Proscribe the IRGC as terrorists, Sunak told
BRITAIN must proscribe Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist organisation, a senior Tory peer has told Rishi Sunak.
Lord Polak, the president of Conservative Friends of Israel, used an event hosted by the group and attended by 19 Cabinet ministers to make the demand. He issued the plea on stage directly to the Prime Minister after Mr Sunak delivered his speech in the Intercontinental Hotel on Park Lane in London.
Lord Polak told The Telegraph: “If you are proscribing Hamas and Hezbollah, they are the children. The parent body is the IRGC who are supporting the Houthis. We are missing the main target. I used the opportunity to remind the Prime Minister and the 19 members of the Cabinet who were there including the Home Secretary, Foreign Secretary and Defence Secretary.
“They should do it. It is the right thing and is supported across the House, Labour and Conservative. Unless there are things that we don’t know, it is one of those things that we have to do.”
Banning the IRGC would make it illegal to be a member of or support the group in the UK, putting it on a par with Islamic State and al-qaeda, with a maximum penalty of 14 years in jail. The Foreign Office has resisted such a move with suggestions that MI6 has warned that banning the IRGC would hamper its intelligence-gathering capability in Tehran and the wider Middle East.
Foreign Office officials have also warned that proscribing the IRGC could lead to Britain losing its embassy in Tehran, which would damage the “protection of UK interests”.
Lord Polak is among a number of senior Tories who have called for proscription. Dr Liam Fox, Conservative former defence secretary, warned that while Hamas had its “fingers on the trigger” of the violence in Israel and Palestine, the “strings being pulled” are from Tehran.
Alicia Kearns, the Conservative chairman of the foreign affairs committee, and Bob Blackman, a joint secretary of the backbench 1922 committee, have also called on the Government to proscribe the IRGC.
The United States has also reportedly called on Britain to proscribe the IRGC in the wake of Tehran’s “complicity” in Hamas’s massacre of 1,400 people in Israel. Joe Biden’s administration is urging its allies to “designate the IRGC as a terrorist organisation” over its link to terror across the globe.
In addition to criminalising association with the group, proscription would also make it easier to seize the organisation’s assets because they can be categorised as terrorist property. Proscribing the IRGC would need legislation but Labour has said it will back the move, having previously called for the group to be designated terrorists.
The British and American strikes on Houthi targets in Yemen are gradually degrading the rebel group’s ability to target shipping in the Red Sea. The latest round of attacks are part of a wider diplomatic push to bring about peace in Yemen, a benighted land whose people have suffered from civil war for years.
The Houthis say that they have fired missiles in solidarity with the Palestinians of Gaza, but this is a spurious justification for a flagrant breach of international law. Trading routes must be kept open and the only surprise is that more countries, especially France and Germany, let alone major exporters like China and Japan, are not taking a more prominent role in the action.
One reason is that the current upheaval in the Middle East and the Gulf has a common factor: Iran. The ayatollahs sponsor both Hamas and the Houthis and are engaged in a proxy war with their enemies, Israel and the West, through them. They would do the same with Hezbollah in Lebanon had not the militia’s hand been stayed by threats of American intervention.
Iran’s malign influence is being spread by fellow travellers, useful idiots and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Rishi Sunak in the Commons yesterday said the possible proscription of the Iranian group was still under consideration but no ban was announced.
Videos have emerged of anti-semitic speeches by IRGC generals given to students in London. One speaker has since boasted of his role in training Hamas before the October 7 attacks in Israel. The organisation has been linked to kidnap and assassination plots in Britain. What is the Government waiting for?