The first Muslim to become a government minister still feels aggrieved about how the police treated him during the 2001 race riots
It was in that overheated summer of 2001, when race riots broke out across the North, that a grainy police video showed a young Asian man walking from a group of youths towards a police line in Burnley with his hands in the air; the next moment he was on the ground.
That man was Shahid Malik, who was appointed this summer as Britain’s first Muslim minister. His account of what happened deviates substantially from that of the police.
“I walked up to this officer and said to him, ‘Listen, everything’s going to be OK. I’m going to move this lot and there’ll be no trouble whatsoever’,” Mr Malik said. “But when I looked into his eyes I could see that he couldn’t really hear what I was saying, because his eyes were kind of a bit zombied, he was all adrenalined up. Within seconds he had lifted his shield and started to smash it in my face. And then the batons came out and I was knocked unconscious.”
Mr Malik’s formal complaint, it has to be said, was dismissed by Lancashire police after an investigation that was overseen by the Police Complaints Authority. It concluded that there was insufficient evidence of an unprovoked attack. Six years later the officers are still in their posts, and Mr Malik, 39, is a junior minister in the Department for International Development.
He still harbours a grievance about the alleged incident. Mr Malik said that it remained one of the turning points “that formed the person that I am”. As he spoke about his life, a distinct pattern emerged: Mr Malik’s path to this comfortable Whitehall sofa has been marked, from an early age, by learning how to respond to hostility – often racist, and on many occasions violent.
His father came to Burnley in 1965, a time and place that Mr Malik described as “probably the most racist environment anybody could ever be brought up in”. He had been tempted from his post as headmaster of a large school in Pakistan by an offer from someone at the British Embassy, who said that Britain was looking for teachers. They lived in one of the poorest wards in the country, said Mr Malik, who was sometimes the only nonwhite boy in his class. “That sometimes used to feel like thirty against one,” he said. “This concept of Paki-bashing was something that was in vogue and a few times a week it would take place. Teachers were oblivious. Completely disinterested in it.”
Was he “Paki-bashed”? “I certainly was,” he said, reeling off incidents that ranged from being beaten “pretty badly” by four skinheads in his first week at secondary school, to being stabbed in the leg with a chisel during woodwork after an argument about race. He had to go to hospital to get stitches. “But again nothing was done – quite incredibly.”
The reaction – or lack of it – from the school authorities was “a real kind of eye-opener”, but so, interestingly, was the reaction of Mr Malik. “You just accepted it, and looking back on it I don’t bear any grudges towards any of those people. The truth is that they were ignorant. And so really it wasn’t their fault, they were just children.”
Did he ever wish that he could live in Pakistan instead? “Never. No, I always thought of myself as very much British, very much that this is my country . . . I still say it’s the best country in the world to live.”
It is obviously important for Mr Malik to show that he remains determinedly positive, that he tries to tolerate and understand – or at least not to generalise about – those who are against him. The day after he left hospital, during the unrest in 2001, he was out patrolling the streets with the police “to show that the police aren’t bad”.
This was despite the shock of what happened. “It was shocking to me at first. You can imagine, I was a commissioner on the Commission for Racial Equality, I was the only ever British commissioner to the Equality Commission for Northern Ireland. I was on Labour’s National Executive Committee sitting with Tony Blair and others. And I’d been commended for my work in calming the situation for the last two days, and here I’d been knocked unconscious, my face was soaked in blood, I had cuts to my chest and arms.
“I remember a white woman stopping in a car and saying, ‘Leave him alone, we can see what you’re doing’. And that was very heartening. It was surreal because I still had handcuffs on me when I was in the hospital bed. It was just a bit unbelievable.”
In the years that followed, he struggled to find a seat. During this time he was the victim of a hit-and-run incident in a Burnley petrol station, his parent’s family car was firebombed and, while walking the street, he was surrounded by 20 members of the extreme-right group Combat 18, who said that they were going to kill him.
Although his father was once Mayor of Burnley and was appointed, in the late 1960s, on to what was then the Race Relations Board (a precursor of the Commission for Racial Equality), his parents wanted him to give up politics.
“They think it’s thankless. In the autumn of 2003, the family were just saying to me, ‘Listen, you’ve been through quite a lot, just stop it. You’re not going to get a seat.’ And I just thought, ‘These people are mad. Of course I’m going to get there’.”
Now, as one of the most powerful Muslims in the country, he faces attack from radical Islamists as well as racists. “There are extremists who think of themselves as Muslims . . . who see me as a hate figure, as the enemy.”
To say that his Dewsbury constituency is divided is something of an understatement. It has the highest British National Party vote in the country and was also the home of the leading suicide bomber from July 7, 2005, Mohammad Sidique Khan. “It doesn’t matter what I do, I’m going to annoy somebody,” he said. “I have just got to do what I believe is right on these big issues, these issues of extremism and morality.”
Once he made it to the Commons, was there an end to his racist encounters? Not quite. He described one incident at Westminster. “We’re on the terrace, there was me and there were two female colleagues, white. And one of the security guys ignored both of them and came up to me and said, ‘Sir, have you got any ID?’ I think you learn through experience to just be very patient and just be very relaxed about these things . . .”
He has been “disappointed” by the language of a few “unreconstructed Tories”, but the thing that annoyed him the most, he said, was still being confused, after two years in Parliament, with his fellow Muslim Labour MP, Sadiq Khan. “Everybody has got our names wrong – the Speaker has got us confused, the Deputy Speaker has got us confused. MPs get us confused constantly.”
After two years tt was “a bit unforgivable,” he said. “There’s about a foot difference in height. He’s a Cockney – I certainly am not,” he said, with a laugh. “And you just think, ‘Wow, how can you keep getting this wrong?’ And I just ignore it, because it’s deeply embarrassing for people when they realise that they’ve got the name wrong.”
We asked whether it was annoying, too, that his post (along with nine other ministerial appointments) was unpaid: did Mr Malik think that there was a touch of tokenism in his promotion? No, he insisted, it just proved that “the Government actually isn’t trying to be overly politically correct. It’s an unpaid role, he happens to be Muslim, so what? Big deal. It shouldn’t send out any messages.” Later, he added suddenly: “Forget about being paid, I would pay to do this job.”
He hopes to use his role at the department to shine a light on how the Government works to help the Muslim world, as part of the “hearts and minds” campaign that Gordon Brown has described.
“I think something like 40 per cent of our development assistance actually goes to Muslims and Muslim countries across the world. It’s very, very significant. We haven’t been good at talking it up, and that’s something we need to do.”
Was the overwhelming emphasis towards Africa, from Mr Brown downwards, a little skewed?
“You’re right about Africa in the sense that there are approximately a billion people in this world who live on less than a dollar a day. And 650 million of them actually are in Asia. And actually a lot of our resources and energy does go into Asia. We’ve got a massive programme in India, in Nepal, in Bangladesh, in Pakistan. I think that what we don’t do is talk that up enough.”
Mr Malik also wants to persuade the wealthy Gulf states to spread their aid beyond the Muslim world. “It cuts both ways in that sense. I think they concentrate their aid on Muslim countries in the same way as you get some organisations which might be Christian that concentrate their efforts on Christian communities.”
Many Westminster insiders described Mr Malik to us as overly ambitious, a self-promoter, whereas we found him to be thoughtful and interesting. Perhaps their reaction was another little piece of racism; was what they called self-promotion simply a necessary determination to overcome prejudice?
“I don’t mind if people say that I’m here because I’m a Muslim in the same way that women have had to endure [discrimination] for years,” he said. “Women have to cross hurdles to get here that men don’t have to. The same is true of black and ethnic minority parliamentarians. And in that sense I believe this to be true: if you’re a woman or if you are black or ethnic minority, you necessarily have to be much better than your white male counterpart to achieve.”
The British body politic might have admitted Mr Malik, but it is still a long, long way from being colour-blind.
Times Online
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