The episode raises troubling questions about Starmer’s judgement and Labour’s approach to courting the votes of people of Bangladeshi heritage.
Questions are now swirling over why Labour failed to see this coming, given the party has long known about Siddiq’s links to her scandal-hit aunt. It was 2016 when Bin Quasem’s case was first raised with her.
He and others among Bangladesh’s “disappeared” have represented an awkward tension with Siddiq’s publicly voiced views on human rights in the years since.
She long campaigned for the release from Iran of her constituent Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, for example, while showing an apparent comparative indifference in her public statements on the suffering and extrajudicial killings under her aunt’s regime in Bangladesh.
Siddiq has also previously appeared alongside her aunt at a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin and appeared on television as a spokesperson for the Awami League, the political party Hasina has led since 1981.
Siddiq also thanked Awami League members for helping her election as a Labour MP in 2015. Two pages on her website from 2008 and 2009 setting out her links to the party were later removed.
Yet once in Parliament Siddiq told journalists that she had “no capability or desire to influence politics in Bangladesh”.
So these links weren’t a secret, but perhaps they weren’t viewed as a bad thing within Labour, not least since it has shown little sign of distancing itself from the Awami League in recent years.
Labour MP Jim Fitzpatrick told the Commons in 2012 that they were “sister organisations”, a warmth shared by many of his colleagues.
And Starmer – who entered Parliament in 2015 at the same time as Siddiq in her neighbouring seat – has met Hasina multiple times.
This included in 2022 when the then-Bangladeshi PM was in London for the Queen’s funeral, a meeting that Bin Quasem calls “heartbreaking and shocking”.
