by Emma Schubart, Conservative Home
Today, at last, the Government has proscribed the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organisation. It is a decision that is unquestionably right. It is also, in a very real sense, years too late.
Since 2022, MI5 has disrupted more than twenty potentially lethal Iran-backed plots on British soil, a rate the Director-General has described as unprecedented outside wartime. Britons have been recruited, via criminal middlemen, to conduct surveillance and plan assassinations against Iranian journalists and dissidents living under the protection of the Crown. Pouria Zeraati, a presenter for Iran International, was stabbed outside his London home. Two of his colleagues were the targets of a plot the security services nicknamed “the Wedding“.
And in recent months, Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamia, an Islamist group with links to Tehran, claimed responsibility for torching Hatzola community ambulances in north London showing that IRGC’s proxies do not confine themselves to killing Iranians.
This is what the Government has finally acted against: a sustained campaign of intimidation, kidnapping plots and attempted murder carried out on the streets of our own cities. Britain should never have waited until nearly four dozen other countries had already proscribed the IRGC before taking action.