Britain's Labour keen to act against Iran's Guards

Before the Thursday British election, the IRGC was name-checked in the Labour party's 2024 election manifesto as a "hostile state actor" - but what will the new Labour government do about it or Iran.

It's a question David Lammy will face from the start as the UK's new Foreign Secretary, a post he shadowed in opposition from 2021.

Talking to London-based foreign journalists a few days before the election (a foregone conclusion at that stage though he was careful not to say so), Lammy said that he would be engaged with the Middle East “from Day One”.

Up to then, questions to the Foreign Secretary-to-be were focused on Europe, Asia, the US. Lammy even worked in a nod to a possible future Trump presidency by talking of his good working relations with senior Republican figures.

He turned to the Middle East last - it’s always a tricky subject for British foreign secretaries but Lammy sounded confident and even enthusiastic when he spoke of his many trips there and the “very close working relations” he maintained across the region.

Talking about the Israel-Gaza conflict, Lammy said that “ working with our partners is essential, we’ve talked about the need for a new contact group that will include some Arab partners and I remain very concerned about the risk and prospect of escalation in Lebanon. I was in Lebanon a few months ago and I’m in good contact with Amos Hochstein, the US coordinator for Lebanon and of course I will be very engaged from Day One…”

And engagement from Day One on the Middle East, said Lammy “of course (was on) Iran, too.” He was, Lammy said, “very concerned about Iran’s proxy relationship with many of the actors that are causing a lot of problems across the region, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis particularly, as you would expect me to be and we’ve always raised our concerns within Iran about the IRGC and repression within Iran and I think you’ll find on Labour backbenches particularly a lot of concern about that.”

And Labour front benches, too, where shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper as well as Lammy himself and other prominent Labour politicians have called for tough action against the IRGC, including proscription.

The cross-Party interest in Iran over the past two years across both the House of Commons and House of Lords has been unprecedented. In the weeks before the election, some 500 MPs and Lords called on a new government to proscribe the IRGC in two separate letters to the then government.

The mood of the new Parliament has yet to be known. But the Labour manifesto is clear that “assassination plots by the IRGC” are among the rise in threats in the UK from hostile states and state-sponsored groups “but Britain lacks a comprehensive framework to protect us. Labour will take the approach used for dealing with non-state terrorism and adapt it to deal with state=based domestic security threats.”

Both the new Home Secretary and Foreign Secretary called on the last Conservative government to amend the UK’s Terrorism Act 2000 to introduce a new category of proscription to cover hostile state actors. Starmer’s government now has the opportunity to do so itself - possibly encouraged by the example of Canada and
reports of the European Union’s foreign action service examining the legalities of proscribing the IRGC at Germany's behest.