Baroness Warsi: Unable—or Unwilling—to Defend Civil Society in U.K.

In a foretaste of how she would approach her responsibilities as Labour’s anti-Muslim hostility czar, for which she is the reported front-runner, British peer Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, a former Conservative cabinet minister, discouraged the research and analysis of the ideological roots of Islamist terror.

Warsi, a non-affiliated peer, resigned from the Conservatives in the Lords in 2024 after refusing to remove a post on X congratulating an anti-Israel protestor on her acquittal for a racially aggravated public order offence — the protestor had held a placard depicting then-Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and then-Home Secretary Suella Braverman as coconuts. Warsi had posted a picture on X of herself drinking from a coconut and wished the protestor “many congratulations.”

Warsi’s stonewalling about Islamist ideology came during the questioning that took place after her inaugural lecture at UCL’s Darwin Lecture Theatre on September 3, 2026. She was speaking on behalf of Equi, a Muslim-led entity which emerged out of nowhere in 2024 calling itself a “leading think tank,” and which has since produced a series of tendentious reports on the Southport riots, sharia finance and devolution. The reports contain ambitious “action plans” to justify government intervention but lack hard and meaningful data.

Introducing Equi’s inaugural lecture, Equi’s managing director Javed Khan said, “We are founded on a very simple belief that better evidence leads to better conversations.” But the evidence in her lecture was anecdotal. Having primed her audience to expect “radical openness and disruptive thinking” on Britain’s social cohesion challenges, Warsi instead delivered cheap political point-scoring—casting doubt on the patriotism of Reform UK, because the wife of its deputy leader had decamped to Dubai to escape Labour’s tax raids, and of Restore Britain, because its co-founder had said Britain is “a people defined by indigenous British ancestry and Christian faith,” when, Warsi noted, King Charles III’s late father Philip was Greek and Winston Churchill’s mother was American.

Ducks the Question

After her talk, I challenged the Baroness to address the profound hostility of followers of the South Asian Deobandi and Arab Salafi fundamentalist movements—which control the majority of British mosques—to Western political and economic models, the Enlightenment philosophy of personal autonomy, pluralism and universal human rights, and gender equality. Sadly, she seemed incapable or unwilling to engage in reasoned debate on this.

Why the reticence? After all, she jokingly told the BBC she took a nine-month “jihadi gap year” in Pakistan after 9/11 and later worked with former Conservative Foreign Secretary William Hague on counter-terrorism. She could offer real insight on the worldview of Islamist terrorists — not least because many have passed through the Tablighi Jamaat circles she reported she grew up in while a child in Dewsbury, including two of the four who carried out the July 7, 2005 suicide bombings on London buses and Underground trains. These “nutcases,” as she calls them, have killed or inflicted life-changing physical and mental injuries on hundreds, including children, as we heard only last month from survivors group Resilience in Unity.

A former chair of the Islamic Society of University College London, where we sat for her talk — “Underwear Bomber” Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab—tried to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day 2008. Why does Warsi say I should not “waste my time” interrogating the motives of these “nutcases”?

Warsi said during the discussion: “Does the Muslim community have nutcases? Absolutely. Does the Christian community have these nutcases? Absolutely. Does the Jewish community have these nutcases? Absolutely. And they’re always on display for all of us to see,” she added.

This was a strange comment. Are the “nutcases” really “on display for all of us to see”? No, quite the opposite. The UCL engineering department described Abdulmutallab as “well-mannered” and someone who “never gave his tutors any cause for concern.”

Activists of the Arab Muslim Brotherhood and the South Asian Jamaat-e-Islami—the ideological fountainheads of the divisive, supremacist Islamist dogma espoused by many terror groups, including the doctrine sanctioning offensive jihad—have for decades posed as charities, educators, imams and political lobbyists, and routinely use lawfare to deter journalists, which makes them hard to track and inform policy on. This explains why Austria has established an “Observatory for Political Islam” to monitor them, a function fulfilled in Germany by its Office for the Protection of the Constitution.

And as for the preachers of religious hate: were it not for the brave undercover reporters behind Channel 4 Dispatches’ “Undercover Mosque” documentaries broadcast in 2007 and 2008, the British public would remain oblivious to the active preaching, in those circles, of hatred against anyone but fundamentalist Sunni Muslims — especially non-Muslims, apostates, blasphemers, adulterers, homosexuals and uncovered women. Habibi has performed the same function since October 7, 2023.

To buttress my question, I cited an April 2024 poll by JL Partners which found that British Muslims are more likely to have a positive than a negative view of Hamas, a proscribed terrorist organization in the U.K.; that 52 percent want to make it illegal to show a picture of the Prophet Muhammad; and that only one in four believe Hamas committed rape and murder on October 7, 2023. Rather than engage with these findings, Warsi deflected and denied them.

On cue, Warsi replied: “I honestly don’t know who the six freaks are that you speak to that give you all this data, but the people I speak with and spend time with — hundreds and thousands of them — I have yet to meet somebody who’s told me ‘Hamas is a great thing.’”

The Reality Warsi Denied

Are we really to believe that only “six freaks” in the U.K. support Hamas, when dozens celebrated and waved Palestinian flags in cities across the U.K. on October 8, 2023, including NHS doctors and imams — some no doubt readers of 5 Pillars, which parroted the Hamas masterminds’ own account of the attacks with no countervailing opinion? Or when, in June 2025, 40 U.K.-based organizations called for Hamas to be removed from the UK terror list, after law firm Riverway Law and advocacy group CAGE International submitted legal applications to then Home Secretary Yvette Cooper?

In November 2023, Labour MP Christian Wakeford named Zaher Birawi, an organizer of the weekly anti-Israel marches, as one of four “Hamas operatives” in the U.K. Another was Mohammed Sawalha, a trustee of Finsbury Park Mosque — a prominent affiliate of the Muslim Council of Britain, whose campaigns against “Islamophobia” Baroness Warsi has historically fronted, and from whom she received the “Political Champion” award at their 2025 gala dinner. The mosque’s former chair and the MCB’s former deputy secretary-general, Mohammed Kozbar, praised Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin as “the master of the martyrs of the resistance.” Has Baroness Warsi really never met any of these people?

(Photo by By Chris McAndrew via Wikimedia)

Her speech at the January 2025 MCB gala dinner, posted on Facebook, was certainly geared to the “resistance” audience when she said: “How dare they! How dare we be told who we can have to speak on our behalf... How dare we be told that we are going to be accountable for what somebody may have said two decades ago!”

She was alluding to a 2009 statement signed by one of the MCB’s leaders, which appeared to condone violence against U.K. armed forces were they to support an arms blockade against Gaza. The government disengaged from the MCB at the time, an official position which remains in place.

All this helps explain the rise of Equi, and its bid to redirect resources from a Labour government keen to staunch the hemorrhaging of the Muslim vote since the start of Israel’s war in Gaza in 2023. Her carefully curated speech at UCL was a far cry from her tub-thumping for the MCB. The government should not fall for it. With her uncovered hair, Yorkshire accent and brisk, sleeves-up style of communication—with nary a religious reference in it—Baroness Warsi never seemed like a woman representing a fundamentalist religious lobby. And yet she always was.

This should have been clear when, having resigned from the Conservative government in 2014 over its “morally indefensible position on Gaza,” she pivoted to spearheading campaigns by the MCB and MEND to delegitimize Western self-defense against Islamist extremism — including the Prevent counter-terrorism duty — and to hound the Conservative Party over its alleged “institutional Islamophobia.”

Going Forward

Call it her “bigotry blind spot,” call it pandering to her political base. But she has failed to take a stand against a chief root cause of “Islamophobia” and antisemitism — exclusionary and militant Islamist theology—because, unlike Sara Khan, whom she and the MCB tried to bully out of her role as Counter-Extremism Commissioner, her heart was never in it. Of Khan, who in 2014 ran a roadshow to protect British Muslim youth from Islamic State’s online propaganda, Warsi tweeted that she is seen “as simply a creation of and mouthpiece for the Home Office,” adding that Khan lacked the “trust” of the Muslim community. Unlike Warsi, who hailed from the Deobandi heartlands of Dewsbury, Khan had no similar reticence about the hostile views preached in that community towards minority Muslim sects, Jews, Hindus, and the West in general.

It will be a true measure of the Labour government’s credulity, myopia, spinelessness and ineptitude if it makes Baroness Warsi, a person with no track record of or interest in countering extremism, its “Anti-Muslim Hostility Czar.”