Foreign Secretary in heated Commons clash over progress of IRGC proscription
Yvette Cooper raises Priti Patel and Robert Jenrick's record in the previous Tory government
Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper has rejected demands for the UK to proscribe Tehran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) “immediately” after the government was accused of “indecision” on the matter.
Dame Priti Patel, the shadow foreign secretary, told the Commons: “The Government’s indecision on how to deal with Iran has left the UK weaker and undermined our own security.
“But, as the House has already started to discuss, proscribing the IRGC will strengthen our position.”
Patel argued that if the Government does not have time to table emergency legislation to proscribe the organisation in this session of parliament then Labour should abandon the Chagos Islands deal to free up parliamentary time.
But responding, Cooper said the government is “determined” to bring forward legislation to proscribe the IRGC, taking the recommendations made by Jonathan Hall KC, the independent reviewer of terror legislation, who proposed more targeted powers under a new law banning foreign government agencies.
The government shares Hall’s view that the IRGC cannot be proscribed under existing terrorism laws because it forms part of the Iranian state.
But it has rejected calls to fast-track the legislation to ensure the new measures are effective. Existing efforts to tackle the Iranian threat have also been bolstered.
Cooper added:”It is legislation that a Conservative government could have done over very many years in order to strengthen the legislation.”
She said the government was also working to strengthen “action on our streets and internationally” to protect citizens, including the UK’s Jewish community, from the Iranian threat.
The Foreign Secretary told the Commons: “We have had a record number of former Conservative and still Conservative Home Office ministers coming forward to call for things that they failed to do while they were in government.”
Cooper also clashed with former Tory Robert Jenrick, who has now joined Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, with a promised role as chancellor if the party wins the next election.
Jenrick had said he had campaigned for Hezbollah to be proscribed, and foreign office objections were overcome, as they were over the banning of Hamas. He accused Cooper of “standing in the way” of proscribing the IRGC.
Responding angrily, Cooper said she took “the threat on UK streets immensely seriously” but noted that Jenrick had been a Home Office minister and a cabinet minister and at a time when Iran state-backed threats “had been seen on UK streets and he did nothing to strenghen the legislation in so many years of government.”
She also accused Patel of “travelling around the world trying to undermine UK security” as the former minister raised the Chagos Islands deal and concerns over China.
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