Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee said the threat from Tehran ranged from physical attacks and possible assassinations of dissidents and Jewish targets, to espionage, cyberattacks, and its continued attempts to develop nuclear weapons.
While the report concluded the Islamic Republic did not pose a similar level of threat as that from Russia or China, committee chair Lord Kevan Jones said that, “[Iran is] there across the full spectrum of the kinds of threats we have to be concerned with.”
The report also stated that the government’s policy on Iran “has suffered from a focus on crisis management, driven by concerns over Iran’s nuclear program, to the exclusion of other issues.”
Ali Ansari, professor of Iranian history at the University of St Andrews, who was involved in the report, said that “strategy is not a word that I think has crossed the lips of policy-makers for a while, certainly with relation to Iran.”
“Nobody steps out and says, ‘What is the point? What is the overarching strategic overview? Where do we want to be in 20 years? Where do we want to be in 15 years? How do we get there?’” he said.
The report stated that Iran views Britain, whom it calls “the cunning fox,” as “a significant adversary—albeit one that sits behind the United States, Israel and Saudi Arabia”—which was opposed to the Islamic Republic’s values and seeking regime change.
It assessed Tehran’s main strategic objectives regarding the UK to include “reducing the UK’s military presence in the region; undermining the UK’s relationships with the United States and Israel; weakening the UK’s security relationships in the Middle East; and silencing criticism of Iran, either from the UK directly or from those residing in the UK.”
Among the suggestions put forward by the committee was that the British government should fully examine whether it would be practicable to proscribe Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), as it has Al-Qaeda, Hamas, and Hezbollah.
The IRGC is classed as a proscribed organization in the United States, Canada, and Sweden.
The report further said that there have been 15 Iranian-backed murder or kidnap attempts against British citizens or UK-based individuals between the beginning of 2022 and August 2023.
Although no evidence was given to the committee concerning the period after August 2023, the committee said its recommendations remained relevant, with subsequent events seeming to bear that out.
In March, Britain said it would require the Iranian state to register everything it does to exert political influence in the UK, subjecting Tehran to the highest tier of scrutiny in light of what it said was increasingly aggressive activity.
In December, two Romanians were charged after a journalist working for a Persian language media organization in London was stabbed in the leg, while in June, a trio of Iranians appeared in court charged with assisting Iran’s foreign intelligence service and plotting violence against journalists.
