Category: Blog Post

Published on Conservative Home, Monday 9th July 2012 by Tim Montgomerie Symphony Hall Last year Conservative Home noted that party conference was not what it was. It has become expensive and corporate. We take our hats off to the co-chairmen, Sayeeda Warsi and Andrew Feldman for their efforts to address this. We’ve already reported the early bird discounts that were introduced this year to cut the costs of attending this year’s Birmingham event if people booked well in advance. Many of the discounts of that programme are still available. Sayeeda Warsi is going to be making a sustained effort over the summer to further promote attendance at conference and especially the multiple accommodation and transport discounts. She aims to place a phone call with every Tory Association Chairman (she might not connect with all of them!) to promote the idea that every party member is entitled to attend conference. She is worried that there are still many members who are unaware of rules changes from some years ago and still think that only Association officers can attend. Baroness Warsi will also be using the calls to urge Associations to maintain campaigning efforts. With police commissioner elections looming this is a summer that we have to maintain momentum, she will say. The third thing that is changing is the introduction of more member-only events at this year’s Birmingham conference. The Prime Minister introduces the idea in the video below… There’ll be a private meeting with Lord Feldman and Baroness Warsi discussing ‘the road to 2015’; An intimate gathering with Oliver Letwin and ministers will discuss the Tory manifesto for the next general election; Stephen Gilbert, the party’s chief campaigner, will give members a preview of campaign tactics. It may be a work-in-progress. Decline in conference participation won’t be reversed in a single year but It is good to see that there’ll be more meaty politics this October. Book now and book here!

Commenting on the report published today by Sir Alex Allan, the Prime Minister said: I asked Sir Alex Allan to look into allegations that Baroness Warsi had breached the ministerial code. He has reported back to me and I am satisfied with the conclusion he has reached that at no point did she use her office for any personal financial gain. He found that while there was a breach of the code it was a minor one for which Baroness Warsi has already apologised. Baroness Warsi is a great asset in building our reputation overseas and representing the British Government abroad in her role as Minister without Portfolio. Minister without Portfolio Baroness Warsi said: I have always maintained that I have never misused my ministerial office for personal or financial gain. The allegations on this matter were untrue and unsubstantiated and I am pleased that Sir Alex Allan’s report has confirmed that. The last month has been a difficult time for me and my family and I am pleased I can now move on from this period and get on with the job that I am privileged to do.

Published in the Evening Standard, Friday 18th May 2012 by Joe Murphy Baroness Warsi: Father asked me ‘why be a leader if you don’t take the lead?’ Baroness Warsi may be a Cabinet minister with all the finely-honed minds of the civil service to call upon, but sometimes the adviser she trusts most is simply her dad. So it was when the horrific details of the Rochdale sexual grooming scandal poured out in a shocking court case this month. Five white girls, aged 13 to 15, were plied with alcohol, food and money and subjected to multiple sex attacks. The guilty men were Muslims of mainly Pakistani origin, some regarded as pillars of their community. Shortly after nine men were convicted, Lady Warsi sat down to dinner at her parents’ house and her father asked what the Government was going to do about it. She did not know. The baroness recalled: “Dad then said, ‘Well, what are you doing about it?’ I said, ‘Oh, it’s not me, it’s a Home Office issue’.” At this her father, Safdar, gave her a remarkable lecture. “He said to me: ‘Sayeeda, what is the point in being in a position of leadership if you don’t lead on issues that are so fundamental? This is so stomach churningly sick that you should have been out there condemning it as loudly as you could. Uniquely, you are in a position to show leadership on this.’ “I thought to myself, he’s absolutely right.” Today she has decided to use an interview with the Evening Standard to do as her father advised. Until now, Lady Warsi — Britain’s most senior Muslim politician and the first Muslim woman to reach the Cabinet — has declined media requests for comment on the case. But in fact, the 41-year-old former solicitor has strong views of what went so badly wrong in a community just like the one in which she was raised. “There is a small minority of Pakistani men who believe that white girls are fair game,” she said — choosing her words with care but not mincing them. “And we have to be prepared to say that. You can only start solving a problem if you acknowledge it first.” She is clear that the colour of the victims’ skin, as well as their vulnerability, helped to make them a target. “This small minority who see women as second class citizens, and white women probably as third class citizens, are to be spoken out against,” she said. This puts her at odds with some commentators who argue that the racial element was coincidental and that sex abuse occurs in white gangs. She says the Rochdale case was “even more disgusting” than cases of girls being passed around street gangs. “These were grown men, some of them religious teachers or running businesses, with young families of their own,” she said. Whether or not these girls were easy prey, they knew it was wrong.” Her second challenge is to British Muslim leaders and preachers who have been equally appalled but nervous of speaking out. “In mosque after mosque, this should be raised as an issue so that anybody remotely involved should start to feel that the community is turning on them,” she said. “Communities have a responsibility to stand up and say, ‘This is wrong, this will not be tolerated’.” So far, she added, the response from organisations like the British Muslim Forum and the Muslim Council of Britain has been “fantastic”. Her third plea is for the authorities to stop being squeamish about investigating allegations involving minorities. “Cultural sensitivity should never be a bar to applying the law,” she said. Failure to be “open and front-footed” would “create a gap for extremists to fill, a gap where hate can be peddled”. The leader of the racist BNP, Nick Griffin, has already gloated about “Muslim paedophile rapists”. Nobody could accuse Lady Warsi of what she calls “pussyfooting” around political minefields. In her five years as a top-level Tory she has hit out at voting fraud, attacked “militant secularisation”, been pelted by eggs and gone eyeball to eyeball against Mr Griffin. But she says her aim is to resolve this issue, not pick a fight. “Leadership is about moving people with you, not just pissing them off,” she said. Her passion is catching. She talks non-stop in a broad Yorkshire accent, acquired in her childhood in Dewsbury where she went to a state school. Fluent in English, Urdu and Punjabi, she is a comfortable mix of cultures. Her mum, Hafeeza, arranged her first marriage, which lasted 17 years. In 2009 she married ”my rock”, Iftikhar Azam, in a ceremony at her parents’ house in Dewsbury. Although a practicing Muslim, who eschews alcohol and fasts at Ramadan, she hints at bending some rules. “Strictly, I should be doing my prayers five times a day. But I hate answering that: If I answer it truthfully my mum won’t be best pleased. If I said I was perfect, I would be lying.” THE key to her confidence and success was a father whom she describes as “an amazing feminist” as well as a remarkable success story. Safdar Hussain came to Britain from a rural village in the Punjab with £2.50 to his name and worked double-shifts in a rag mill to make ends meet. He became a bus conductor, bus driver, taxi driver and driving instructor before co-founding a firm manufacturing hand-made beds that now turns over £5 million a year. Safdar encouraged his wife to have driving lessons in the Seventies, put his five daughters through university and into professional careers — and told them all to embrace the best of their Pakistani heritage as well as British culture. When travelling abroad, she urges Muslim parents to give their girls the same chances, arguing that the Koran clearly exhorts followers to acquire knowledge. “Nowhere does it say, ‘Only if you are a bloke’.” It’s hard to imagine any bloke telling Lady Warsi what to do. Except, of course, her dad.

Britain’s first Muslim Cabinet minister tells her Tory colleagues to wake up to what’s happening in the country. Oliver Wright meets Sayeeda Warsi Published in The Independent on Monday 16th April 2012 by Oliver Wright Baroness Sayeeda Warsi is standing, surrounded by large sacks of African chillies, having an animated conversation with a former nuclear submarine engineer about his new range of hot sauces. Since we met five hours ago, we’ve already launched the Tories’ Welsh local government election campaign in Newport; visited the first “wireless” town centre in Monmouth; and toured a women’s refuge in Cardiff. But for the moment, as we sample the Hot Diggidy Dog sauces (“You just can’t take the spice,” Warsi jokes), Simon Llewellyn, the firm’s boss, wants to bend her ear about bank lending. “You can only get a loan now if you’re already successful enough not to need it,” he laments. She listens, suggests a new government scheme which might help him, and when he still seems downbeat promises to personally deliver a letter of complaint to the Treasury. Then we’re off again. Ahead is a party fundraising evening (with a “luxury” pub finger buffet) in the Vale of Glamorgan and a three-hour drive to the Salford Premier Inn for the night. And that’s day one. Tomorrow we’ll tour the new Blue Peter studio, watch five former Lib Dem councillors in Rochdale defect to the Tories and visit a steam railway in the Rossendale Valley before Warsi heads off to Preston for more visits and then a fundraiser in Penrith. As co-chairman of the Conservative Party, Warsi, 41, does these 48-hour visits around the country every week for nine months of the year. It is a gruelling schedule, but there has been little sympathy for her among some of her Tory colleagues in Westminster. Some have sounded less than impressed with their chairman. Anonymous briefers in Westminster variously paint her as a “lightweight” not up to the job; “over-promoted” because of her race and gender; never elected to office; “not to be trusted” for big media performances; and about to be sacked in a reshuffle. So are they right? In person it is clear that Warsi – the second of five daughters of a Punjab migrant who settled in Dewsbury and started his own furniture company – is a very different kind of Tory Cabinet minister. She speaks 19 to the dozen, sometimes switching mid-sentence between Urdu and English. She says what she thinks, in a strong Yorkshire accent, and doesn’t really do Westminster diplomatic speak. She hasn’t always had privilege and doesn’t much care for it. She is blunt about wanting to make the Conservative Party more like her and less like her critics (middle-aged white men, for the most part). You suspect that’s really why they don’t like her. She says she sees her job as party chair not as representing MPs to the leader,but representing the grassroots, and in particular the northern towns and cities which the party has never really cracked electorally. “One of the criticisms is that I should be a strong voice at the table for, say, the Right of our party or the 1922 [committee of backbenchers],” she says. “Of course I have to speak for all of the party but the ’22 have got quite a loud voice as it is. “The voice that isn’t heard is our activists. These are the people who don’t get to hear or speak to the Prime Minister all of the time. I must make sure that the voices that are heard the least are the voices that are passed back to the Prime Minister.” Warsi writes a fortnightly report for David Cameron on what she see and hears on her tours around the country and says there is a mismatch between the intrigue of the Westminster village and what bothers Conservative activists. “The easy part of being a Conservative is to sit in Westminster and be a navel gazer,” she warns. “I don’t think it’s my job to stand outside Westminster waiting for some camera to appear so I can jump in front of it and give a 30-second snippet. I’m more effective if I’m out on the ground.” Her analysis of the Tory problem at the next election is pertinent. She points out that in order to win an overall majority the party cannot rely on the Shires and must do better in the kind of places, like Dewsbury, where she grew up. “The battleground will be the 35 most marginal seats that we hold and the 35 seats which we need to win. If you see where our marginal seats are they are predominantly in the North. They are predominantly in urban areas. And they are predominantly in seats which have large non-white populations. “Those are the areas we need to concentrate on. We have to win more seats which are urban and get votes from people who are not white.” This means targeting ethnic voters who, Tory internal polling shows, share many of the party’s values but instinctively vote Labour. “It’s about how we make the brand relevant, how we make those communities feel that we can be a home for them. We need to do that nationally in the language that we use and the way we come across. You can’t turn up at a temple six months before an election and hope it will all be alright. It’s about ongoing engagement. We have to look, feel and think like the whole of the country.” Warsi has the support of Cameron, but her position has led to complaints from some senior Tories that her strategy is just window dressing. Warsi, who is Britain’s first Muslim Cabinet minister, does not agree. “Every time I go out and campaign, people who walk away from it see a face of the Conservative Party that is probably not the stereotype that the Labour Party would like to paint,” she says. “Every time you have human contact you chip away at that myth they’re trying to create. We have to look, feel and think like the whole of the country. The more you treat it like an add-on the more it behaves like an add-on.” So why, if this is the strategy, did the Conservatives, along with Labour, do so badly in the Bradford West by-election where the Muslim vote moved squarely behind George Galloway? Warsi admits that both parties were out-campaigned on the ground by Respect, and is surprisingly forthcoming in her praise for Galloway. “I don’t begrudge him. Not one minute,” she says. “Eighteen thousand people came out of their homes and voted for that man so whether we like it or not we’ve got to respect the democratic process.” Travelling around with her and talking to the Conservatives she meets, it is clear that the party’s Westminster troubles of the past few weeks have taken their toll. Outside London it is not “donorgate” that resonates but the perceived attack on pensioners in the Budget which people mention time and time again. “That has damaged us badly,” says one councillor. “It was very badly handled.” But in stark contrast to the Westminster sniping against Warsi, no one has a bad word to say about her – even privately. They like the fact that she is travelling to places which would not be seen as natural Tory territory, and her lack of pomposity plays well among activists. Warsi herself is unsentimental about the future (she would like to do a cookery show and write more if she leaves government), but the critics who hope she will be sacked in the next reshuffle are likely to be disappointed. The logic behind her assent still remains. In short: if Cameron is to win at the next election, the Conservatives need Baroness Warsi rather more than she needs them. A life in brief: from Punjab to Yorkshire Born Dewsbury, West Yorks, 1971. Education: Birkdale High School and Leeds University, where she studied law before practising as a criminal defence lawyer. Career: Not a typical Tory, at one stage working for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and counting Respect Party leader Salma Yayoob as a childhood friend. Warsi drifted into Conservative circles in the 1990s, and in 2003 attended the party conference in Blackpool, where Oliver Letwin suggested she should become a candidate. Two years later she stood for election in Dewsbury. She lost, but by then had come to the attention of David Cameron who decided that if a young, Asian, northern, working class Tory could not be elected to office she could at least be appointed. In 2007 he gave her a peerage, ensuring she could serve in the shadow Cabinet. She came to wider public prominence in 2009 when, at short notice, she had to stand in for William Hague on a now infamous Question Time debate with the BNP’s Nick Griffin. Her performance won her widespread praise. “I’d spent years fighting [the BNP] on the ground in Dewsbury – they were not abstract people to me. I knew he [Griffin] just needed to open his gob for long enough and he would hang himself,” she recalled.