Tighter laws on foreign influence don’t go far enough

John Woodcock

The UK government may be stonewalling over backing American and Israeli assaults on Iran’s nuclear weapons facilities, but ministers know that sitting on the fence will offer little protection from the expected upsurge in the regime’s malign activities on British streets.

UK security services say they have foiled more than 20 terror attacks on British soil in recent years. A journalist working for the dissident channel Iran International was stabbed in the legs outside his home in Wimbledon. Counterterrorism officers recently arrested five Iranians suspected of plotting an attack on the Israeli embassy in London.

So on one level, the tighter laws in force from today designed to flush out agents of hostile states are timely and welcome. Iranian agents in the UK will now have to register under the new Foreign Influence Registration Scheme. Iran, along with Russia, is specified under the enhanced tier of the scheme due to the government’s assessment that they pose a risk to our national interests. The list of those required to be registered is to be made public. Failure to comply with the scheme is a criminal offence that could land you in jail for five years.

This all sounds tough in theory but it is worryingly unclear how it is going to be enforced. And there is one glaring hole in the scheme that must be addressed urgently. To protect British Muslims from the risk of radicalisation by a hostile foreign power, FIRS should be urgently extended to include the twilight army of Islamists involved in organisations and charities that in effect serve as outposts of the regime, or cheerleaders for it.

Take the Islamic Centre of England mosque, which has published material calling for the destruction of Israel and which a Policy Exchange think tank report called the London “nerve centre” of the Iranian regime. Then there is the Islamic Human Rights Commission, which was identified by the Shawcross review in 2023 as an “Islamist group ideologically aligned with the Iranian regime, that has a history of extremist links and terrorist sympathies”. Also unlikely to be required to register are figures from pro-Iran regime charities in London such as the Dar Al-Hekma Trust and Abrar Islamic Foundation, which, The Times recently revealed, are currently under investigation by the national terrorist financial investigation unit. (They deny wrongdoing.)

FIRS, for all its good intentions, may prove painfully insufficient to protect Britain from Tehran’s long reach. A broader and more concerted effort will be needed to cut through the softer web of Iran’s malign influence.

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