The winner of this year’s Orwell prize for political writing, announced last week, was a book that centres around the disappearance in Belfast of Jean McConville. McConville, a widowed mother of ten, was snatched from her home in December 1972 by a gang of armed men. She was never seen again.
What irony then that the person who chaired the panel of judges was none other than Labour MP Tulip Siddiq. Over a number of years, Siddiq has assiduously refused to publicly denounce the responsibility of her very own family, currently ruling Bangladesh, for hundreds of secret detentions, enforced disappearances and extra-judicial killings, or indeed even to lobby her family members to help get these men released.
Siddiq has built her liberal and human rights credentials off the back of her campaigning for the release of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who has been imprisoned in Iran on false espionage charges. It may well be the case that it was the publicity from this work which brought Siddiq to the attention of the Orwell Foundation in the first place.
Yet Siddiq deserves little credit for her role in this campaign.
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