We must get Tehran’s thugs off our streets
In 2018 a Russian hit squad attempted to poison a defector, Sergei Skripal, and his daughter in Salisbury with the nerve agent novichok. The mission was quickly identified as an operation by the GRU, Russian military intelligence, and the response was laudably quick.
Theresa May gave the Kremlin 24 hours to explain whether this was a direct hostile act against Britain or a sign that Russia had lost control of its chemical weapons stocks. When there was no reply, Britain expelled 23 Russian diplomats, the US threw out 60 from the embassy in Washington and EU and Nato countries expelled dozens more.
There was a crackdown on illicit Russian financial channels. Formal condemnations were issued at the G7 and the UN security council.
Flash forward to 2026. Now it is Iran that has been linked to repeated assassination and kidnapping plots, surveillance of dissidents and attacks on Jewish targets throughout Europe.
It is acting like a hostile state on our own territory yet the response has been piecemeal. “After Salisbury,” says Simone Rodan-Benzaquen, of the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies, “we treated Russia’s activities as an assault on British sovereignty. With Iran we have too often treated them as an unfortunate by-product of Middle East policy and the nuclear file.”
MI5 and counterterrorism policing have tracked more than 20 potentially lethal Iranian-backed plots in Britain.
Typically — and this was a lesson drawn by the Iranians from the response to the Skripal case — Tehran has not been directly using agents from the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) or the equally sinister Ministry of Intelligence and Security. Rather, it prefers to contract organised crime groupings, local gang networks. Their remit is surveillance of UK-based Iranian dissidents, the targeting and reconnaissance of Jewish and Israeli buildings, attacks on synagogues, the torching of Jewish community ambulances.
The regime can find outsiders to do its dirty work in Britain
These assaults punctuated the last months of Sir Keir Starmer’s premiership and contributed to the drafting of what turned out to be his security-related swan song: the National Security (State Threats) Act, which sets out a series of penalties for supporting or providing material benefits to the activities of IRGC units on British soil, but also to their proxies, their cyber-warriors, surveillance teams and radicalisation networks in mosques, schools and community charities. It stops short of outright proscription, just as the post-Skripal measures did not ban relations with the Russian military, and the phrasing is supposed to dodge long court challenges.
Yet it does not quite answer the central question: how does Britain even begin to tackle so-called hybrid warfare on its soil? Starmer was looking for an answer to a lawyer’s puzzle: how do you deal under terrorism legislation with hostile state entities using the tactics of terror cells? Banning the IRGC outright would have gummed up the practicalities of negotiating the release of dual nationality citizens held in Iranian prisons. A ban could even take away one of the diplomatic conduits Britain needs to support the US in its jumbled-up war over the Strait of Hormuz.
And, to complicate matters further, the IRGC is evolving quickly into a different kind of state management apparatus. Ban the IRGC, so Starmer’s advisers whispered, and you may reduce the possibility of a negotiated settlement to end a war that we disapprove of. But the securocrats could see what was happening to Britain at a time of vacillating government. We were promised that Britain could become safer (or at least make more nuanced decisions) as the result of Brexit. Instead, the EU has long since proscribed the IRGC while Starmer dithered over the correct legislative approach. No one in the British security establishment likes to be seen as a Tehran patsy while Trump wages an on-off war over Hormuz. It’s not just a bad look; it projects a weak government.
The fact is that the constraint of Tehran, even under the new act, only works if there is proper intelligenceled implementation. Rodan- Benzaquen calls for a proper mapping of IRGC influence networks, the disruption of sanctions-dodging channels, the review of visas and residency granted to regime facilitators and closer scrutiny of how the Iranian diplomatic mission actually functions. The benchmark that actually matters, she says, is whether two years from now “the regime has fewer operatives, fewer front organisations, fewer financial channels and less freedom to intimidate people on British soil”.
That should be a watchword not just for Britain but for all western societies edging towards building greater national resilience in a hostile world. After the West called out the Kremlin for the Skripal attack, Russia’s methods of subversion changed. Russia today has become more inclined to outsource its mischief to criminal freelancers. It hires assassins to kill defectors rather than rely on GRU officers with a paper trail that makes them easy to identify. By most accounts it is a buzzing marketplace and not just for a Russia wrapped up in an all-consuming war.
Iran, too, is learning fast that the IRGC can find outsiders to do its dirty work in Britain and Europe while it concentrates on fighting for control of the strait. Britain’s new security leadership has to adapt accordingly: the coming two years will not just be about buying in high-cost stealth weaponry but also about constructing internal defences against stealthy disruptors, arsonists, assassins even, who have come to see us as the soft underbelly of Europe.
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