Here is how the government should target Iranian regime activity in the UK

Last weekend’s al Quds Day protest, the anti-Israel ‘hate-fest’ established by Ayatollah Khomeini more than forty years ago, was predictably grim.

While the home secretary’s commendable decision to ban protesters from marching through the heart of our democracy was highly welcome, the scenes which occurred in Vauxhall, the chants of “death to the IDF”, “from London to Tehran” and placards emblazoned with images of Ayatollah Khamenei and the words “choose the right side of history”, were, as in previous years, a disgrace.

To demand that the world’s only Jewish state be, as one organiser put it last year, “wiped off the map” is an outrageous act of antisemitism at any time, but is truly appalling when the UK is facing an ongoing antisemitism crisis.

For this event to be staged barely two months after the Iranian regime slaughtered up to 36,000 protesters, and while Tehran indiscriminately launches attacks on British servicemen and women and our regional allies in Israel and the Gulf, simply compounds the offence.

But the protest should also force us to examine the very real threat the Iranian regime poses to the UK.

Two weeks ago, the police arrested four men on suspicion of spying on the Jewish community for the regime. These allegations aren’t isolated incidents. Last November, the director-general of MI5 warned that the security agencies have tracked “more than 20 potentially lethal Iran-backed plots” in the previous year.

At the heart of Iran’s terror-related activities, drive to propagate antisemitism, and efforts to nurture homegrown Islamist extremism in Britain, is the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

As Roger Macmillan, the former director of security at Iran International, argued in a paper for LFI earlier this month, the government should immediately proscribe the IRGC’s Quds Force, the external terror wing of the IRGC, under existing terrorism legislation, and urgently accelerate implementation of the recommendations of the Hall review. Once these new proscription-like powers to tackle state-based threats are on the statute books, the IRGC can be banned in its entirety.

But the case for proscription isn’t just about the anger so many of us feel seeing butchers like Khamenei celebrated in the heart of our democracy.

The current sanctions regime alone cannot, and has not, curtailed the IRGC’s nefarious activities in the UK. By banning it, we’ll ensure its members cannot be active in any respect in the UK, including attending or speaking at meetings, and that it will be a criminal offence for anyone in Britain to support, associate with, or share propaganda created by, the IRGC.

Beyond proscribing the IRGC, there are a range of other measures the government can and should take. It should establish a cross-departmental task force to tackle the Iranian domestic threat. Soft influence networks that advance the regime’s objectives under the cover of cultural, academic, charitable or media activity should be identified and dismantled. Regime mouthpieces such as Press TV, Tasnim News, Fars News and other platforms linked to Tehran should be sanctioned. A review of links between Iran and the charitable and NGO sector, akin to previous reviews of espionage and abuse in the sector carried out with regards to China, should be instituted.

We should also follow Australia’s lead in introducing a new legal framework to allow organisations to be designated as “prohibited hate groups” with a range of accompanying offences. The government has announced highly welcome measures to make it harder for extremists and hate preachers to enter the UK. Now let’s increase the punishments for religious, spiritual or other leaders in Britain who advocate or threaten violence by creating a new aggravated offence, just as Australia has done.

Sanctions against Iran should be escalated and enforced. Targets could include the new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, and Abdollah Hajji Sadeghi, the supreme leader’s representative, or “political commissar”, in the IRGC.

We also need to work more closely with our allies in Europe and the US so we “mirror and match” sanctions. It is also essential to stop the regime exploiting loopholes including the use of cryptocurrency networks, the “shadow fleet” and its commercial facilitators to evade sanctions.

Regime oligarchs, elites and proxies here in the UK should be ruthlessly identified and sanctioned in the manner in which Putin’s rich cronies and enablers were targeted after the invasion of Ukraine. Their war-machine against the Iranian people should not be supported by assets in the UK.

Their ill-gotten assets should be used to support the countless brave Iranians who two months ago demanded an end to the odious regime under which they have suffered for far too long.

Mark Sewards MP is Parliamentary Chair of Labour Friends of Israel