Every weekday morning, students from the south Asian community in this Lancashire town would assemble before heading to school. It was the 1970s, a period when extremist organizations were gaining strength, and they were the sons and daughters of Asian migrants who had moved to Britain in the previous decade to address employment gaps.
One of these children was Asad Rehman, who had come to the northern town with his family from Pakistan at the age of four. “We would all walk together,” he explains, “since it wasn't safe to walk alone. The little ones in the middle, older children forming a perimeter, because we’d be attacked on the way.”
Conditions were just as difficult at school. Other children would give fascist salutes and yell abusive language at them. They shared extremist publications openly in the halls. Minority children day after day, as soon as the dinner bell would go, we secured ourselves into a classroom, due to the risk of assault.”
“I began discussing to everybody,” says Rehman. Together, they decided to defy the teachers who had not kept them safe by jointly deciding not to attend. “declaring this is because the schools didn't provide security for us.” This became Rehman’s first taste of activism. When he became part of national equality efforts emerging across the country, it influenced his political outlook.
“We started to protect our community helping me understand that crucial insight which I've carried: our strength multiplies as a united group compared to acting alone. You need organisations to organise you along with a shared goal that binds you.”
In the past few months, Rehman became chief executive of the green organization Friends of the Earth. Over many years, the familiar face of environmental crisis was the iconic bear on melting ice. Currently, discussing global heating without mentioning social, racial and economic injustice has become highly inappropriate. And Rehman has been as a leader of this transformation.
“I accepted this position given the enormous challenge out there,” he told the media on the sidelines a climate justice protest outside Downing Street recently. “We face multiple connected challenges of climate, social injustice, of financial structures which are biased against ordinary people. It’s ultimately an equity issue.
“And there is only one organisation that has always centred fairness – environmental justice and climate justice – this particular network.”
Boasting over a quarter-million members and 233 local action groups, This environmental network (Scotland has its own) is the UK’s biggest green activist community. In the year to summer 2024, it allocated over ten million pounds on activism ranging from courtroom challenges on official regulations community initiatives opposing chemical use in park playgrounds.
But it has – albeit undeservedly – earned a reputation as relatively moderate versus other groups. More bake sales and petitions instead of confrontational tactics.
The selection of an advocate for economic justice like Rehman may represent the organisation’s attempt to redefine itself.
This isn't the beginning he collaborated with the network.
After graduating, he maintained campaigning for racial justice, collaborating with a community organization during a period when the far right remained active in the capital.
“We organized protests, handling individual cases, and it was rooted in the community,” he recalls. “And I learned being a community organiser.”
However, unsatisfied than just responding to racism on the streets and from the state collaborating with activists, worked to frame equality work within a rights framework. This led him to Amnesty UK, where over the next decade he worked with global south activists to demand a fundamental shift regarding the interpretation of basic rights. “Back then, the organization didn't focus on financial and community issues. they only campaigned political freedoms,” he notes.
As the conclusion of the 1990s, his efforts at the organization introduced him with multiple international social justice organisations. During that period they had coalesced as anti-globalization activists challenging free-market policies. What he was to learn from them shaped his future work.
“I traveled and working with these people, and everybody you spoke to mentioned the severity of environmental issues, agricultural challenges, how it was displacing people,” he recalls. “It struck me! Everything we have fought for and secured might be lost because of environmental collapse. And this thing that is happening, known as global warming – and yet it wasn't being discussed like that.”
That guided him to an initial position with Friends of the Earth during the mid-2000s. At the time, many activists framed climate change as a distant threat.
“This network represented the unique environmental organisation that separated away from typical conservation groups. helping establish of the emerging the climate justice movement,” he says.
Rehman worked to bring the voices from global south nations during negotiations. This approach wasn't make him popular. In a particular instance, he shares, after a meeting between UK government representatives and green groups, an official contacted his boss requesting he control his assertive tactics. He didn't reveal on which minister it was.
“Many believed: ‘Why does he challenge conventions?’ Understand, the environment is a nice thing, discussion is possible. [But] I viewed it as combating discrimination, advocating for freedoms … about power structures.”
Justice narratives were increasingly becoming accepted among activists. But the converse was also happening. rights-based campaigns engaging with sustainability concerns.
This led to that War On Want the trade union-backed {
