Sayeeda Warsi, Baroness Warsi

The Right Honourable The Baroness Warsi PC
Minister without Portfolio
Incumbent
Assumed office 12 May 2010
Prime Minister	David Cameron
Preceded by	Hazel Blears
Chairman of the Conservative Party
Incumbent
Assumed office 12 May 2010 Serving with Lord Feldman
Leader	David Cameron
Preceded by	Eric Pickles
Shadow Minister of State for Community Cohesion and Social Action
In office 2 July 2007 – 11 May 2010
Preceded by	Position established
Succeeded by	Position abolished
Personal details
Born	28 March 1971 (1971-03-28) Dewsbury, United Kingdom
Political party	Conservative
Alma mater	University of Leeds College of Law, York
Religion	Islam

Sayeeda Hussain Warsi, Baroness Warsi (Urdu: سعیده حسین وارثی, born 28 March 1971) is a British solicitor and politician of Pakistani origin who was created a life peeress in 2007. As of 2012 she was the co-Chairman, with Lord Feldman, of the Conservative Party, and a Minister without Portfolio in David Cameron's Cabinet. She is the third Minister to be a Muslim, following Shahid Malik and Sadiq Khan, the first unelected Muslim, and the first female Muslim, to serve as a minister in the UK.

Family and early life

Warsi was the second of five daughters born in Dewsbury, West Riding of Yorkshire, in 1971, to Pakistani immigrants from Bewal, Gujar Khan. Her father, Safdar Hussain, operates a bed manufacturing company, which has a turnover of £2 million a year, after starting life as a mill worker. It was featured in 2004 in the BBC TV troubleshooter series 'I'll Show Them Who's Boss' where former head of Granada Gerry Robinson found problems and family disagreements "on a scale of Dallas or Dynasty" were keeping the firm out of profitability. Warsi has said that her father's success led her to adopting Conservative principles.

In 1990 Warsi married, and had one daughter. She and her first husband divorced in December 2007 after 17 years of marriage. On 20 August 2009 Warsi married Iftikhar Azam in a simple Nikah ceremony at her parents’ house in Dewsbury despite the fact his first wife claimed not to know she had been divorced.

Education

Warsi was educated at Birkdale High School, Dewsbury College, and the University of Leeds, where she read Law (LLB). She attended the College of Law, York to complete her legal practice training and thereafter with both the Crown Prosecution Service and the Home Office Immigration Department. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

Early career

After qualifying as a solicitor, she worked for John Whitfield – the last Conservative Member of Parliament for Dewsbury – at Whitfield Hallam Goodall Solicitors. She then set up her own specialist practice in Dewsbury. She has also worked overseas for the Ministry of Law in Pakistan and in Kashmir as chairman of the Savayra Foundation, a women's empowerment charity.

Political career

Warsi was the Conservative parliamentary candidate for Dewsbury at the 2005 general election, becoming the first Muslim woman to be selected by the Conservatives. During the election campaign she was criticised for producing election literature which was described as "homophobic" by the gay rights group Stonewall and may have contributed to her losing what should have been a 'winnable' seat in the pro-Conservative swing. Warsi was defeated by 4,615 votes, achieving a lower share of the vote than in 2001, contrary to the national swing towards the Conservative party. She served as a special adviser to Michael Howard on community relations, and was appointed by David Cameron as chairman of the Conservative Party with specific responsibility for cities.

In its December 2006 edition New Statesman magazine reported that Warsi had received support for her general election campaign from Lord Ahmed, a Labour peer.

Life peer

Despite a swing against the Conservatives in the seat she contested in the 2005 general election, on 2 July 2007 Warsi was appointed Shadow Minister for Community Cohesion and a working peer. Her peerage was conferred as Baroness Warsi of Dewsbury in the County of West Yorkshire on 11 October 2007 and gazetted on 26 October 2007. On joining the House of Lords, she became its youngest member.

On 1 December 2007 Baroness Warsi travelled to Khartoum, with the Labour peer Lord Ahmed, to mediate in the Sudanese teddy bear blasphemy case: a British citizen teaching at Unity High School had been prosecuted and jailed for insulting Islam, after allowing her class to name a teddy bear Mohammed. Although the peers' meeting with the Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir did not lead directly to Gillian Gibbons being pardoned, it is acknowledged that, along with the enormous efforts made by her family, friends, and others, it may have been an indirect and helpful contribution to her release.

Minister without portfolio

On 12 May 2010 David Cameron appointed Baroness Warsi Minister without portfolio, a cabinet post, when she succeeded Eric Pickles as chairman of the Conservative Party. Her appointment makes Warsi the first Muslim woman to serve in the Cabinet.

She was sworn of the Privy Council on 13 May 2010.

Controversial views

Gay rights

The gay rights organisation Stonewall, as well as several Labour politicians, questioned her suitability for a high-profile Conservative Party role owing to leaflets issued during her 2005 election campaign which contained views which they claimed were homophobic. Some of her 2005 campaign leaflets claimed that Labour's lowering of the homosexual age of consent from 18 to 16 (under the Sexual Offences (Amendment) Act 2000) was "allowing schoolchildren to be propositioned for homosexual relationships", and that homosexuality was being peddled to children as young as seven in schools. On the subject, Baroness Warsi said that "I look back at lots of my election leaflets and think, 'God - why did I phrase it like that? What was I on?" adding "There was a whole team that was involved in my election leaflets. Looking back on it, maybe I could have used much better language than that", while adding her belief that sex education should be "out of the school system, initially".

Immigration

Warsi went on record saying that people who back the British National Party (BNP) may have a point. "They have some very legitimate views. People who say 'we are concerned about crime and justice in our communities – we are concerned about immigration in our communities'". On 22 October 2009 Baroness Warsi represented the Conservatives on a controversial edition of Question Time marking the first ever appearance of Nick Griffin, leader of the BNP. During that broadcast she strongly criticised the BNP, and when directly asked whether she was in favour of civil partnerships, replied "I think that people who want to be in a relationship together, in the form of a civil partnership, absolutely have the right to do that."

Islam

On 30 November 2009 she was pelted with eggs by a group of Muslims whilst on a walkabout in Luton. The protesters accused her of not being a proper Muslim and of supporting the death of Muslims in Afghanistan. Baroness Warsi told the BBC that the men were "idiots who did not represent the majority of British Muslims". She later continued her walkabout with a police escort. In May 2010, British radical Islamic preacher Anjem Choudary warned that she could be in physical danger if she visited Muslim communities. He said she would be attacked by eggs every time she went near a Muslim community and some protesters may take the attacks further, because he did not view her as a Muslim and could not represent Islam or any Muslim due to her support of the military involvement of the British Army in some Muslim countries.

In the context of the United Kingdom debate over veils, a Tory MP tried to ban women from wearing burqas in public in 2010. Warsi responded that the garment does not limit women from engaging in everyday life. Amidst critics who say the burqa is divisive and has no place in British society, she argued that the choice of what to wear should be down to the individual.

Church and state

In September 2010 during the visit of Pope Benedict XVI to England and Scotland, Baroness Warsi said the Labour government appeared to have viewed religion as "essentially a rather quaint relic of our pre-industrial history. They were also too suspicious of faith's potential for contributing to society - behind every faith-based charity, they sensed the whiff of conversion and exclusivity," she said. "And because of these prejudices they didn't create policies to unleash the positive power of faith in our society." She returned to this theme, as a cabinet minister, in February 2012, saying "Britain is under threat from a rising tide of militant secularisation", before an official visit to the Vatican to mark the 30th anniversary of the re-establishment of full diplomatic ties between Britain and the Vatican.. She considers that religion has a place in the public sphere, rather than advocating a complete separation of church and state. While she herself is a Muslim, she says that Europe needs to be "more confident and more comfortable in its Christianity".

Allegations by her of fraud

On 30 September 2010 she was quoted by the New Statesman as making accusations of electoral fraud that robbed the Conservatives of an overall majority. She would not be drawn on the specific nature of the allegations or what evidence she had. Later that day she pulled out of an appearance on the BBC's Question Time.

Styles

• Miss Sayeeda Warsi (1971–1990)
• Mrs Sayeeda Warsi (1990–2007)
• The Rt Hon. The Baroness Warsi (2007–2010)
• The Rt Hon. The Baroness Warsi PC (from 2010)

External links

• Sayeeda Warsi official website
• Profile at the Cabinet Office
• Profile at the Conservative Party
• Profile at Parliament of the United Kingdom
• Current session contributions in Parliament at Hansard
• Voting record at PublicWhip.org
• Record in Parliament at TheyWorkForYou.com
• Profile at Westminster Parliamentary Record
• Profile at BBC News Democracy Live
• Sayeeda Warsi, Baroness Warsi collected news and commentary at The Guardian
• Profile: Sayeeda Warsi, BBC News, 2 July 2007
• Sayeeda Warsi: Cameron's secret weapon, The Sunday Times, 3 Oct 2009
• Britain's first Asian Cabinet Minister, BBC World Service, 3 June 2010 (26 minute audio interview)
• Debrett's People of Today
• www.telegraph.co.uk

Political offices
New office	Shadow Minister of State for Community Cohesion and Social Action 2007–2010	Position abolished
Preceded by Hazel Blears	Minister without Portfolio 2010–present	Incumbent
Party political offices
Preceded by Eric Pickles	Chairman of the Conservative Party 2010–present Served alongside: The Lord Feldman of Elstree	Incumbent