Iran's Long Arm Reaches Into Britain. Our Governments Have Looked Away for Too Long
Iran has threatened to strike American military bases in Europe if they are used to launch further attacks against Tehran. That warning should alarm Britain. American forces operate from RAF installations on British soil, including Lakenheath and Mildenhall. If Iran carries out its threat, British territory would become a target. Yet the greater scandal is how long successive governments have known about Tehran's hostile activities within our own borders.
In April 2025, the Henry Jackson Society published The Long Arm of Tehran, a damning examination of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and its activities in Britain. Its findings exposed an organised campaign of intimidation, surveillance and attempted assassination, including the use of criminal gangs to target opponents of the Iranian regime. The report also highlighted weaknesses in British sanctions and counter-terrorism legislation that had allowed IRGC-linked activities to continue.
The warning was hardly new. MI5 had already identified more than twenty potentially lethal Iran-backed plots against people in Britain since 2022. Iranian dissidents and journalists had become targets. Jewish communities faced growing threats. Tehran had demonstrated that it was prepared to export its campaign of intimidation onto British streets. Yet our political establishment continued to treat the danger as something that could be contained through sanctions, diplomatic pressure and occasional ministerial condemnation.
The Henry Jackson Society also exposed a glaring contradiction. Labour had demanded that the IRGC be proscribed as a terrorist organisation while in opposition. Once in government, that determination weakened. Britain had sanctioned the organisation, but sanctions alone could not address the full range of its activities. The United States and Canada had already designated the IRGC as a terrorist organisation. Britain continued to hesitate.
In July 2025, Parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee added its own damning assessment. Britain's approach to Iran had been too reactive, with national security repeatedly competing against diplomatic and economic considerations. That criticism should have prompted a fundamental change in policy. Instead, the familiar pattern of warnings, reviews and limited measures continued.
In July 2026, Labour finally designated the IRGC as a threat to national security, introducing criminal penalties of up to fourteen years for certain forms of support and assistance. It was a significant step, but one that stopped short of full terrorist proscription. Membership of the organisation remains outside the specific criminal offence that applies to proscribed terrorist groups. After years of assassination plots, intimidation and hostile operations, ministers must explain whether these new powers provide all the protection Britain needs, and why they chose this framework rather than terrorist proscription.
The wider failure extends beyond Iran. Successive governments have struggled to confront Islamist extremism, foreign-funded ideological influence and hostile networks exploiting Britain's democratic freedoms. Our borders must be properly enforced, foreign interference investigated and extremist organisations subjected to the full force of the law. None of this requires abandoning civil liberties. It requires the political will to defend them.
Britain faces a regime openly threatening military installations in Europe while its intelligence services have spent years uncovering hostile operations at home. The warnings have come from intelligence chiefs, parliamentary committees, independent researchers and from Iran itself. Ministers can no longer plead ignorance. How much more evidence do they need before they finally act?
"Tehran had demonstrated that it was prepared to export its campaign of intimidation onto British streets."
Kemi Badenoch references our scoop from today's New Statesman column at PMQs - Labour MPs (50 so far and counting) coordinating a private letter to PM to express concern about approving Rosebank
https://t.co/h8At8K0diN
Kemi Badenoch asks why Andy Burnham needs the Boston Consulting Group to help him draw up plans to end 40 years of neoliberalism
'This government is adrift. Two weeks ago we had a do nothing Budget. It pushed all the difficult decisions to the spending review. Can he assure the house the spending review will come before next Summer'
Burnham says he will present his 10-year plan for Britain to Parliament before it rises
He says the Budget was the most popular budget for a number of years. He says the 10-year plan will include his proposals for a national care service. He says the govt will present the Milburn review to Parliament next week
But he doesn't say whether spending review has been delayed until the Autumn...
Freedom ? What freedom ? You've created a system that places the family members they fought for at the bottom of every pile
You've stripped people of the right to freedom of speech & expression & criminalised feelings, emotions & wrong think
You've politicised & weaponised the police & justice system against the British people (their family members)
You are imprisoning people & banning them from entering our country simply because they don't align with your politics
You've RUINED everything they fought for
At least you got your photo opportunity 🤬
Is this really democracy, justice and fairness in action? Britain 2026, Remembrance Day, @10DowningStreet as occupied by @UKLabour@andyburnham and @ukhomeoffice occupied by @ShabanaMahmood using our own money, to prevent @MaggieOliverUK holding them to account, and implement the findings of the original IICSA inquiry itself (around £200 million), while crowing regarding the new grooming gangs inquiry (estimated £65 million). And who is paying for the Government's defence? Us, again, a conservative £75,000. What is the point, of the trauma revisted by the survivors and their families, the investigations, the costs, both financially and emotionally, for the Government, not only to ignore the findings, but use Lawfare, to close the argument down. That's not democracy, that's a dictatorship, and we are funding our own demise.
Day 2 of our JR today.
Still consumed in legal arguments as the govt says they don’t HAVE to do anything. Public enquiries have no legal obligation to implement any recommendations!
That’s true of course. But what arrogance! How insensirive and dismissive of all survivors and victims who believed the promises made to them - that retraumatising themselves to bring change were just empty words! Empty promises!!
And of course it begs the question, why are we going into yet ANOTHER public enquiry …. That’s the real question here …. And why spend billions of public Monday in public enquiries….. it seems as though it’s just another way to avoid action and accountability and kick the ball down the road!!! 😡😡😡
But we The Maggie Oliver Foundation are fighting this to the death and doing our best to expose the hypocrisy and lies of successive governments!
We and our incredible legal team Howe and Co can but try…
200+ recorded rapes EVERY single day in England and Wales-over 74,000 a year.
Instead of fixing the crisis, the establishment, media, and politicians attack anyone asking why.
The government, media, Lefties and establishment have failed.🇬🇧
Great, the French got to decide who we could return.
It would be interesting to know what criteria the French used to refuse returns?
Up to 50% of some “groups” were rejected.
I’m thrilled this experiment only cost us over £660 million and we got to keep the ones France refused to take back and now we have to fund, who knows for how long!
Britain's national war memorial was only meant to stand for a week. 🕊️
Summer 1919. Britain planned a huge victory parade through London. 🎖️
But the dead couldn't march. They lay abroad, or were never found. 💔
So the Prime Minister asked the architect Edwin Lutyens for a place where the troops could salute them. 🫡
It went up in wood and plaster, right in the middle of Whitehall. 🪵
Fifteen thousand soldiers marched past it. Each one saluted the dead. 🇬🇧
Then the parade ended. But people kept coming. 🌹
In the week it was meant to stand, over a million came. 🤯
Its sides look perfectly straight. They aren't. 📐
No names on it. No cross. It belongs to everyone who lost someone. 🙏
Today, at eleven o'clock, the nation falls silent around it once more. 🕯️
At the going down of the sun and in the morning, we will remember them. 🌺
Be part of us. ☝️🇬🇧
Be Proud Of Us. 🙏🇬🇧
In this morning's update:-
Andy Burnham's GMCA lent £55.7m in 2017 to the Manchester Life companies, Manchester City Council's joint venture with Abu Dhabi United Group, owner of Manchester City.
Asked about these loans on Good Morning Britain, Angela Rayner said:- "all of that is transparent. The Prime Minister says he is happy for people to see that."
Yesterday, a day late, GMCA refused to release the loan documents, calling my request "vexatious". In the same letter it admits there is "a legitimate public interest in transparency and accountability concerning GMCA's use of public money".
I asked for just five documents:- the two reports councillors approved the loans on, and the three loan agreements.
Burnham told Parliament on 12 October "all my dealings will be published", and promised to put out "everything that I have done working with them" as Mayor.
GMCA has told the press it has no active partnerships with Abu Dhabi United Group. If that is the case, why hide it?
#ProjectCleanCity @JuliaLopezMP@SianReform@NathanEvansTeam@MENnewsdesk@DeclanGCarey@JoshHalliday@jackdulhanty@rbrooks45
643 people sent me a DM yesterday about my post exposing how Andy Burnham’s Manchester council machine secretly intercepts emails from the public.
I believe this new revelation is going to trigger an even bigger shockwave.
Manchester City Council is currently fighting tooth and nail to keep a massive urban regeneration contract hidden from taxpayers.
The corporate partner is a Hong Kong-based developer called Far East Consortium. The funding is a staggering £120 million of public money, including £34.1 million handed over directly by Burnham’s combined authority.
Here is the specific detail that exposes the absolute arrogance of the modern political class.
When a local resident filed a request to read the document, the Chinese developer actually consented to its publication. It was the British council that intervened, heavily redacted the contract, and officially branded the taxpayer’s request for basic transparency as "manifestly unreasonable."
We are operating in a geopolitical environment where foreign powers routinely use infrastructure and property investment to build leverage inside Western cities.
Yet local Labour authorities are handing nine-figure sums of public wealth to Chinese-linked conglomerates, while deploying the full weight of their legal departments to keep British citizens in the dark.
They are perfectly comfortable outsourcing the regeneration of a major UK city to foreign capital. They are just terrified of the people funding the project ever seeing the actual terms.
MAJOR DEVELOPMENT
ALERTS/DRONES HAVE BEEN REPORTED SO FAR IN:
NORTHERN POLAND, SOUTHERN LITHUANIA, CENTRAL LITHUANIA AND LATVIA
🇷🇺🇵🇱🇱🇹🇱🇻‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️
@FCDOGovUK@Ed_Miliband@Uma_Kumaran@UKinFrance@francediplo_EN@FranceintheUK Stop importing Violence and we might take you seriously.
Otherwise this is just another attack on white people...
Just like the misogyny package that does not mention
Forced marriage
Child and cousin marriage
Forced face covering
Weekly beating
And other medieval practices