Lord Blunkett has looked back to his experience as Home Secretary after the 9/11 terror attacks in calling for a clampdown on Iran influence in the UK.
Talking exclusively to the JC, the Labour grandee said there has been a “historical reluctance” by the authorities to deal with extremists in Britain.
He spoke as a new report from Labour Friends of Israel (LFI) for which he wrote the foreword calls for the regime’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to be banned in the UK.
In a wide-ranging interview conducted before the Metropolitan Police banned the Al Quds Day march that had been due to take place this weekend, Blunkett also raised concern that it could have been a “vehicle for those who pose a genuine threat”.
Addressing concerns about pro-Iranian activism in Britain, he said the terror threat the government faced in 2001 after the Al Qaeda attacks in the US showed the principle of free speech should not be used as a shield for rhetoric that promotes violence or intimidation.
Blunkett said: “I’ve always had this problem. I had it back in 2001 at the time of the attack on the World Trade Centre. My efforts then to substantially tighten the law and to bring in incitement as a tool was heavily resisted by the civil liberties lobby.
“Whilst this is a very delicate and difficult area, we need to be clear that anything that incites or encourages or facilitates a threat to others is unacceptable, and we should deal with it as such. That applies online as well as offline.”
Blunkett said the UK had already begun reassessing the evolving threat landscape before the attacks of 11 September 2001.
BRIGHTON, GREAT BRITAIN - SEPTEMBER 29: British Prime Minister Tony Blair applauds British Home Secretary David Blunkett during the fourth day of the Labour Party Annual Conference on September 29, 2004 in Brighton, England. (Photo by Ian Waldie/Getty Images)Getty Images
He said: “When I became Home Secretary… following the Good Friday Agreement back in 1999, there was a gradual reassessment being made.
“We were aware of what was going on in Afghanistan in the training camps… but the 9/11 was a shock to the whole world system.”
The attacks accelerated a shift underway within Britain’s security services. Yet the broader threat that emerged in the aftermath of 9/11 has never disappeared, he warned.
“It fades and re-emerges, and at the moment, in terms of the use of state-backed operators, we need to be alert and as decisive as we were 25 years ago.”
The new LFI report is written by security expert Roger Macmillan and outlines the risk the IRGC poses to British citizens, with MI5 reporting last October on some 20 Iran-backed plots in the UK over the previous year.
Blunkett said a ban under counter-terrorism legislation would strengthen the tools available to authorities investigating hostile threats and make the police’s role “more straightforward”.
The government has repeatedly signalled its intention to proscribe the group but has yet to do so. Blunkett suggested that legal caution inside government had slowed progress.
“The problems that the government have had in proscribing Palestine Action has made officials much more cautious in providing their recommendation,” he said.
He pointed to “fiduciary duty,” the obligations ministers face under the ministerial code to ensure that any decision is legally robust and proportionate, which had “slowed things down”.
But Blunkett said recent developments, including evidence of Iranian-linked activity in Britain, should give ministers the confidence to act.
“I hope that a combination of what we’re seeing in terms of the threat from Iran to non-combatant countries and the clear threat that has been demonstrated… over the last 12 months to the UK will give Shabana Mahmood the confidence to be able to go forward on this.”
Members of the Basij militia march in a parade at a Revolutionary Guards base in northeastern Tehran (Image: Getty)Middle East Images/AFP via Getty
He said he did not believe the government was complacent about the challenge posed by Tehran but warned: “There has been a historic reluctance to address the issue,” pointing to what he described as the “exponential threat” posed by the regime’s global networks.
“At a time when this conflict has now escalated, this is surely the moment to demonstrate our commitment as a nation to dealing with the internal threat… because this is what we’re talking about with the IRGC now, the internal threat to our people.”
Regarding extremism in general, Blunkett called for a broader public awareness campaign to highlight its scale of and particularly online incitement.
Citizenship is “essential” to inoculate against antisemitism, he said, adding that it should form part of “a much more broad-based public information campaign. Most people are not aware of the extent of threats and hate speech and the incitement of actions that is taking place across the country.”
More broadly, the Labour stalwart said he was concerned that Britain’s political system was becoming increasingly fragmented, allowing smaller parties to mobilise support around sectarian issues.
He praised the traditional two-party system that had required politicians to appeal to a wide range of communities and interests. “The old-fashioned democratic politics of having to widen your base and appeal to a broad sway of the British people is now being diminished,” he said, advocating the retention of the first-past-the-post system.
Marchers on Al Quds Day in London in 2024 (Carl Court/Getty)Getty Images
Speaking before the Al Quds Day march that had been due to take place in London on Saturday was banned, Lord Blunkett voiced fears it could have been “a vehicle for those who pose a genuine threat”.
The authorities have since stopped the march taking place, while allowign a static rally instead, along with a counterprotest, with the two taking place on different sides of the Thames.
Al Quds Day, named after the Arabic word for Jerusalem, was established in 1979 by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and has become an annual global rally framed as an expression of Palestinian solidarity but widely recognised as a propaganda exercise for the Iranian regime.
In London, a march marking the day has taken place annually during Ramadan. For more than a decade, critics have called for the event to be banned, particularly after previous demonstrations featured Hezbollah flags before the group was fully proscribed in the UK, alongside placards calling for the destruction of Israel.
Last year hundreds of demonstrators marched through central London carrying images of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and Qasem Soleimani, the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force (IGRC), killed in a US drone strike in 2020.
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