Isaac Herzog did not mince his words. The Israeli president looked at Britain’s record on Iran and asked, simply: “What is this?” Ten, twenty terror events linked to Iran on British soil in a single year. Jewish ambulances firebombed. Four men arrested surveilling Jewish targets on Tehran’s behalf. Ballistic missiles fired at Diego Garcia, a base where British personnel serve. And a Prime Minister who has still not proscribed the organisation responsible for all of it.
Herzog’s question deserves a straight answer. Britain is the only major western ally that has not designated the IRGC as a terrorist organisation. The United States has. The European Union has — and the EU spent years resisting precisely because it feared straining relations with Tehran, before being shamed into acting by the IRGC’s massacre of its own protesters. Britain has not moved. The question worth asking is not whether Starmer has the information. He does. The question is what he intends to do with it.
This matters because the case against Starmer is not one of ignorance. MI5 disclosed 20 disrupted Iran-backed plots against British citizens since 2022. The Walney report documented more than 30 Iran-linked institutions operating inside Britain, eight of them already under Charity Commission investigation. The intelligence picture is not ambiguous. The threat is established, documented, and growing. What is missing is the political will to act on it.