Warsi the Warrior

The Conservative Chair takes on one of the biggest challenges facing society

I’ve known Baroness Warsi, Sayeeda, for over 15 years. When we first set up Operation Black Vote in the North of England we were told about a dynamic lawyer who was fighting the good fight on behalf of those who were least able to defend themselves.

I got in touch.  It was easy to see how we shared many ideas not least our mutual desire to empower our communities to engage in politics and use the democratic tool to achieve justice and equality.

Back then Warsi was the Asian version to America’s Angela Davis. She would passionately speak, always without a script, relating the injustices that she and her colleagues were dealing with on a daily basis. Then she would talk about the solutions; ‘Communities  must', she argued, ‘work  together to fight for social and racial justice. All political parties',  she demanded ‘must respect our communities and acknowledge the contribution we are making and can  make in the future’.

Having reached the highest political office of any Muslim woman in the UK, one might expect Warsi to tow the political line; after all, some including myself had begun to wonder, where has that forthright campaigner gone?  And is the inevitable consequence of power that we lose our spark to fight the ‘good fight’?

But yesterday, to the dismay of certain sections of the media and perhaps from some within her own Party, with her Leicester University Sternberg Lecture speech Warsi reminded us what brought her to politics: to fight injustice.  And in doing so she confronted one the biggest challenges facing society today: Islamophobia.

 “At various times, Britain has not been at ease with various religious minorities, whether that’s the Catholic community, eventually resulting in Catholic emancipation, or more recently, the British Jewish community. We must bring some of those lessons to the rise of anti-Muslim hatred’ Warsi stated in an interview before her speech.

During her speech she implied that it was okay, even around polite ‘dinner tables’, to abuse Muslims.

The very recent  sloppy journalism that readily demonised Muslim men as potential sexual abusers, is testament to Warsi’s main point that; Muslims are seen as fair game to insult, either subtly - ‘Oh, they’re okay, they’re moderate’, or ‘they are all bloody terrorists’.

The most shocking element around Warsi’s comments is not her moderate critique -  statements  that are blindingly obvious -  but the vitriol from the Tory Right such as Norman Tebbit who wrote in his blog that he would have told Warsi ‘not to make that speech’, or the Daily Mail’s, Richard Littlejohn who questions, ‘What dinner parties are you going to?

One thing’s for sure, Baroness Sayeeda Warsi would have known the Tebbit’s and Littlejohn’s of this world would  come out to attack her, but undeterred she made the speech anyway.

It is without the  boldest statement ever made by any serving senior Black politician on these issues.  It is the Sayeeda Warsi, I met some fifteen years ago in Bradford.

Simon Woolley