The Iranian people deserve the opportunity to choose a democratic future for themselves, writes the former Secretary of State for Wales
Last weekend, I travelled to Paris to address what was intended to be a rally of more than 100,000 Iranians whose demand was both simple and profound: that their country should once again be free.
Instead, I witnessed an extraordinary act of political weakness.
The arrangements for the rally had been agreed weeks in advance with the organisers, the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI). Yet, at the eleventh hour, the Paris Police Prefecture issued an order preventing it from proceeding as planned. The official explanation was couched in the language of public order. The political effect was unmistakable. A Western democracy had chosen to silence the principal democratic opponents of one of the world's most brutal dictatorships.
Speaking later in Paris, I said the incident demonstrated the Iranian regime's ability to lean on weak governments. I make no apology for that observation. Tehran has spent more than four decades learning how to exploit hesitation in the West. It understands that when democracies equivocate, postpone or search for reasons not to act, the regime can press harder. It interprets compromise not as goodwill but as surrender.
That is why Britain must now show more steel than France displayed last weekend. The Government should proscribe Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist organisation – a course that many former parliamentary colleagues and I have long advocated – and make clear that it recognises the NCRI as the movement best placed to restore democracy to Iran.
The IRGC is not a conventional military body. It is the regime's praetorian guard, its instrument of repression at home and its promoter of violence abroad. It has crushed peaceful protest, armed and directed proxy organisations across the Middle East, threatened international shipping, supported hostage-taking, and projected intimidation far beyond Iran's borders. Britain's security services have repeatedly warned of Iranian-linked plots against people living in this country. The legal fiction that the IRGC can be treated as an ordinary arm of the Iranian state has become impossible to sustain.
Proscription would not be an empty gesture. It would strengthen the powers available to the police and security services, make it harder for the IRGC to operate through front organisations and sympathisers, and send an unmistakable message that state-sponsored terrorism will not be tolerated on British soil. If organisations directed, financed and trained by the IRGC are rightly designated as terrorist organisations, it is absurd that the directing mind should remain outside the same legal framework.
But this debate is about more than Britain's national security. It is about whether Western democracies are prepared to recognise a political reality that Tehran has spent decades trying to conceal.
For years, the regime has worked to persuade foreign governments that there is no credible democratic alternative to clerical rule. It is a clever argument because it encourages fatalism. If there is no alternative, accommodation becomes policy by default. We are invited to manage the regime, contain it, negotiate with it and hope that, one day, it may somehow moderate itself.
Repression at home and aggression abroad are not regrettable excesses of the regime. They are essential to its survival.
There is, however, a democratic alternative. It already exists and deserves to be recognised.
The NCRI, supported by Resistance Units operating throughout Iran, has spent decades preparing for the democratic transition the Iranian people deserve. Its supporters have endured mass executions, imprisonment, torture, exile and relentless demonisation. They have done so because they believe, as I do, that Iran can again become a free, secular, democratic, and non-nuclear republic.
The NCRI’s President-elect, Maryam Rajavi, has set out that vision with remarkable clarity in her Ten-Point Plan: free elections, the separation of religion and state, equality before the law, equal rights for women, autonomy for Iran's nationalities, the abolition of the death penalty and a non-nuclear Iran at peace with its neighbours. These are not extremist demands. They are the foundations of constitutional democracy.
The NCRI has also declared its readiness to establish a provisional administration to oversee the transfer of political sovereignty to the Iranian people. That matters. Democratic transitions are not achieved through slogans alone. They require planning, leadership, a coherent programme and the discipline to move from resistance to constitutional government. In my judgment, the NCRI is the movement most capable of bringing about that transition.
Some argue that Iran's future lies in the restoration of the monarchy under the son of the Shah. I disagree.
The Iranian people deserve better than a choice between two forms of authoritarian rule. They deserve the opportunity to choose a democratic future for themselves.
That is why the regime fears the NCRI. It fears organised democratic opposition. Above all, it fears the prospect that the Iranian people will conclude they need not choose between the mullahs and the monarchy. They already have a democratic alternative.
Britain cannot decide who governs Iran. That choice belongs to the Iranian people alone. But Britain can decide whether it stands with a regime that imprisons, tortures and executes its opponents, or with those prepared to risk everything to replace tyranny with the rule of law.
We must proscribe the IRGC. We must recognise the NCRI as the principal democratic movement preparing for Iran's transition. Above all, we must demonstrate that Britain will always stand with those who fight peacefully for democracy rather than those who govern through fear.
That will be morally right. It will be strategically wise. And it will serve Britain's national interest.