A Profile of City Minister Tulip Siddiq

Tulip Siddiq has served as the Labour Member of Parliament for Hampstead and Highgate, a constituency formerly known as Hampstead and Kilburn, since 2015. Following Labour’s victory in July, she received the appointment of economic secretary to the Treasury and City minister, a role that entails oversight of the UK’s financial services sector. She is the niece of Sheikh Hasina, Bangladesh’s longest-serving prime minister, who was deposed by a pro-democracy movement earlier this year. Siddiq has recently been implicated in an inquiry concerning allegations that her family misappropriated nearly £4bn from the nation’s infrastructure initiatives. An individual close to her described these accusations as “trumped up charges”. Siddiq’s father held a position as a university professor in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, while her mother was granted political asylum in the UK, being the teenage sister of Sheikh Hasina. They encountered each other and wed in London, subsequently relocating their family – Siddiq has an older brother and a younger sister – to Hampstead. Having been brought up as a Muslim, Siddiq stated that her family “embraced multicultural Britain… in the heart of the [local] Jewish community”. During her childhood, she had encounters with Nelson Mandela, Bill Clinton, and Mother Teresa, and her family received an invitation to the White House. Her maternal grandfather was Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, who served as Bangladesh’s inaugural president. He and the majority of his family members were assassinated during a military coup in 1975, when soldiers raided their residence in Dhaka. Siddiq’s mother and aunt survived this event as they were overseas at the time. Siddiq became a member of the Labour Party when she was 16 years old, subsequently citing the National Health Service (NHS) and the care provided to her disabled father as primary motivations. She identified former cabinet minister Barbara Castle as her political role model and has characterized her mother and maternal aunt as “two very strong feminists”. Prior to her political career, she was employed by organizations such as Amnesty International, Save The Children, and the Greater London Authority. By 2010, she was involved in Ed Miliband’s successful campaign for the Labour leadership, and also served as a special adviser to former cabinet minister Tessa Jowell. She had also secured election to Camden council in north London. Following the announcement by former Oscar-winning actress Glenda Jackson that she would not seek re-election as an MP, Siddiq was chosen as Labour’s parliamentary candidate for the Hampstead and Kilburn constituency. Upon her election to Parliament in the 2015 general election, Siddiq was among 36 Labour MPs who put forward Jeremy Corbyn for the party leadership, though she supported Andy Burnham in that contest. She was subsequently re-elected in 2017, 2019, and 2024, securing significantly larger majorities each time. Appointed as a shadow education minister in 2016, she stepped down from the front bench three months thereafter to cast her vote against initiating Brexit. Siddiq is perhaps most recognized for her advocacy for the liberation of her constituent, British-Iranian national Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who was held in Iran for almost six years. In 2017, during her campaign for Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s freedom, Siddiq was questioned in a Channel 4 News interview regarding her failure to confront her aunt, who faced accusations of heading an authoritarian government in Bangladesh responsible for human rights violations. A dispute followed, with the program’s editor alleging her conduct towards a pregnant producer was “threatening”, for which Siddiq issued an apology. She got married in 2013. Two days prior to the birth of her second child in 2019, she was present in the Commons, using a wheelchair, for a crucial Brexit vote. Later that same month, following an alteration to the rules, she became the inaugural MP to cast a vote by proxy.