Nazir Afzal on riots, racism and the far right: ‘These people are so stupid, they tell you they are coming’

It is an unconscionably bleak week for antiracist activism when I meet Nazir Afzal OBE, former chief prosecutor, now chancellor of Manchester university and chair of multiple charities. The 61-year-old is drinking a Red Bull, which is the only perceptible trace that the far-right riots around the UK are, in his words, “taking a toll”. “It’s been tiring and it’s been emotional,” he says. “I’ve had people coming to me from all over the country, particularly people in minority communities, not just Muslim communities, saying: ‘What’s happening? What can we do? I’m scared.’ What can I say to them, in terms of reassurance? All I can say is what I’ve been saying all week: there will be consequences for those involved. We might have more smartphones, but we have fewer smart people. Every crime has been recorded.”

Afzal describes his life as a lawyer, and his life before that, as one of stubborn faith that the law could be used as a force for social good. But when people ask the questions he describes – “How do we get through this? What do I say to my family? What do I say to my children?” – the promise that justice will be served is not only a vital reassurance, it reflects how bad things have become. “It’s what I remember from the 60s and 70s,” he says. “It’s what my children don’t remember because they’ve never seen it, but they’re feeling it now. I’m glad my parents aren’t alive to see this.”

He is keen to accentuate the positive – and calls the antiracist counter protests last week “immensely touching and heartwarming”. But his language about the courts, which delivered their first verdicts on Wednesday, is stark. “It’s about ensuring that the rioters see the shock and awe of the criminal justice system,” he says. Numerous people have been jailed for between 12 weeks and three years – which he thinks could work as a deterrent for others. “The fear that their actions generated requires a level of reassurance that I think only a sense that there are severe consequences brings.”

Of course, Afzal has seen unrest before. He was chief crown prosecutor for north-west England in 2011, when there were riots nationwide after the police killing of Mark Duggan in Tottenham, north London. In some respects, that was “much worse, in terms of numbers. And the agile nature of it, you had no idea where it was next going to happen. Right now, these people are so stupid, they tell you when they’re coming.” But there are so many other ways in which the current riots are worse: social media is amplifying every act of violence, making people more fearful. But crucially, he says: “This feels targeted against people who are black and brown. I can’t have a conversation with any person of colour at the moment without finishing with, ‘Keep safe.’ I shouldn’t be saying that in 2024 to anybody, but that’s what we’re saying.”

Afzal’s account of his life is inseparable from an account of racism in the UK, and it makes you feel ashamed to hear it. He was born in Small Heath, Birmingham, 10 miles from and six years before Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” speech in 1968. His parents were from the North-West Frontier of Pakistan, his father ran a catering business for the British army, first in India, then Cyprus, later in Northern Ireland, while his mother was an ad hoc community organiser. “She didn’t have any skills. She never went to school, never mind university,” he says. “She arrived in England; she quickly found the other recent immigrants, who needed advice and support.” He organises his personality in a systematic, lawyerly way – from his mother, he got his drive to help others. From his father, resilience: “My uncle was murdered by the IRA in Belfast. He was dragged off the street into the back of a van and shot in the head in the presence of another member of my family, a cousin, who was told, ‘Would you go and tell Mr Afzal to get out of Northern Ireland?’ I remember viscerally being shocked by all of that. But my dad had lived through partition – he’d seen terror – and he didn’t seem to blink. He stayed another 10 years.”

Afzal was their first child born in the UK – he has three older brothers, and his parents had three more children after him. It was a loving family, he says. “I couldn’t have asked for more, but the moment I walked out the door, I realised I was different because of the way I was treated by my fellow pupils.” He can’t remember the days in his childhood that he didn’t come home with spit on his coat. “That was a routine experience.” When he was 13, he was attacked by three boys on his way home from school. “I was trying to avoid falling to the ground, but I couldn’t and I fell to the ground. They started kicking my head. I only survived because a taxi driver pulled up and they ran away. I’m pretty sure if he hadn’t, they’d have carried on kicking me. I remember going home and my dad opening the door. There’s me with a bloodied face, and the only thing he said to me was: ‘Don’t tell your mum.’” That was quite an important moment for me because I thought: ‘Where’s the justice of this? What have I done? Nobody will pay for what’s happened to me; it’s just a secret I need to keep from my mum.’”

Back then, he remembers, all the racist slurs were about geography and skin colour, never about his faith (his mother was a very observant Muslim, his father less so “largely because he didn’t pray five times a day back then. I remember in the 70s, the mosque was somebody’s house”). Now, he says, racist language is often “about faith, about the prophet or the 72 virgins”. That Islamophobia is a proxy for racism is pretty obvious, but the way he spells it out underlines something vital: that the leap from ethnic to faith-based bigotry has provided the cover for a lot of elite racism.

By the time Afzal was 16, he had chosen law as a career, which his father wasn’t wild about. “We were children of immigrants. My father had a suitcase in the house that was always packed in case we were chucked out. Asians had just been chucked out of Uganda. So he always felt: ‘We want our children to learn a skill that’s useful back in Pakistan. So doctor, engineer … ’ We laugh at it now, but this was the reality of our experience. And law, why do we need lawyers?” Nevertheless, Afzal went to Birmingham University for his degree, Guildford for his postgraduate studies, and knew from very early on what he wanted to specialise in. “Criminal law is a very human form of law – it’s the only kind I ever wanted to talk about. It’s the most exciting, the most real.”

He says the racism he faced was an organising principle, of how he worked, and the work he wanted to do. “Getting abuse or just getting looks,” on the streets in Guildford, “it’s difficult to explain what that feels like. Somebody doesn’t have to say anything to make you feel inferior.” Professionally, there was rarely anything overt, but critical decisions would be taken in the pub on a Friday night. “Somebody who’s not a drinker is automatically excluded – in that case, I don’t think deliberately. My answer was to work doubly hard. I felt like that was the only way for me to level the playing field.” His work ethic destroyed his first marriage, “but there were lots of things that destroyed my first marriage”, he says, with equanimity. He was working as a junior prosecutor by day and DJing by night, surviving on three hours’ sleep. This is a bit of a curveball, I say: what kind of music? “Garage, house, jungle,” he says, in the tone of voice that suggests obviously. But he’s careful to stress he was no good – he gave it up because Andrew Weatherall told him as much.

But he had plenty on his plate, anyway; the Crown Prosecution Service was relatively new, starting operations in 1986 due to a growing sense that the country needed an “independent gatekeeper, to look at cases”. The police hated the CPS because it had, in effect, taken over its role in investigating the merit of cases. “Courts didn’t like us because we’d take a lot of defence lawyers from them.” The public didn’t like the CPS either because it was under-resourced and the papers were full of its failings. Still, he loved this work and speaks admiringly of the police investigators he worked with. “There was a case that changed me,” he says. It was a woman who filmed her husband abusing their 18-month-old baby. As part of the preparation for the case, Afzal had to look at the video. “At that time, I had an 18-month-old daughter myself. I remember going home to her and hugging her tightly and realising I didn’t have a job any more. I had a mission.”

In 2001, just months after 9/11, Afzal became the youngest person and first Muslim to hold the role of assistant chief crown prosecutor. It was from here that he believed he could make the structural changes he had long believed the law to be capable: “Focusing on the areas of criminality that we’ve never really got right, I could use the power of my office to invite people to come and tell me what we’re doing badly.” He created the first stalking framework, then remodelled the response to antisocial behaviour, which came in for a lot of criticism in the 00s for catapulting delinquents into the criminal justice system. The case he cites, though, gives the flipside to that argument; Fiona Pilkington, who killed herself and her severely disabled daughter in 2007, after years of abuse from local youths. “The problem until then was that we were always looking at the crime, not looking at the impact. The impact in that case was a double death.”

After that, he took on honour-based violence and forced marriages. “Five-thousand women a year were being forced into marriage, and we had nothing on it,” he says. After that, child sexual exploitation, which included street grooming and grooming gangs in Rochdale. He remembers a journalist asking him: “Why do you keep picking subjects that give the far right a stick to beat Muslim communities with?” He replied: “We should have our own stick to deal with these issues. By not talking about these things, we’re giving the far right their opportunity.”

It was in May 2012, after he launched the commissions on grooming, that the far right first targeted him. “I wasn’t ready for it,” he says. “I hadn’t appreciated that I was actually a threat to them. They were saying that all brown men were rapists, yet it was a brown man who prosecuted these guys.”

It started with online disinformation, the BNP saying that he “was the guy that didn’t prosecute these rapists. Completely false, but their followers believed it. And I got inundated. I had people trying to break into my house. I had to have police protection for a fortnight. I had to tell my kids, who were 11 and 12 at the time, the prime minister’s got police on his front door – that was the only way I could think to reassure them. The kids had to go to school in taxis for several months. In one week, I had more than 17,000 letters and emails calling for me to be sacked and deported.”

It was the closest he ever got to quitting, and three things saved him. First, his staff, who shielded him from the abuse as much as they could. Then there was his boss, Keir Starmer, director of public prosecutions at the time, who discreetly issued the instruction that Afzal shouldn’t do any overnight travel because he needed to be at home to reassure his family. “Keir Starmer, he looked out for me,” Afzal says. “He made sure that I was safe and secure, knowing that I was under attack and also knowing that I would not have asked for help.” Finally, he did not quit because he knew that there were other victims, other cases still to prosecute.

He would leave the CPS a few years later, in 2015. “I was bored,” he says, a little flippantly, before becoming serious. “Every prosecutor is a failure, because somebody’s been harmed for it to get to me. I wanted to spend the rest of my life trying to prevent harm.”

And now he finds reasons to be positive, ordering them in his trademark bullet points. “I’m really proud of the white people who stood in the path of these riots; second, the police have got bad apples, but the vast majority of them are brilliant at what they do, and they have again shown how good they are in the last few days, responding to what’s happening without fear or favour; third, I admire the restraint of communities who have been provoked. They’re holding back because they know that it will just make things worse. But is it over today? I don’t know if it’s over today. But it will pass. And there will be consequences.”