Why hasn't Tulip been sacked? FT explains
City minister’s proximity to Keir Starmer and delayed reaction from Tory opposition are part of the picture, says an opinion piece published by the British daily
UK City Minister Tulip Siddiq has been under the spotlight of British media since the Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC) launched an inquiry against the Sheikh family that includes her on 17 December last year.
Leaders from the UK opposition party, the UK Conservatives, have called on British Prime Minister Keir Starmer multiple times, asking him to dismiss Tulip.
However, why is she still in office is the question asked in a recent opinion piece published by the British newspaper Financial Times.
Keep updated, follow The Business Standard's Google news channel
The piece, written by Stephen Bush, an associate editor and columnist at the Financial Times, delved into possible reasons that might have been playing a role in Tulip not getting dismissed yet.
He wrote that Tulip's story looks considerably bigger than the one that led to the resignation of Louise Haigh, a British MP who stepped down from the post of Transport Secretary after a decade-old fraud conviction resurfaced.
Stephen wrote, "My colleagues revealed that a man secretly detained for eight years by the regime of Siddiq's aunt and former Bangladeshi ruler Sheikh Hasina said Dhaka police raided his family home after British journalists asked Siddiq about his plight.
"This alone raises more serious questions than a lost phone. In November, Haigh was forced to resign after admitting she had pleaded guilty to a criminal offence over a missing mobile phone."
Last week, Tulip referred herself to the UK government's adviser on ministerial standards after an FT investigation found she was given a two-bedroom flat in London's King's Cross in the early 2000s by a person with links to the Awami League.
"Why is she still in her post? Part of the answer is about proximity to the prime minister. Siddiq, like Haigh, is someone from the party's middle or 'soft left' who "lent" a nomination to Jeremy Corbyn in 2015 and helped accidentally power Corbyn to the Labour leadership, with all the consequences that had," writes Stephen.
"But unlike Haigh, a Sheffield MP who backed Lisa Nandy for the Labour Party leadership, Siddiq is a power player within the London party. As the MP for Hampstead and Highgate, she is Keir Starmer's constituency neighbour. Siddiq backed him for the leadership very early in the contest."
"Although the prime minister has shown ruthlessness when required in shedding or demoting his allies, he has also shielded them whenever he has been able to and retained them in his government. Another aspect is that the Awami League is one of Labour's sister parties, and has campaigned for Labour here in the UK. 'Siddiq's family are the Kennedys of Bangladeshi politics,' as one Labour official puts it," writes the FT columnist.
As the third reason, Stephen wrote the UK opposition thus far has not made it remotely painful for Starmer to retain his friend and ally in government.
"Kemi Badenoch called for the prime minister to sack Siddiq late on Saturday night, but both she and the shadow Treasury team have been slow to run with the story. [I'm not going to revisit all the arguments I made last week as to why it would have been better to focus on the Siddiq affair than that of grooming gangs, where the opposition front bench was visibly not across the detail. This all remains the case.] Now that the main opposition party has woken up to the story, it may be that Siddiq's days as a Treasury minister are numbered," he writes.
