Back in the first week of January, the hot Whitehall gossip was that the government was about to proscribe Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist organisation.
It looked like a logical, inevitable step: after all, Ken McCallum, the head of MI5, had recently disclosed that ten IRGC plots to murder people on British soil had been foiled in the previous year, and both Home Secretary Suella Braverman and the Security Minister Tom Tugendhat were known to be in favour of it.
A few weeks later, the JC revealed evidence that Iran had been planning to assassinate prominent Jews in Britain and throughout the diaspora. Tugendhat confirmed our story in an interview, adding that the number of thwarted IRGC assassinations had risen to 15. And then… nothing.
The reason for the absence of action, it has long been clear, is resistance from the Foreign Office. Indeed, when a high-level delegation organised by the Jewish Leadership Council met Foreign Secretary James Cleverly on Wednesday evening, he told them not to expect proscription any time soon.
So why isn’t it happening? Why are Britain’s diplomats pushing back? And in the end, does this matter? It’s not that the Foreign Office is going soft on Iran. More individuals and institutions are constantly being added to the UK sanctions lists, both because of their involvement in Iran’s nuclear weapons programme and for their abuse of human rights.
Senior officials have told me that Cleverly is “appalled” by the JC’s investigation revealing that UK-based academics have collaborated with colleagues in Iran in developing technology with military applications such as engines for drones and fighter jets.
As my colleague Felix Pope and I reveal this week, this also extends to futuristic communications systems that make use of lasers, which could be deployed for civilian purposes but also to mount deadly attacks on Israel or countries in Europe by Unmanned Aerial Vehicle “swarms”.
Several possible reasons for the Foreign Office position have emerged in the past six months. One of the more compelling was advanced after the execution of the UK-Iranian dual national Alireza Akbari: that proscribing the IRGC might lead to the judicial murder of other British prisoners of the Tehran regime.
But for some time now, the principal one, which was stressed again by Cleverly at Wednesday’s meeting, has been that it is seen as advantageous to maintain diplomatic “engagement”.
It is feared that if Britain went ahead with proscription, Iran would retaliate by forcing the closure of the British embassy in Tehran. To this, officials sometimes append a postscript: that the USA, our closest ally, is especially keen to see this stay open, because their own embassy has been shut since it was stormed and its diplomats taken hostage during the Islamic revolution in 1979.
America, it is claimed, see our embassy as a portal not only for diplomacy, but for gathering vital intelligence. I can’t judge the validity of this claim, although it seems to me that it’s far from certain that proscribing the IRGC would lead to the Iranians kicking us out. If they did, they would of course be forced to close their embassy in London – which is something they might well want to avoid: they too like having a diplomatic portal.
As for engagement: if the recent history of dealing with Iran tells us anything, over issues as diverse as nuclear weapons and hostages such as Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, it is that the agenda advanced by the country’s radical, ideologues in the shape of the IRGC and its ultimate chief, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, will always trump the somewhat more moderate positions advanced by its foreign ministry. Lest we forget, Khaemenei and the IRGC are sworn to do all they can to destroy Israel and kill Jews.
However, there is a deeper issue. The Whitehall debate over proscription truly pits apples against oranges, unlike against unlike. Braverman and Tugendhat want to proscribe the IRGC because it poses a real and present danger to British citizens, some of them prominent Jews, and to members of the Iranian opposition based here.
To them, this isn’t an abstruse diplomatic problem with nuanced arguments on both sides, but something that concerns the most basic role of the state: to protect those who live inside its borders. Proscription would have further consequences. It would mean that to parrot the IRGC’s ferociously antisemitic, jihadist propaganda in Britain as some are wont to do, often under the guise of “anti-Zionism”, would become a criminal offence.
The various pro-Iranian regime mosques and cultural centres, such as the Islamic Centre of England in London’s Maida Vale, would finally be forced to close. These institutions, found in many large cities, currently enjoy charitable status, despite their frequent hosting of extremist preachers who have, for example, mourned the slain IRGC terrorist mastermind Qasem Soleimani as a martyred hero.
For the moment, they provide a platform for spreading radicalisation of a highly dangerous kind. The terror groups Hamas and Hezbollah have both, rightly, already been proscribed. But both derive succour and inspiration from their IRGC paymasters in Tehran. The time has come to proscribe the terrorist organ grinder, too.
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