Are conspiracy theories ‘far-right’ only if they are promoted by white working-class people?

An explosive – but false – claim by a top Asian lawyer led to a social media frenzy over rape gangs

Nazir Afzal (Photo: Shaanop / Wikimedia Commons)

Nazir Afzal generally has a lot to say for himself. A former chief crown prosecutor (he headed the Crown Prosecution Service in the north-west of England), Afzal has become well-known for his regular forays into the political arena, where he is very vocal on issues such as racism and sexism. He is particularly active on social media, opining to his large following on everything from Harry and Megan (he likes them and thinks that she is the victim of a racist witch-hunt) to Trump supporters and the Tories (he dislikes them) and the removal of ‘racist’ statues (a good thing).

Given his eminent career, Afzal is seen by some as a kind of sage. He has been awarded an OBE, and his view is regularly sought by mainstream media outlets.

In 2022, his book The Race to the Top: Structural Racism and How to Fight It was published. The book's synopsis describes Afzal as someone who ‘knows what it’s like to break the glass ceiling, challenge prejudice and shake up predominantly white institutions’.

At the same time as he was writing the book, Afzal was leading a major cultural review of the London Fire Brigade (LFB). The review’s publication came a few weeks after that of his book and concluded that the LFB was ‘institutionally misogynist and racist’. The finding sparked a national media furore and sent a shockwave through the LFB and wider fire service. Afzal went on to call for a national inquiry into other public bodies, warning that they, too, were hotbeds of racism and sexism. ‘This is a national pandemic issue, which requires a national pandemic-type response,’ he said.

As a professional firefighter myself, and someone who knows the LFB intimately, I studied Afzal’s report closely. I considered it a sloppy piece of work – unscientific, unscholarly and biased – and felt that it gave a deeply misleading impression of the organisation as it was today.

I also felt that Afzal’s findings should have been seen in the context of his recently-published book. It would plainly have been extremely awkward for him, having just written a treatise alleging structural prejudice throughout Britain’s institutions, to have concluded that a high-profile institution he had been tasked to investigate was not characterised by this failing.

Dr Richard Norrie, the director of research and statistics at think-tank Civitas, was scathing in his assessment of Afzal’s review, criticising its methodology and lack of rigour. He found that the evidence relied on by Afzal and his team was largely anecdotal and very possibly historical. ‘[T]he Afzal review proves on close inspection to be tendentious without having made its case. The charges of institutional racism and misogyny have not been substantiated by sufficient evidence,’ Norrie said.

Despite this, Afzal’s stock appears not to have fallen. He is still a man in demand. And no more so at the moment than on the whole Pakistani rape and torture gang scandal which has been dominating the media in recent days. In fact, Afzal has been vocal on this topic for many years, not only because he hails from the Pakistani Muslim community himself but also because, as a chief crown prosecutor, he was involved in the prosecution of certain gangs in the north-west of England.

While he deserves credit for bringing some of the perpetrators to justice, it should be noted that he has – wrongly, in my view – dismissed any suggestion that there was any ethnic or cultural dimension to the crimes. ‘The vast majority of paedophiles and child abusers in this country are white British – 95 per cent,’ he told the Independent. ‘The one thing these men have in common with the vast majority, with virtually all paedophiles, is that they are men. We have got to focus on what the real issue is.’

One of the main focal points of the current ruckus is the claim – which has gone viral on social media, not least because Elon Musk amplified it – that in 2008, when the country was led by Gordon Brown, the home office sent a circular to all police forces instructing them not to investigate the gangs because the girls involved had ‘made an informed choice about their sexual behaviour’. In fact, this claim has been circulating online in one form or another for several years.

Earlier this week, BBC Verify carried out a detailed investigation into the claim. They found that it was first made in 2017 in a column which appeared in the International Business Times. In 2018, the author of the column repeated the claim in an interview for BBC Radio 4. The author and interviewee was … one Nazir Afzal. Within a month of the Radio 4 broadcast, the claim started appearing on social media and, according to the BBC, began to gain ‘considerable traction’ around a year later.

Afzal made the claim clearly and unambiguously. In the radio interview, he said, ‘You may not know this but, back in 2008, the home office sent a circular to all police forces in the country saying, “As far as these young girls who are being exploited in their towns and cities, we believe they have made an informed choice about their sexual behaviour and therefore it's not for you police officers to get involved in.”’

There was just one problem. The claim was completely untrue. BBC Verify has scoured government records for evidence of the circular but can find nothing. Afzal has since told the BBC that he never saw the circular himself but had been informed by police officers that some of their colleagues had misinterpreted a separate circular. He was, however, unable to provide the identity of these officers, and the separate circular he cited had nothing to do with rape gangs at all.

So why did he make the claim – twice? We may never know. If Afzal made a genuine mistake – and it’s hard to see how that could be the case – he acted extremely carelessly. On such a sensitive matter, the public is surely entitled to expect a former chief crown prosecutor with a significant public profile to get his facts straight before making such an explosive claim. Gordon Brown himself was forced to issue a public statement confirming that the claim was a ‘complete fabrication’.

What has been interesting is the muted media reaction to BBC Verify’s exposure. There has been barely any comment on Afzal’s role in promoting the baseless claim. In fact, the day after the BBC published its piece, Afzal popped up in two national radio interviews during which he asserted that ‘several dozen victims and survivors’ had been in touch with him in recent days to say they were being ‘retraumatised’ by the reignited public debate (which has included a call by many for a national public inquiry into the gangs). Afzal claimed that many of these individuals were now seeking medical help and, without batting an eyelid, complained about ‘misinformation’ being spread.

I ask you this. If the original claim about the bogus home office circular and its content had been made by a white working-class person rather than a top Asian prosecutor and media talking head who regularly promotes ‘fashionable’ causes, and if that claim had gone viral to the extent that it did and the miscreant was later tracked down as part of a fact-checking exercise, would the mainstream media and political commentariat have turned a blind eye in the same way? It is highly doubtful.

To many liberal sophisticates, the white working-class is ‘low information’ and almost certainly bigoted – and therefore fair game. Remember after the Southport massacre when Bernadette Spofforth, a mother of three from Chester, was arrested and held in a cell for 36 hours simply for suggesting on social media that if reports of the suspect being an asylum seeker known to the security services turned out to be true, all hell would break lose? I don’t see how Afzal’s false claim could be considered any less inflammatory. Yet there was never any chance that he would have his collar felt. Just as the police were not interested when, at the height of the civil unrest after Southport, the chief of ‘anti-fascist’ charity ‘Hope Not Hate’, Nick Lowles, republished a false claim that a Muslim woman in Middlesbrough had been attacked with acid. Neither Afzal nor Lowles should have been arrested, of course. But it does seem that there is one rule for the likes of them and another for the ‘oiks’.

We might also ask if Nazir Afzal will be branded ‘far-right’ by Sir Keir Starmer – they worked together at the Crown Prosecution Service – and others who are usually so quick to condemn those who promote conspiracy theories. Or whether high-profile liberal media voices - ordinarily across these types of story like a rash - will do their jobs and take Afzal to task for the ‘fake news’ he generated? It seems unlikely. To some, disinformation and misinformation only matter when they are spread by their political opponents or the lower orders.

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