London: According to a parliamentarian, Iran represents a "clear and present danger," and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards must be immediately designated as a terrorist organisation in the UK.
Bob Blackman, MP for Harrow East, said to Arab News that "every day we delay, we give them the opportunity to expand their operations, to carry out other nefarious activities." "We've seen evidence of some of the organisations in the UK that are running directly under the IRGC,"
He stated that this posed "a serious threat to our homeland security, so it is important that we address it and prompt action is required."
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Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Gaza Strip have already been designated as terrorist organisations by the British government, according to Blackman, and they "are funded and supported by the IRGC." The actions of the regime have been listed, and they are sufficient grounds for outlawing it.
The US has achieved it, other European nations are working toward it, and "we need to encourage our allies to work jointly with us so they cannot operate anywhere else in the world," he added.
The UK has yet to impose sanctions on them despite widespread support from all political parties as a matter of national interest and security, and "the only reason the government, in my opinion, are hesitating over that is that ends negotiations, and if it ends negotiations, well, fine." That doesn't bother me," Blackman said.
Since September, negotiations to reopen a 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran that was cancelled by the then-president, Donald Trump, in 2018 have come to a standstill.
"There are no negotiations taking place because it is clear that the IRGC and the Iranian regime are suppressing their people, as evidenced by the fact that thousands of people have been detained, hundreds have died, and many more face the prospect of execution for nothing more serious than engaging in anti-regime protests. On that basis, there is no time to negotiate," he said.
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Since there is evidence that Iran violated its obligations under the current treaty, talks cannot take place, according to Blackman, negotiations are a mistake in the first place.
What we must do is do everything in our power to stop them from obtaining a nuclear weapon. Of course, that implies at all costs. We cannot allow them to develop nuclear weapons and be able to threaten the region with nuclear conflict. That would simply be a catastrophe for everyone in the area and perhaps beyond.
He demanded the imposition of harsher penalties against specific people in an effort to "bring this regime to its knees" because it refused to engage in negotiations.
According to Blackman, the UK government's justification for urging dual nationals and British citizens to leave Iran is that they run the risk of being kidnapped and used as hostages, which has already happened.
All kinds of nefarious activities are taking place right now, including interference in foreign elections, terrorist plots that have been thwarted not only in the Middle East but also in Europe and the UK, as well as cyberattacks that have been confirmed to be ongoing against the House of Commons and the Houses of Parliament as a whole, with the obvious goal of disrupting our data and harming us as a whole.
That just proves that these people can't be trusted in the slightest, he said, adding that they should be banned.
In order to share fresh information about the IRGC's terrorist activities and the need to outlaw them, the National Council of Resistance of Iran's UK office held a press conference on Thursday. Blackman was speaking outside of it. He claimed that after numerous discussions with the UK Foreign Office, they will now speak with the Home Office because it is ultimately their decision whether to proceed.
According to Hossein Abedini, deputy director of the NCRI's UK representative office, they are in contact with numerous MPs from various political parties and there is a powerful British committee in parliament that supports Iranian freedom and has been very active in various debates.
He described to reporters how the IRGC trained at military bases and large garrisons throughout the nation, including in Tehran, where it served as an army of terror and oppression against the Iranian people.
On May 31, 2022, representatives of eight regime-affiliated terrorist and extremist organisations met at the International Directorate of Ali Khamenei's office. Abedini shared a classified Farsi document that the NCRI had acquired.
A 55-member military delegation from Venezuela was brought to Iran in 2022, according to one of the minutes from the Quds Force, one of the IRGC's five branches, "which shows the dimensions of the IRGC's intervention in a Latin American country," according to an English translation of the document provided by the NCRI.
Abedini demanded that the Mullah Seyed Hashem Mousavi-led Islamic Center of England, which has offices in London and is overseen by the International Directorate of Khamenei's Office, be shut down because it had agents working to spread the regime's propaganda throughout the UK.
Abedini commented on the recent execution of Alireza Akbari, an Iranian-British national and a former deputy defence minister of Iran, and suggested that this might support the UK's decision to outlaw the IRGC.
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"That clearly demonstrates the regime's panic and the fact that they are in a very precarious situation. I believe it will add, but it's a political choice, so the UK will arrive at that point if the members of Parliament keep applying pressure, he continued.