'Baroness Warsi gave official roles to people with links to extremist groups'

Former member of working group on anti-Muslim hatred accuses Warsi of making dubious appointments

Baroness Warsi, the first Muslim woman to sit in United Kingdom's Cabinet, handed official posts to people linked to militant and radical groups, including a man involved in an “unpleasant and bullying” campaign to win planning permission for the controversial London 'megamosque' proposed by a fundamentalist Islamic sect,  the Telegraph reported.

Fiyaz Mughal -- a former member of the cross-Government working group on anti-Muslim hatred” set up by Lady Warsi and Nick Clegg, UK Deputy Prime Minister -- told The Telegraph that he had resigned in protest at the group's activities.

“I was deeply concerned about the kinds of groups some of the members had connections with, and some of the groups they were recommending be brought into government,” said Mughal, who is head of Tell Mama, the British national organisation for monitoring anti-Muslim attacks.

“The working group was Sayeeda [Warsi]’s personal project and she was responsible for the appointments. There was very little transparency about who was put on," said another member of the working group.

The Telegraph reported that some members of the group are using their seats at the table to urge that Whitehall work with extremist-linked bodies, including one described by the Prime Minister as a “political front for the Muslim Brotherhood”. Some are also pressing to lift bans on foreign hate preachers from entering Britain, including Zakir Naik, who has stated that “every Muslim should be a terrorist”.

The working group, set up in 2012, has continued after Lady Warsi’s resignation last summer in protest at the Government’s “morally indefensible” policy on the Gaza crisis.

One of its most prominent non-government members is Muddassar Ahmed, a former senior activist in the Muslim Public Affairs Committee (MPAC), an extremist and anti-Semitic militant body which is banned from many universities as a hate group.

During Ahmed’s time, MPAC campaigned heavily against “Zionist” MPs, in particular Jack Straw, the former foreign secretary, and Lorna Fitzsimons, the former Labour MP for Rochdale, the Telegraph reported. She lost her seat after MPAC sent thousands of leaflets to local Muslim voters saying they should sack her because she was “Jewish”. She is not Jewish. MPAC has stated that Muslims are “at war” and that “every Muslim who does not participate in that war is committing a major sin”.

Ahmed said that his “regrettable” MPAC activities were “many years in the past” and he was now a “very different person from what I was then”. He had not been involved in the racist campaign against Fitzsimons, he said, but had concentrated on Straw. The UK government also insisted that Ahmed had “dissociated himself” from MPAC and its “approach” to politics.

More recently, Ahmed and his PR company, Unitas Communications, have played a role in a body called the Newham People’s Alliance (NPA), which was created to demonstrate “community support” for plans to create Britain’s biggest mosque near the Olympic Park in the east London borough of Newham.

Also on the working group is Iqbal Bhana, who has repeatedly praised the work of a body called the Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC). The group has defended Abu Hamza, saying he has been “demonised” and claiming his recent terrorism conviction in America was an example of the “double standards of the British justice system in relation to Muslims”.

Other members include Iftikhar Awan, a former trustee of Islamic Relief, a charity with links to the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, and Sarah Joseph, a former spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), with which the current and previous governments have broken ties over its links to extremists.

However, some former member of the working group, such as Chris Allen, an academic, claims that not all members of the working group are extremist or radical sympathisers and there is no suggestion that any member is a supporter of violent extremism.

Another member, Matthew Goodwin, the associate professor of politics at Nottingham University and an expert in hard-Right political movements, said he was not aware of any attempt by the group to push an extremist agenda. He said that he and others had been frustrated at the group’s lack of progress.