In the autumn of 2015, MI5 and the Metropolitan Police raided properties in north-west London. They found three tonnes of ammonium nitrate stockpiled by a man linked to Iran-backed Hezbollah. It was more explosive material than was used in the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, the deadliest act of homegrown terrorism in US history.
It was one of the most serious terror plots disrupted on British soil that decade. But the public did not learn of it for four years.
The plot had been uncovered just months after Britain signed the Iran nuclear deal, and the working assumption inside Government, by several accounts, was that surfacing it risked derailing the diplomacy. The network responsible was never publicly named or confronted. Quiet diplomacy was bought with public silence.
That silence had a cost beyond the plot itself. It signalled to Iran’s networks in Britain that the political will to confront them would bend whenever a deal was on the table. The years since have shown exactly what grows in that space: rising sectarianism, the steady mainstreaming of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) aligned political Islam, and a generation of younger British Muslims exposed to radicalising material with the regime’s fingerprints on it through social media and university societies.
A rally in January in solidarity with protesters, calling for the UK to proscribe Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (Photo: Alishia Abodunde/Getty)The UK-based Islamic Human Rights Commission’s annual Al Quds Day march, founded by Iran’s first supreme leader, Ruhollah Khomeini, in 1979, explicitly to export hostility to Israel, has filled central London with chants for Israel’s destruction, portraits of IRGC Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani and the open display of Hezbollah’s banner. This is not a grassroots protest about Palestinians. It is Iran’s state ideology performed annually on British streets, and it has provided cover and confidence for a sectarian politics organised around Tehran’s worldview rather than any genuine concern for Gaza or the West Bank.
Beneath that visible layer sits an infrastructure most of the public never sees, and which does the regime’s radicalising work day to day rather than once a year. IRIB, Iran’s state broadcaster, answers constitutionally to the supreme leader and operates affiliated outlets and personnel in Britain, including Press TV figures whose programming has been flagged by community security groups for singling out British Jewish institutions, charities and schools by name as “Zionist infiltrators”. Regime sympathiser networks on social media amplify the same material, repackaged for younger audiences and dressed up as unrelated British political causes such as Scottish independence, anti-monarchy sentiment and anti-immigration anger, precisely so that the regime’s framing reaches people who would never knowingly watch Iranian state media.
This is precisely the architecture that hardens, in time, into the kind of plot uncovered in 2015. Soft influence does not stay soft indefinitely. It builds sympathetic audiences, normalises hostility toward Jewish and Persian diaspora communities, and creates the permissive environment from which the next IRGC-linked operative, or more alarmingly, the British national radicalised by what they have consumed, steps forward. Many of the plots in recent months have involved British nationals recruited rather than dispatched from Tehran – again with no knowledge of who is directing operations.
Britain now has a genuine test of whether it has learned anything. The National Security (State Threats) Bill completed its House of Commons stages on 17 June, creating a power to designate state-linked bodies in the way Britain proscribes terrorist organisations, with offences carrying up to 14 years for supporting a designated group. It now moves to the House of Lords. The IRGC is the obvious candidate for designation, and Keir Starmer committed his Government to do so immediately after the Golders Green attack against the Jewish community in April. So, increasingly, are the media outlets and online networks that radicalise on its behalf without ever needing to send an operative through passport control.
Donald Trump’s fragile Iran deal is the worst possible backdrop for a home secretary trying to make a politically difficult designation (Photo: Ludovic Marin/AFP)The bill creates a power, not an automatic proscription, so ministers must still choose to use it, body by body. That is exactly where the 2015 pattern threatens to repeat. A tenuous, faltering ceasefire with Tehran is the worst possible backdrop for a home secretary to make a politically difficult designation, and the easiest excuse to defer one quietly in the name of not rocking an already fragile diplomatic process, with a US administration increasingly desperate to preserve its deal.
Britain paid for that caution once already, in a bomb factory in north-west London that very nearly became operational, and in a decade of sectarian radicalisation that the silence of 2015 helped normalise. If the IRGC and the networks that carry its message in Britain are not designated when this legislation reaches the Lords, ministers will not be deferring a difficult decision. They will be choosing, again, to let the threat grow unchallenged on our own streets.
Roger Macmillan is a counter-terrorism specialist focused on Iran and former Director of Security at Iran International TV, the London-based independent Persian-language broadcaster
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