Government’s terrorism adviser said he recommended powers to ban the IRGC a year ago

The government’s Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation has told GB News that he advised ministers to introduce new powers to ban the IRGC and groups acting for it nearly a year ago.

Jonathan Hall KC also said the current scale of antisemitic attacks constitutes an “emergency”.

On a ban on the IRGC, he said: “It’s legislation I proposed last May. I recommended that there should be new measures to allow the government to designate the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and any private body that acts as a sort of a wing of them.

“If you’ve got some group that is carrying out intelligence activities for, say, Iran, then they should be proscribed as well. So I’m pleased that they’re doing what I recommended last year.”

Asked about the raising of the UK’s terror threat level, Jonathan Hall KC said: “It’s going to be independently done. The Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre is so independent that Joe Biden visited Northern Ireland just before the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, nonetheless, they put it up.

“So you will, I think you can be fairly sure it’s rigorously independent. They will have all sorts of secret intelligence, and they will be working it out. To some extent it’s pretty obvious, isn’t it, as some of your previous contributors have said it looks like there is going to be another attack, I’m afraid, on Jews, but they’re also having an eye to the other stuff.

“But there’s an interesting thing there as well, the Home Secretary refers to Iran, or the hostile state link, which, of course, is not a separate thing, but it makes it, I suppose, more likely that terrorism is going to happen.”

He said he had wondered: “Let’s say you have a very, very severe threat against just a small [part] of Britain. Would you raise the threat level for the whole country? And I candidly don’t know what the answer is.

“I would like to think that this is an emergency for Britain as a whole, if members of our society are unable to go about their business. As it happens, there is a wider threat.”

Hall said ministers should have a heightened level of concern over antisemitism: “I think there should be a very, very high level of concern indeed.

“And I always go back to what happened in 2005 after the attacks on London. You’ll remember those. And the prime minister of the day said it was his priority. He took uncomfortable, unpopular steps.

“A lot of people were very cross about what he did, but he decided to go after radical Islamist extremism. I think a similar commitment needs to be done now in relation to antisemitism.”

Asked whether he expected marches and protests to be banned now, he said: “It’s quite important that the government actually sets the tone as well. The courts are independent, rightly. Prosecutors are independent as well. But sometimes courts and prosecutors need to understand and have the information to really understand the scale of the threat.

“I don’t think it’s good enough if someone is seen as simply, well, he only tried to put his match in front of a synagogue and it didn’t catch light. I think courts and prosecutors have now got to be presented with the facts so they can understand this is part of a very dramatic systematic attack on our fellow citizens.

“And the government I think can help by at least explaining that, both to the courts, to the prosecutors, but also to the public at large.”

On a re-post on X by Zack Polanski on Golders Green attack, he said: “I’ve got my own personal views, but I’m not going to get drawn into that now. It’s not my function. The only thing I would say is, I do think we all need to pull together on this.

“There will, of course, be debates, and that’s all fine, but ultimately, we depend upon a government. They have got the power at the moment, and I hope they use their power very wisely, because this is an emergency.”