In Absentia?

As Peter Mandelson is fined for having urinated outside George Osborne’s house, Mandelson’s handpicked MP for Hartlepool, one Jonathan Brash, is to host on Monday the Awami League of the overthrown Bangladeshi dictator Sheikh Hasina, who was in November sentenced to death in absentia for crimes against humanity. The following month saw the conviction in absentia for corruption, with a sentence of two years’ imprisonment and a fine, of Sheikh’s niece, Tulip Siddiq, who is the Labour Member of Parliament for Hampstead and Kilburn, and who is thus a constituency neighbour of Keir Starmer, under whom she previously served as Anti-Corruption Minister.

As yet another of their councillors and parliamentary staffers, Connor McGrath of Stevenage, is convicted of child sex offences, Labour right-wingers are normally very sniffy about the Labour Left’s ties to what were not officially “sister parties”, nominally Socialist parties from the same mould as they were. Plus the American Democrats, who would not thank anyone for calling them that, but who are in fact the mould.

Yet the Awami League does not even pretend to be anything like that. If Campaign Group MPs were wrong to host, say, Yanis Varoufakis, because he was not a member of PASOK (who is anymore?), then what does that make Brash? Or Siddiq, in addition to her being the only British MP subject to an Interpol Red Notice? She rejects her conviction because it was delivered by a judge without a jury. Think on.