Nazir Afzal on racism, facing threats from the BNP and Al-Qaeda and what he thinks of ex-boss Keir Starmer

His father, who was originally from Pakistan and had come to the UK after working as a caterer in the British Army, answered gently but with the unvarnished and very bitter truth.

“The police are not interested in you,” he said. “They don’t care about us. There is no justice.”

Mr Afzal recounts the story at the very beginning of his autobiography, The Prosecutor, which he is discussing at the Harrogate Literature Festival next week.

It tells the story of how that formative event inspired him into a life of seeking justice – rising through the ranks of the fledging Crown Prosecution Service to become Chief Crown Prosecutor for North-West England. He prosecuted hundreds of thousands of cases – making high-profile enemies from the BNP to Al-Qaeda along the way.

He tells The Yorkshire Post that there is a direct line between the lack of justice he suffered as a child and what he dedicated most of his working life to.

“Pretty much everybody’s on a journey and my journey started in Birmingham at a time when Enoch Powell was making speeches about Rivers of Blood and when skinheads were openly wearing Nazi regalia, screaming and shouting at you and spitting at you," he says.

"If it wasn’t for the fact that a taxi driver turned up, those three men would have probably killed me.

"I have no doubt that the experiences that I’ve tried to describe in the book are really the reason why I moved into the roles I did. It’s a real privilege that I can take what happened to me, and understand what other victims have had to go through in order to try and make sure my feeling of impotence and powerlessness is not something that they have to feel.”

Mr Afzal says while some things have improved since his experience as a teenage boy, further progress is still very much needed.

“Bigotry is as real today as it ever has been,” he says. “What’s different is that authorities take it more seriously and they have reached out and encouraged people to report their crimes. In some part, they have reacted to it and acted upon it and people have been brought to justice but we are only talking about the tip of the iceberg.

“On a daily basis, some people are locked in their homes and don’t feel to come out because they are scared of anti-social behaviour or anti-semitism or Islamophobia. We’ve still got some way to go but undoubtedly we have made progress.”

Becoming 'The Prosecutor'

Mr Afzal initially began his legal career as a defence solicitor, but realised it was not the role for him when he was asked to defend a man accused of rape after stalking his victim for six months.

In the book, Mr Afzal recounts the rapist’s “cruel pleasure” in hearing his victim’s statement and wanting to “reach across the desk and throttle him”. He handed his resignation in the same day and went on to join the Crown Prosecution Service, which had been established in 1986 to take over the prosecution of court cases from the police and end the conflict of interest the previous system caused.

He says CPS lawyers initially tended to have few friends elsewhere in the justice system.

“They didn't hate us, they detested us,” he smiles.

“The CPS was created because there were so many miscarriages of justice and it was necessary to have an independent prosecution service. So we had taken away power from the police. Then the public hated us because we weren’t properly funded. We were making mistakes, we were losing cases. The defence community hated us because they were losing experienced staff to the CPS. Judges hated us because they missed their police advocates. Politicians hated us because they just hated us.

“The reality was there was a trust deficit. There was a job to do to build that trust but it wasn’t a job you did to get kudos or reward or recognition.”

Mr Afzal says despite the challenges, the job was a true calling.

“Even though it is called the Crown Prosecution Service, it is really the People’s Prosecution Service. The public needed somebody to fight for them, to make sure that bad behaviour was addressed, to make sure that the innocent were prevented from going into the system. You will get attacked right, left and centre, but I did it because I thought it was the right thing.”

He says playing a part in delivering justice for victims in crime was an “immense privilege”.

“I can think of so many examples of where people have finally been able to get on with their lives or have gotten some recompense for the pain they suffered. That is absolutely essential in a democratic society.”

He says almost 25 years of working for the CPS showed him both the best and worst of people – recalling one case in which he was prosecuting parents sexually abusing their own children, including an 18-month-old toddler.

“You go home that evening and you hug your own children. You realise your job is a mission, it is not just a job – it is much more than that. It is about delivering something to people that otherwise they wouldn’t get.”

He says such cases brought fresh appreciation of the specialist police officers working in child abuse units who view such horrifying footage on a daily basis in an attempt to identify perpetrators and paedophile networks.

“They are the best of us - the people who are absolutely dedicated to finding wrongdoing and protecting the most vulnerable. I’ve may have seen the worst of us but I think that’s over, that’s been overwhelmingly I’ve seen the best.”

Threats from Al-Qaeda and the BNP

As he rose through the ranks of the CPS and took on higher-profile cases, Mr Afzal became a public figure and went on to attract the ire of both

Al-Qaeda and the BNP.

In the former case, he was warned by Special Branch that he was on an Al-Qaeda hit list after successfully pushing for stronger charges against people protesting over the Prophet Mohammed cartoons who called for the UK to be bombed and waving signs threatening ‘Massacre those who insult Islam’ and ‘Be prepared for the real Holocaust’.

“I charged some of them with soliciting murder because they were carrying signs saying ‘behead this’ and ‘behead that’. That is soliciting murder and a public order charge would have given them a slap on the wrist whereas soliciting murder is a six-year sentence. You don’t see those placards any more on the streets so it has that impact on behaviours.

“What was funny about being told someone wanted to kill me was I asked the officer, so what now? He said, 'I’m just obliged to tell you that you are on the list’. Fifteen years later, I am still here.”

But while that was frightening, he was even more unnerved by threats from the Far Right after overseeing successful prosecutions of child sexual exploitation cases in Rochdale in 2012.

Fake news on Facebook claimed he had been behind a decision not to launch an initial prosecution into the matter in 2009 – three years before he had even been based in the North-West. Within 48 hours of the post he received 17,000 abusive and racist emails demanding he was sacked and deported and had men congregating outside his house calling him an apologist for rape gangs.

In the book, he writes: “As I lifted the phone to call the police, I could feel my hands shaking: anger surged through me, more intense than anything I had ever felt. I had spent 20 years prosecuting some of the worst criminals in the country. I’d been exposed to rapists, murderers, terrorists. I’d seen the worst of humanity. But I never talked about my work at home. I always left it at the office, kept it separate from my family. Now, it was invading my personal life and threatening those I loved the most.”

He reflects today: “A police officer stood outside my door for two weeks, my kids had to go to school in a taxi for three months, I got doorstepped by Nick Griffin. They wanted to destroy me and they came close to that, I have to admit.

“My family was suffering, I was suffering.

“I vividly remember a moment where I had a fever and I was at home and just collapsed on the floor of the kitchen. My two youngest children walked in and one said to the other, ‘I think Dad’s dead’. That stirred me. It was having a massive effect on my personally but I couldn’t show it. There was so much to do.”

Demand for judge to lead Sarah Everard inquiry

Mr Afzal left the CPS in 2015 and has gone on to hold a series of other roles, including the chief executive of the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners, advising the Welsh Government on gender-based violence issues and joining the advisory board of Google’s Innovation Fund for counter-extremism.

He recently called for the resignation of North Yorkshire Police and Crime Commissioner Philip Allott over his comments about Sarah Everard's murder and also has strong views about the inquiry announced into the circumstances surrounding her murder by police officer Wayne Couzens.

Mr Afzal says that the current inquiry plans announced by the Home Office do not go far enough and must be broadened to have a similar scope to the Stephen Lawrence inquiry.

The Home Office has announced a two-part non-statutory inquiry - one looking at the specifics of murderer Wayne Couzens’ employment as a police officer and the second looking at wider issues across policing such as vetting practices and workplace behaviour.

He says this did not go far enough and should be replaced with something on the same footing as the Macpherson inquiry into the Stephen Lawrence murder, which conculded the Met was institutionally racist.

“We need a judge-led independent inquiry as we had with Stephen Lawrence. Anything less than that is an attempt to move the agenda on.

“But the agenda doesn’t move on - between Sarah Everard’s murder and now, 80 other women have died and there will be another 80 in the next six months.

“This is not going to change unless we do something very different.”

He also says it has been hard to say the collective impact of cuts on the justice system in recent years following recent concerns about falls in successful prosecutions of rape cases.

“If you lose 21,000 police officers as we have done nationally, you lose half a million years of policing experience. When you lose 25 per cent of prosecutors, when you lose 800 police stations and hundreds of magistrates’ courts, what do you think is going to happen?

“It is really is bewildering to me that people can stand up and say it is nothing to do with resources. Cases of rape and serious sexual offences are the most complicated cases, they are the ones that require the greatest resource by some distance.”

No plans to move into politics

Despite describing Sir Keir Starmer, a former CPS colleague, as a “kindred spirit” in the book, he says he has no desire to enter the world of politics – but admits to being asked.

“I’m not a politician and every time I have been asked I have said no. I’m not talking about Keir here but I will say this - I think we have the least capable Parliament in my lifetime.

“The one thing lacking in politics generally is honesty and integrity. The public don’t know what to believe anymore. What Keir has set out to do is to try and restore that in public life, that you can actually believe what somebody says. To my mind that is the biggest challenge we face.

“He’s also having to rebuild a Labour party that had one of its worst performances in generations against a Government that seems immune from attack. I think he has got his hands full.

“I hope he has the resilience and the ideas - I think we need to hear more about the vision but as a man I have the utmost respect for him.

“I have been asked a couple of times in the last five years if I was interested in standing. But I feel I can achieve a great deal more outside wearing different hats than I possibly could in Parliament.”

Talk to take place in Yorkshire

Nazir Afzal will be sharing stories from his memoir, The Prosecutor, in Yorkshire next week.

He will appear at The Crown Hotel in Harrogate on Friday, with the event beginning at 6.30pm.

It is part of the Raworths Harrogate Literature Festival, which is running between October 21 and 24.

Among the other speakers at this year’s festival are the Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, Ed Miliband and Robin Ince.

Tickets for Mr Afzals’ event cost £13.

For more information and to book tickets, visit www.harrogateinternationalfestivals.com/whats-on/the-prosecutor-with-nazir-afzalSupport The Yorkshire Post and become a subscriber today. Your subscription will help us to continue to bring quality news to the people of Yorkshire. In return, you'll see fewer ads on site, get free access to our app and receive exclusive members-only offers. Click here to subscribe.