by Aurele Tobelem, Quillette
As Iranian agents surveil London’s Jewish communities and IRGC-backed plots multiply, Britain’s failure to proscribe the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps endangers UK citizens.
In the early hours of 6 March, British counter-terrorism police arrested four Iranian men suspected of assisting Iranian intelligence services in surveillance operations targeting London’s Jewish community. The arrests took place in Barnet, Harrow, and Watford, boroughs that together are home to roughly 65,000 Jews, one of the largest concentrations of Jewish life anywhere in Europe. Six others were also arrested in connection with the operation. The arrests are not the first indication of Iranian state activity in Britain, nor will they likely be the last. But they raise an obvious question: why does the United Kingdom still refuse to proscribe the IRGC as a terrorist organisation?
Britain has long faced a diverse array of terrorist threats, and it has often responded with makeshift solutions. Tourists who visit London are often surprised to discover that in the heart of one of the world’s busiest cities there are almost no rubbish bins. Most of them were removed after the Irish Republican Army’s bombing campaigns of the early 1990s, when a bomb concealed inside a bin at Victoria Station killed one person and injured dozens. In 2013, when the City of London reintroduced just twenty bins—this time blast-proof—on a “trial basis” along Bishopsgate in response to littering concerns, the decision made national headlines.
Proscription was intended as a step toward severing the military and ideological support networks that terrorist organisations might cultivate within the United Kingdom. The policy was shaped in large part by the Northern Ireland Troubles, a decades-long conflict between the IRA and British police and military authorities. The IRA’s mass-casualty attacks, particularly its bombings of civilian spaces, eroded sympathy for its cause. On “Bloody Friday,” 21 July 1972, the IRA detonated 22 bombs across Belfast, killing nine people and grievously injuring around 130 others. One year later, Parliament enacted the Northern Ireland (Emergency Provisions) Act 1973, expanding powers of search and arrest for anyone suspected of IRA links. Section 10 of the Act, as originally drafted, stated: “Any constable may arrest without warrant any person whom he suspects of being a terrorist.” For the first time in its modern history, Britain had adopted a zero-tolerance stance toward terrorism.