Mick Hartley

Stephen Pollard in the Spectator reinforces the point made here yesterday – that the fight against Iran is our fight too:

It must be a comforting thought to those who oppose the military action against the Iranian regime that it is, to coin a phrase, a quarrel in a faraway country, between people of whom we know nothing. It’s not our fight and not our war, they argue.

But the arrests this morning of four people – one Iranian and three dual British-Iranian nationals – on suspicion of assisting a foreign intelligence service show how ludicrous such a view really is. (Six other men were also arrested on suspicion of assisting an offender.) Iran has been our fight – our concern – for decades, and not simply because of its plans for a nuclear weapon and its use of terrorist proxies to create instability across the Middle East. It is our fight for a far more direct reason: the Iranians have plotted and planned the assassination of British citizens, on British soil, for many years. As Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy put it this morning, after the arrests: ‘Iran is the biggest state sponsor of terrorism globally and sadly, that is in effect in our own society as well. Our intelligence services and counter-terrorism police have thwarted lots of action over the last few years.’…

Ken McCallum, the director general of MI5, has reported that Iran’s ‘aggressive intelligence services’ actively plan terrorist attacks on British soil. In 2023, the then security minister Tom Tugendhat told MPs how the police and security services had detected at least 15 ‘credible threats’ to kill or kidnap UK citizens and residents in 2022. Iran had been gathering information about Jews as ‘preparation for lethal operations’. Tugendhat cited IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps) member Mohammad Mehdi Mozayyani, who ‘worked to conduct a lethal operation against Iranian dissidents here in the United Kingdom’.

This has gone on for years. And yet no government – not the government of which Tugendhat was a member, nor the current Labour government – has done anything about it (Tugendhat should be exempted from criticism as one of the few ministers committed to real action, albeit that he was stymied at every turn). The IRGC remains a legal organisation, free to go about its business until the police and security services manage to interrupt its terror plots as, it seems, they have done today.

To describe this repeated refusal by governments of all stripes to proscribe the IRGC as an abrogation of the duty of protecting British citizens barely comes close to the scale of the failure.

But the IRGC is far from being the only issue. Tehran also operates a network of mosques, student bodies and other organisations. The fact the IRGC remains legal allows the likes of the Islamic Centre of England (ICE) to operate as a charity, despite being described in 2024 by the then chair of the Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee, Alicia Kearns, as the IRGC’s ‘London office’.…

It is worrying to consider what might come next here in the UK. This morning’s arrests show the reality of the domestic threat, which the security services have long believed is no less dangerous than that posed by Russian and Chinese agents. But when you combine the depth and reach of Iran’s proxy organisations here, the rise of Muslim sectarian politics and over two years of regular marches in support of Iran’s terror proxies – and, in recent days, demonstrations of explicit support for the Iranian regime – the ingredients are there for something deeply troubling.

Explicit support for the Iranian regime not just from Muslims here – like the Greens deputy leader Mothin Ali – but from many on the left.