WE HAVE seen quite a political spat in the early days of the New Year: Sir Keir Starmer coming under fire from Elon Musk over his former role as head of the Crown Prosecution Service, and whether or not he was responsible for the lack of prosecutions of the rape gangs (a term which has finally gained traction over the euphemism ‘grooming gangs’). Starmer has had a staunch defender in this: his former colleague Nazir Afzal, Chief Crown Prosecutor for the North West area from 2011-2015.
Here, for example, Afzal responds to Musk directly: ‘Under Starmer’s leadership we finally tackled these abuses, which had previously been handled poorly He put me in charge, we brought 100s of offenders to justice & gave voice to 1000s of victims.’
Afzal is lauded across the mainstream spectrum from the Guardian to the Telegraph: ‘Nazir Afzal is a hard-bitten former prosecutor who took on the Rochdale child grooming gangs and the 2011 rioters . . .’ But who is Afzal? And was his role really as presented?
Afzal was born in Birmingham in 1962 to immigrants from the North-West Frontier province of Pakistan. He read law at Birmingham University, and spent his career from 1991 in the CPS, initially in London. He became the ‘youngest person and first Muslim to hold the role of assistant chief crown prosecutor’ and, to his credit, throughout his career, he seems to have had a focus on prosecuting issues which have particular traction in the Muslim population, including forced marriages and ‘honour’ killings. Indeed, as we shall see, he makes a strong show of violence against women being a particular area of his focus.
He came to the limelight on being appointed Chief Crown Prosecutor for the North West. This was shortly before the 2011 riots which, as with the riots of 2024, saw the justice system kick in swiftly when it chooses. But his fame chiefly rests on being the prosecutor overseeing the successful charges against one Rochdale gang.
A Home Office Select Committee in 2012 (chaired at the time, remarkably, by serial ethics-pusher Keith Vaz) questioned both Starmer, then head of the CPS, and Afzal regarding the changes to CPS procedure which led to the successful prosecution of nine members of the Rochdale rape gang. Here is Starmer churning out some the clunky managerialese that we have come to know, if not love: ‘One of the things we did in light of the Rochdale ultimately successful prosecution was to walk through the decision-making from start to finish, from when the case first came to us, and then after that to gather together other cases we have throughout the organisation.’
(I hope that’s enlightening.)
Later, Afzal states: ‘What the director [Starmer] has tasked me with is to ensure that whatever good practice we have developed around Rochdale and the child sexual exploitation in the North West is rolled out and used everywhere. But let’s be clear about this. This happens everywhere. It may well come in different forms. The vast majority of it takes place with white males being involved, but the point is recognising that there was a particular issue, it was one that we had to address, and we are now being seen to address it.’
Vaz asks Afzal about whether race plays a role: ‘From my perspective, it is an issue but not the issue. The issue here is predators preying on the most vulnerable in our society. They just happen to be from a particular ethnicity.’ (Emphasis mine.)
Afzal’s role is clear: the ‘star’ NW Chief Prosecutor runs cover for the ‘it’s not just Muslims’ sleight-of-hand (assisted, note, by Vaz himself who obscures the matter by solely referring to ‘race’ and not religion).
In a Guardian interview from 2014, he goes even further.
‘Where there is involvement of Asian men or men of Pakistani origin, [Afzal] points to a practical, rather than cultural explanation – the fact that in the areas where grooming scandals have been uncovered, those controlling the night-time economy, people working through the night in takeaways and driving minicabs, are predominantly Asian men. He argues that evidence suggests that victims were targeted not because they were white but because they were vulnerable and their vulnerability caused them to seek out “warmth, love, transport, mind-numbing substances, drugs, alcohol and food”. “Who offers those things? In certain parts of the country, the place they go is the night-time economy,” he says. “Where you have Pakistani men, Asian men, disproportionately employed in the night-time economy, they are going to be more involved in this kind of activity than perhaps white men are. We keep hearing people talk about a problem in the North and the Midlands, and that’s where you have lots of minicab drivers, lots of people employed in takeaways, from that kind of background. If you have a preponderance of Asians working in those fields, some of that number, a very small number of those people, will take advantage of the girls who have moved into their sphere of influence. It’s tragic”.’
Afzal is virtually presenting the gang rapists as victims themselves, exposed as they are to the temptations of working in the night-time economy. It’s sickening stuff. This is a short step away from the fundamentalist Muslim website 5Pillars: ‘Its (sic) the open exposure to vices and western society’s marketing of women as objects of sexual pleasure that influences these minority of Muslim taxi drivers who cannot control their whims and desires.’
It is clear that, during Afzal’s four years heading the CPS in the North West, some procedural changes were instituted which did enable – finally – some successful prosecutions to be brought. It may be that he had the central role in this which he is always happy to portray; we cannot know. But we can see that his public role was to cover for the religious and ethnic roles of the rape gangs, and in a way that surely must be painful to the victims.
Afzal is not alone in this of course – this has been (in effect) UK state policy for over a decade. The Jay report of 2022 (behind which the Government has sought to hide, backed by Afzal here) is a masterpiece of hiding the rape gangs under the cover of sexual abuse more generally. Both the Catholic Church and the Church of England are given prominence; Rochdale appears in the executive summary solely in connection with Cyril Smith; Rotherham not at all.
Nazir Afzal resigned his CPS role in March 2015. He had been accused of sending a text message to a defendant (it is not apparent who, or what the case related to). Although exonerated in an internal inquiry, he resigned anyway. The official line given, that his departure was part of a cost-reduction programme, makes little sense unless he was being paid a substantially higher salary than whoever replaced him. And in this Guardian interview he puts it down to being ‘bored’. It appears a strange end for a ‘star prosecutor’ in the job for less than four years.
Afzal subsequently became Chief Executive of the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners (APCC) in 2016, but lasted under a year in the role, with another resignation for unusual reasons. After the Manchester Ariana Grande terror attacks, Afzal felt it more important to appear on television than continue the job. The APCC stated: ‘Nazir told the board that he intended to go on Question Time to discuss the recent events in Manchester. The Board, made up of all parties, advised that it would be inappropriate for him to do so, given the number of contentious issues relating to policing which could be raised especially in discussion with politicians who were appearing and during purdah. He resigned from his post in order to make this appearance.’
Since then, Afzal has been the beneficiary of an enviable portfolio of appointments to the great and good. He was a member of the Complaints Committee of the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO) for six years. He is chair of both the Catholic Safeguarding Standards Agency, and (since September) the Church of England’sNational Safeguarding Panel. He is onOxfam’s Safeguarding & Ethics Committee, and the National Police Chiefs Ethics Committee. He is the Welsh Government’s national adviser on violence against women. He is Chancellor of the University of Manchester and chairman of the Lowry theatre and gallery in Salford (his credentials in the arts appear to be ‘Minority communities love drama’.)
He has published two books: an autobiography and a book on ‘structural racism’. He misses no chance to introduce his personal history in his interviews, particularly the racism of his childhood.
Afzal has been adept at the cross-party political playbook of what you may call ‘soft concealment’ in the rape gangs, a playbook repeated in the aftermath of the Southport murders:
‘The driver here was male violence,’ he told the New Statesman. ‘We’re missing the misogyny here. We won’t know until the trial what were the motivators, if there were any, in relation to the alleged killer of these three girls. But a month before that, BBC presenter John Hunt lost his wife and two daughters [to an attack by] a white man. There were no demonstrations there, apparently . . .’
Afzal’s latest sensitive Islamic political question is the cousin-marriage debate. Here, in a video for the notionally right-leaning Pharos Foundation, he sets out his ‘thoughtful, nuanced approach’ to the issue. He is not in favour of legislating. His approach is ‘informed by science’ (where have we heard that before?): he cites the canard that ‘only’ 7 per cent of cousin marriage births result in genetic conditions, similar to births to older mothers; he even calls them ‘conspiracy theories’. He cites Tommy Robinson making it ‘difficult to have a discussion’. He appeals to personal autonomy. The legal and moral traditions of the UK are of course, nowhere mentioned.
It is a helpful discussion, though, because it clarifies his position on ‘community relations’ generally: ‘We need to be able to deal with these issues ourselves so that we don’t give ammunition to those who would wish to divide us.’ He talks about the ‘direction of travel’, and that ‘not prohibition, but empowerment’ being the solution.
In other words: back off; don’t legislate, let the ‘communities’ deal with it themselves. I come back to what he said witnessing the rape gangs still in operation earlier: ‘I want the members of the community, as they are now doing, providing information, providing intelligence’.
Afzal, the placed ‘hero’ of the Rochdale grooming gang persecution, is actually arguing for something very different: the policing of ‘communities’ (primarily) within themselves. He has been elevated to the role of being a spokesman for child protection and community relations. He has got there through running government-approved cover for the rape gangs, and other things.
I have no opinion as to whether Afzal did himself aid any change in procedure that brought a handful of mass rapists to justice. If he did, he deserves credit. But I have seen nothing in his career or statements that mark him out as anything other than a low-level bureaucrat, any more than Starmer himself. He has been a public face to ‘do a job’, and has received quite some prominence since. His principal role has been to cover for the regime, and he has done this faithfully.
This article appeared in Dogmatic Slumbers on January 7, 2024, and is republished by kind permission.
