Muslims Don’t Matter: Sayeeda Warsi lacerates her former Tory colleagues
This heartbreaking book by Sayeeda Warsi tells the story of a deeply unhappy marriage.
For many years, Warsi devoted her life to the UK Conservative party.
When she joined it two decades ago, it seemed to embody everything she believed in: family values, decency, tolerance, fairness, the rule of law.
Slowly, the UK's first female Muslim cabinet minister's eyes opened. She came to realise that it wasn’t like that at all. In Muslims Don't Matter, she records the betrayals, the bullying, the abuse, the insults.
She recalls the Conservative party spy who was sent to report on her when she became a government minister. How, in 2013, polemicist Douglas Murray labelled her “the enemy at the table" in his Spectator column.
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How the Daily Telegraph, the Tory party bible, targeted her in an article headlined “Islamic ‘radicals’ at the heart of Whitehall”.
Another paper accused her of being an “Isis sympathiser”. At the time, she was actually on the Islamic State (IS) group kill list.
Of course, you expect abuse when you enter politics. But not from your own side.
'Acceptable Muslims'
Worse still, as Warsi details in this clear-sighted and eye-opening work, it was not just her who was being victimised.
She writes that “stigmatising and smearing Muslims in public life is no accident. It is a deliberate strategy designed to scare and silence British Muslims, to discourage them from taking their rightful place in public life, and engaging with democratic and public institutions".
There was only one way that a British Muslim could get ahead in the Tory party, Warsi records.
That was by sucking up to the Conservative bosses and the right-wing press. In other words, disowning your identity as a Muslim.
Warsi lacerates those she calls “interlocutors from Muslim communities, who do not question or challenge government".
She recalls how Maajid Nawaz of the Quilliam Foundation was invited by Michael Gove to Downing Street to brief the prime minister and cabinet.
"Nothing new was learnt from the meeting," Warsi acidly notes. "But it allowed us to listen to Gove's views on Muslims through the mouth of a supposedly authentic voice."
She says that in government, the Conservatives chose "acceptable Muslims" on the basis that they “did not question any aspect of the UK's foreign policy in the Middle East".
These figures were "subject to approval" by "certain think-thanks" and also "organisations from other faiths, such as the Board of Deputies of British Jews".
'Murdered for being Muslim'
At the annual Eid reception in Downing Street, notes Warsi, only those who acquiesced to a "state-sanctioned" version of what Muslims should think were invited. She is scathing about those for whom a “samosa and a photo at Number 10 is sufficient reward for their compliance".
In this environment, she says that "policy is not something Muslims helped to shape; it is weaponised as something done to us”.
She is especially eloquent on the reckless way senior Tory politicians promoted the right-wing trope that child sex abuse is a specifically south-Asian phenomenon connected with so-called "grooming gangs".
She explains the consequences: the vicious racist and Islamophobic attacks on entirely innocent people.
She cites the murder of 81-year-old grandfather Mushin Ahmed in Rotherham as he made his way home from prayers.
His killers stomped on the elderly victim's head, causing fractured eyesockets and brain damage, while verbally abusing him and baselessly calling him a "groomer".
Makram Ali was killed outside Finsbury Park mosque in London by right-wing terrorist Darren Osborne, reportedly radicalised after being obsessed with a BBC documentary drama about a child sex ring in Rotherham.
Mohammed Salim, 82, was murdered a few hundred yards from his Birmingham home by a right-wing terrorist as he walked back from his mosque. As Warsi points out, these three men were “murdered simply for being Muslim".
Deeply divisive claim
Warsi says that senior Tories have nevertheless propagated and popularised the grooming-gang myth. On this, she singles out two former Tory home secretaries - Sajid Javid and Priti Patel.
But her real venom is reserved for Suella Braverman, who, in a Daily Mail column in 2023, when she was home secretary, asserted that group-based child sexual abuse was "almost all British Pakistani men".
Warsi states that politicians such as Braverman 'often project themselves as patriots, as people fighting to preserve tradition, culture and heritage. Yet by waging culture wars, they destroy the values we should be defending'
This deeply divisive claim was false. As a result, recalls Warsi, hundreds of British Pakistani leaders wrote to the then-Prime Minister Rishi Sunak “asking for a meeting, and for him to distance himself from Braverman’s remarks”.
Warsi records that Sunak "did not even have the decency to acknowledge that complaint, let alone respond". He is one of many Tory politicians to emerge dreadfully from this book.
Warsi states that politicians such as Braverman “often project themselves as patriots, as people fighting to preserve tradition, culture and heritage. Yet by waging culture wars, they destroy the values we should be defending."
It’s impossible to disagree.
Warsi has not only written a tract for our times. This is a historical document that will be studied by future generations.
Anyone eager to learn why the most successful political party in British history lost its connection with mainstream values and is turning instead into a virulent far-right movement must read this book.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
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