ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO MURNAGHAN, SKY NEWS

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: What attracts teenagers to terror?  As you heard in the bulletin there, it is thought the three teenage girls who left Gatwick airport on Tuesday are bound for Syria and hundreds of British citizens are already thought to be fighting with so-called Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.  Well Baroness Warsi was until last year the Minister for Faith and Communities and a senior Foreign Office Minister.  She is also a former Conservative Party Chairman who, as you can see, joins me now from Wakefield and a very good morning to you, Baroness Warsi.  Now just staying with these young girls, these teenagers who may be on their way to Syria, misguided as they are, can you understand why they from their point of view felt they wanted to go?

BARONESS WARSI: Well there’s been many pieces of research, academic research, as to what drives people to radicalisation, what attracts people to groups like IS, there is no single definitive answer.  Much has been talked about in terms of identity, sometimes it’s in relation to the glorification of violence, sometimes it’s in relation to seeking a wider purpose in life, sometimes it’s connected to religion and I think one of the concerns that I’ve always had is that there isn’t a single driver for radicalisation and there isn’t a single journey to somebody becoming a terrorist.  

DM: But clearly something is going wrong with the identification and indeed communication with particularly young people who may be becoming radicalised.  

BARONESS WARSI: I think, look, this is something that we’ve talked about on a number of occasions in government.  There isn’t a single definitive answer, there isn’t conclusive research which shows that this is the point or this is the one issue which would radicalise a young person, if there was then we would have an easy answer, there would be a moment when we could intervene and we could stop young people going down this route but because the description of how people become radicalised, the identities of people who become involved in terrorist activity is so varied, it’s why this problem has been so difficult for us to resolve.  

DM: One of the big drivers, isn’t it, is the influence of others whether it be through social media or face to face, and the question that I was asking is do you think that the government is putting all its resources or all the resources it should, into identifying that route, those conversations that are being had being had by those that want to radicalise young people and countering with other arguments?

BARONESS WARSI: Well online radicalisation is of course a large aspect of it.  It’s where young people hang out, it’s where they get a lot of their information and therefore it’s only natural that it’s where they would go to for their material in terms of becoming radicalised.  It also means that sometimes we’ve been wanting to find an easy answer and have said, look, mosques should do more, madrassas should do more and it is becoming more and more apparent that people are not being radicalised in places of worship but actually are being radicalised in their bedrooms by being on the internet.  Much resource has gone into making sure that websites are taken down but we are fighting an ever losing battle with extremist groups.  One of the things that IS has been incredibly successful at has been using the internet and social networking spaces for their own propaganda.  

DM: You said there an ever losing battle and you have said in the past that you feel the government has a policy of non-engagement with Muslim communities.  

BARONESS WARSI: Well one of the solutions to this problem has got to be more engagement with British Muslim communities. I’ve said for a long time that we will never achieve anything if all we do is listen to people who tell us what we want to hear or have exactly the same views as certain people in government.  We are only going to change people’s views when we actually engage with people whose views are different to us, we are only going to be able to bring on board large sections of the community if our engagement with British Muslim communities is broad and is wide and I have for many years now, raised concerns about how we have had, not just this government but the last Labour government as well, had a policy of disengagement where more and more people are being seen as beyond the pale and therefore not fit for engagement. It is a policy which I practically ignored in government, to much criticism, even to criticism in the media but it is a policy which I think was right to ignore and nowhere was it more important when we saw the aftermath of the tragic murder of Drummer Lee Rigby where we saw the community, the British Muslim communities, collectively, unconditionally come out and condemn what had happened and stand together, despite the backlash that was felt in the days and months after the tragic killing of Drummer Lee Rigby.  It’s because I maintained and others maintained that engagement with individuals and organisations that that response was so collective and so clear at that time.  

DM: What about, when you talk about engagement, Eric Pickles, of course your former colleague in the Communities department, when he wrote after Charlie Hebdo and all the awfulness of Paris, when he wrote to mosques and faith leaders amongst others and said he needs them to explain and demonstrate how faith in Islam can be part of British identity.  Do you think he was missing the target?

BARONESS WARSI: Well I have a lot of time for Eric, I’ve known how committed he is to community engagement, I consider him not just to be a colleague but a friend and I have no doubt that his intentions were absolutely right when he wrote that letter but the response to that letter was very much because of this policy of disengagement.  It was a very different response to the response that we got after the murder of Drummer Lee Rigby and it was because there were people and groups and individuals within the British Muslim communities who felt that government had not been speaking to them, had not been listening to them, had not been consulting with them and therefore the response, even to what was actually quite a positive letter, was quite negative and that’s why I go back to what I said in a newspaper only a few weeks ago, that unless we make sure that our engagement with British Muslim communities is wide and deep, we will not be able to resolve these issues.  They are as a community part of the solution and to make them part of the solution they need to feel that they being heard.  

DM: What role do you think your resignation from government has played in all this?  Do you think that some of the response has been, well, if they are not listening to someone like Baroness Warsi in government, they are never going to listen to us?

BARONESS WARSI: I think that’s a valid accusation to be levelled at me and it is certainly one of the things that I thought about long and hard before my resignation.  I did think about the other issues that needed, that I needed to be involved in, that I felt still needed a lot of work but in the end the question that I had to answer, Dermot, at that time was am I prepared as a Minister at the Foreign Office who every day had to stand at the dispatch box and repeat government lines which I fundamentally did not believe in and which I felt were not morally defensible and whether those lines, written in Hansard and created as history, was something that I was prepared to stand by and I wasn’t.  At that point I took the decision that I would rather be on the wrong side of government than be on the wrong side of history.  

DM: But that is a real worry, isn’t it, for British society, if leadership figures like yourself feel that there isn’t a place for them at the moment in government.  

BARONESS WARSI: Well I don’t think it was like that.  The decision that I took was in relation to the issue on Gaza, it was not in relation to general government policy and we certainly still have people from British Muslim communities who still are engaged in government, Lord Tariq Ahmed is a colleague and a friend who still sits at the Department for Communities and Local Government but I think irrespective of whether or not British Muslims are sat around the Cabinet table, what matters is that the government of the day, any government of the day, is engaged with British Muslim communities and one of the ways in which government can do that is by making sure that it reaches out, irrespective of whether or not British Muslims are the ones doing that reaching out.  In fact to some extent it should be non-British Muslims who are doing that reaching out, just ordinary members of the Cabinet, ordinary members of government, it shouldn’t be left to the British Muslim members of government to reach out to British Muslim communities, that’s not the way that good engagement is done.  

DM: A good point to end it on.  Baroness Warsi, a pleasure talking to you, thank you very much indeed.  

BARONESS WARSI: Thank you.