IRGC On British Soil: Labour Stalls, Greens Cheer the Regime.
Mothin Ali stood with the Khamenei crowd. Labour is still reviewing its options.
Nobody named it. That’s how you know it’s real.
Not officially. Not on record. When a Downing Street spokesman was asked last month why the government hadn’t acted, he confirmed it is a long-standing position not to provide a running commentary on the proscription process.
A running commentary.
Think about that for a second. More than five hundred protesters killed in Iranian streets. A regime running targeted assassination plots against dissidents on British soil. Your own security services telling you, out loud, on the record, that they tracked more than twenty potentially lethal Iran-backed plots in a single year. And the official position is that commenting on what you’re doing about it would constitute a running commentary.
You getting this?
Because here’s what a running commentary actually looks like. It looks like MI5 Director General Ken McCallum standing at Thames House in October 2025 and telling an invited audience that his counter-Iran effort had been grown again. That the IRGC was frantically trying to silence its opponents in Britain. That twenty potentially lethal plots had been tracked in twelve months. That fourteen nations had collectively condemned Iran’s efforts to kill, kidnap and harass across Europe and North America.
That’s the running commentary. He was already providing it. The government just didn’t want to be included in it.
“Nobody named it. That’s how you know it’s real.”
Has Labour Actually Got A Plan Here, Or Just A Process?
Here’s what you need to hold in your head at the same time.
Keir Starmer supported banning the IRGC while in opposition. Clear. Stated. Sincere enough to say out loud during an election campaign.
Jonathan Hall KC — the government’s own independent reviewer of terrorism legislation — reported back in May 2025. His recommendation was precise. Create a legal power, a Statutory Alert and Liability Threat notice, that functions as the equivalent of proscription for state-backed organisations. Apply it to the IRGC. Close the legal gap that currently allows the IRGC to run radicalisation activity through British mosques and community centres that sanctions alone cannot touch.
He wrote it down. He submitted it. He was finished.
Nine months ago.
So here’s the question nobody in Westminster wants to answer directly. Who benefits from the IRGC remaining unproscribed? Not British citizens. Not the dissidents living under threat. Not the Jewish communities the IRGC has been documented targeting. Not the Iranian families in this country who watched their homeland’s protesters being shot in the streets.
You see where that question leads, don’t you.
The US proscribed the IRGC in 2019. Canada followed. Australia followed. The European Union — not exactly known for moving at speed — designated it a terrorist organisation on the 29th of January 2026, with Iranian security forces killing hundreds of protesters as they announced it. Britain’s allies formed an orderly queue.
Britain watched from the window and called it a process.
“Twenty plots in a year. A review complete. Legislation ready to write. Nine months of silence where a decision should be. The IRGC filled that silence the way it always does — carefully, patiently, in buildings the law currently has no mandate to enter.”
Here’s the gap worth understanding, because it’s the gap the government keeps glossing over.
Al-Qaeda is proscribed. ISIS is proscribed. Belonging to either, encouraging support for either, sharing their material — criminal offences. All of it. That’s what proscription actually does. It doesn’t just freeze assets. It makes the entire infrastructure of radicalisation legally indefensible.
The IRGC isn’t proscribed. Which means their network of mosques, charities and community centres in Britain — what British-Iranian IRGC expert Kasra Aarabi describes as a fully operational radicalisation apparatus using identical methods to ISIS and al-Qaeda — faces no equivalent legal mandate. Sanctions can’t touch propaganda. Sanctions can’t touch recruitment. Sanctions can’t touch the slow, patient work of building the kind of person who ends up in a social media thread celebrating martyrdom with a hundred and sixty heart reactions.
Business Secretary Peter Kyle told the nation that sanctions had been extended to the full extent possible.
The IRGC took note of that and kept working.
Is that incompetence? Maybe. Except when the same incompetence appears in exactly the same place, every single time, despite being flagged by your own reviewer, your own security services and your own parliamentary record — at some point incompetence stops being an explanation and starts being a choice.
Saturday Night, February the 28th, 2026. Two Crowds, One City.
You need to picture both of them.
First crowd. British Iranians. Celebrating in the streets of London. Weeping. Many of them have spent their entire adult lives waiting for this moment — the night Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, was confirmed dead following US and Israeli strikes. The regime he led executed men for homosexuality. Killed women for removing their hijabs. Ran targeted assassination plots against dissidents on British soil. Sent its security forces into the streets and killed hundreds of protesters who asked for basic rights.
These people know that history personally. It’s in their families. Some of them have been protesting outside the Foreign Office for over a thousand consecutive days.
Now picture the second crowd.
Different part of London. Same night. Flags in support of the Iranian regime. Chants of “Death to America.” “Khamenei, you make us proud.” “Death to Israel.” “Death to the IDF.” An American flag being stamped on the ground.
Mothin Ali, deputy leader of the Green Party of England and Wales, was in that second crowd.
He subsequently explained that he is proudly anti-war.
Right. So were the Iranians in the first crowd. They were just anti a different war — the forty-six year one the regime had been running against its own people. Funny how that war never made it into Mothin Ali’s anti-war position.
“Mothin Ali stood in the crowd mourning a man whose regime executes gay men and kills women for their hair. Zack Polanski went on the BBC and called the strikes that ended that regime illegal. The Green Party had expressed solidarity with the Iranian people twenty-three days earlier. None of them noticed the silence between those two positions. Or they noticed and said nothing. One of those is worse than the other. You decide which.”
The rally was co-organised by the Islamic Human Rights Commission — described in William Shawcross’s 2023 independent review of the Prevent programme as an Islamist group ideologically aligned with the Iranian regime. The same organisation that, in its press release mourning Khamenei, described him as a rare role model, an erudite, principled, spiritual individual who had stood on the right side of history.
The right side of history. A man whose security forces killed hundreds of his own citizens in weeks for asking for basic rights.
Green MP Ellie Chowns, North Herefordshire, confirmed that Mothin had attended an anti-war protest. She added that the party regards the US and Israeli strikes as an illegal war not making the world a safer place. Her leader went further. Zack Polanski went on BBC’s Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg and called the strikes illegal and unprovoked. Then on ITV he called the United States and Israel rogue states and demanded the UK cut ties with both. The Green Party had expressed solidarity with the Iranian people twenty-three days earlier.
Nobody appeared to notice the distance between those two positions. Or they noticed and said nothing. One of those is worse than the other. You decide which.
Keir Starmer said he was shocked by Ali’s presence at the rally. Then went back to not proscribing the IRGC.
You’ve Seen This Pattern Before, Haven’t You?
Because it isn’t new. And it isn’t accidental.
After Hamas murdered 1,200 people on the 7th of October 2023, Mothin Ali posted “White supremacist european settler colonialism must end!!” — using Hamas’s own framing for what they had just done. Zack Polanski was urged to remove him. He didn’t.
On the 14th of January 2026 — twenty-three days before the rally — the Green Party published a formal statement expressing solidarity with the Iranian people demonstrating extraordinary courage against the despotic Iranian regime.
Twenty-three days later, their deputy leader was standing with the people defending that regime.
Both statements are on the Green Party’s record. Neither cancels the other in their accounting. You’re supposed to not notice the gap between them.
So what actually holds this together? Because it isn’t ideology. Ideology has content. Ideology has values you can test against observable reality. What the Green Party has is positioning. Every single stance calibrated around one fixed point — opposition to the West, to America, to Israel, to whatever the mainstream consensus happens to be at any given moment. The actual content of the regime being supported doesn’t enter the calculation.
Khamenei's Iran executes men for homosexuality. Former security minister Tom Tugendhat put it on the parliamentary record without flinching — the Green Party's deputy leader, he said, stood with those who murder gay and lesbian men and women by hanging them from cranes. It kills women for removing their hijabs. It runs assassination plots against British-based dissidents. It has done all of those things continuously, documentably, for decades.
None of that appears in the calculation. What appears in the calculation is that America and Israel struck the regime. And therefore the regime deserves solidarity.
You see what that makes this, don’t you.
It isn’t anti-war politics. It is anti-West politics in an anti-war coat. And the distance between those two things is where the IRGC has been operating, quietly, patiently, in buildings the law currently has no mandate to enter.
“The IRGC doesn’t need to win. It just needs the silence to continue.”
Three Questions.
Is the government’s current approach practical?
No. The legal gap is identified, named, and documented. The mechanism to close it was written and submitted in May 2025. It sits unused while the IRGC continues exactly what it was doing before the review was commissioned. That isn’t a policy position. That is a choice dressed as a process.
Is it logical?
Only if you weight diplomatic relations with a regime whose supreme leader is now dead above the security of British citizens. That calculation was questionable when Khamenei was alive. Events have made it absurd.
What’s the likely outcome?
More plots. More radicalisation operating in the legal gap that everyone can see and nobody is closing. More Green politicians in pro-regime crowds explaining afterward that they were simply anti-war. More Downing Street spokesmen confirming that the process is ongoing and that commentary is not the government’s position.
And in the mosques, the charities, the community centres and the group chats that the current sanctions regime has no legal mandate to touch, the patient, careful work continues.
Nobody is naming it.
“Nobody named it. The review is complete. The legislation is ready. The silence continues. That’s how you know it’s real.”
Sources and methodology: MI5 Director General Ken McCallum’s annual threat address, October 2025, published at mi5.gov.uk. Jonathan Hall KC independent review, May 2025. Parliamentary record, Iranian State Threats debate, Hansard March 2025. Jewish Chronicle, February 23 2026. Jewish News, March 1 2026. GB News, March 1 2026. William Shawcross Independent Review of Prevent, 2023. Green Party official statements, January and February 2026. All quoted statements verified against primary sources.