Keir's Cover

The questionable career of Nazir Afzal

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”. Later, he tweets his encouragement for the Prime Minister to sue Musk for libel (though as the thread shows, without doing his homework as he incorrectly claimed that no sitting Prime Minister had sued for libel, whereas Major and Wilson both had- oddly slapdash for a lawyer.)

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 what has his role really as presented?

Typical “thoughtful” posture

Prosecuting the rape gangs: or covering for the system?

Afzal was born in Birmingham in 1962 to immigrants from the North-West Frontier province of Pakistan. It’s worth noting that he is therefore a minority amongst the minority: up to 70% of British Pakistanis derive from Mirpur, a Kashmiri region, emigration from which was facilitated through the construction of the Mangla Dam in the early 1960s, which flooded 280 towns and villages. (The construction of the dam was underwritten by the British government, which provided UK work permits as part of the “compensation”.) As a Pashtun, it would be misleading to characterise him as simply “British Pakistani”; his parents, of course, had simply been part of British India pre-partition.

Partition was particularly bloody in Kashmir. 20,000 Hindus and Sikhs were massacred in Mirpur itself on or about 25 November 1947, along with the rape and and abduction of non-Muslim girls. By 1951, only 790 Hindu and Sikh Mirpuris remained in Pakistani Kashmir - out of 114,000 before partition.

Afzal 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 their 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 on one Rochdale gang.

In this Home Office Select Committee in 2012 (chaired at the time, remarkably, by serial ethics-pusher Keith Vaz) questions both Starmer (then head of the CPS) and Afzal regarding the changes to CPS procedure that 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 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.

Then, when he notes that he had observed at first hand grooming still taking place:

I could see grown men with young girls who clearly were not their daughters in a situation or a particular situation that caused me concern, and I actually did something with that information. The point is, I think there is a responsibility on all of us. When I first went to Rochdale, which was bizarrely after these convictions, people were saying, "Nazir, do you want a team of whistleblowers?" No, I want the members of the community, as they are now doing, providing information, providing intelligence, which enables the police to build strong cases, which enables us to build strong cases.

Finally, before rounding off the section of the committee’s questions on the rape gangs, 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. What is little known is just in the Rochdale case the so-called ringleader was subsequently prosecuted successfully for raping an Asian woman. Similarly, only last week a white man, John Tatton, was prosecuted for sexual offences against one of the victims in the Rochdale case. So you have a white man, you have an Asian female, you have a white female-it is much more complex than people would like to think it is. From my perspective, we just need to have a better and richer picture, really, in order for us to make some judgments on it.

(Emphasis mine.)

Afzal’s role is clear: here, before the Parliamentary committee the “star” NW Chief Prosecutor runs absolute cover for the “it’s not just Muslims” slight-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, he 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 not targeted 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.”

You may like to read that again. Yes, 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 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 that 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 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.

Two resignations and many appointments

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 enquiry, 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 interview he puts it down to being bored: ‘“I was bored,” he says, a little flippantly, before becoming serious.’ It appears a strange end for a “star prosecutor” who had not been in the job for four years.

Afzal subsequently became Chief Executive of the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners 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 for 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.”

Exactly why Afzal believed it was important for his voice to be heard in this matter is not revealed. His statements are nothing more than the usual standard “Don’t Look Back in Anger” fare such as this: “These deluded narcissistic criminals never divide or defeat us”. The APCC had made it a contractual term, however, that Afzal would not make any media appearances without the consent of the board. For some reason, the Association appears to have felt particularly strongly about Afzal’s 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’s National Safeguarding Panel. He is on Oxfam’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 (his credentials in the Arts appear to be “Minority communities love drama”.)

In truth, Afzal has been proficient at inserting himself into “drama” where he can. Here, from the time of his North West appointment, an interview leads with “If you watch TV's Law and Order UK, you will already know something about the work of Nazir Afzal. The writers and directors of the ITV drama came to Afzal, then director of the Crown Prosecution Service for London West, for guidance on plot lines and realism… Even the set was based on Afzal's office.” He as 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.

A very political prosecutor

It’s never wise to judge a person by their Twitter account, but Afzal himself highlights his “greatest hits” on his personal website:

Musk didn’t invent Tesla, he bought it Musk didn’t invent SpaceX, he bought it Musk didn’t invent Starlink, he bought it Musk didn’t invent “X,” he bought it Musk didn’t invent Trump, he bought him

If I hear one more racist say “they’re invading our country” & “they don’t share core British values,” I’m going to remind them of how invading countries used to be a core British value

He does not exactly present himself as an acute and original mind.

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 me, calling it “a pandemic that will outlive the one that we’ve just been through”… 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…

This is pure distraction: Rudakubana’s name and background had been released before this interview. But, “He was born in this country, the alleged killer. So immigration is not the issue.”

Afzal’s latest sensitive Islamic political question is regarding 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% 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 even 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 prosecution, is actually arguing for something very different: the policing of “communities” (primarily) within themselves; what I have called the milletisation model (the Ottoman system whereby different religious communities managed their own internal affairs separately). He has been elevated to the role of being a spokesman for child protection and community relations. He has got there though running government-approved cover for the rape gangs, and other things. The coin of his role in the Rochdale rape saga is two-sided: he is presented as the “good Muslim”, who (with his boss Starmer) challenged the bad old systems; but at the same time, the imagery is clear that the “community” is there to sort its own. And the “community” largely responsible - the Mirpuris - is only tangentially “his”.

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.