Government Policy on Iran

Chris Clarkson Excerpts

Wednesday 9th December 2020 Westminster Hall

[Chris Clarkson (Heywood and Middleton) (Con)]

May I say what a pleasure it is to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Miller? I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Henley (John Howell) for securing this debate.

Iran is a part of the world steeped in history, culture, art, and religion, from the Seleucids to the Parthians and the Sassanids to the Rashidun caliphate and beyond. This is a part of the world that I greatly admire, so what follows is not a criticism of the Iranian people but, rather, of the regime which controls their country and has set back thousands of years of progress.

Iran is a bad actor on the world stage. We are not dealing with a country that has much interest in the international rule of law or standards of human rights and transparency, which we and our partners would consider the baseline for a country’s conduct in the wider world. Tehran is enriching uranium to a higher fissile purity than is permitted under the JCPOA, and is on track to possess weapons-grade enriched uranium. This is not a clandestine activity by a secretive state; it is a flagrant and belligerent provocation by a thugocracy. Iran continues brazenly to violate the terms of the JCPOA, and it has failed to engage in constructive dialogue. I would urge Ministers to consider what the next steps are.

Iran’s malfeasance is not limited to its nuclear ambitions. In January, I had an opportunity to visit the Golan heights in Israel. Just a short distance from where I stood, a bloody, brutal civil war is raging. “Civil” is, in all honesty, a terrible misnomer for what is happening in Syria—it is the systemic suppression of that country’s people by a despot. Iran has invested millions in military assistance for Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

In Lebanon, Hezbollah controls the country’s southern border with Israel and acts with the impunity of a terrorist state, regularly staging attacks on its neighbour. The common thread, again, is substantial financing by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard. It has become a prolific and notorious state sponsor of terror; its tentacles are wrapped around each of its regional neighbours, and it cannot be treated separately from its proxy.

Our Israeli friends have an expression: “Ve’im lo achshav aymatai”—“And if not now, when?” In recent months, Israel has agreed landmark peace deals with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Sudan, and those outstanding achievements are evidence of a new direction of travel for a more peaceful and prosperous middle east. The normalisation of Israel’s relations with its regional neighbours is underscored by a shared common concern about both Iran’s nuclear ambitions and its sponsorship of terror through its proxies.

The Arab world should be commended on how far it has been willing to come in such a short time, and on or the statesmanship of its leaders in setting aside old and bitter rivalries with the region’s only democracy. To quote a common Arabic phrase, “Eljyaat ahsan men elrayhat”—“What is coming is better than what has been”. Iran is looking increasingly like the outlier in the middle east.

In closing, I would urge colleagues in the Government to redouble our efforts to bring the Iranian regime to account. We owe it to the people here at home; we owe it to our friends in the middle east, and we owe it to the Iranian people. There will come a day when Iran is a free nation again, loosened from the dogmatic and extreme regime that grips it, but that will not be an easy process.

There is a Persian expression: “Baa yek dast nemitunaan do hendhuneh bardaasht”—“You can’t lift two watermelons with one hand”. It means that one should always get some help. The Iranian people need a hand, and we should be willing to reach out.