‘Just heartbreaking’, wrote the Labour MP Tulip Siddiq this week as she shared a picture of the daughter of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, the British-Iranian mum who is currently imprisoned in Iran on trumped-up charges of espionage. Tulip has, quite rightly, dedicated much time to trying to free Zaghari-Ratcliffe. It’s a pity though that she doesn’t go to the same lengths to lobby Bangladesh, another repressive country, over the hundreds of people that have been secretly detained there in recent years. Unlike Iran, Bangladesh also happens to be a place where the Labour MP appears to have considerable clout: her aunt, Sheikh Hasina, is the prime minister; her uncle, Tarique Siddique, is Hasina’s security adviser; and her first cousin, Sajeeb Wazed Joy, is an adviser to the Bangladeshi government.
It is almost unprecedented for a British MP to have such close family ties to the leader of another country, particularly an authoritarian nation where a single family rules the roost.
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More than half of Britons receive more from the state than they pay in taxes, according to figures from the Office for National Statistics. The proportion of those receiving more through benefits than they paid in taxes last year fell slightly to 52.6 per cent, down a percentage point compared with the year before. The
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