Ban Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard, Lord Polak tells Rishi Sunak
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Britain must proscribe Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist organisation, a senior Tory peer has told Rishi Sunak.
Lord Polak, president of Conservative Friends of Israel, used an event hosted by the group and attended by 19 Cabinet ministers to make the demand.
He issued the plea on stage directly to the Prime Minister after Mr Sunak had delivered his speech at a lunch in the Intercontinental Hotel on Park Lane in London.
Lord Polak told The Telegraph: “If you are proscribing Hamas and Hezbollah, they are the children. The parent body is the IRGC who are supporting the Houthis. We are missing the main target.
“I used the opportunity to remind the Prime Minister and the 19 members of the Cabinet who were there including the Home Secretary, Foreign Secretary and Defence Secretary.
“They should do it. It is the right thing and is supported across the House, Labour and Conservative. Unless there are things that we don’t know, it is one of those things that we have to do.”
Foreign Office resists ban
Banning the IRGC would make it illegal to be a member of or support the group in the UK, putting it on a par with Islamic State and al-Qaeda, with a maximum penalty of 14 years in jail.
The Foreign Office has resisted such a move with suggestions that MI6 has warned that banning the IRGC would hamper its intelligence-gathering capability in Tehran and the wider Middle East.
Foreign Office officials have also warned that proscribing the IRGC could lead to Britain losing its embassy in Tehran, which would damage the “protection of UK interests”.
Lord Polak is among a number of senior Tories who have called for proscription. Dr Liam Fox, Conservative former defence secretary, warned that while Hamas had its “fingers on the trigger” of the violence in Israel and Palestine, the “strings being pulled” are from Tehran.
Alicia Kearns, the Conservative chairman of the foreign affairs committee, and Bob Blackman, a joint secretary of the backbench 1922 committee, have also called on the Government to proscribe the IRGC.
The US has also reportedly called on Britain to designate the IRGC as terrorists in the wake of Tehran’s “complicity” in Hamas’s massacre of 1,400 people in Israel.
Joe Biden’s administration is publicly urging its allies to “designate the IRGC as a terrorist organisation” over the Iranian state security body’s link to terror across the globe.
In addition to criminalising association with the group, proscription would also make it easier to seize the organisation’s assets because they can be categorised as terrorist property.
Proscribing the IRGC would need legislation but Labour has said it will back the move, having previously called for the group to be designated terrorists.
