Pro-Indian British Member of Parliament (MP) Keith Vaz announced his retirement from parliamentary politics after his involvement in a drugs and sex scandal.
MP Vaz represents Leicester East, having the largest numbers of British-Indian population in the UK. He is currently facing six-month suspension from the House of Commons after a parliamentary committee found him to have “expressed willingness” to purchase cocaine for sex workers in 2016.
Keith Vaz, 62, who remained an MP for the last 36 years and won 8 elections, had to leave the Leicester constituency for the upcoming elections in December 2019 since Labour Party was under pressure to deselect Vaz after his suspension from the parliament for showing “disregard for the law” and causing “significant damage to the reputation and integrity of the House of Commons as a whole”, according to the report of the Parliamentary Committee on Standards.
Vaz announcement comes after Labour’s national executive committee deferred a decision on Vaz’s future as a candidate at a key meeting last week. The former MP had been under mounting pressure to quit, with even his party colleague and Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott urging him to “consider his position” and “agree not to be a candidate”.
MP Keith Vaz campaigned in 2015 to welcome the India PM Modi in the UK and his humiliated departure from the British politics would be a setback for the Indian lobby in the UK. Last month Keith Vaz demanded the withdrawal of an emergency resolution passed by the Labour Party on Kashmir. He criticised the motion on ‘internationalising Kashmir,’ passed in the Labour Party conference in Brighton on September 25 and claimed that It has created unnecessary distress and division within the Party and the country.
