REFNATION
Foreign PolicyEnded 15 Jul

Should the UK ban Iran's IRGC and its UK-based proxy over attacks on Jewish sites?

Yes 72%No 28%68 votes cast

The UK government has designated Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Islamic Movement of the Companions of the Right under new national security powers. The proxy group claimed seven arson and vandalism attacks on Jewish sites in Britain and is believed to have been directed by the IRGC's Quds Force. Security Minister Angela Eagle stated that the Quds Force almost certainly directed the attacks across Europe.

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There was no ambiguity in this one, and little appetite for it: voters backed proscribing Iran's Revolutionary Guard and its British front by close to three to one, and unlike most foreign-policy questions on this platform, nobody split neatly along the usual lines. When arson attacks on synagogues are the premise, the instinct to reach for the security state's toughest tool wins out over any residual squeamishness about banning organisations.

The one wrinkle worth pausing on is age. The youngest cohort, split almost down the middle, was markedly more equivocal than the 25-34s, who backed the ban almost unanimously — a reminder that generational scepticism about state security powers, sharpened by post-9/11 and post-Prevent debates, still lingers among the very youngest voters even when the target is a regime already treated as a pariah. Women, meanwhile, were the most united bloc of all, all but one in favour.

The result sits squarely on a fault line that has been hardening for years — Britain's slow drift from treating Iran as merely hostile to treating it as an active threat on home soil, following the same logic that saw MI5 warn of some twenty Iran-linked plots since 2022. A vote like this doesn't resolve that debate so much as confirm which way the public mood has already tipped.

Where this platform usually finds Britain divided, here it found near unanimity — proof that when the alleged target is synagogues rather than abstractions, consensus comes easily.

IDF are the aggressors

NO case · Migano · 1 respect

LeftCentreRight
72%
Yes · 49 votes
28%
No · 19 votes
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Migano· 48
The Left-Leaning Pragmatist
Voted noC. Left lean

IDF are the aggressors