The candidate left out in the cold

He was young, bright, Blairite - and Asian. As a prospective Labour MP, Shahid Malik seemed a favourite for the safe seat of Brent East. But everything changed after he aired his views on Iraq. Paul Vallely reports

It's only 10 minutes by car from Shahid Malik's old home in Gordon Street, amid the boarded-up terraced houses of the Stoneyholme estate in the heart of Burnley, to where he lives now, up the Colne road in a handsome Victorian villa with views overlooking the green expanse of Pendle Hill. But there is far more to the journey between the two than mere geography might indicate.

Malik is a remarkable character. He is an exemplar of the "local lad made good", in party-political terms at any rate. Born into a working-class, Asian family on the former mill-town's grimmest inner-city estate, he is the youngest and only non-white member of both Labour's National Executive Committee and a host of worthy political quangos.

His face may be familiar for a rather different reason. You may have seen it, on the television or in the newspapers, pouring with blood after he was struck violently in the face by a police riot shield, while he was trying to stop rioting in his home town during the long, hot summer three years ago, when a number of Lancashire former cotton towns were convulsed by race riots.

Now he is in the news again, as Tony Blair faces embarrassing allegations that Labour is blocking certain Muslim candidates from standing as MPs in the next general election because they, like the overwhelming majority of the Asian community, opposed the war in Iraq. So widespread is the concern within the party's ranks that even that the Blair loyalist Trevor Phillips, chair of the Commission for Racial Equality, has been complaining behind the scenes - and the cabinet minister Patricia Hewitt took the unusual step of publicly denouncing as "disgraceful" the decision to keep Malik off the shortlist for the parliamentary nomination in Ken Livingstone's old constituency of Brent East.

It has all been distinctly uncomfortable for Malik who, until recently, was seen as the perfect New Labour apparatchik. Young, Blairite, from an ethnic minority, Muslim, working class, he ticked all the boxes. In addition to being elected by ordinary party members to the NEC, he chairs Labour's Ethnic Minority Forum, is vice-chair of its Women, Race and Equalities Committee, sits on Gordon Brown's Economic Policy Commission, is the sole representative from Great Britain on Northern Ireland's Equality Commission, and is on the UK board of Unesco.

All other things being equal he would have been a dead cert for a safe Labour seat in the House of Commons - the party has just 12 Asian MPs, and demographics suggest it should have three times that number. But then came the war...

Malik is one of seven children. He was born in Burnley where his father, Rafique, worked on an electronic assembly line. But before Malik senior moved to Britain in the mid-1960s, he had been a headmaster in Pakistan, and before long he became a key figure in the Pakistani community, locally and nationally. He was chair of the National Federation of Pakistani Organisations and was appointed to the Race Relations Board, the forerunner of the Commission for Racial Equality (on which his son Shahid sat two decades later). He was also Mayor of Burnley.

"When he became a local councillor in 1976 he was one of only two Pakistani councillors in the whole of the UK. People would travel from all over the country to seek his advice," recalls Malik, sitting in his parents' house - he is unmarried and still lives with them. The finely-corniced front room is dominated by a huge, silk, green and black, Islamic-patterned carpet, and a complete set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica dwarfs the English version of the Koran on the bookcase.

"I started knocking on doors for Labour, aged eight, with my Dad," he says. "When I was 15 I joined the party and I've been a member for 21 years."

Yet, as a youngster, he did not see politics as a full-time business. "I wanted to be a snooker champion. I was quite good. If I'd gone professional I'd have been in the top 120 players now," he says with a directness and lack of modesty which is characteristic and rather engaging, though his political rivals might see it otherwise. Later in the day we drive through the Stoneyholme estate on which he was brought up, and he points out the flat kitchen roof on to which he used to climb from his bedroom window at night, with his cue, to sneak off to play in the local snooker hall. He also points out the Christian youth club where he was allowed to practice.

His childhood was characterised by a curious amalgam. At school he was routinely subjected to "Paki-bashing". "Every break, and after school, skinheads would be after the Asian lads, running into us, kicking and punching. It was a nightmare," he recalls. And yet, as we tour the town, many of the friends about whom he offers anecdotes have Irish names. When he was in hospital after the police attacked him, two of the friends who came to see if he was OK were white - and angry that hospital staff wouldn't let them in, fearing they were British National Party supporters out to do more damage.

This split personality is part of the oddness of Burnley, one of the most insular and remote of the northern mill towns, far nearer to the small Yorkshire market-town of Skipton than it is to Manchester. It's a white town, where blacks and Asians are tolerated so long as they know their place. Or were. At the last general election Burnley was the place in the UK where the extreme right-wingers of the BNP did best. One in 10 people in the town voted for them.

"Being tolerated is not enough," says Malik. "We've got to get away from the British idea that we're proud of this tolerance. Black and Asian people don't want to be tolerated. We want to be accepted."

The irony is that Shahid Malik cannot say that he, personally, has not been accepted. On leaving school he got a job with the East Lancashire Training and Enterprise Council, working on business development - a career which took him, very young, to the job of chief executive of Haringey Regeneration Agency in north London, in charge of a budget of £150 million. It was a post, however, he was happy to relinquish when he was elected to the NEC, for which he had stood simply because he felt it wrong that all 37 candidates for the election were white.

Yet, though he says he had not dreamed that he would be elected, he talks of politics with undisguised ambition. "We need more ambitious people. If we're the party of aspiration we should be supporting and nurturing people from ethnic minorities. My ambition is a means to an end - to change things for the better for the most deprived and discriminated-against people in our society. It's not personal. I don't think realistically in my lifetime you're going to see a black person as prime minister."

Such talk gets up the noses of some in the party who routinely dub him as a carpet-bagger for touting himself round various constituencies in the hope of getting a Labour seat.

"I regard that as a racist jibe," he says. "I've put up for four constituencies. Roy Hattersley went for 14, Tony Blair for six or seven, Gordon Brown for four or five. There are many white people out there who've gone for infinitely more seats than I have. If you're black and ambitious that's seen as dangerous; if you're white and ambitious that's seen as commendable."

What has proved considerably more dangerous for Malik is being caught between the community in which he was brought up and the party he has adopted.

His strength, he feels, is his empathy with young British Muslims. "They can connect with someone who was born here, who knows their language, who understands their concerns, who knows about the tension between the East and West, the old cultures and the new way of life," he says. He has seen a range of responses among his generation of British-born Muslims. There are those who have changed their names, "from Tariq to Tony", to gain acceptability, jobs or girls - one of his Pakistani friends tells women that he is Italian. Then there are those who have become more overtly religious to find in Islam what is lacking elsewhere. "And in the middle, somewhere, are all the rest".

But speaking out from this world has brought him into conflict with the Labour leadership. He has twice taken on the Home Secretary, David Blunkett - " before it was fashionable to do so", he quips. The result was that Blunkett refused to renew Malik's warrant as a member of the Commission for Racial Equality.

"Many of the debates David Blunkett has promoted aren't healthy - like telling members of the Muslim community who they should marry." Blunkett said they should marry fellow British-born Muslims rather than importing spouses from Pakistan. "I don't think it's the job of government to say who people should marry, especially when they're just targeting one community. Presumably there's no problem if you want to marry a Canadian or an Australian.

"Then there are false debates - like raising the issue of forced marriages among Asians, or genital mutilation within the African community. The assumption is that ethnic-minority communities tolerate these practices. Home Office figures show there are 200 forced marriages a year. Among an Asian community that's almost two million strong that is 0.01 per cent. So we don't need discussion on forced marriages; we just need the existing law applied and the guilty people put behind bars.

"Yet raising the issue in this way helps define how a community is seen to outsiders. It's not in context, not in perspective, and yet it damages how the rest of society sees us. It's like saying that some white people are paedophiles so therefore, by implication, the white community is in favour of paedophilia. It's a nonsense. And it's dangerous because it reinforces negative racist stereotypes. I'm sure that wasn't the Home Secretary's intention, so all I can conclude is that it wasn't terribly well-thought out."

You can see why this hasn't gone down too well in Whitehall. Nor, evidently, has his line on the war.

Compared with some backbench rebels, Malik's line on Iraq is pretty mild. At the outset, on Newsnight, he said that even speaking about war was destabilising for the Middle East. He was keen for inspectors to have more time. Then on the eve of war he said, on The World at One, that he did not share the American urgency for war, that he did not believe Iraq was an immediate threat, and that Britain should not go to war without an explicit second UN resolution - a line he re-iterated in a speech to the Labour conference. Then, when war began, he told Tony Blair, in the NEC, that the Muslim community and others felt there were double standards being applied - with UN resolutions on Iraq being acted on and those on Israel being ignored. In response the Prime Minister said he would press George Bush on the Middle East "roadmap for peace".

All of which does not sound terribly controversial or disloyal. More tellingly, it articulates the serious problem Labour now has with its Muslim constituency. "September 11 has been the worst thing that's ever happened to the Muslim world," he avers.

"The people who carried out that evil act, far from helping Muslims, have profoundly damaged and distorted the image of Islam and set back the cause of integration by years or decades. But it has made the Muslim community here much more politicised, more alert, and more confident in its own identity. Once the Labour Party was the natural home of British Muslims. After Afghanistan and Iraq, everything is more difficult. It's ironic: this government has done more on the domestic agenda for Muslims than any other government in British history. Yet, because of their foreign policy, all that is ignored."

Muslims, he says, have been statistically twice as likely to vote Labour as anything else. More than that, they are twice as likely to turn out to vote as the average voter. "That makes them four times as important as your average voter. If they go elsewhere that indicates serious danger for the party in many big urban conurbations." Enough to lose Labour the next election? "It's a possibility. It depends on the next stage of the endgame in Iraq. And whether they will take notice of people like me telling them not to throw the baby out with the bathwater by turning to another party."

All of which, I suggest, ought to make New Labour's strategists more, rather than less, keen on making sure that candidates like Shahid Malik get seats to fight.

"There are a lot of decent people in senior positions in the party who have expressed to me their disappointment over the Brent East decision," he comments, diplomatically. "But what's the point in being in politics if you just go along with absolutely everything the leadership say? I'm sure they don't just want clones. That wouldn't be healthy for anybody."

He may, it seems, be in for a rude political awakening.