Britain’s newspapers are today filled with stories about Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, who resigned from David Cameron’s cabinet this week in a purported response to the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas.
According to her, Cameron’s Conservative Party will lose next year’s General Election on the ethnic minority vote; which is less of an indictment of the Tories, and more an indictment of the type of divisive, segregationist rhetoric that Warsi and her ilk continue to prop up in Britain.
Warsi, while pretending to be an advocate for community cohesion, is potentially one of the most damaging public figures in this regard, helped not by the fact that she was appointed as an unelected Cabinet Minister under a ‘Conservative’ Prime Minister.
Her resignation, which she claims is over Gaza, but was really about her lack of promotion at the last Cabinet reshuffle, has intensified the anti-Conservative sentiment amongst Britain’s Muslim community at a time when Warsi was supposed to be bridging the gap. The incident has been immediately seized upon by the lunatic fringe.
In short, Cameron has been hoist with his own petard. Appointing a know-nothing, pseudo-conservative, token minister like Warsi was never going to end well. It speaks to his lack of foresight that he not only kept her in Cabinet after she was axed as Tory Party Chairman, but also that she was given such a serious sounding brief as ‘Senior Minister of State’ at Britain’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office.
But now the Conservatives have a new turbulent priest, and one who isn’t afraid to be dodgy and downright offensive. Warsi has shared a platform with a number of questionable individuals, and her own personal pedigree is nothing to write home about. Perhaps to write to the Home Office about?
She has wormed her way through the Conservative Party and the upper echelons of British politics and now she is ready to lash out along the only tribal lines that matter to her. Her own personal protest was nothing but her way of stabbing back at those whom had lashed out at her for her God-given incompetence.
In an interview with the Independent today, Warsi talked about the Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI) group’s influence, as if she wasn’t involved in trying to set up the Conservative Friends of Pakistan, and Conservative Friends of India groups. It just so happens that while CFI has been successful, Warsi’s endeavours haven’t yet made it off the ground.
And she lashes out despite the fact that both CFIndia and CFPakistan approached the CFI group a number of times for advice and support. Perhaps Warsi is simply not the best ambassador for projects such as these? I know for a fact that CFIndia struggled to find a director for some time. They even approached me about the job.
The Baroness skirted close to the anti-Semitic line today when she said in relation to the Conservative Friends of Israel: “I hope that how the Conservative Party raises its funds does not have an impact in relation to its policy in Government. The national interest should never be subject to the chequebooks of anybody.”
Whipping out the “rich Jews are influencing British policy” argument is a slight upon her former boss Cameron and all her current colleagues. To imagine that they can be bought off in any way raises the question of why Warsi failed to raise this while she was in government, and why it is suddenly only becoming a priority now. God knows it is not like the CFI are news to Warsi. As we know, she has attended their events before.
So far from being a high-and-mighty martyr for ‘Palestine’, it is becoming more evident that Warsi is simply an opportunistic hypocrite whose departure from the British government should be celebrated in the streets.
This is by no means the last we have heard of the Baroness. But mark my words, it is the last time she will ever speak on behalf of the British government. Unless she joins the Labour Party, that is. Which as far as the Baroness is concerned, is not beyond the realms of possibility. She’ll fit right in with Miliband and co.