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.