Britain has finally recognised the IRGC as a terrorist group. This is what must come next to actually stamp them out

It is worth being precise about the mechanism: this is not the same regime that bans Hamas or Islamic State under the Terrorism Act 2000; it is a new designation power built for state and state-backed actors, created because the old proscription regime was never designed to capture a branch of a foreign government.

The practical effect is similar, up to 14 years in prison for anyone who supports, assists, or takes money from a designated body, but the label matters: it is this new state threats legislation, not the terrorism list, that Britain has just applied to the IRGC for the first time. It is the right decision, and one that is several years overdue.

Sir Keir Starmer made this promise in person, in April, standing in the wreckage of Kenton United Synagogue days after it was firebombed by a group linked to Iran's military machine, and pledged legislation within weeks. That commitment was written into the King's Speech in May, and the Act received Royal Assent on 10 July. Today's designation is the final stage of a promise made repeatedly in response to attacks on British Jews that the Government itself linked to Iranian proxies. There should be no confusion about who forced the Government's hand: the Board of Deputies, the Community Security Trust, and a community that spent months asking why a state sponsoring arson attacks on its synagogues was still, on paper, just another foreign government.

This designation also lands in the final days of Sir Keir's premiership, as Labour prepares to hand power to his successor. Today is a caretaker Prime Minister closing out a promise he made personally, in a synagogue, rather than leaving it for whoever inherits his desk. That should not diminish the decision, but it is a reminder that this took a change of political weather, not just a change of law.

I have argued for this designation for years, most recently in the days before Royal Assent, when officials still refused to confirm whether the IRGC would be included. That reticence was understandable in one sense: designating a state actor mid-ceasefire. At the same time, Tehran's hardliners consolidate power amid a regime that looks weaker than at any point in a generation, was never going to be presented as low-risk. But it was always the wrong instinct. A more fractured, paranoid Iranian regime is not a safer one to leave undesignated; its Quds Force has every incentive to lash out through the deniable, proxy-run networks that MI5 has spent two years cataloguing: more than 20 potentially lethal plots and a 35 per cent rise in state threat activity, according to the Security Service's own figures.

None of that infrastructure disappears because an organisation has been added to a list of bodies designated under the state threats legislation. Designation gives police and prosecutors a tool against the IRGC itself, but most IRGC personnel operating in Britain do so under diplomatic cover and are largely untouched. The networks that matter most, sympathetic broadcasters answerable to the Supreme Leader, front charities and Islamic and education centres laundering the regime's ideology into British communities, online influencers doing Tehran's work remotely, and the Al Quds Day marches filling central London with Quds Force portraits since 1979, sit adjacent to the IRGC rather than inside it. A designation that stops at the organisation's name risks becoming symbolic rather than operational.

The Government deserves credit for pairing this with the £250 million just announced for Jewish community security and policing: more than 500 additional officers, continued Project Servator patrols, and £59 million for counter-terrorism policing. That is money well spent, but money for protection is not the same as the capability to prosecute, and three things now need to follow quickly.

First, resourcing for investigation and prosecution, not just protection: the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation has warned that police and security services are gaining powers without the people to use them.

Second, scope: Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and Security is at least as active on British soil as the IRGC and has escaped the same reckoning; capturing one Iranian instrument while leaving its sister service untouched will simply displace the threat.

Third, consistency: the same test now applied to Iran's proxies must be applied without fear or favour to Russian and Chinese state-linked bodies on the same footing, or the new power will look built for one country alone.

Britain should have acted on this years ago. The warnings from MI5, and the pattern of Iranian-backed plots on British soil, were clear long before today, and that delay has a cost the country is still paying. Today's decision was right. Whether it was the start of something serious or the end of a long argument that Whitehall was relieved to close will be decided by what the next Government does in the months that follow, not by what was announced today.

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Roger Macmillan is a security and counter-terrorism specialist and former Director of Security and Iran International TV.

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