He was born in Burnley where his father Rafique worked on an electronic assembly line

He was born in Burnley where his father, Rafique, worked on an electronic assembly line. 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). 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. 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. 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.

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. 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. 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.

Tony Blair’s invasion of Iraq has contributed, even though it was just a political game.”. We should never have been in Iraq in the first place.”Hanan Jasim, 29, a biology masters student from Kuwait”The Madrid bombings have affected me They were on my mind as I came to the station today. The more security we can get the better: let’s do whatever we can to the maximum, that’s what I say. These terrorists don’t distinguish between me [as a Muslim] and you They also kill mothers, babies, everyone. I can’t help keeping an eye open for anything suspicious, like an unattended bag. You wonder how many would be killed if terrorists bombed a train in this country The sooner Blair gets us out of Iraq, the safer I’ll feel.