The real scandal isn’t the protest. It’s who’s protesting

Amid all the debate over whether the government and Metropolitan Police were right to cancel the Al Quds march on Sunday, a more fundamental, pressing question was missed. Regardless of whether or not they should be allowed to, why do so many people in this country want to turn out to express their support for the vile Iranian regime in the first place? 

Many in the political and media world seem to want to ignore this issue, preoccupying themselves instead with less troubling questions about the limits of the right to protest or where we draw the line on free speech. But the far bigger problem is the sheer number of people in this country who seem to deplore our values and instead stand in support, sympathy or solidarity with our enemies, even at a time when those very enemies are, like Iran and its proxies, engaged in attacks on our armed forces.

It is too easy just to point the finger at radical Islam, as many do. Like all religions, Islam has its extremists – including here in Britain. This is part of the problem. The organisers of the Al Quds march, the Islamic Human Rights Commission, had described Ali Khomeini – a man who brutalised his own people for decades, oversaw the murder of thousands upon thousands of critics, and exported terrorism across the globe – as a “rare role model” who “stood on the right side of history”. Religious extremism is part of the problem, as it long has been.

But this problem goes well beyond any one minority group. It is being driven by the sheer number of Iran’s useful idiots on the ideological extreme left in this country. These people are primarily motivated by a burning hatred of the United States and Israel. They see those two countries as forces for Western imperialism and bastions of global capitalism – two things they despise more than anything else. In their minds, then, any state or group that confronts US or Israeli power becomes a natural ally – an ideological bedfellow they must stand in solidarity with.

It matters not to them that their heroes arrest women for the sin of showing their hair, gun down thousands of protestors just for marching through the streets and execute LGBT people. No matter that they sponsor terrorist attacks on innocent people across the globe, like on 7th October. These British zealots, who no doubt think of themselves as decent, compassionate, liberally-minded progressives, are all too happy to overlook that, so desperate are they to see the US and its allies taught a lesson. They are only too happy for other people, in other countries, in other parts of the world, to suffer terribly at the hands of what they seem to see as the plucky underdog taking on the big bad bullies. And while cheering all of this on from afar, of course, they enjoy the comforts that come with living in a country with values as different as it is possible to be to those of the Iranian regime they seem to venerate.

How can there be any cohesion in society, or integration between different groups, when we can’t even agree on something as basic as what values we share?

Any solution to this has to start with recognising the scale of the problem. There has been a lot of debate about the values held by some people who migrate to this country and a lot of focus on how to help immigrants to integrate. Not enough is said about the number of people who have always lived here and yet seem to despise so much of what Britain and its allies stand for.

These people are dangerous, not just in their tacit support for global terrorism like that promoted by Iran, but because of the fractures they cause in this country. How can there be any cohesion in society, or integration between different groups, when we can’t even agree on something as basic as what values we share? Whatever our politics, faith, ethnicity or nationality, should we not be able to coalesce around a few fundamental principles: democracy, freedom, tolerance, decency and secularism? If we agree on nothing else, should we not at least be able to agree on those?

Most people in Britain do, regardless of whether they were born here or moved here from abroad. But we have seen in the past fortnight that far too many do not. They would rather ally themselves with regimes and groups that believe in none of those principles – quite the opposite, in fact.

Perhaps the easiest solution is for those people to move to a country more in line with their values. If fighting Western imperialism is more important to you than being able to choose who governs you, being free to express your political views or living your life without fear of being murdered by the government, then maybe a new life in Iran would be more to your liking.

Of course, most of these middle-class communists wouldn’t last a day in Tehran, stripped of their Morning Star subscriptions, their Stalinist book clubs and their ability to organise endless marches. But perhaps a short time there might make them more appreciative of the benefits of Western democracy. For now, though, they will go on decrying “the West” while being all too happy to live in and benefit from it, and happily letting other people suffer at the hands of the murderous, terrorist regime they march in support of. Rather than arguing about how and where people might express their backing for the likes of the IRGC, we must wake up to the much bigger problem: the fact that so many people in Britain want to.

• Ben Kentish is a presenter at LBC