Nearly 75 percent of Britain’s Labour voters back designating Iran’s Revolutionary Guards as a terrorist group, a poll cited by the Telegraph shows, increasing pressures on the prime minister to fulfill his party’s pre-election pledge.
The survey of more than 1,500 adults by pollster JL Partners found that 75% of Labour voters and 65% of the wider public back a ban on the IRGC, while only 5% of Labour voters opposed it, the Telegraph reported on Sunday.
Three-quarters of Labour supporters said the group posed a threat to Britain’s national security.
The findings follow MI5 disclosures that security services and police have foiled at least 20 Iran-linked assassination and kidnap plots in Britain over the past two years.
“The British public are rightly under no illusions about the nature of the Iranian regime. It is clearer than ever that the IRGC poses a threat to the safety and security of everyone in Britain,” the Telegraph quoted Labour MP Jon Pearce as saying.
Senior Conservative figures also urged the government to act. Lord Arbuthnot, a former chair of parliament’s defense select committee, was quoted as saying: “With MI5 telling us they have foiled at least 20 state-sponsored attacks by Iran in the UK, what on earth is holding the Government back from proscribing the IRGC?”
The IRGC, a branch of Iran’s armed forces, is already under British financial sanctions, but critics argue those measures are insufficient.
The poll showed that 51% of the public believe sanctions have failed to curb the group’s activities, and 46% doubt authorities are doing enough to counter IRGC-linked operations in the UK.
As an alternative to proscription, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has backed proposals for new legislation to give ministers powers to blacklist state agencies such as the IRGC, the newspaper said.
The poll was commissioned by the Iranian Front for the Revival of Law and National Sovereignty, founded by Vahid Beheshti, a political activist and journalist who has staged a protest for more than 900 days outside the Foreign Office.
The debate in Britain comes as other Western allies have already taken action. The United States designated the IRGC as a foreign terrorist organization in 2019, while Canada added the group to its terrorist list in 2023.
“We can impose restrictions against the United States, France, Britain and Germany in the Strait of Hormuz and not allow them to navigate,” Hossein Shariatmadari, the representative of Ali Khamenei in the hardline Kayhan newspaper told state broadcaster.
“Just by announcing such a restriction, the oil price will surge to $200, and the biggest economic blow will be dealt to the enemy.”
This is not the first time Shariatmadari has raised the prospect of using Hormuz as leverage. Last year, after European sanctions on Iranian airlines, he urged the closure of the waterway to tankers and cargo ships from “hostile countries.”
At the time, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said Iran had not issued such a threat despite acknowledging it had the capacity to do so.
Other Iranian officials returned to the theme after US strikes on nuclear facilities earlier this year.
Closing the strait would be disastrous for Iran itself, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio warned in June.
“If they do that, it will be another terrible mistake. It’s economic suicide for them,” he said, urging China to pressure Tehran against such a move.
Any Iranian closure of Hormuz would be “extremely dangerous,” European Union’s foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said in June, while UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy described it as “a monumental act of self-harm, making a diplomatic solution even harder.”
Global artery under strain
The Strait of Hormuz carries about one-fifth of the world’s oil exports. Iran has never attempted a full closure, but it has disrupted shipping through repeated seizures of commercial vessels.
“Europe and the United States would get miserable” if Tehran restricted oil flows, the Revolutionary Guards–linked Javan newspaper wrote in July, citing a shipping industry figure.
“Even countries with no link to the Iran-Israel war will suffer losses.”
The paper added that greater instability in the Middle East would drive up shipping and insurance costs globally.
Iran’s military loaded naval mines onto vessels in the Persian Gulf after Israeli strikes in June, though the mines were not deployed, according to Reuters.
US officials said the move indicated Tehran was weighing a serious escalation that could cripple global commerce.
Iran’s parliament approved a measure to close the strait in June following US airstrikes, state media reported, though the measure was not binding.
