq was not heavily promoted by Labour despite her associations, but because of them. Labour has found the British affiliates of the Awami League highly useful for exercising influence over Bangladeshi people in Britain, particularly first-generation immigrants who are facing the usual challenges of anyone who’s just moved countries. The same oligarchs who were pocketing money stolen for them by Sheikh Hasina and then buying luxury properties in London as assets and gifts, have also been extremely helpful in corralling voters in East London and other key areas to vote the ‘right way’.

Thus, the Labour leadership could satisfy itself that it was maintaining core support, and doing its bit for multiculturalism while staying on the right side of businessmen who had handy reserves of cash (that could be accessed as long as you didn’t ask where it had come from). And what better way to make sure such ‘community leaders’ stay onside, than getting a member of their most celebrated family into parliament and high office?

The Bangladesh revolution will have come as a massive shock to kleptocratic businessmen but has also been an interesting case of postcolonial blowback for both the British state and the British Labour Party. Siddiq’s resignation is both a political and personal blow to Keir Starmer; the two are known to be friends outside of politics, which is yet another thing you can add to your list of ‘very unusual choices for a human-rights lawyer’. The uprising has also delivered a systemic blow to the Labour Party, which took on this liability due to a fundamental feature of the way that it sees working-class people and minorities as passive groups to be manipulated from above. A good dose of people power, as has been demonstrated on the streets of Bangladesh, is what’s needed as the antidote here in Britain too.