Yesterday, the announcement by security minister Angela Eagle that the Government will designate the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) was presented as a crucial breakthrough.

In a sense it is: a campaign to treat the IRGC as an organization subject to terrorist-style restrictions has finally succeeded. But anyone tempted to see this as the moment Britain gets serious about the Iranian threat should look more closely at what designation actually adds, and at what is being left out.

Since 2023, the UK has targeted the IRGC with extensive sanctions against senior figures, entities and associated networks. This new designation adds a criminal offense for supporting or benefiting from the group, alongside the symbolic parity of treating it with the severity of a terrorist organization. This is true even if, under the new framework, it is classified as a state threat rather than a terrorist entity.

That symbolism matters to the Jewish community and dissidents who have spent years arguing that the UK is too soft on Iranian threats. But the organization is already known and already sanctioned. Designating it again does not, by itself, give police and prosecutors many tools they did not already have.

According to the Home Office, “in addition to the criminal consequences, designation sends a clear signal to designated bodies and the public that state threat activity against the UK or its interests will not be tolerated.” Yet, if the point of the new law is to send that “clear signal”, then the most glaring omission in the announcement is the Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS).

MOIS is Iran’s formal civilian intelligence ministry, operating within Tehran’s government structure but ultimately answerable to the Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei. This is the service that actually runs much of the sharp end of Iran’s activity on British soil. MI5’s Director-General has spoken of more than 20 potentially lethal Iran-backed plots tracked in a single year, and the pattern behind them is consistent: MOIS rarely acts through identifiable Iranian state personnel. Instead, it works through deniable intermediaries such as gangs and cyber-criminals. It makes sure that no obvious Iranian state actor is present at the scene.

British and American investigations have tied MOIS to the criminal network run by the narcotics trafficker Naji Sharifi-Zindashti, used against dissidents in the West, and to cyber units such as MuddyWater and the group behind the “Handala” data-wiping attacks. In 2025, three men were charged in London with assisting a foreign intelligence service after allegedly surveilling the Iran International journalists and sites connected to the Jewish community. This is the kind of proxy-driven casework that defines MOIS’s method, and that Defence Secretary Dan Jarvis has stated involves “the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Ministry of Intelligence and Security” directing “damaging activity”.

That proxy model is exactly why MOIS designation would be operationally significant. Unlike sanctions, which target specific individuals, entities and assets, designation applies to the organization itself and creates criminal liability for those who provide it with support. Designating MOIS would mean prosecuting the recruiters, couriers and fixers who make a proxy network function, even when the ministry itself never sets foot in the country. It closes the gap that sanctions cannot reach.

Designating the IRGC restricts the space for overt ideological support, fundraising and mobilization in Britain. But shutting down a propaganda network is not the same as dismantling a covert operational infrastructure.

MOIS is not among the three bodies Parliament will vote to formally designate, but the power to add it finally exists. Ministers should not treat the upcoming votes on the IRGC as “job done”. They should not let the organization at the center of Iran’s covert war in Britain escape the net.

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Dr Limor Simhony Philpott is a writer and researcher focusing on antisemitism, extremism and defence.

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