Tories call for emergency legislation to ban Iran’s IRGC
Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp has called for emergency legislation to be passed to ban Iran’s IRGC.
On the government’s announcement of more funding to protect Jewish communities, he told GB News: “Well, it’s come too late. We’ve been calling for it for some time, and had the government listened to what we were saying a few months ago, then perhaps yesterday’s tragedy could have been averted.
“Of course, while it is welcome [that they] have now finally acted, it is treating the symptom rather than the cause. We need to stop antisemitism happening in the first place. But what does that mean? It means, for example, deporting any foreign citizen, or indeed British citizen whose citizenship can be revoked, who commits antisemitism or expresses antisemitic views or support for extremism or support for terrorism, because we cannot keep importing extremism and terrorism into this country.
“We have to just stop that completely and deport people who are here, who are antisemitic or who express support for extremism or terrorism is not acceptable. Where we can kick people out who do those things we should do, foreign citizens and even British citizens, where they have dual nationality or where we can strip them of their citizenship.”
He added: “It’s also worth saying that Iran has been organising and sponsoring some of the recent antisemitic attacks, I don’t know about yesterday, but it’s certainly been sponsoring and organising others. That is why we do need to ban the IRGC immediately, not in a year’s time, but now, and we Conservatives would help the government.
“We’d back the government to pass emergency legislation to ban the IRGC in the next few weeks. This doesn’t need to take a long time, in the next few weeks, and the government should also be expelling all Iranian agents in the UK and most of their diplomats, because they have been organising attacks and paying criminals to carry out these attacks.
“We expelled a lot of Russian diplomats and all of their spies after the Salisbury attack. I don’t know why the government hasn’t done that to Iran. They’ve apparently had a little private chat with the Iranian ambassador yesterday, presumably asking him nicely to stop. That’s not good enough. We should expel them.”
He called for bans on a number of other groups: “That would include organisations like the Muslim Brotherhood, MEND, CAGE, Five Pillars, and all these other organisations that encourage extremism. But the truth is we have imported a lot of extremism into this country over the last few years. That has to end. We cannot any longer allow people with extremist views to enter the United Kingdom.
“Those people here already with extremist views who are not British citizens, should be deported and where people are antisemitic or support terrorism and have British citizenship, if we can strip it because they’re a dual national or they’re entitled to citizenship of another country, we should deport them as well.”
