UK appoints Tulip Siddiq as City Minister: Report

 
Father of the Nation Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman's granddaughter Tulip Siddiq has been appointed City Minister in Sir Keir Starmer's new Labour Party government in the United Kingdom. Tulip Siddiq is Bangabandhu's daughter Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina's younger sister Sheikh Rehana's daughter.

Tulip Siddiq shadowed the role when Labour was in opposition, and has now been appointed to the post which has hit news headlines in the international media.

She was re-elected as MP for Hampstead and Highgate, an affluent area in North West London, on 4 July by 15,000 votes. It will mark the fourth time she has held the seat, having first entered parliament in 2015.

Before becoming shadow City Minister in 2021, she was shadow education minister. Before heading into politics, she had stints at corporate PR firm Brunswick and Amnesty International, before going on to advise now London Mayor Sadiq Khan. Former City Minister Andrew Griffith told journalists that Tulip Siddiq was a "very sensible choice and we worked well together, albeit on opposite sides". While she has cautioned against a regulatory "race to the bottom", Tulip Siddiq has mostly supported efforts to cut red tape in financial services. Speaking at an Investment Association conference last June, she said that the UK listings drought "should concern all of us". A Labour government would encourage more pension schemes to back domestic stocks, which could help keep hold of fledgling UK technology firms that have looked to the US for bumper valuations, she said.

In an interview with the Financial Times in May, Tulip Siddiq said she would "tear down the barriers to competitiveness and growth" and hold regulators accountable if elected.

While largely absent from the media during the campaign trail, as Labour has ramped up its engagement with business in recent months, Tulip Siddiq has enjoyed hospitality including tickets to a concert at The 02 from pension giant Aviva, the MPs' register of interest shows. She criticized the Conservative Party in 2022 after it took a £500,000 donation from crypto investor Christopher Harborne around the time it pledged to turn the UK into a digital assets hub, and described the government's plans for a NFT for Britain as a "vanity project".

"Instead of protecting the public by properly regulating the crypto market, it appears the Conservatives have been looking after the interests of their wealthy donors," she said. Tulip Siddiq has also urged the government to push through regulation of the buy-now-pay-later sector, as delays have "left millions of consumers at risk from bad actors".