Baroness Warsi - We must look at what drives radicalisation

“The security in this place,” says Sayeeda Warsi, glad of the protection that safeguards parliamentarians. “It wasn’t like this 10 years ago.” It’s Wednesday morning and the Baroness has just collected me from the metal detectors and armed guards at the peers’ entrance to the House of Lords.

In five hours’ time, that parliamentary security will be put to the test in tragic and deadly circumstances by Khalid Masood and the very “Islamic” terrorism I’m here to discuss with Warsi. The same police officer who kindly pointed me down the road to the right entry point, PC Keith Palmer, will have been stabbed to death (I recognise his face instantly when it appears on the news that night).

Right now, however, the reason Warsi is sticking a red leather chair under the handle of the door to a Lords meeting room is not to keep out Masood, or any other possible armed intruders, but because the creaky wooden thing won’t stay shut.

Of course, the pair of us have no idea of the events that will follow. But when we sit down to chat, Warsi – the Conservative peer and former party chairman whose provocatively named new book, The Enemy Within, analyses the UK’s relationship with its Muslim communities – could barely be more frank.

She speaks candidly about our dangerous misunderstandings of who and what is threatening us – and how she believes government policy in recent years may have done more harm than good.

The images of Islamic hate preachers such as Abu Hamza, delivering sermons to followers in Britain urging them to kill infidels, have proved hard to shift despite it being accepted that extremists have long been cleared from UK mosques.

The 45-year-old Warsi is angry at the way Muslims have been blamed over the years for atrocities carried out by terrorists claiming to act for Islam.

Warsi accepts religious extremism can be a factor in terrorism but she underlines that it is one of many. Other, arguably more important reasons why people are drawn into supporting Isis, she says, are too often ignored or underestimated.

“We’ve always had people who will use something to justify their violent positions,” the Baroness tells me. “Just because you use something to justify your violent position doesn’t mean that’s what motivates you.”

Warsi points to the recent attacker at Paris Orly Airport, Ziyed Ben Belgacem. He was shot dead after trying to grab the gun of a soldier while shouting “I am here to die for Allah.” She says: “Apparently he was high on drugs and drink. That’s not the actions of a very devout Muslim, is it?”

She highlights that no terrorist attack in Britain since 7/7 has been carried out by someone born into the Muslim faith. Can we seriously say Islam is the real cause for the average terrorist carrying out attacks inspired by the so-called Islamic State (IS), she asks. “Or is it just because you were a bit of a loser and you had nothing going for you, and you thought: ‘I’ll go off and join a big gang’.”

Warsi says evidence from the behavioural sciences unit at MI5 has since shown those who become “radicalised” and go on to commit violence are more likely to be mentally ill criminals whose previous convictions mean they’re unable to get a job.

To them, IS, its money and its macho way of hitting back at the world appear attractive, “and I’ll say it’s in the name of the religion because I wouldn’t want to say all these other things, because that will make me look really naff”.

It’s not a new argument. But Warsi has good reason to make it, having been accused in a Spectator article following Lee Rigby’s murder in 2013 of being “the enemy at the table”, a sympathiser to radicalism who had infiltrated the Cabinet, because she addressed a group with links to an extremist.

“I’m pretty thick-skinned; I’m from Yorkshire, from a strong working-class home, I’m a defence lawyer. But that insult basically said everything I stood for, everything I knew, where I was born, where I was raised, where I had built my businesses – that I did not belong.”

Warsi is speaking out now because she’s concerned at how little politicians have looked beyond ideology as the cause of terrorism, and because she hopes things will be different under Theresa May. She argues the controversial Prevent strategy of identifying people suspected of becoming radicalised remains “bizarrely” misguided in targeting young Muslims, when so many terrorists come from other backgrounds and convert to jihadism – just like Masood, aka Adrian Russell Ajao – with little or no experience of Muslim life, when they are preyed upon by extremists.

The peer says Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and David Cameron all fell into the populist trap of appealing to “British values” while lecturing Muslims on what they should do to stop terrorism – leaving their diverse communities feeling increasingly alienated, potentially the very radicalisation they want to stop.

Warsi is glad a counter-extremism Bill criticised for being ill-defined has apparently been shelved, and she praises Cameron’s successor for her attitudes. “She’s a person of faith,” she says of May. “I’ve been at events with Theresa where we’ve been in a church and she’s been down on her knees doing her prayers... That’s a good start. She also understands that all religions are a broad church, and therefore she understands that all faiths have their fair share of crazies.”

She speaks happily about what her own faith means for her. However, she admits she would rather not say how many times she prays – perhaps understandably when she has reportedly been placed on a “kill list” by IS, but also because “my mum would be completely traumatised when she read the paper,” she says with a laugh.

Throughout our conversation, Warsi is warm and friendly. How much more sombre our meeting would have been if we’d chatted later in the day. She was in a parliamentary tea room with members of the anti-Islamophobia group Tell Mama when Westminster was placed into lockdown by Wednesday’s attack.

Speaking to me two days later, she praises the Government’s response, and says she has been reflecting on how so many lives will have been changed by this latest act of terrorism. “If we really want to do justice, this is a moment where we can have a genuine look at what it is that drives radicalisation, rather than the catch-all category of ideology,” she underlines once more.

After all, PC Palmer died protecting MPs of all backgrounds – including Muslims such as her.

The Enemy Within: A Tale of Muslim Britain by Sayeeda Warsi, published by Allen Lane, is out now priced £20.

Baroness Warsi: A political life

Sayeeda Warsi was born in 1971 - one of five sisters born to Pakistani parents in Dewsbury.

In 1992 she graduates in law from Leeds University, going on to work for the Crime Prosecution Service and later setting up her own legal practice.

In 2005 she fails to win the Dewsbury seat at the general election for the Tories, but is ennobled as the youngest life peer in Parliament by David Cameron, then Opposition Leader.

Appointed chairwoman of the Conservative Party in 2010 and Minister without Portfolio, the first woman Muslim to attend Cabinet.

2016 - announces she is backing Remain in the EU referendum because of Leave’s “hateful, xenophobic campaign”.