‘A Polar Bear on an Iceberg? Here’s This Picture of Catastrophe and You’ve Totally Depoliticised It’ Read our Monthly Magazine And support our mission to provide fearless stories about and outside the media system HM: Asad, last August you became the first person of colour to lead Friends of the Earth, as its chief executive, in its more than 50-year history. You’ve previously had roles at Amnesty International UK and War on Want. Fighting injustice is clearly threaded through your journey. How did your background and upbringing shape you as a political activist? How do you think things have changed? The moment we’re in now feels very alienating for a lot of people. While people of colour might not face the same level of racist attacks in the streets or discrimination that is as overt, at the same time, the story of progress when it comes to racial justice in Britain is complicated… And that collective identity, that shared struggle which people from different minority backgrounds and working-class communities, found together beyond race has also fragmented… Extremism always evolves. It seems paradoxical, but also logical, that at the same time that racism moved away from street violence such as the National Front, and conversations about multiculturalism and diversity went national, elements seen as fringe within the far-right 30 years ago have now entered the mainstream – both as a backlash and a continuation of what has always been there under the surface? I’ve long explored how ‘identity’ is complex and how we all have more ‘multiplicity’ within ourselves even if we don’t think about it like that. But most political and media discussion of identity is reductive and binary, feeding ‘identity politics’ and ‘culture wars’. One example is how those on the right are increasingly making the distinction between ‘Britishness’ as a civic national identity that everyone – including people of colour who have ‘assimilated’ – can have; and ‘Englishness’ as a distinct ethnonationalist identity that only people with ancestors born here carry. The past year has also seen ‘Operation Raise the Colours’ putting St George’s and Union flags on display in towns across England – a campaign with ties to far-right networks. Yet, this summer’s World Cup reflected modern England in the way only our national team can do. How do you feel about where we are at with Englishness? Race, class, inequality: this is the political lens you have brought to your role leading Friends of the Earth. Why is this intersectional approach to the climate crisis so key – at a time when the right is framing net zero as antithetical to the very real struggles people are dealing with in their everyday lives? Even though the UK has been experiencing continuous extreme heat this summer, it still feels as if the climate crisis is ‘far away’ when it comes to political and public perception of its impact and where it is on our list of priorities. How can this human instinct to not look at something because it’s ‘over there’ or at some distance be countered? The challenge also seems to be about community-building – especially when it comes to tackling the weaponisation of the right, which is pitting different groups and issues against each other?

August 24, 2026

‘A Polar Bear on an Iceberg? Here’s This Picture of Catastrophe and You’ve Totally Depoliticised It’ Read our Monthly Magazine And support our mission to provide fearless stories about and outside the media system HM: Asad, last August you became the first person of colour to lead Friends of the Earth, as its chief executive, in its more than 50-year history. You’ve previously had roles at Amnesty International UK and War on Want. Fighting injustice is clearly threaded through your journey. How did your background and upbringing shape you as a political activist? How do you think things have changed? The moment we’re in now feels very alienating for a lot of people. While people of colour might not face the same level of racist attacks in the streets or discrimination that is as overt, at the same time, the story of progress when it comes to racial justice in Britain is complicated… And that collective identity, that shared struggle which people from different minority backgrounds and working-class communities, found together beyond race has also fragmented… Extremism always evolves. It seems paradoxical, but also logical, that at the same time that racism moved away from street violence such as the National Front, and conversations about multiculturalism and diversity went national, elements seen as fringe within the far-right 30 years ago have now entered the mainstream – both as a backlash and a continuation of what has always been there under the surface? I’ve long explored how ‘identity’ is complex and how we all have more ‘multiplicity’ within ourselves even if we don’t think about it like that. But most political and media discussion of identity is reductive and binary, feeding ‘identity politics’ and ‘culture wars’. One example is how those on the right are increasingly making the distinction between ‘Britishness’ as a civic national identity that everyone – including people of colour who have ‘assimilated’ – can have; and ‘Englishness’ as a distinct ethnonationalist identity that only people with ancestors born here carry. The past year has also seen ‘Operation Raise the Colours’ putting St George’s and Union flags on display in towns across England – a campaign with ties to far-right networks. Yet, this summer’s World Cup reflected modern England in the way only our national team can do. How do you feel about where we are at with Englishness? Race, class, inequality: this is the political lens you have brought to your role leading Friends of the Earth. Why is this intersectional approach to the climate crisis so key – at a time when the right is framing net zero as antithetical to the very real struggles people are dealing with in their everyday lives? Even though the UK has been experiencing continuous extreme heat this summer, it still feels as if the climate crisis is ‘far away’ when it comes to political and public perception of its impact and where it is on our list of priorities. How can this human instinct to not look at something because it’s ‘over there’ or at some distance be countered? The challenge also seems to be about community-building – especially when it comes to tackling the weaponisation of the right, which is pitting different groups and issues against each other?

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AR: I was born in Pakistan and my parents came to the UK as economic migrants. They ended up in the north-west of England, where a lot of people from our part of Pakistan, in the Punjab, were originally brought over to work in the factories and mills. We lived in Burnley, which was one of the places that was experiencing rapid deindustrialisation. It was a very white, working-class area, and I was one of the first non-white kids in my primary school. People often ask: how did you get political? And I say: I had no choice, because of the context and reality of racist violence I grew up in.
The National Front used to sell newspapers in my secondary school. Every day, there would be some form of racist abuse, some physical attack. People would pour beer on the Asian women. They would use dogs to terrorise them when their husbands went to work. The house we lived in was firebombed and constantly scrawled with swastikas. And the police weren’t doing anything. In school, it was basically paki-bashing. The break-time bell rang and all the non-white kids would pretty much barricade themselves into one classroom because, if you were down the corridors or in the playground, you would be attacked. Teachers were too scared to do anything.
Racists forced me to learn more about black history because of the stuff they’d say to us. You’d get beaten up, but it would spur me on. What was going on on television screens would play out on the streets and at school. When Roots first aired [in 1977], they’d say to us: ‘say your name is Kunta Kinte’. But then, when in the show [the character’s grandson is] given Chicken George as his slave name, the kids would say to us: ‘say your name is Chicken George’ – and we’d say, ‘no, it’s Kunte Kinte’. Apart from that there was Mind Your Language, Love Thy Neighbour, It Ain’t Half Hot Mum – popular, casual racism was on TV screens.
At 14 or 15, I organised a school strike against racist violence – we would go to school but not go in. It was a necessity just to organise. We moved to another area which had slightly more non-white people and an Asian community, because it was safer, but that area was close to the Burnley football ground – so on Saturdays, you’d get football fans come through doing a bit of paki-bashing, smashing a few windows. Every morning, all the kids going to school would get together – we’d put the younger kids in the middle, and then we’d head off – if you went by yourself, or one or two, you’d definitely be attacked. So it was organising without thinking it was organising – just for safety.
Being seven, eight, nine was different, because you felt totally powerless. An example of how random the violence could be… when I was in primary school, I was stood at the bus stop and somebody walked by with a cricket bat and smashed me right in the face. As a kid, you’re thinking, ‘I’m not going to go home because my parents will be more worried, I’ll go to school’. We didn’t want to tell our parents too much of what was happening because they then felt even more powerless. But when you got to 12 and 13, and a few more families moved in and they had kids who were 15 or 16, we suddenly became a bit more able to stand up for ourselves.
I joined the Labour Party Young Socialists, a youth wing controlled at that time by the Trotskyist Militants, and they were a whole bunch of lefties who were like ‘ooh, a non-white person and lefty who wants to talk about these things’. So I found an outlet. Then one day, an Indian nurse, who had come to my house to see my mum, showed me a [leaflet for the] Asian Youth Movement around the Bradford 12 [a group of young Asian and black men, many of whom were members of the United Black Youth League, who were charged in 1981 with terrorism offences after making petrol bombs to defend against racist attacks. In 1982, they were acquitted by an all-white jury on th…

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