Each weekday morning, every child in the south Asian community in Burnley would gather before making the journey to school. It was the 1970s, the National Front were mobilising, and they were the children of south Asian workers invited to Britain a decade earlier to fill labour shortages.
Among them was Asad Rehman, who had moved to the Lancashire town with his family from Pakistan at the age of four. “We would all walk together, because it was dangerous to walk alone,” he remembers. “Younger children in the middle, older children around the edge, because we’d be attacked on the way.”
Things were no better at school. Pupils would perform Nazi salutes and hurl racial epithets at them, some exchanged Bulldog, the National Front newspaper, openly in the halls, and the black and brown pupils “every day, as soon as the dinner bell would go, we would barricade ourselves into a classroom, because we would be attacked”.
“So I started talking to everybody,” says Rehman. Together, they decided to defy the teachers who had failed to protect them by collectively refusing to attend, “and we will say this is because the schools aren’t safe for us”. It was Rehman’s first taste of organising, and as he joined wider antiracism movements that were formed across the country, it shaped his political outlook.
“We started to protect our community and I started to realise that abiding lesson that has stayed with me: we are much more powerful when we are a ‘we’ than when we’re individual. You need organisations to organise you and you need a vision to hold you together.”
This summer, Rehman was appointed chief executive of the environmental charity Friends of the Earth. For decades, the poster child of climate breakdown was the polar bear drifting on an ice floe in a warming ocean. Now, to speak of the climate crisis without mentioning social, racial and economic injustice has become all but unthinkable. And Rehman has been at the forefront of this transformation.
“I took this job because of the scale of the crisis out there,” he told the Guardian on the sidelines of a Make Them Pay climate justice protest outside Downing Street last month. “It’s an interconnected crisis of climate, [of] inequality, of economic systems that have been rigged against ordinary people. It’s ultimately a crisis of justice.
“And there is only one organisation that has always centred justice – environmental justice and climate justice – that’s Friends of the Earth.”
With more than 250,000 supporters and 233 local action groups, Friends of the Earth England, Wales and Northern Ireland (Scotland has its own Friends of the Earth) is the UK’s biggest environmental campaigning network. In the year to summer 2024, it spent more than £10m on activism ranging from courtroom challenges to government policy to local campaigns against councils’ use of pesticides in park playgrounds.
But it has – albeit undeservedly – earned a reputation as a less radical organisation compared with its peers, more bake sales and petitions than road blockades and occupations.
The appointment of a stalwartly class-conscious campaigner like Rehman could be the organisation’s attempt to shed that image.
And it is not the first time he has worked there.
After graduating from university, Rehman continued campaigning for racial justice, working with the Newham Monitoring Project in the era when the far right was still a force in east London.
“It was running campaigns, and it was doing casework, and it was rooted in the community,” he says. “And I learned being a community organiser.”
But not content with simply reactively countering racism on the streets and from the state he, along with many others at the time, sought to place antiracism on a human rights level. This led him to Amnesty UK, where over the next decade he worked with global south activists to push for a fundamental shift in the understanding of human rights. “At that time, Amnesty didn’t campaign on economic and social rights, they only campaigned on civil and political rights,” he says.
By the end of the 1990s, Rehman’s work with Amnesty had brought him into contact with a range of international social justice organisations that at that time had coalesced into the counter-globalisation movement against neoliberalism. What he was to learn from them would affect the rest of his career.
“I was going and working with these people, and everybody you spoke to was saying how bad climate was, how farming was becoming impossible, how it was displacing people,” he says. “And I was like, Jesus! Everything we have fought for and won is going to be unravelled by this thing. And this thing that is happening, it’s called climate – and yet nobody’s talking about it like that.”
This led Rehman to his first job with Friends of the Earth, in 2006. At the time, most environmental organisations were talking about climate change as a problem for the future.
“Friends of the Earth was the only mainstream environmental organisation that then officially broke with what I’d call the rest of the environment movement, and was one of the founders of what we now call the climate justice movement,” he says.
Rehman worked to bring the voices of the developing world to the table. It did not always make him popular. On one occasion, he recalls, after a meeting between UK government representatives and environmental NGOs, a minister called his chief executive demanding he call off his “climate Taliban”. He would not be drawn on which minister it was.
“People just felt: ‘Who is this person who doesn’t follow [the] same rules?’ You know, the environment is a nice thing, we can all agree and talk. [But] I saw it as a fight against racism, a fight for human rights … a deeply political fight.”
Justice narratives were increasingly becoming accepted in climate and environmental campaigning. But the converse was also happening, with justice-oriented groups increasingly tackling climate and environmental issues.
And so it was that War On Want, the trade union-backed anti-poverty campaign, in 2017 appointed Rehman as director. “I was able to bring another part of that coalition together into that space, writing the same story, but with slightly different actors.” It was here that he worked until this summer, when Friends of the Earth announced it wanted him back, this time as the boss.
Shortly after news of Rehman’s appointment broke, the UK environment movement’s political wing chose its new leader. The election of Zack Polanski as the leader of the Greens marked a significant leftward shift for the party.
Hours before Rehman spoke at September’s Make Them Pay demo, Polanski was leading protesters in a march down Regent Street in central London. “I think Rehman’s phenomenal,” Polanski said. “He’s been a keen voice in the climate movement for a long time. Someone who’s able to speak with clarity, particularly around the global south and the deep inequality.”
Others among the crowd, including some who had worked with Rehman, had more nuanced views about his suitability for the role. “Asad is very principled and committed,” said one former colleague. “But he is a campaigner, not an organiser. He’s very good at saying the right things, and getting people fired up, but he’s not really about the hands-on organisation.
“That said, I have not met anyone who is able to bring together the economic and climate justice messages so well, so if anyone is going to take this job, I would want it to be him.”
And it is organising that is at the heart of Rehman’s intentions for Friends of the Earth. His vision is to mobilise and grow the organisation’s significant local network, building on its environmental base into broader community organising.
“We have over 230 local groups – that makes us an incredible force,” he says. “We were responsible for the climate bill, for the first Climate Change Act in the whole world. We’ve been responsible for winning transformative solutions. We led the fight against fracking.
“Now we have to lead the fight again. For a new story, a story that connects climate and inequality, that tackles the far right by recognising we have millions of people in this country who have been left behind. We’re being offered nothing but division and hatred. We have to provide an answer for them. Friends of the Earth is going to be in the forefront of that.”
