Tehran’s crumbling empire, the war against Western civilisation, and Britain’s dangerous loss of national resolve

By Catherine Perez-Shakdam

The Western Front | Strategic Commentary | November 2026

The British establishment has developed a peculiar talent for recognising a threat at precisely the moment when denying its existence becomes more embarrassing than confronting it. Until then, the preferred arrangement is to appoint a committee, commission a review, deplore the latest outrage and congratulate ourselves upon the sophistication of our response. One imagines the enemy must find this immensely reassuring.

Winston Churchill would have been considerably less impressed.

He belonged to a generation that understood something our political class appears increasingly determined to forget: a nation does not preserve its freedom through the elegance of its excuses. It does so by recognising what threatens that freedom and possessing the courage to act accordingly.

Britain once understood this. King and Country were words spoken with a seriousness now almost impossible to reproduce without provoking the suspicion that one has committed some unspeakable ideological offence. Patriotism was a perfectly respectable sentiment, the Union Jack an emblem of shared inheritance, and national sovereignty a responsibility governments were expected to discharge.

Today we appear to have perfected the language of tolerance while becoming increasingly uncertain about what, precisely, we are prepared to tolerate.

I was reminded of this during my recent conversation with Liam Tuffs, when we examined the ideological ambitions of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the machinery of repression I encountered during my years inside the regime’s circles of influence, and the methods by which authoritarian movements attempt to weaken societies long before they possess the military means to defeat them.

We discussed the corruption of language, the manipulation of religious authority, the exploitation of vulnerable people and the manner in which institutions can gradually accommodate ideas fundamentally hostile to their founding principles. We examined how shame and dependency can be used to fracture families, how faith may be corrupted into an instrument of political obedience, and how patriotism can be recast as a moral embarrassment.

But there was another, more immediate question hanging over our discussion.

What happens when a revolutionary regime, deprived of the regional empire through which it once projected its power, turns increasingly towards the vulnerabilities of the West?

For Britain, this is no longer a question that can be safely consigned to academic speculation.

The Islamic Republic has spent almost half a century building the means to project its authority beyond Iran’s borders. From Lebanon to Yemen, from Iraq to Syria, Tehran invested in armed movements, political dependencies, religious institutions and intelligence networks designed to extend its reach while keeping the Iranian state at a convenient distance from the consequences.

The IRGC became the principal instrument of this enterprise, transforming revolutionary theology into an operational system.

Hezbollah established itself as a formidable military and political power in Lebanon. Assad’s Syria supplied an indispensable corridor of influence. Iraqi militias became entangled with the institutions of the state, while the Houthis extended Tehran’s regional leverage towards the Red Sea.

The regime called this arrangement the Axis of Resistance, displaying that characteristic revolutionary gift for bestowing heroic titles upon enterprises whose consequences are borne chiefly by other people’s children.

For years, the arrangement worked.

Then the architecture began to fracture.

Assad’s fall in December 2024 deprived Tehran of a crucial ally. Hezbollah suffered devastating military and leadership losses. Iran-aligned groups in Iraq encountered mounting political and strategic pressures. The network which once provided the Islamic Republic with strategic depth became increasingly vulnerable to the very forces it had been constructed to resist.

Lina Khatib’s April 2026 study for Harvard’s Belfer Center describes the structural degradation of Iran’s proxy model and the extent to which the network’s weakening has changed the regime’s strategic calculations.

A revolutionary empire built upon dependencies has discovered the inconvenience of watching those dependencies collapse.

Yet wounded regimes do not necessarily become moderate regimes. They may become considerably more inventive in their efforts to survive.

For Tehran, the loss of regional freedom of manoeuvre creates an incentive to search for alternative instruments of pressure. Criminal networks, foreign intelligence operations, cyber capabilities, ideological influence and coercion against expatriate communities offer possibilities quite different from the conventional deployment of regional militias.

Europe, with its open societies, transnational networks and fragmented security jurisdictions, presents opportunities which the Islamic Republic has already demonstrated a willingness to exploit.

And Britain has been discovering the consequences.

On 13 October 2026, Sir Ken McCallum, Director General of MI5, disclosed that Iran-linked investigations had resulted in more than fifty arrests in Britain over the preceding twelve months. He described the regime’s use of criminal intermediaries to threaten Iranian dissidents, intimidate journalists and pursue targets associated with its adversaries.

He also warned of expanding Iranian ambitions involving more difficult targets, including military installations.

Consider how extraordinary this ought to sound.

A foreign revolutionary state has developed networks capable of threatening individuals and institutions on British territory. The very people who sought refuge from Tehran’s repression have discovered that the regime’s reach does not necessarily end when they cross an international border.

In July, the British government designated the IRGC and an Iran-linked organisation under new state-threat powers. The latter had claimed responsibility for attacks against Jewish and Israeli-linked premises and Persian-language media, including the appalling arson attack on Hatzola ambulances in Golders Green.

By October, Britain and thirty-three other countries had publicly condemned Iranian hostile-state activity.

This is the assessment of our own security institutions. No appeal to speculative conspiracies is required.

And yet the official recognition of the danger has arrived after years in which warnings about Iranian foreign operations were too readily dismissed as exaggeration.

In 2022, I warned about Iranian efforts to identify and intimidate members of the diaspora. The idea that Tehran regarded Britain as a potential operational environment was hardly fashionable in polite conversation.

Now MI5 describes threats arising from precisely the sort of hostile-state activity that ought to have commanded greater attention years earlier.

There is very little satisfaction in being vindicated when the price is paid by those whose safety depended upon someone listening.

But the threat has another dimension, one which is considerably harder to detect than a criminal conspiracy or an intelligence operation.

It concerns the corruption of language.

Revolutionary movements have always understood that political power becomes easier to exercise when the words through which a society understands itself have first been altered. Change the meaning of oppression, liberation, justice and resistance, and conduct which might otherwise provoke universal condemnation can acquire an entirely new moral vocabulary.

I saw this process at work in Tehran.

In February 2017, I attended the Sixth International Conference in Support of the Palestinian Intifada. Khamenei addressed the assembled representatives of political movements and armed organisations in the familiar language of religious obligation and historical destiny.

The Palestinian cause supplied the Islamic Republic with something immeasurably valuable: a vocabulary capable of reaching beyond the Shia world and appealing to audiences whose political instincts might otherwise have led them to regard the clerical regime with considerable suspicion.

Think of the achievement.

A government that supported Bashar al-Assad through Syria’s devastation could claim the moral authority of defending oppressed peoples. A regime which imprisoned women for refusing compulsory religious observance could borrow the language of liberation. Political violence could be sanctified through the language of resistance.

Once such arguments circulate widely enough, their original authors need no longer supervise their repetition.

People begin to mistake borrowed assumptions for independently acquired convictions.

That is among the more remarkable achievements of propaganda.

None of this means that every Western activist criticising foreign policy is acting on Tehran’s instructions. It would be intellectually dishonest to make such a claim, and the public evidence supports no sweeping assertion that Iran directs Western political opposition.

What concerns me is the willingness of some political movements and institutions to accept the moral vocabulary of authoritarian actors without adequately examining its meaning or implications.

When intimidation becomes activism, coercion becomes cultural authenticity, and political violence becomes an understandable expression of grievance, democratic society has begun surrendering the language through which it distinguishes freedom from tyranny.

There is a reason authoritarian movements invest so heavily in ideology.

The cheapest victory is the one an adversary delivers voluntarily, having first been persuaded that surrender constitutes moral progress.

During my conversation with Liam Tuffs, we explored another feature of coercive power: its capacity to invade the most intimate aspects of human life.

I have encountered the consequences of a political theology which makes obedience to religious authority a condition of citizenship. I have seen the extent to which the Iranian regime regards the conduct of women, the independence of families and the freedom of individual conscience as matters falling within the jurisdiction of the state.

The repression of Iranian women illustrates the point with terrible clarity.

The woman who refuses compulsory veiling challenges the regime because her disobedience exposes the limits of its authority. Her refusal asserts that there remains some part of human existence over which the clerical establishment possesses no legitimate claim.

For an ideological system built upon compulsory obedience, such a proposition is intolerable.

Coercion has other instruments besides the police baton or the prison cell.

Shame can be cultivated. Dependency can be engineered. Vulnerable people can be isolated from those who might protect them. The promise of belonging can be transformed into a demand for submission, while family obligations may be exploited to ensure silence.

These mechanisms recur in different abusive environments. Their presence does not establish one centrally directed operation, and there is no evidence that every instance of coercion in Britain derives from Iran.

Nevertheless, recognising the methods through which domination operates is indispensable to understanding the wider ambitions of ideological authoritarianism.

Faith itself can become an instrument of power when political authorities claim the right to define conscience, punish dissent and demand obedience in the name of divine obligation.

The distinction between religion and political coercion is fundamental.

It should be possible to defend the freedom of a Muslim to practise Islam while defending with equal determination the freedom of another Muslim to reject clerical authority, abandon religion or challenge the political demands of an Islamist organisation.

These are complementary obligations in a free society.

Yet Britain sometimes appears so fearful of being accused of intolerance that it struggles to distinguish between defending religious liberty and accommodating those who would deny that liberty to others.

This is particularly unjust to the Muslims, Iranian exiles, dissidents, women and secular reformers who have fled coercive systems precisely because they believed Britain offered something better.

A government which cannot protect such people has failed one of the most elementary tests of sovereignty.

Which brings me to the question of patriotism.

At what precise moment did affection for one’s country become something requiring a defence?

When did the Union Jack acquire, in certain political circles, the status of an ideological provocation? And how did the words King and Country come to be treated as relics of an embarrassing past rather than expressions of a continuing constitutional responsibility?

There is something profoundly dishonest about the suggestion that patriotism necessarily carries the implication of ethnic hostility.

A nation can acknowledge its historical failings while preserving affection for the constitutional inheritance that makes such acknowledgement possible.

Britain’s independent courts, representative institutions, freedom of conscience and traditions of parliamentary accountability were not bestowed upon its people through the benevolence of history. They emerged through centuries of conflict, reform and sacrifice.

Their value does not depend upon pretending that Britain has always honoured them perfectly.

The institutions which permit a nation to recognise and correct its failures are themselves achievements worth defending.

Nor is patriotism the exclusive property of those whose ancestors happened to be born here.

The Iranian who fled religious persecution, the British Muslim who rejects authoritarianism, the dissident whose family remains in danger abroad and the citizen who can trace generations of service to the Crown all have a stake in preserving the constitutional order.

What unites them is the expectation that the law will protect their freedom against arbitrary power.

That is the foundation of a patriotism worthy of the name.

Churchill understood this obligation, though he was himself a man of considerable contradictions whose historical record deserves examination without sentimentality.

When Britain faced the possibility of surrender in 1940, he recognised that the nation’s survival depended upon its willingness to resist a tyranny whose ambitions were already unmistakable.

He did not imagine that elaborate diplomatic vocabulary could alter the nature of the danger.

Nor did he regard the defence of Britain as a matter requiring the approval of those who wished it defeated.

His achievement was to confront reality when accommodation had become easier than courage.

There is a lesson here, though one that ought not to require another world war to rediscover.

Britain’s present challenges are different. Iran is not Nazi Germany, and contemporary hostile-state operations cannot sensibly be compared in military scale with the existential danger Britain faced in 1940.

The useful comparison concerns political judgement.

A government must be capable of recognising when a hostile power is exploiting its weaknesses, and of responding before the consequences become irreversible.

It must distinguish a genuine threat from a convenient political fantasy, and an ideological adversary from an entire religious community.

It must protect legitimate dissent while refusing to tolerate intimidation, foreign interference and the subordination of individual rights to coercive political authority.

Above all, it must possess sufficient confidence in its constitutional inheritance to defend it without apology.

The Islamic Republic has demonstrated its willingness to project power beyond Iran’s borders. Its regional network has suffered severe damage, but its foreign operations continue to present serious security concerns. Britain has already experienced the consequences through intimidation, criminal intermediaries and threats against people who believed themselves beyond Tehran’s reach.

Whether these operations represent a coordinated alternative to the regime’s weakened Middle Eastern network remains a question requiring sustained intelligence assessment.

There is, however, no justification for pretending that the question itself is imaginary.

What Britain needs is an approach that joins intelligence, criminal enforcement, diplomatic pressure and institutional resilience with a renewed understanding of what national security exists to protect.

A country cannot indefinitely preserve freedoms in which its political leadership has ceased to express any confidence.

It cannot defend religious liberty while treating ideological coercion as a subject too delicate to investigate. It cannot protect dissidents from foreign intimidation while regarding sovereign responsibility as an inconvenience. And it cannot hope to maintain a free society if its own citizens come to believe that the expression of national loyalty is somehow incompatible with democratic virtue.

When Liam Tuffs and I discussed Tehran’s ambitions, I found myself returning to a frustration which has accompanied much of my work on the Islamic Republic.

The regime has spent decades demonstrating what it wants. Western governments have spent an extraordinary amount of time explaining why we ought not to take its declarations seriously.

I remember Tehran in 2017. The confidence of its leadership. The language of sacred struggle. The ease with which political violence was described as a moral obligation.

And I remember how readily that language was dismissed elsewhere as revolutionary theatre.

Now MI5 speaks publicly of Iranian-linked hostile operations in Britain, and the government acknowledges the activities of a foreign power which has shown itself prepared to reach into our national life.

At what point does disbelief become negligence?

Britain does not need a politician who dresses himself in Churchill’s vocabulary or surrounds himself with photographs of wartime London. We have endured enough theatrical patriotism to last several lifetimes.

It needs leaders prepared to shoulder the responsibilities that made Churchill’s courage necessary.

There was a time when King and Country expressed an obligation extending beyond ceremony. The country offered loyalty; its leaders owed service, judgement and the willingness to defend its independence.

That obligation has not expired.

The British people should not have to choose between their freedoms and their reputation for tolerance. They are entitled to both.

And those who have sought sanctuary here from the Islamic Republic, from religious persecution or from political tyranny are entitled to expect that Britain will remain a country in which the freedoms they fled to enjoy are protected.

Does Britain need a Churchill?

Perhaps the more troubling question is whether we still possess the national confidence to recognise one.

For I have seen what becomes of societies in which ideological authority is permitted to place itself above law, where dissent becomes treachery and where loyalty to the state is measured by obedience to those who claim to speak in its name.

I should prefer not to see Britain surrender its own inheritance through indifference.

Churchill’s Britain survived because, when the danger became undeniable, enough of its people understood that freedom was worth defending.

We might begin by recovering that understanding.

A nation which no longer believes itself worthy of defence should hardly be surprised when its enemies begin to agree.

Sources and references

1. The Dozen with Liam Tuffs, “The Spy Who Exposed Iran’s Terror Regime,” 29 October 2026. (YouTube)

2. MI5, Director General’s Annual Threat Update, 13 October 2026. (MI5)

3. House of Commons Library, Iranian State Threat Activities in the UK, 3 November 2026. (UK Parliament)

4. UK Government, Joint Statement on Iran, 12 October 2026. (FCDO)

5. UK Government, Support for IRGC Outlawed in Crackdown on Foreign State Proxies, July 2026. (Home Office)

6. Joint Committee on Human Rights, Transnational Repression in the UK, July 2025. (UK Parliament)

7. Lina Khatib, The Degradation of Iran’s Proxy Model, Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center, April 2026. (Belfer Center)

8. Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, Sixth International Conference in Support of the Palestinian Intifada, February 2017. (Research archive)

The Western Front publishes independent geopolitical analysis, strategic assessments and investigations into the threats confronting Western democracies. The author’s firsthand observations are distinguished from publicly documented intelligence assessments and analytical judgements.

Chemical Warfare, the Islamic Republic and Europe’s Dangerous Illusion of Security

By Catherine Perez-Shakdam

The Western Front | Strategic Intelligence & Analysis | 3 November 2026

There is a peculiar comfort in the sound of a key turning in a lock. A small, satisfying click, followed by the conviction that whatever madness may be unfolding beyond our front door has been safely excluded. We have built entire civilisations around this instinct. We raise walls, establish borders, maintain armies and fund intelligence services, all in the reasonable expectation that danger can be identified, intercepted and kept at a manageable distance.

We have become rather fond of our locks.

Unfortunately, the enemies we face have spent considerable time studying the doors.

On 3 November 2026, The New York Times reported that Israeli intelligence had warned American and Gulf officials that the Islamic Republic of Iran might be preparing to use chemical weapons against its adversaries. According to the reporting, Israeli officials believe Tehran is advancing technologies that could allow chemical agents to be delivered by missiles or introduced covertly into foreign countries.

The intelligence has divided Washington. Some officials reportedly consider the warning credible, particularly given the latest intelligence concerning Iranian preparations to attack American interests. Others suspect that Benjamin Netanyahu’s government is attempting to persuade President Donald Trump to resume major military operations against Iran. Gulf officials were reportedly even less impressed, with one suggesting that the Israelis had presented their conclusions without sufficient supporting evidence.

Perhaps the Israeli assessment is correct. Perhaps its urgency has been overstated. The intelligence itself has not been made public, so neither conclusion can responsibly be treated as established.

But I find the debate rather revealing, for it has become so absorbed in the question of Israeli motives that a far more consequential matter risks being overlooked.

What if the chemical threat is real, and what if European governments are considerably less prepared to confront it than they imagine?

There is an uncomfortable tendency in Western security thinking to regard a danger as manageable once it has been assigned to the appropriate department. Chemical warfare belongs to the specialists, Iranian aggression to the intelligence services, civil protection to the emergency planners and military deterrence to NATO. Each institution attends to its responsibilities, produces its assessments and provides the government of the day with the reassurance that someone, somewhere, has the situation in hand.

The public is invited to conclude that the house is secure.

We have, after all, locked the door.

The Warning We Have Already Been Given

The suggestion that Iran may possess chemical-weapons capabilities did not originate with Israeli intelligence this week.

In July 2024, Ambassador Nicole Shampaine, the American permanent representative to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, made an allegation that ought to have attracted considerably greater attention.

The United States, she explained, assessed that Iran maintained a chemical-weapons programme involving the development of weapons filled with pharmaceutical-based agents. She also referred to a video posted on an IRGC-affiliated Telegram channel threatening American officials while displaying weapons imagery, including depictions of poison.

The language was sufficiently explicit to leave little doubt about Washington’s concerns.

Then, in March 2026, the American delegation returned to the subject before the OPCW Executive Council. Shampaine repeated the assessment that Iran maintained a chemical-weapons programme involving the weaponisation of pharmaceutical-based agents and called upon other member states to oppose Iran’s continued membership of the Executive Council.

This was an official American accusation made within the international body responsible for enforcing the Chemical Weapons Convention. It was not an intelligence leak, an anonymous briefing or an Israeli attempt to shape American military policy.

Yet an allegation, however serious and however authoritative its source, is not the same as an independently verified finding. The OPCW has not publicly established that Iran is preparing an imminent chemical attack against Europe. Nor does the material currently available demonstrate that Tehran possesses a fully operational capability to deliver chemical weapons through the means described in the latest Israeli reporting.

That distinction deserves protection, particularly after the intelligence failures surrounding Iraq in 2002 and 2003. Those failures were consequential precisely because the distinction between what intelligence suggested and what governments claimed to know became dangerously blurred.

But the lesson of Iraq was surely to demand better evidence, rather than to cultivate a reflexive disbelief whenever chemical weapons are mentioned.

Two separate American statements, issued nearly two years apart, provide grounds for a sustained investigation into Iranian chemical-weapons activities. The newest Israeli allegations add urgency to that inquiry, even if their operational claims remain contested.

And the nature of the substances identified by Washington raises questions of its own.

Pharmaceutical-based agents capable of interfering with the central nervous system do not necessarily resemble the familiar agents associated with the trenches of the First World War or the chemical attacks carried out by Saddam Hussein’s forces against Iraqi Kurdish civilians. The distinction is significant because chemical-weapons threats encompass different agents, intended effects and methods of employment.

For a government assessing the danger, the relevant questions concern the substance involved, the form in which it might be weaponised, its likely effects, the reliability of the intelligence and the circumstances under which the regime might contemplate its use.

The international prohibition is clear. The operational picture is considerably less so.

And in matters of national security, uncertainty is a reason to investigate.

I Have Heard the Regime Explain Itself

I have spent years listening to the Islamic Republic explain its ambitions, sometimes from considerably closer quarters than I would ever have wished.

In February 2017, I attended the Sixth International Conference in Support of the Palestinian Intifada in Tehran, an extraordinary gathering of Iranian officials, Palestinian factions, foreign delegations and representatives of movements that the regime regarded as constituents of its wider struggle against Israel.

Ali Khamenei addressed the conference, describing Israel in terms that left precious little room for ambiguity about his desired outcome. The Palestinian struggle was presented as a sacred obligation, resistance as a historical necessity, and the eventual disappearance of Israel as an objective that must remain beyond negotiation.

I remember being struck by how comfortably the language of religious duty accommodated the expectation of perpetual violence. What might have appeared to foreign observers as familiar revolutionary bombast had, within that political environment, a more serious purpose. It supplied a moral vocabulary through which coercion could be justified and extraordinary sacrifices demanded.

There was a confidence about it, too. The leadership did not appear particularly troubled by the possibility that Western governments might object to its declared objectives. Indeed, I came to understand that the regime often regards such objections as evidence that its adversaries are reluctant to acknowledge the nature of the confrontation before them.

My experiences in Tehran have left me sceptical of the reassuring distinction so frequently drawn between the Islamic Republic’s language and its intentions.

That scepticism should not be mistaken for a claim that every public threat is accompanied by an operational plan. States exaggerate, deceive and posture. The Iranian leadership is perfectly capable of all three, and its threats must be tested against evidence of capability, preparation and political intent.

But a regime’s ideology matters. It determines the objectives its leadership considers legitimate, the violence it is prepared to defend and, in periods of exceptional danger, the limits it may be tempted to cross.

The massacres of 7 October 2023 demonstrated the catastrophic potential of violence justified through the language of resistance. The attack was carried out by Hamas, and Khamenei’s speech six years earlier does not establish that Tehran directed that particular operation. Yet the ideological environment in which organisations such as Hamas have received Iranian support cannot simply be dismissed as incidental.

I have heard the regime speak about the destruction of its enemies. I have watched Western audiences explain why those declarations ought not to be taken at face value.

The difficulty, as I see it, is that we have grown so accustomed to treating extremist language as a species of political theatre that we sometimes neglect to examine the institutions, weapons, networks and strategic calculations capable of giving it practical effect.

Chemical warfare introduces a particularly troubling possibility into that equation.

If an authoritarian leadership already disposed to justify exceptional violence acquired a credible chemical-weapons capability, its decisions would still be constrained by military considerations, fears of retaliation and the survival interests of the regime. Those constraints matter enormously.

But they are circumstances to be assessed, not assurances to be assumed.

The Threat Has Already Crossed Europe’s Borders

We need only turn to Britain’s own intelligence assessments to understand why the possibility of an Iranian chemical threat cannot be confined to discussions about the Middle East.

On 13 October 2026, Sir Ken McCallum, Director General of MI5, delivered a public warning about the changing character of Iranian operations on British soil.

In the preceding twelve months, he disclosed, Iran-linked investigations had resulted in more than fifty arrests in the United Kingdom. His account described the use of criminal intermediaries to intimidate Iranian opposition figures, threaten independent media organisations and target Israeli interests.

More disturbing still was his description of Iranian ambitions to reach increasingly difficult targets, including military installations.

For years, the Islamic Republic has relied upon an architecture of plausible deniability. It employs intermediaries, cultivates relationships with armed organisations and makes use of criminal networks whose activities complicate the task of attributing responsibility to Tehran.

The pattern is hardly unfamiliar to anyone who has studied the IRGC’s external operations.

What is significant about McCallum’s statement is that the danger is now being described publicly by Britain’s domestic intelligence service in terms that extend beyond surveillance and intimidation.

He linked members of the IRGC to a front organisation that had claimed attacks against Jewish communities and facilities across Britain and Europe. Among the incidents discussed were attacks involving ambulances, synagogues and businesses.

There is an obvious difference between arson and chemical warfare, and it would be intellectually dishonest to treat evidence of the former as proof that the perpetrators possess the means or intention to conduct the latter.

But the existence of an established hostile-state threat network changes the questions European governments must ask.

The old assumption that the principal danger from Iran would arrive through conventional military confrontation in the Middle East has become increasingly difficult to sustain. British intelligence has already identified Iranian-linked hostile activity on British territory, while official Iranian threats have extended to European countries that might become involved in military operations against Tehran.

The issue, therefore, is whether a chemical capability, should it be confirmed, could eventually be incorporated into a wider strategy of coercion beyond Iran’s immediate neighbourhood.

That prospect remains hypothetical. Its consequences would be sufficiently severe to justify serious planning.

What concerns me is the temptation to wait until intelligence establishes an imminent operation before examining the adequacy of our defences.

The purpose of preparedness is to ensure that a society is capable of responding before a foreseeable danger becomes an accomplished fact.

A City Does Not Have to Be Destroyed to Be Defeated

Consider what a confirmed chemical-weapons incident would mean in a European city.

The consequences would depend upon the agent employed, the number of people exposed, the setting and the effectiveness of emergency intervention. There is no single chemical-attack scenario that can honestly be presented as representative of every possible incident.

Nevertheless, even a limited attack could produce effects reaching well beyond its immediate victims.

An unexplained hazardous-substance incident in a crowded urban environment would place enormous demands upon emergency services while officials established what had happened. Hospitals might need to manage potentially contaminated casualties. Transport authorities could be required to suspend services. Police would have to preserve evidence while protecting the public, and government communications teams would face the unenviable task of explaining a developing danger without spreading unnecessary alarm.

Uncertainty would become a problem in its own right.

People would want to know whether the air was safe, whether they should remain indoors, whether their children could return to school and whether those they loved had been exposed. Rumour would move considerably faster than laboratory confirmation. The first official statement would be scrutinised, questioned and perhaps immediately contradicted by speculation circulating online.

For most people, the crisis would be experienced through interrupted journeys, anxious telephone calls, hospital waiting areas and the sudden realisation that ordinary routines depended upon systems they had scarcely considered before.

An attacker seeking political leverage might regard that anxiety as useful, particularly if it produced pressure upon a government to alter its policies.

There is a temptation to imagine chemical warfare exclusively through images of devastation: incapacitated soldiers, abandoned streets, protective suits and emergency cordons. Such scenes are possible, but the strategic consequences of an incident may also lie in prolonged disruption, mistrust and the struggle to restore public confidence.

The distinction matters because chemical terrorism or state-directed chemical violence could seek effects disproportionate to the physical scale of an incident.

Europe has some experience of this danger.

In March 2018, Sergei and Yulia Skripal were poisoned in Salisbury with a Novichok nerve agent. Dawn Sturgess subsequently died after exposure to the agent in nearby Amesbury. The incident required an extensive response involving police, public-health authorities, chemical-weapons specialists and other agencies.

The Salisbury attack did not produce the mass-casualty catastrophe associated with battlefield chemical warfare. It nevertheless showed that a chemical agent could be used on British soil, that members of the public could suffer consequences beyond the intended targets, and that the response could require substantial investigative and specialist resources.

The lesson should have been difficult to forget.

The British public has already witnessed the use of a chemical warfare agent in an English city.

Its implications for national preparedness deserve continued attention, particularly as the government assesses the conduct of other hostile states.

The Limits of Our Preparedness

Britain is not without defences.

The Cabinet Office’s National Risk Register identifies serious threats to the country, including risks associated with chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear incidents. Specialist emergency teams exist, and the government has undertaken exercises designed to test cooperation between civilian authorities, the police and the military.

In November 2025, up to 600 participants from the emergency services, armed forces and partner organisations took part in a major exercise in Cambridgeshire. It simulated a complex hazardous-substance incident and examined the ability of different agencies to coordinate their response.

That is serious work, and those undertaking it deserve recognition.

But exercises tell us only so much.

They can expose weaknesses, improve coordination and test whether procedures survive contact with realistic operational pressures. Their value depends upon the assumptions incorporated into the scenario and the willingness of authorities to address whatever shortcomings emerge.

The more searching question is whether Britain’s preparedness has kept pace with the changing intentions and capabilities of hostile states.

Can local authorities maintain essential services during a prolonged emergency? Are hospitals and ambulance services sufficiently prepared to respond to an unexpected chemical incident? Can central government coordinate public information without allowing conflicting instructions to create confusion? Are specialist capabilities available where they are needed, and can neighbouring jurisdictions provide assistance without losing precious time to administrative uncertainty?

These are practical questions. They should have practical answers.

It would be useful, too, to know how European countries intend to cooperate when a serious incident requires expertise, equipment or assistance that cannot be supplied quickly by the affected state alone.

NATO has experience of chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear defence, while the OPCW possesses specialised expertise and mechanisms for international assistance. National civil-protection structures provide another layer of capability.

The challenge is to establish whether these arrangements would operate effectively under the strain of a genuine emergency.

It is possible that many of the answers are reassuring. Some may be contained in classified assessments or operational plans that cannot sensibly be disclosed.

What should be available to Parliament, however, is sufficient evidence that the government has tested the relevant capabilities, identified gaps and established a credible programme for addressing them.

Security cannot be measured merely by the number of institutions listed in an organisational chart.

The Calculations Tehran May Be Making

There is one aspect of the current warning that deserves particular attention: timing.

The Islamic Republic has experienced sustained military pressure, the weakening of elements of its regional network and the consequences of direct confrontation with Israel and the United States.

Such conditions are dangerous precisely because they can produce competing incentives within an authoritarian leadership.

The regime may recognise that chemical warfare would invite severe retaliation and therefore regard any operational capability as too costly to employ. Equally, leaders who believe that their survival is at stake may become willing to consider measures they would reject in more stable circumstances.

Neither conclusion can be established through ideology alone.

The relevant calculations involve capability, military necessity, the likelihood of successful attribution, expected retaliation and the interests of those who would be required to authorise and execute an attack.

But one should also consider the coercive value of a chemical threat that remains unfulfilled.

If an adversary can persuade European governments that military or diplomatic decisions might provoke unconventional retaliation against their populations, it may acquire leverage without ever carrying out the threatened operation.

Fear can influence policy even when the underlying threat is uncertain.

This is why the response must be carefully judged. Alarmist predictions risk serving the interests of those who would like European publics to believe themselves helpless. Dismissing the danger without investigation would be equally foolish.

The task is to deny Tehran both advantages.

That requires a credible capacity to identify, prevent and respond to chemical threats, accompanied by a clear understanding that any confirmed use of chemical weapons would carry serious consequences.

It also requires the discipline to resist having Western policy dictated by threats whose credibility has not yet been established.

Deterrence, after all, is partly a question of what an adversary believes a government is prepared to endure.

What Must Be Done Before the Next Warning

The British government should now undertake a specific review of the potential Iranian chemical-weapons threat, drawing upon American intelligence, Israeli assessments, its own collection capabilities and the expertise available through international arms-control institutions.

The purpose should be to establish the precise grounds for concern, rather than to endorse or refute the latest Israeli allegations on political grounds.

Officials should identify what is known about Iranian research, development and possible weaponisation activities, and determine whether there is evidence connecting those activities to operational planning. The distinction between an existing programme and preparations for an attack is fundamental.

They should also examine whether the reported development of chemical-weapons delivery capabilities, if corroborated, would require changes to existing British and European threat assessments.

For Parliament, the immediate requirement is accountability over preparedness.

The government should be asked to explain when specialist chemical-emergency capabilities were last tested, what weaknesses were identified and what improvements have subsequently been made. Such scrutiny need not disclose sensitive operational information.

There should also be a renewed examination of public communication during a suspected chemical incident. A population that receives accurate, timely and comprehensible instructions is less vulnerable to panic, misinformation and attempts at coercion.

Internationally, London should work with allies to strengthen the exchange of intelligence concerning chemical-weapons activities while supporting the OPCW’s verification and assistance functions. It should press for clarification of the outstanding American allegations and for appropriate scrutiny through the mechanisms established by the Chemical Weapons Convention.

The financial and organisational demands of such an approach are real. Specialist equipment, trained personnel, medical preparedness, exercises and interagency coordination all require sustained investment. They compete with other legitimate public priorities, and no government can prepare equally for every conceivable emergency.

That is precisely why a serious assessment of the threat is required. Resources should be directed towards identifiable vulnerabilities rather than the most dramatic scenario circulating in the press.

I would go further.

Britain should encourage a European review of chemical-threat readiness that establishes measurable standards for detection, emergency coordination, medical response, public communication and recovery. Existing NATO and European mechanisms offer foundations upon which such work can be developed.

The review should be based on plausible threats, involve independent scrutiny where appropriate and produce recommendations that governments can be held responsible for implementing.

It would be an altogether more useful response than another solemn declaration of concern.

The Comfort of the Locked Door

I have spent enough time studying the Islamic Republic, and enough time in the company of those who have helped shape its policies, to recognise the danger of assuming that its leadership must ultimately share our understanding of restraint.

The West is often inclined to interpret threats through the logic of its own political institutions. We assume that violence will be constrained by the costs it imposes, that governments will prefer stability to escalation, and that even fiercely ideological leaders will recognise certain boundaries as inviolable.

Often, those assumptions prove correct. Sometimes they fail catastrophically.

The purpose of intelligence is to distinguish between the two before the consequences become irreversible.

Today’s reports have not established that Tehran is preparing an imminent chemical attack on Europe. They have, however, brought renewed attention to an Iranian chemical-weapons concern already raised publicly by the United States, against a background of documented Iranian hostile activity on European territory and increasingly explicit threats of retaliation.

That is sufficient reason to demand answers.

I would prefer Britain to examine the threat and discover that its defences are equal to it. I would prefer the allegations of imminent chemical warfare to prove unfounded, and the costly business of preparedness to remain an exercise in prevention rather than recovery.

But I have little patience left for the notion that a danger becomes less serious because acknowledging it would oblige us to make difficult decisions.

There is something particularly troubling about a civilisation that has grown so sophisticated in the management of risk that it begins to confuse the language of preparedness with the achievement of safety.

We have agencies, committees, protocols and plans. We have officers trained to confront dangers that most citizens will never encounter, and specialists whose work deserves far more recognition than it receives. Their efforts matter enormously.

Yet all of these protections depend upon the willingness of governments to recognise when the threat has changed.

In Tehran, I learned that the Islamic Republic’s leadership does not necessarily measure its ambitions against the limits that Western governments consider reasonable. I also learned that its declarations are often most revealing when foreign observers find them too extravagant to take seriously.

That experience has made me wary of easy reassurance.

The latest chemical-weapons warning may yet prove exaggerated. The intelligence deserves to be examined with the greatest possible rigour, and no military decision should be taken upon the strength of allegations that have not survived such examination.

But neither should Europe wait for a chemical attack to discover whether its elaborate arrangements for public protection can bear the weight placed upon them.

There is an old and rather comforting habit of believing that danger will announce itself in sufficient time for us to respond.

We have been fortunate, on many occasions, that it has.

The trouble with the locked door is that we so rarely ask whether the danger we fear is capable of entering by some other means.

And by the time we hear it coming, the lock may no longer matter.

The Western Front publishes independent geopolitical analysis and strategic assessments of emerging threats to Western security. This article distinguishes documented state activity, official intelligence assessments and allegations that remain unverified in the public record.

Sources consulted include the US delegation to the OPCW, MI5, the UK Cabinet Office, the Home Office, contemporaneous records of the 2017 Tehran conference and reporting published on 3 November 2026.

Sources and References

The following bibliography covers the report’s principal factual claims, intelligence assessments, historical references and policy recommendations. Primary government and intelligence documents are prioritised.

1. The New York Times (3 November 2026). Julian E. Barnes, Natan Odenheimer, Eric Schmitt, Adam Rasgon and Dustin Volz, “Israeli Claims of Iranian Chemical Weapons Divide U.S. Officials.” The central reporting behind the latest Israeli intelligence warning, including disagreements among American and Gulf officials over its credibility. (New York Times; syndicated article, GV Wire).

2. Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (July 2024). Ambassador Nicole Shampaine, Statement of the United States at the 106th Session of the OPCW Executive Council. The US delegation’s explicit allegation that Iran maintains a chemical-weapons programme involving pharmaceutical-based agents, alongside concerns about an IRGC-affiliated video depicting poison. (OPCW official statement).

3. Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (10 March 2026). Ambassador Nicole Shampaine, United States Statement at the 111th Session of the OPCW Executive Council. Reiterates American concerns regarding Iran’s alleged weaponisation of pharmaceutical-based agents and calls for opposition to Iran’s continued membership of the Executive Council. (OPCW official PDF).

4. Office of the Director of National Intelligence (2024). Annual Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community, p. 19. Assesses that Iran probably intends to continue research and development of chemical and biological agents for offensive purposes, including substances with incapacitating effects. (ODNI official PDF).

5. Office of the Director of National Intelligence (March 2025). Annual Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community, p. 26. Reiterates the assessment of Iranian offensive chemical and biological research, including agents capable of causing incapacitation or death. (ODNI official PDF).

6. MI5, UK Security Service (13 October 2026). Sir Ken McCallum, Director General’s Annual Threat Update. Primary evidence of Iranian-linked hostile activity in the United Kingdom, including more than fifty arrests arising from Iran-linked operations over twelve months, criminal intermediaries and expanding ambitions to target more difficult sites. (MI5 full speech).

7. Euronews (3 March 2026). Malek Fouda, “Tehran Vows to Strike European Countries if They Join Iran War.”Documents Iranian Foreign Ministry warnings that European participation in military operations against Tehran could provoke retaliation, including threats directed at European cities. (Euronews).

8. Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center (26 February 2017). “Support for Violence and Terrorism and Calls for the Destruction of Israel at the Sixth International Conference on Palestinian Intifada in Tehran.”Contemporaneous documentation of the conference held on 21–22 February 2017, including Khamenei’s statements and the participation of regional organisations. (Research report).

9. Middle East Institute (21 February 2017). Alex Vatanka, “Khamenei’s Deadly Threat Against Israel.” Contemporaneous analysis of Khamenei’s remarks at the Tehran conference, including his rejection of political compromise and his stated objective of Israel’s elimination. (Middle East Institute).

10. UK Government, Home Office (4 December 2025; updated February 2026). The Dawn Sturgess Inquiry Report, chaired by Lord Hughes of Ombersley. The official independent inquiry into Dawn Sturgess’s death following Novichok exposure in 2018, providing evidence of the consequences of chemical-agent use on British soil. (Official inquiry report).

11. UK Cabinet Office (14 July 2026; updated 12 August 2026). National Risk Register 2026. Government assessment of the UK’s most serious national risks, providing the resilience and preparedness framework used in the report’s examination of chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear emergencies. (UK Government).

12. UK Home Office and Ministry of Defence (12 November 2025). “UK Tests Response to Malicious Use of Hazardous Substances.” Official account of the 4–7 November exercise at Papworth, Cambridgeshire, involving up to 600 emergency-service, military and partner-agency personnel. (UK Government).

13. Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. Chemical Weapons Convention, Article I: General Obligations. Establishes the international prohibitions on the development, production, acquisition, stockpiling, transfer and use of chemical weapons, including military preparations for their use. (OPCW treaty text).

14. Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. Chemical Weapons Convention, Article X: Assistance and Protection Against Chemical Weapons. Establishes the framework for international assistance, protection, detection, medical support and cooperation in the event of threatened or actual chemical-weapons use. (OPCW treaty text).

The French Connection, the Betrayal of the Shah, and the Extraordinary Deception That Allowed a Revolution to Become the Occupation of Iran

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An Exclusive Evening with Catherine Perez-Shakdam

What does Ali Khamenei really believe about the West? What drives the Islamic Republic’s hostility toward Israel? And what did I discover during my encounters with some of the most powerful men in Tehran?

On Sunday, November 8, I will be hosting an exclusive, private online event, limited to just 10 participants.

Having met Ali Khamenei, Ebrahim Raisi, and other senior figures within the Islamic Republic, I will share my firsthand experiences of a world few Western analysts have ever entered, offering a rare perspective on the regime’s ideology, its ambitions, and the future of Iran.

This will be an intimate, unscripted conversation, giving every participant the opportunity to ask questions directly and explore matters that rarely receive the attention they deserve in conventional interviews.

EVENT DETAILS

📅 Sunday, November 8, 2026

🕔 5:00 PM UK time (GMT)

💻 Private online event

⏳ Duration: 90 minutes

🎟️ Participation fee: £195 per person

🔒 Strictly limited to 10 guests

TO REGISTER YOUR INTEREST

📩 unitedwesternfront@outlook.com

Please email with the subject line “I Sat with the Ayatollah – November 8” to request your place. Registration details and payment instructions will be provided by email.

With only ten places available, early expressions of interest are encouraged.

Some stories can only be told by those who were in the room.

I look forward to sharing mine with you.

Catherine Perez-Shakdam

Presented by The Western Front

How the Islamic Republic has learned to exploit Western political language, cultivate sympathetic commentators, and turn the institutions of liberal democracy into unwitting amplifiers of its preferred narratives.

By Catherine Perez-Shakdam

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On the psychology of terror, the weaponisation of sexual violence, and the extraordinary courage of the women who have become the conscience of Iran’s struggle for freedom

The Western Front | 31 October 2026

By Catherine Perez-Shakdam

There is something almost comically revealing about a government that possesses ballistic missiles, revolutionary armies, intelligence organisations, prisons, gallows and an apparently limitless supply of men claiming to speak on behalf of the Almighty, yet finds itself so profoundly threatened by a young woman allowing the wind to pass through her hair.

One might be tempted to laugh at the absurdity, were the consequences not so hideously real.

For nearly half a century, the Islamic Republic has devoted an extraordinary proportion of its political energy to the supervision of women. Their appearance, their movements, their relationships, their education and the manner in which they occupy public space have all become matters upon which the state considers itself entitled to pronounce. A lock of hair may attract the attention of the authorities. An uncovered head can invite punishment. A woman exercising what most of us would regard as the unremarkable privilege of deciding how to dress may discover that she has unwittingly entered into a confrontation with the ideological foundations of an entire political order.

There is something almost touching about the fragility of a revolution that must be defended against a woman’s choice of clothing.

But the obsession is neither incidental nor the product of some quaint cultural misunderstanding. The regulation of women occupies a central place in the Islamic Republic’s conception of authority, because compulsory obedience in the most intimate areas of life serves to establish a political principle of considerably wider application. If the state can determine what a woman must wear, where she may go and how she must conduct herself, it has already asserted a claim over her autonomy that reaches far beyond the question of religious observance.

The female body becomes a place upon which political authority is displayed, tested and enforced.

And when women refuse to submit, the regime confronts a difficulty that its immense security establishment has proved singularly incapable of resolving. Punishment can produce compliance, sometimes for years, but it cannot compel the individual to accept the moral legitimacy of those who administer it.

The women of Iran have understood this with a clarity that ought to command the admiration of anyone who values liberty.

They have confronted a government capable of inflicting extraordinary suffering upon them, fully conscious of the danger, and have continued to challenge its claim to govern their lives. Some have paid with their freedom. Others have endured torture, sexual assault, permanent injury and the loss of people they loved. Some have been killed. Many remain imprisoned, while others face capital proceedings whose fairness has been challenged by human-rights organisations.

Yet the demand persists.

Zan. Zendegi. Azadi.

Woman. Life. Freedom.

Three words that have exposed the moral bankruptcy of an entire system of government.

And behind them stand women whose courage deserves more than the passing admiration of a world that has become terribly proficient at expressing concern while carrying on with its ordinary business.

The education of fear

Terror is frequently imagined as an exceptional event: the arrival of armed officers in the middle of the night, the firing of a weapon or the unmistakable violence of an interrogation room. Such scenes certainly belong to the Islamic Republic’s history, but they tell us only part of how repression operates.

The more insidious achievement of an authoritarian system lies in making fear an ordinary consideration of daily life.

A woman leaving her home in Tehran must consider the possibility of being challenged over her clothing. A student may have to calculate whether defying compulsory hijab rules could jeopardise her university education. An employee may fear disciplinary proceedings or dismissal. A mother may worry that her daughter’s refusal to comply with official expectations will bring the attention of the security services upon the family.

The state need not intervene on every occasion. Indeed, the possibility that enforcement may be unpredictable can make its authority more intrusive.

A person who cannot know when punishment will arrive may begin anticipating it everywhere.

This is the psychological advantage of arbitrary power. It encourages people to internalise the expectations of the authorities, until the prospect of intervention alters their conduct even in the absence of an official standing beside them.

Iran’s compulsory veiling system has developed precisely this capacity for intrusion. Human-rights organisations have documented the use of surveillance, vehicle confiscations, financial penalties, prosecutions and restrictions upon access to public services and employment. These measures have been justified through the language of morality and public order, although their consequences fall directly upon women’s ability to conduct their lives independently.

What makes the arrangement especially revealing is the disproportion between the conduct being punished and the machinery assembled to punish it.

A woman removes a headscarf. The state may respond with police intervention, administrative sanctions or criminal proceedings.

For all its revolutionary ‘grandeur’, the Islamic Republic has succeeded in turning the most ordinary acts of female independence into matters of political defiance.

And the women have responded with an audacity that deserves our astonishment.

They continue to appear in public with their hair uncovered. They challenge restrictions through their conduct, their writing and their participation in public life. Some do so openly, while others exercise resistance through decisions that may appear insignificant to an outside observer but carry substantial personal risks.

There is no great army standing behind them, no guarantee that the law will protect them if they are arrested and no reason to suppose that the men responsible for enforcing the regime’s instructions will suddenly discover a fondness for constitutional liberty.

Yet they persist.

Perhaps this is why the spectacle is so intolerable to the authorities. A woman who refuses to obey without exhibiting fear has exposed something that authoritarian power would prefer to keep concealed: its capacity to command obedience is never quite the same thing as its ability to command belief.

The body as an instrument of terror

There is a darker dimension to the Islamic Republic’s repression, one whose deliberate cruelty deserves to be examined without the evasions through which political violence is so often made more palatable to polite society.

Sexual violence has been documented as an instrument of repression in Iran’s detention system.

The evidence is sufficiently substantial to permit neither dismissal nor the luxury of treating every account as an isolated aberration.

In December 2023, Amnesty International published an investigation based upon the experiences of 45 survivors subjected to sexual violence during the crackdown following the Woman, Life, Freedom protests. Among them were women, children and men who described rape, including gang rape, sexual assault, threats of sexual violence and other degrading treatment by state agents.

The allegations concerned personnel associated with the Revolutionary Guards, the Basij, the police and intelligence institutions. Survivors described abuse during arrest, transportation, interrogation and detention, including in facilities where they were deprived of effective protection or access to independent legal assistance.

The testimony was harrowing. It included accounts of beatings, electric shocks, sexual humiliation, threats and assaults intended to punish detainees, extract confessions or intimidate them into abandoning political activity.

The perpetrators operated within institutions that purported to defend the moral integrity of the Islamic Republic.

There is a particular obscenity in that contradiction.

Men who claim to act in defence of religious virtue have inflicted sexual violence upon people accused of violating the prescribed moral order. The very authorities who insist upon regulating the conduct and appearance of women have been implicated in acts that constitute some of the gravest violations of bodily integrity imaginable.

The hypocrisy is breathtaking, although the suffering it produces leaves little room for amusement.

What requires closer examination is the political purpose served by such violence.

Rape and threats of sexual assault can be used to inflict acute psychological suffering, establish control over detainees, compel compliance and discourage further resistance. The violence invades the most intimate sphere of a person’s existence, attacking the sense of bodily security upon which ordinary human freedom depends.

Its effects may continue long after the physical assault has ended.

A survivor may experience enduring fear, difficulties with trust, distress associated with memories of the attack or apprehension at the prospect of renewed detention. Others may struggle with injuries requiring extensive medical care. There is no universal response to trauma, and survivors should never be reduced to an inventory of symptoms, but the capacity of sexual violence to cause profound and prolonged suffering is well established.

The political consequences can extend beyond the individual.

When a woman is arrested during a demonstration, her family may have no reliable information about where she is being held or how she is being treated. Her mother may spend days searching for news. Her husband or partner may be unable to establish whether she has received medical care. Her sisters and friends may hear accounts of sexual abuse in detention and understand that the same danger could await them.

The threat travels.

A prison cell may contain one detainee, but fear can spread through an entire community.

This is among the most disturbing features of sexual violence used within a campaign of political repression. Its effects can be magnified through the knowledge that others are vulnerable to similar treatment.

The possibility of sexual assault becomes a means of discouraging women from entering the public square, joining demonstrations, providing testimony or challenging the authorities.

And where survivors fear social stigma or retaliation, perpetrators may seek to exploit that fear to secure their silence.

The shame, needless to say, belongs entirely to those who commit the abuse.

Yet the possibility that a survivor may feel compelled to conceal what happened provides the perpetrators with an additional advantage. The victim may be left to confront both the original violence and the fear that disclosure will produce further suffering.

In such circumstances, silence may be a means of survival.

It should never be mistaken for consent, acquiescence or the absence of abuse.

Nor should anyone presume that every survivor wishes to recount the details of her experience publicly. There is something deeply objectionable about demanding that a woman expose the most intimate circumstances of her suffering before the world agrees to believe that she has been wronged.

Her dignity is not contingent upon the production of a sufficiently graphic account.

The responsibility to investigate belongs to the authorities and the institutions capable of establishing the facts. The burden of shame belongs to the perpetrator.

And the responsibility for preventing further abuse belongs to those who possess the power to intervene.

We should also be precise about what the available evidence establishes. International investigators have documented patterns of sexual violence by Iranian state agents during the suppression of protests. This does not mean that every individual assault has been traced to a single written order issued by the highest political leadership, and serious accountability requires distinctions between direct perpetrators, commanders and officials who may bear responsibility under international law.

Such precision makes the findings more difficult to evade.

For the evidence has now passed well beyond the realm of allegation alone.

In March 2024, the United Nations Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Iran concluded that grave violations committed during the suppression of the Woman, Life, Freedom protests, including rape and other forms of sexual violence, torture, murder and gender persecution, formed part of conduct amounting to crimes against humanity.

The legal significance is considerable. Crimes against humanity require more than the commission of an individual atrocity. They involve specified acts committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against a civilian population, with the required knowledge of that attack.

The Mission found grounds for applying that framework to the violations it investigated.

The Islamic Republic’s representatives may contest those findings, but the suffering documented by investigators cannot be made to disappear through official denial.

A state that claims the authority to govern in the name of morality has been confronted with evidence of sexual violence and persecution committed by the very institutions responsible for preserving its rule.

What a terrible account of revolutionary virtue.

The wounds that remain after prison

The international imagination has become familiar with certain images of Iranian resistance. A young woman stands before armed officers, her hair uncovered. Students chant in a university courtyard. A crowd raises its hands beneath a slogan that has travelled from the streets of Iran into the conscience of the wider world.

These photographs possess an extraordinary power. They capture moments in which individuals appear to have overcome the instinct for self-preservation in pursuit of something they regard as greater than themselves.

But a photograph rarely tells us what follows.

The United Nations Fact-Finding Mission documented the use of unlawful force against protesters, including shootings that caused deaths and permanent injuries. Security forces fired metal pellets and other projectiles, sometimes at close range, leaving victims with severe wounds and permanent damage to their eyesight.

The injuries inflicted upon the eyes of protesters are especially disturbing.

Sight is among the most intimate ways in which we encounter the world. To emerge from a demonstration having lost the ability to see, or with one’s vision permanently impaired, is to carry the consequences of state violence into every subsequent day.

There are the practical difficulties of treatment and rehabilitation, the interruption of education or employment, and the immense adjustment demanded of a person whose body has been injured through an act of political repression.

Other survivors have described beatings, fractures, sexual assault, prolonged isolation and psychological abuse.

Some return from detention with injuries apparent to everyone. Others carry suffering that may be invisible to those who encounter them in ordinary life.

A sudden noise, an unexpected visitor or the sight of an official uniform may revive memories of arrest or interrogation. The fear of renewed detention may persist. For some, the difficulties are compounded by financial insecurity, restricted access to medical care and the possibility of further attention from the authorities.

The experience of survivors varies, and it would be insulting to imagine that every person subjected to repression responds in precisely the same manner.

Yet one fact remains.

Release from detention does not necessarily bring an end to the consequences of what occurred there.

We should remember this when international attention moves elsewhere, as it inevitably does. The news cycle is a notoriously restless creature, forever searching for the next outrage and displaying very little interest in the unfinished suffering of those whose stories have ceased to command its attention.

The women of Iran must continue living with the consequences long after the photographs have disappeared from our screens.

There are hospital appointments, legal difficulties, families to support, children to care for and ordinary lives to reconstruct under the shadow of possible renewed persecution.

The work of recovery is seldom dramatic.

It is also rarely brief.

And it deserves a seriousness of international concern that extends considerably beyond the occasional ceremonial declaration of solidarity.

The mothers who refused to surrender their dead

There are few things more morally devastating than the sight of a mother required to defend the memory of her murdered child against the government responsible for the circumstances of that child’s death.

A parent who has lost a son or daughter ought to be permitted the privacy of grief. The ordinary rituals of mourning, the gathering of relatives, the burial, the photographs preserved upon a mantelpiece and the speaking of a beloved name should remain beyond the reach of political coercion.

Yet in Iran, even these intimate acts have become matters of official concern.

Human-rights organisations have documented the intimidation of families seeking accountability for relatives killed during protests. Some have faced surveillance, interrogation, arrest or restrictions upon funeral and memorial ceremonies. Following the violence of January 2026, Amnesty International reported instances in which families were pressured over burial arrangements and prevented from mourning freely.

The cruelty is almost difficult to comprehend.

A government has already deprived a family of someone they love, and then attempts to regulate how that loss may be acknowledged.

The purpose of such interference is painfully apparent. Public mourning can become an accusation against the authorities. A photograph held above a crowd may contradict an official account. A mother who refuses to stop speaking about her child can sustain public attention long after those responsible would prefer the matter to be forgotten.

And so grief itself becomes subject to political discipline.

The state seeks to exercise authority over memory.

But the mothers of Iran have shown a refusal to submit that ought to command the deepest respect.

Some have continued to speak despite threats. Others have attended commemorations, preserved testimony, challenged official accounts and demanded to know why their children were killed.

Their courage emerges from circumstances no human being should be asked to endure.

We are inclined to reserve the language of heroism for those who advance towards danger by choice, yet there is an equally demanding form of courage in the parent who has already suffered an irreparable loss and nevertheless refuses to accept silence as the condition of her own safety.

A mother standing with the photograph of her child possesses no army, no prison system and no authority to compel the obedience of others.

But her insistence upon the truth can acquire a moral force that an entire government struggles to answer.

What reply can a state offer to a woman who asks why her daughter never came home?

What explanation can a political order provide when it treats a memorial gathering as a threat to national security?

And what does it reveal about the men who govern when they consider the remembrance of the dead an activity requiring police supervision?

The mothers who continue demanding justice are preserving something precious: the right of the living to remember those whom power has taken from them.

In doing so, they have become custodians of a history that the authorities may attempt to suppress but cannot entirely erase.

Jina, and the courage that survived her

Jina Mahsa Amini was twenty-two years old when she died in September 2022 after being detained by Iran’s morality police.

Her arrest concerned alleged non-compliance with compulsory hijab regulations. The United Nations Fact-Finding Mission subsequently concluded that her death was unlawful and resulted from physical violence while she was in state custody.

Twenty-two.

An age at which life ought to be expanding, full of possibilities still too numerous to contemplate, was brought to an end under circumstances that would become a defining indictment of the system responsible.

Her death provoked an extraordinary uprising.

Across Iran, women removed their headscarves, cut their hair in public and confronted security forces. Students joined the demonstrations. Families protested. Men stood beside women demanding rights that the government had long treated as negotiable privileges.

The words Woman, Life, Freedom became the language of a movement whose ambitions extended beyond the repeal of a particular regulation.

For many participants, the demonstrations expressed a rejection of the wider political system through which the Islamic Republic exercised control over their lives.

The response was devastating.

Protesters were killed, arrested and subjected to grave abuses. Children were among those who suffered. The UN investigators documented serious violations, while Amnesty International and other human-rights organisations gathered testimony concerning torture, sexual violence and unfair proceedings.

Yet the demonstrations exposed a problem the authorities had not anticipated.

Women who had been taught to regard obedience as an obligation began refusing it publicly, knowing that others could see them.

A government may enforce a law through fear for many years, but the spectacle of people openly disregarding that law can alter the moral atmosphere in which it operates. The individual who believed herself alone discovers that others share her refusal. What once appeared impossible acquires the character of a collective demand.

This does not mean that courage eliminates danger.

Nor does it suggest that repression has ceased. Women continue to face legal restrictions and punishment, and the security apparatus remains capable of inflicting severe harm.

But something has changed.

The state has been confronted with women who no longer accept that its instructions concerning their bodies are entitled to moral obedience.

And once that conviction has taken root, no police decree can simply restore the old certainty.

One need only observe the women who continue to appear unveiled in public, despite the risks, to understand the significance of this transformation.

Their acts may be quiet. Their defiance is unmistakable.

A girl walking to university without a headscarf is not required to deliver a speech explaining the meaning of liberty. Her conduct already expresses the principle.

And the regime, for all its formidable machinery, has been unable to extinguish it.

The gallows and the women whose names must be remembered

There is a particular horror in the use of capital punishment against people accused of political or security-related offences following proceedings that fail to meet international standards of fairness.

The death penalty has long formed part of the Islamic Republic’s coercive apparatus. Human-rights organisations have documented unfair trials, allegations of torture, coerced confessions and restrictions upon legal representation in cases that may culminate in execution.

Women have been among those exposed to this machinery.

In October 2026, the Kurdish political prisoner Varisheh Moradi was again sentenced to death after an earlier conviction had been overturned because of deficiencies in the proceedings. Pakhshan Azizi, a Kurdish humanitarian worker, has also faced a death sentence in a case that has attracted substantial international criticism.

The legal circumstances of individual prisoners differ, and they deserve careful documentation. Some sentences have been upheld, others overturned, and certain cases remain subject to further proceedings.

This matters particularly when portraits of women facing political persecution are circulated together under warnings of imminent execution.

A recent image identifying eighteen Iranian women has attracted attention, but those pictured do not all share the same judicial status. Some face confirmed death sentences, others capital charges, retrials or different forms of imprisonment.

We owe these women the discipline of accuracy.

Their circumstances are already sufficiently grave without introducing claims that cannot be substantiated. An advocacy campaign that confuses a pending capital charge with an enforceable death sentence risks obscuring the urgency of those cases in which execution remains an immediate legal possibility.

Behind every photograph is a person whose life deserves to be considered in its own right.

A name, an age, a profession, a family, a set of convictions and a future that ought never to depend upon the political convenience of a court operating beneath the authority of an authoritarian state.

Some are mothers or wives. Others are daughters and sisters. Many are students, workers, activists or women who became caught in the machinery of repression through circumstances that had never formed part of their ambitions.

Their humanity extends beyond the relationships through which society may recognise them. They are people with their own thoughts, aspirations and entitlement to liberty.

And whatever the precise stage of their proceedings, the use of capital punishment in cases involving serious allegations of torture, coercion and denial of due process presents an urgent challenge to international human-rights protections.

The gallows possesses an appalling finality.

A prisoner who is executed cannot testify against her interrogators, challenge the judgment of her court or return to her family. Whatever injustice may have occurred becomes irreparable.

Yet the attempt to silence an individual through death does not necessarily extinguish her memory.

Iranian history has demonstrated this repeatedly.

The names of those killed under repression can acquire a significance far beyond the lives their persecutors attempted to control.

The authorities may possess the power to end a life.

They have proved considerably less successful at determining how that life will be remembered.

The heroines of an unfinished revolution

There is a tendency in the writing of history to give rather too much attention to the men who command armies and rather too little to the women whose acts of resistance make political transformation possible.

We remember generals advancing beneath banners, presidents delivering speeches, revolutionaries standing upon balconies and the familiar assembly of statesmen who appear in photographs whenever the future of a nation is being negotiated.

Meanwhile, the women who endured imprisonment, protected their families, carried messages, preserved evidence, challenged injustice and sustained resistance through years of danger are sometimes relegated to the margins.

Iran’s future historians must resist that temptation.

The women who have challenged the Islamic Republic have earned their place at the centre of their country’s struggle for freedom.

They have demonstrated courage in circumstances that no civilised society should permit to exist.

Some have faced security officers armed with weapons they themselves could never hope to possess. Others have entered interrogation rooms knowing what former detainees have described. Some have stood before judges who may possess the power to sentence them to death, while families have waited outside prisons for news that might never arrive.

Others exercise their courage in the quiet routines of ordinary life.

A mother teaching her daughter that obedience is not the measure of virtue. A student refusing to accept that her intellectual future should depend upon compliance with ideological regulations. A woman preserving the names of murdered protesters or helping the relatives of detainees obtain information.

These actions rarely produce the dramatic imagery through which the world prefers to understand resistance.

They are no less consequential for that.

A political system that attempts to regulate every aspect of personal life may be challenged as effectively through sustained civil disobedience as through the more familiar spectacle of organised protest.

And the women of Iran have made such resistance an everyday practice.

Their extraordinary achievement lies partly in their refusal to allow the state to define the limits of their moral imagination.

For all its power to punish, the Islamic Republic has been unable to persuade countless women that its restrictions are just.

The authorities may demand submission, but they cannot make that demand worthy of respect.

And here we encounter the most remarkable quality of Iranian women’s courage.

It has endured without the expectation of immediate victory.

There is a kind of bravery that depends upon the prospect of success, and another, considerably more demanding kind, that persists when success remains uncertain and the consequences of resistance are painfully clear.

The women of Iran have shown us the latter.

They have continued to challenge the authorities despite arrests, injuries, executions and the knowledge that others have suffered terribly for doing the same.

But we ought to be careful how we speak of this.

There is a risk that admiration becomes a form of romanticisation, that we begin to treat the suffering of Iranian women as a magnificent spectacle from which the world may draw moral inspiration.

Their pain is no gift to the rest of us.

There is nothing glorious about rape, torture, blindness, imprisonment or the execution of a political prisoner. Such experiences do not become morally desirable because those who endure them display extraordinary strength.

The women subjected to these abuses deserved lives in which their courage was never tested in such ways.

They deserved the freedom to study, work, marry, raise families, remain unmarried, dress according to their conscience and participate in the political life of their country without fear of punishment.

They deserved the ordinary liberties that governments elsewhere are expected to respect without demanding expressions of gratitude.

That they have fought so fiercely for such elementary freedoms tells us something remarkable about their character.

It tells us something dreadful about the political order that denied them.

Their courage belongs to them. The disgrace belongs to those who made that courage necessary.

Justice must follow the evidence

International condemnation of the Islamic Republic’s treatment of women is necessary, but it is insufficient when detached from meaningful efforts to establish accountability.

The United Nations Fact-Finding Mission has documented grave violations and emphasised the importance of preserving evidence. Amnesty International’s 2026 investigation, Architects of Atrocities, examined the institutions and chains of command implicated in the repression of the 2022 uprising, identifying officials whose potential responsibility warrants criminal investigation.

Such work is indispensable because the pursuit of justice cannot rest upon expressions of moral outrage alone.

The circumstances of detention, the identities of alleged perpetrators, the responsibilities of commanders and the involvement of judicial authorities must be established through evidence capable of supporting lawful proceedings.

The women who suffered abuse deserve more than the satisfaction of hearing the international community condemn what was done to them.

They deserve credible investigations, protection from retaliation, access to legal counsel, appropriate medical and psychological care, and the prospect that those responsible may eventually face justice.

Their families deserve the right to know what happened.

Those facing the death penalty after unfair trials require urgent intervention, including demands for stays of execution, the review of proceedings and the protection of their fundamental rights.

Where the evidence supports allegations of international crimes, states should examine the lawful avenues available for prosecution, including the exercise of universal jurisdiction where domestic legislation permits.

A future Iran will also confront these responsibilities.

If the country eventually emerges from the political order established in 1979, the restoration of justice will require more than the removal of the men presently occupying its highest offices.

The institutions through which repression was conducted will have to be examined, their records preserved and the responsibility of individuals established.

The crimes committed against women must not be buried beneath the political conveniences of transition.

Nor should accountability become an excuse for indiscriminate punishment. The legitimacy of a future legal order will depend upon its ability to distinguish individual culpability from institutional membership and to provide the fair proceedings denied to so many under the present system.

That will demand patience, independence and a seriousness of purpose that political vengeance can never supply.

But the women who have suffered sexual violence, torture and unlawful imprisonment should never be asked to purchase national reconciliation through silence.

Their experiences belong to Iran’s historical record.

And their right to justice cannot reasonably expire with the government responsible for violating it.

We should bow before them

I have spent years examining the Islamic Republic, studying the convictions of its leadership and the institutions through which it exercises power. I have encountered men who spoke of sacrifice with extraordinary solemnity, who regarded obedience as the highest expression of political virtue and who appeared genuinely persuaded that they possessed a divine entitlement to determine the lives of others.

There is something about such men that has always struck me as profoundly revealing.

They possess an almost limitless appetite for the sacrifices of other people.

The sacrifice of the young, the sacrifice of women, the sacrifice of those who disagree, and the sacrifice of entire generations whose ambitions are treated as expendable whenever they conflict with the survival of the revolutionary system.

Yet for all their professions of spiritual certainty and their considerable willingness to impose suffering, they remain terribly unsettled by women who refuse to obey.

And perhaps this is the final humiliation of the Islamic Republic.

A state that has accumulated extraordinary military and coercive power finds itself challenged by young women whose principal demand is the right to live as free human beings.

An intelligence establishment capable of monitoring, arresting and interrogating dissidents has been unable to extinguish the voices of women speaking from prison.

A judiciary that possesses the authority to pronounce death sentences has failed to persuade the grieving mothers of Iran that their children should be forgotten.

I think of those mothers often.

I think of the women who preserve photographs of children whose lives were taken from them, and who must now endure the terrible business of continuing to live in a world from which those children have disappeared.

I think of daughters waiting for news of imprisoned mothers, of wives who have watched loved ones carried away, and of sisters determined that the names of the dead should remain part of their country’s memory.

And I think of the women themselves, those who have faced imprisonment, injury and threats of sexual violence, knowing perfectly well what might happen and refusing to surrender their convictions.

There are also the women whose names we shall never learn.

Those who quietly sheltered someone in danger, who helped a prisoner obtain assistance, who refused an instruction they knew to be unjust, or who found the courage to speak when everything around them suggested that silence would be safer.

History may never record every one of these lives.

But Iran’s struggle for freedom has been shaped by them.

When the day comes that Iranians can determine the future of their country without fear of political persecution, it would be a profound injustice if the women who carried so much of this struggle were treated as supporting characters in a story told principally through the accomplishments of men.

They have earned something considerably greater.

They have earned the right to be recognised as authors of their country’s future.

And there is a particular moral grandeur in the manner with which they have assumed that responsibility.

For what does courage look like when every material advantage belongs to one’s oppressor?

Sometimes it is the young woman who stands before an armed officer and refuses to lower her eyes.

Sometimes it is the mother who carries the photograph of her murdered child through a crowd, unwilling to allow the authorities to dictate the terms of her grief.

Sometimes it is the prisoner who continues writing after being warned that her words may prolong her incarceration.

And sometimes it is an ordinary girl walking through Tehran with her hair uncovered, conscious of the risks and unwilling to concede that her appearance belongs to the state.

There is no need to invent grandeur for such women.

Their actions possess it already.

We should bow before their courage.

We should bow before the mothers who refuse to abandon the memory of their children, the daughters who have rejected the inheritance of compulsory submission, the wives and sisters who have endured intimidation, and the countless women who continue resisting in ways that may never attract the attention of a foreign correspondent.

We should bow because they have displayed a moral fortitude that is exceedingly rare, confronting a machinery of repression whose capacity to injure them is terribly real.

But our admiration must never become an excuse for leaving them to endure that machinery alone.

They need solidarity that survives the passing excitement of the news cycle, governments prepared to pursue accountability and institutions willing to preserve the evidence of what has been done to them.

Those who survived sexual violence need protection and care. Those imprisoned for exercising fundamental freedoms need justice. Those facing execution after unfair proceedings need urgent intervention. And the families of the murdered deserve to know that the world has not quietly accepted their loss as another regrettable episode in a distant country’s political history.

The women of Iran have already demonstrated what they are prepared to sacrifice.

The question now concerns what the rest of us are prepared to do with the knowledge of their suffering.

I cannot look upon their courage without feeling an almost overwhelming sense of humility.

For they have been denied freedoms that many of us exercise without a moment’s reflection, and have nevertheless continued demanding them with a determination that exposes the inadequacy of so much of our comfortable political rhetoric.

They have faced armed men while possessing nothing that could protect them from the consequences of their defiance.

They have endured prisons, threats, beatings and the possibility of death.

And still they refuse to disappear.

That refusal may prove to be among the most consequential acts of political courage in modern Iranian history.

The Islamic Republic has built prisons to contain these women, laws to subjugate them and gallows to silence them. Yet it has failed to extinguish their belief that their lives belong to them.

And what a magnificent failure that is.

For a government may control the institutions of the state, command its armed forces and punish those who dissent, but it cannot indefinitely manufacture the moral consent of people who have ceased to believe in its authority.

The women of Iran have demonstrated this with their bodies, their voices, their memories and, in too many cases, their lives.

They have shown us the price of freedom with a clarity that no philosophical treatise could hope to equal.

And when the history of Iran’s liberation is eventually written, their names should stand at its very centre.

To the mothers, daughters, wives and sisters of Iran, to those behind prison walls, those who have survived unspeakable cruelty, those who continue to resist and those whose voices were taken from us before the world had properly learned their names, I offer my deepest admiration.

May the country you love one day be worthy of the courage you have shown in its name.

May your daughters inherit the freedoms you were denied, and may those who inflicted such suffering upon you be brought before courts capable of administering the justice that was so often withheld.

Above all, may no one ever persuade you that your sacrifices belong to a history written by others.

You are the unsung heroines of Iran’s march towards freedom.

And when that freedom comes, may the world remember that it was defended, day after day, by women who stood before the guns and would not kneel.

We bow to you.

Zan. Zendegi. Azadi.

Woman. Life. Freedom.

Sources and documentation

United Nations Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Iran, March 2024. Findings concerning the unlawful death of Jina Mahsa Amini, state violence, torture, sexual assault and crimes against humanity committed during the suppression of the Woman, Life, Freedom protests. (https://www.unognewsroom.org/story/en/2100/hrc-press-conference-fact-finding-mission-report-on-iran-18-march-2024/0)

Amnesty International, 6 December 2023. They Violently Raped Me: Sexual Violence Weaponized to Crush Iran’s Woman Life Freedom Uprising. Investigation based upon testimony from 45 survivors of sexual violence, including women, men and children. (https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde13/7480/2023/en/)

Amnesty International, 16 September 2026. Architects of Atrocities. Investigation into institutional responsibility and the chain of command implicated in crimes against humanity during the 2022 uprising. (https://www.amnesty.org.uk/knowledge-hub/all-resources/architects-of-atrocities/)

United Nations Fact-Finding Mission, September 2026. Findings relating to the repression of protests beginning in December 2025 and allegations of further crimes against humanity. (https://www.iranrights.org/library/document/5359)

Human Rights Watch, World Report 2026: Iran. Documentation concerning gender discrimination, compulsory hijab enforcement, arbitrary detention, torture and restrictions upon fundamental freedoms. (https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2026/country-chapters/iran)

Amnesty International, 23 January 2026. Iran: Authorities Unleash Heavily Militarized Clampdown to Hide Protest Massacres. Reporting concerning intimidation of bereaved families, restrictions upon burials and the suppression of public mourning. (https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2026/01/iran-authorities-unleash-heavily-militarized-clampdown-to-hide-protest-massacres/)

Amnesty International, September 2026. Why Is Amnesty International Calling for International Justice for Crimes Against Humanity in Iran? Examination of international accountability, gender persecution and sexual violence. (https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2026/09/why-is-amnesty-international-calling-for-international-justice-for-crimes-against-humanity-in-iran/)

Freedom House, Freedom in the World 2026: Iran. Assessment of restrictions upon women’s liberties, surveillance, political repression and public resistance. (https://freedomhouse.org/country/iran/freedom-world/2026)

How Britain learned to police offence, criminalise discomfort and mistake the management of language for the preservation of democracy

By Catherine Perez-Shakdam

There is something almost touching about the faith modern governments place in their ability to improve the human condition by regulating the words with which human beings describe it. Where previous generations concerned themselves with liberty, justice and the proper limits of state power, ours has developed a peculiar fascination with the emotional consequences of disagreement. We have acquired an entire administrative vocabulary for describing offence, elaborate procedures for recording it and a growing class of political and institutional authorities prepared to explain which expressions may be considered tolerable in polite society.

The difficulty, of course, is that polite society has never been particularly hospitable to intellectual independence. Some of humanity’s most necessary arguments began as breaches of good manners, and almost every meaningful advance in political or scientific understanding has required someone, somewhere, to contradict a proposition that others regarded as sacred.

One suspects that Galileo would have found the modern language of harmful discourse wonderfully familiar, although he might have been surprised to discover that the guardians of orthodoxy had exchanged their ecclesiastical robes for the more reassuring attire of public administration.

Britain has become an especially interesting laboratory for this experiment in managed expression. A country that once regarded its citizens’ willingness to tell their rulers precisely what they thought of them as evidence of national character now appears increasingly uncertain whether such candour should be celebrated, tolerated or referred to the appropriate authorities.

There is a revealing contradiction at the heart of this development. Our political class speaks incessantly of protecting democracy while showing an extraordinary sensitivity to the disagreements through which democracy necessarily operates. Offence has gradually acquired the status of a public problem. Language is increasingly treated as a form of conduct requiring supervision, while the boundary between expressing an objectionable opinion and committing an actionable wrong has become a matter of growing controversy.

The constitutional danger arises when the state begins to assume responsibility for deciding which forms of disagreement are socially permissible, which descriptions are morally acceptable and whose experience of offence should carry institutional weight.

For once the government acquires the habit of supervising language in the name of protecting society, it becomes remarkably difficult to establish where its authority ought to end.

And there is no reason to suppose that those entrusted with such authority will invariably possess the wisdom, impartiality or restraint necessary to exercise it.

The invention of the non-criminal suspect

Consider one of the more ingenious contributions British policing has made to the vocabulary of modern government: the non-crime hate incident.

The expression deserves to be admired for its almost supernatural capacity to accommodate contradiction. One might reasonably have supposed that the absence of a crime would limit the interest of the criminal justice system. Yet under the recording arrangements developed in England and Wales, speech and behaviour falling below the criminal threshold could nevertheless become the subject of an official record, provided that the incident was perceived as motivated by hostility or prejudice.

The original rationale was neither mysterious nor inherently unreasonable. Police have a legitimate interest in identifying patterns of intimidation that might develop into criminal conduct, particularly where individuals or communities face a credible risk of violence. The experience of people subjected to sustained harassment deserves serious attention, and no sensible defence of free expression requires the police to ignore evidence of danger merely because an offence has not yet occurred.

The problem emerged when the perception of hostility became sufficiently detached from objective evidence that lawful speech itself could become the principal subject of police scrutiny.

In 2019, a citizen participating in a public argument about proposed changes to gender-recognition legislation discovered that his social-media comments had been recorded by police as a non-crime hate incident. An officer visited his workplace and subsequently contacted him, despite acknowledging that no criminal offence had been committed.

The officer’s explanation, recorded in the subsequent court proceedings, included the extraordinary observation that he needed to check the citizen’s thinking.

One might search the entire history of British constitutional development for a more revealing expression of official presumption.

The police, whose proper business includes protecting the public from violence, investigating criminal wrongdoing and maintaining the peace, had apparently discovered an additional responsibility: the examination of a citizen’s intellectual habits.

In December 2021, the Court of Appeal found that the recording guidance was disproportionate in its interference with freedom of expression. The judges recognised that recording lawful speech in police databases could discourage participation in public debate, particularly where controversial political questions were concerned.

The court’s reasoning deserves to be read carefully because it exposes a danger that does not require imprisonment, prosecution or even the formal accusation of a crime.

The knowledge that one’s opinions may become the subject of an official record can be sufficient to alter the way one speaks.

A teacher may reconsider contributing to an argument about education. A professional may refrain from discussing a proposed change in the law. A journalist may begin to wonder whether a controversial observation is worth the trouble it might attract.

The prudent citizen learns to remain silent.

And the machinery responsible for producing that silence may congratulate itself upon having promoted social harmony.

What makes the episode especially troubling is the administrative ease with which the distinction between allegation and established wrongdoing can become obscured. A complaint is received, a record created, an individual identified and a description of hostility entered into an institutional system. The terminology carries the appearance of official judgment even where the evidence establishes no criminality.

The law has traditionally been concerned with distinguishing accusation from proof. Administrative language can sometimes achieve the remarkable feat of making that distinction disappear without formally abolishing it.

In March 2026, the College of Policing and the National Police Chiefs’ Council announced major reforms to the recording of non-crime hate incidents, acknowledging that existing practices required substantial changes. The proposed replacement system would require a clearer policing purpose and place greater emphasis upon ensuring that lawful expression did not become the subject of unnecessary intervention.

Yet in September, the government confirmed that the replacement framework was not expected to be implemented until early 2027.

There is something quintessentially bureaucratic about discovering that a system has become sufficiently problematic to warrant fundamental reform, while continuing to operate it in the meantime.

One can only hope that those whose lawful speech has attracted unwarranted attention appreciate the administrative delicacy of the arrangement.

The great migration from injury to offence

The philosophical difficulty is considerably older than any particular government, statute or police recording system.

It concerns the relationship between subjective experience and public authority.

Offence is an entirely genuine human response. It may arise from cruelty, ignorance, deliberate provocation or the simple discovery that another person does not share one’s convictions. It can be painful, humiliating and occasionally morally justified.

But the sincerity of an emotional response does not establish the illegitimacy of whatever produced it.

A religious believer may regard criticism of his faith as intolerably offensive. An atheist may find the doctrines of that faith intellectually absurd. A political activist may regard opposition to a cherished social programme as evidence of prejudice, while an opponent may consider the same programme an assault upon fundamental liberties.

All may be sincere. None possesses, by virtue of that sincerity, an automatic entitlement to silence the others.

The distinction is elementary, which perhaps explains why it has become so unpopular.

Modern political discourse increasingly encourages us to treat the experience of offence as though it were itself evidence of an injury requiring redress. The language of personal distress migrates into the vocabulary of institutional responsibility, and what began as a disagreement between citizens acquires the character of a problem to be resolved by authority.

The consequences are predictable.

If offence is sufficient to justify intervention, those who can most persuasively claim to have suffered it acquire an advantage over those who are merely attempting to argue.

The result encourages a peculiar form of political competition in which the offended party becomes the presumptive victim, the person responsible for the offending statement becomes the presumptive wrongdoer, and the substance of the original disagreement is quietly escorted from the room.

What a splendid arrangement for anyone who wishes to avoid having to defend an argument.

And how convenient for political movements whose preferred assumptions might prove considerably less persuasive if subjected to sustained scrutiny.

One need only observe the growing fascination with officially approved terminology to appreciate the possibilities. Political parties and campaign organisations have increasingly sought to establish preferred definitions, acceptable descriptions and prescribed ways of discussing contentious social questions.

There may be excellent reasons to recommend particular language. Words have histories, associations and consequences. Courtesy is generally preferable to cruelty, and a civilised person ought to be capable of criticising an idea without needlessly humiliating another human being.

But persuasion and compulsion belong to different moral universes.

The right to recommend a vocabulary does not confer the right to impose it. The conviction that a description is offensive does not make that description unlawful. Nor should political disagreement be transformed into evidence of misconduct merely because one participant refuses to adopt the terminology favoured by another.

Whoever controls the permissible vocabulary of a debate has acquired considerable influence over its possible conclusions.

A political movement that succeeds in establishing its own language as the only morally legitimate language enjoys the remarkable luxury of having its assumptions accepted before the argument begins.

Its opponents must either concede the intellectual territory or face accusations arising from their refusal to do so.

The manipulation is particularly effective when dressed as a matter of public virtue.

After all, who wishes to appear opposed to kindness, inclusion or respect?

The question is whether these virtues are to be cultivated through reason and example or enforced through institutional pressure.

A society that cannot distinguish the two is already in some difficulty.

Two-tier policing and the politics of suspicion

The accusation of two-tier policing has become one of the most contentious expressions in contemporary British political life.

It reflects a suspicion, held by some citizens, that the authorities approach comparable conduct differently according to the political character of those involved. Demonstrations are compared, arrest decisions scrutinised, public statements examined for inconsistencies, and conclusions drawn about which opinions appear to attract sympathy or suspicion from official institutions.

Such comparisons require considerable care.

Public-order situations differ in their levels of violence, threats to life, available evidence and operational circumstances. A peaceful demonstration and an attack upon police officers are categorically different activities, whatever political cause their participants claim to represent.

The Home Affairs Committee’s examination of the violent disorder of summer 2024 found no evidence that peaceful protesters had been suppressed on account of their political opinions. It concluded that the severity of the police response reflected the serious criminality involved, including assaults, arson and attacks upon buildings.

That conclusion deserves to be taken seriously. The liberties of peaceful demonstrators are not strengthened by pretending that violent disorder is an equivalent exercise of political expression.

Yet it would be equally unwise to imagine that the committee’s findings settle every public concern about consistency in policing.

The existence of a politically charged accusation does not relieve public institutions of their responsibility to demonstrate that legal standards are being applied impartially.

The question is sufficiently important to be asked without rhetorical exaggeration: can citizens be confident that the police will respond to the same conduct according to the same legal principles, regardless of the political or ideological sympathies of those involved?

That confidence cannot be sustained through official irritation at the question itself.

If the authorities believe that apparent discrepancies arise from differences in evidence, risk or criminal conduct, they should explain those distinctions wherever doing so is lawful and compatible with operational responsibilities.

If errors have occurred, they should acknowledge them.

And where the evidence supports allegations of unequal treatment, corrective action should follow.

The difficulty begins when public suspicion is treated as a moral offence rather than a question of institutional legitimacy.

No government is entitled to the confidence of its citizens merely because it finds their scepticism inconvenient.

Indeed, the more vigorously a public authority insists that its conduct must not be questioned, the more urgently one ought to examine the basis of that insistence.

The rule of law depends upon more than the existence of legislation. It requires sufficiently predictable enforcement that citizens can understand the consequences of their conduct without having to calculate the ideological preferences of those exercising power.

Where that predictability is lost, even the perception of unequal treatment can corrode public trust.

And a police service whose legitimacy is brought into question is placed in an exceedingly difficult position, particularly when it must confront genuine threats to public order.

A mature democracy should therefore treat complaints about inconsistent enforcement as matters requiring evidence and examination. It should neither accept every allegation nor dismiss the very act of raising one as an indication of political bad faith.

There is a world of difference between undermining the police through false accusations and holding them accountable through legitimate scrutiny.

A free society must remain capable of recognising it.

The criminal law and the problem of bad manners

Britain possesses criminal legislation governing communications that are threatening, menacing or grossly offensive, among other categories.

The underlying concerns are not imaginary. Targeted harassment can destroy lives. Credible threats can silence people far more effectively than any government censor. Incitement to violence creates risks that the state has a legitimate responsibility to address.

A person who threatens to murder a journalist or intimidates worshippers outside a synagogue is engaging in conduct fundamentally different from that of someone who publishes an offensive political opinion.

The distinction ought to be obvious. Unfortunately, the increasing elasticity of the language surrounding harm makes it necessary to restate it.

The criminal law must be capable of identifying conduct that warrants punishment while protecting the wide range of expression that democratic life necessarily permits.

This is particularly important when legislation relies upon evaluative concepts such as gross offensiveness.

Context matters, and the Crown Prosecution Service’s guidance recognises the need to consider freedom of expression and the proportionality of criminal proceedings. Yet the presence of such safeguards does not eliminate the concern that citizens may struggle to anticipate when highly provocative language will attract police attention.

The House of Lords Library examined this problem in 2025, following reporting based upon freedom-of-information requests indicating that police forces were making more than 12,000 arrests annually under two communications statutes.

The figure requires qualification. It was assembled from responses provided by individual forces, rather than a single complete national dataset, and the offences concerned encompass conduct extending well beyond the expression of unpopular political opinions.

Nevertheless, it raises a legitimate question about the exercise of criminal powers in relation to communication.

An arrest is no trivial inconvenience.

A person may be removed from home, questioned, have electronic devices examined and experience consequences for employment or reputation, even where the investigation ultimately produces no prosecution.

The possibility of such intervention inevitably influences the willingness of some people to participate in controversial debate.

And where the boundaries of criminality are insufficiently clear to ordinary citizens, the temptation to remain silent grows stronger.

It is worth remembering that the European Court of Human Rights established in 1976 that freedom of expression protects material capable of offending, shocking or disturbing.

The principle is indispensable.

A democracy has little need of constitutional protection for opinions that enjoy universal approval. The value of freedom becomes apparent when speech is unpopular, provocative or deeply objectionable to those who possess political influence.

The point is especially relevant to criticism of religion, government, ideology and public policy.

To prohibit legitimate criticism merely because it is considered offensive would grant the objects of that criticism a degree of protection fundamentally incompatible with meaningful democratic scrutiny.

There can be no general entitlement to remain unoffended by the existence of contrary beliefs.

Otherwise, every sufficiently determined faction would acquire a veto over its opponents’ participation in public life.

And public debate would become a competition to establish who could claim the greatest injury from having been contradicted.

The quiet efficiency of administrative intimidation

The most effective restrictions upon liberty are not always the most conspicuous.

A prison sentence is unmistakable. A criminal conviction carries an obvious public meaning. But administrative scrutiny can influence behaviour without producing either.

A complaint may be lodged with a public institution. An employer may receive an inquiry. A professional body may be asked to review allegedly inappropriate expression. An individual may be informed that no offence has occurred but advised against repeating the conduct that attracted attention.

Each intervention can appear modest when examined in isolation.

The cumulative effect may be rather more substantial.

A citizen who learns that expressing an unfashionable opinion can produce administrative difficulty may gradually cease to express it. The decision requires no formal order, and the institution responsible need never acknowledge that it has discouraged legitimate speech.

The individual undertakes the work of censorship himself.

This is one of the more revealing features of contemporary efforts to manage expression. They can produce silence while preserving the outward appearance of liberty.

No book need be prohibited. No opinion need be formally declared illegal. Citizens simply become increasingly conscious of the possible consequences of saying what they think.

Political conformity then acquires the character of prudence.

The language of administration is particularly well suited to this process because it replaces moral and political judgment with the reassuring appearance of procedure.

A disputed opinion becomes an incident. An accusation becomes a concern. The concern becomes a matter for assessment, and the assessment acquires the authority of an institution whose decision may affect the life of the person under scrutiny.

At no stage is anyone required to declare himself an opponent of free expression.

Indeed, those responsible may sincerely believe they are defending it.

The problem is that freedom becomes progressively conditional upon navigating an expanding set of institutional expectations.

And because those expectations are often presented as expressions of public morality, challenging them can itself become grounds for suspicion.

The citizen who questions a definition may be accused of rejecting the value it supposedly protects. The person who objects to official language may be treated as hostile towards the community that language is intended to respect.

The argument is won by redefining disagreement as evidence of moral deficiency.

One can scarcely imagine a more efficient means of avoiding the difficulty of persuasion.

Democracy without the inconvenience of dissent

The philosophical poverty of this approach becomes apparent when one considers what democratic government is supposed to accomplish.

A democracy must provide mechanisms through which people who disagree profoundly can nevertheless live under a common legal order.

It cannot reasonably expect to eliminate the disagreements themselves.

Political liberty requires room for citizens to criticise prevailing assumptions, question official definitions, challenge religious doctrines and dispute the policies of those who govern them.

Some of these arguments will be informed and thoughtful. Others will be foolish, offensive or intellectually embarrassing.

The freedom to speak necessarily includes the freedom to be wrong.

Indeed, the possibility of error is central to the purpose of open argument. If the state were already capable of determining which ideas were true, morally acceptable and socially beneficial, public debate would become little more than an elaborate ceremony for endorsing conclusions reached elsewhere.

Such arrangements have been attempted often enough. Their achievements in the field of human freedom have been unimpressive.

There is a reason authoritarian governments have always displayed such an anxious interest in the words their citizens use.

Language allows people to describe experiences that official ideology would prefer to conceal. It permits criticism of institutions that claim moral authority and gives form to political alternatives that those institutions may regard as dangerous.

Control over language therefore offers a means of influencing the boundaries of political imagination.

A government that determines which descriptions are legitimate can make certain criticisms more difficult to articulate. A political movement that establishes its preferred terminology as an institutional requirement can place its opponents at an immediate disadvantage.

This need not arise from an elaborate conspiracy.

It may emerge from the accumulation of sincere convictions, administrative incentives and the entirely ordinary human desire to prevent one’s opponents from winning an argument.

The results may be no less troubling for having been produced without a single identifiable architect.

One of the principal virtues of constitutional restraint is that it recognises the fallibility of those who exercise power.

Political leaders are not appointed guardians of ultimate truth. They are temporary officeholders entrusted with limited authority, subject to criticism and eventual replacement.

Their convictions may be sincere. Their moral judgments may even prove correct.

Neither circumstance gives them an unlimited claim upon the speech of the people they govern.

This consideration becomes particularly important when political parties advocate restrictions they believe will protect values they hold dear.

They ought to ask whether they would welcome those same powers in the hands of a future government committed to entirely different principles.

The answer should encourage a degree of modesty.

A restriction celebrated when exercised against one’s opponents may become rather less attractive when directed against one’s friends.

The protection of liberty therefore cannot depend upon the identity of the government or the popularity of the speaker.

It must rest upon principles capable of surviving changes in both.

The society that mistakes silence for peace

There is another difficulty with attempting to regulate the expression of offensive ideas: it may leave the ideas themselves entirely untouched.

A prejudice does not vanish because its expression attracts official disapproval. A political grievance does not become less deeply held because the language used to describe it has been declared unacceptable.

People may simply become more cautious about where and how they speak.

The public square appears calmer, while resentment migrates into private conversation or communities where distrust of official institutions is already well established.

There is no guarantee that this will happen in every circumstance, but the possibility deserves serious attention. A government that mistakes the suppression of visible disagreement for the reduction of underlying hostility may discover that it has merely deprived itself of an opportunity to understand what people actually think.

And this is surely a strange ambition for a democratic state.

The proper answer to an objectionable argument is ordinarily a better argument. Where speech crosses into criminal threats, harassment or incitement, the law has a legitimate role. But the mere fact that an opinion is offensive cannot justify transferring responsibility for its rebuttal from citizens to the police.

There is something profoundly infantilising about a political culture that increasingly encourages adults to regard the experience of disagreement as an injury requiring official assistance.

It diminishes the intellectual agency of the person claiming offence while placing extraordinary power in the hands of those expected to provide protection.

The victim of an offensive remark becomes someone whose distress must be administered. The speaker becomes an individual whose expression may require supervision. The state congratulates itself upon having acted as mediator between two citizens who might otherwise have been obliged to conduct the uncomfortable business of disagreeing.

How very civilised.

And how very far removed from the intellectual confidence upon which a free society ought to depend.

None of this requires indifference towards genuine victims of intimidation.

A Jewish family receiving credible threats, a Muslim worshipper subjected to targeted harassment, a journalist threatened with violence and an individual offended by criticism of a political belief have experienced different circumstances.

The law should possess sufficient precision to recognise those differences.

When every unpleasant encounter is described through an expanding vocabulary of danger, the language necessary to identify actual threats risks losing its force.

The protection of vulnerable people demands clarity about wrongdoing, not the indefinite expansion of the concept of offence.

The limits of political authority

Britain’s recent debate over speech reveals a tension that no government can resolve through administrative guidance alone.

The state has legitimate responsibilities to prevent crime, protect individuals against intimidation and preserve public order. It also has a duty to respect the liberty of citizens whose opinions may be unpopular, offensive or hostile to the assumptions of those temporarily exercising power.

Those responsibilities will sometimes require difficult judgments.

What ought to remain beyond dispute is that the power to govern does not confer ownership of the national conversation.

Political parties may recommend language, advocate social values and criticise expressions they regard as offensive. They are entitled to persuade, campaign and argue as vigorously as their opponents.

But no party should regard electoral success as a mandate to establish an official moral vocabulary beyond the requirements of lawful and proportionate regulation.

No public institution should presume that its disapproval of an opinion makes that opinion a legitimate subject of disciplinary intervention.

And no police officer should find himself placed in the position of determining whether a citizen has thought correctly about a matter of public controversy.

The Court of Appeal’s 2021 judgment and the subsequent recognition that non-crime hate-incident recording required substantial reform demonstrate why these boundaries matter.

They also expose a broader problem. A political system may gradually acquire practices that discourage expression without ever undertaking an explicit decision to abolish the freedom concerned.

The accumulation of administrative expectations, institutional pressures and uncertain legal thresholds can alter public behaviour as effectively as more conspicuous prohibitions.

That possibility should trouble anyone who values democratic government, regardless of political allegiance.

It is easy to defend free expression when it protects a view one already holds. The difficulty begins when the same principle requires tolerance of opinions one considers deeply mistaken.

Yet that is the obligation upon which the entire arrangement depends.

We do not require freedom of speech to protect the opinions that receive polite applause at dinner parties, or the sentiments governments are delighted to hear repeated. Such expressions are generally safe enough without constitutional assistance.

Freedom becomes necessary when someone wishes to challenge the accepted wisdom of his age, question the moral authority of an institution or tell those in power that their most cherished assumptions are nonsense.

The state may find the experience unpleasant.

That is one of the principal reasons the freedom exists.

For there is a considerable difference between a government protecting citizens from unlawful harm and a government attempting to protect its preferred conception of society from the inconvenience of criticism.

The first is an essential function of legitimate authority. The second risks transforming political disagreement into a question of obedience.

Britain should be especially wary of that distinction, given the constitutional traditions upon which it continues to pride itself.

The country’s liberties were shaped through centuries of conflict over the rights of Parliament, the authority of the Crown, the freedom of religious conscience and the ability of ordinary people to challenge those who claimed the privilege of governing them.

Those struggles did not produce an unlimited right to say anything without consequence. British law has always recognised circumstances in which expression may lawfully be restricted.

What they established, through considerable difficulty, was the principle that government authority must itself be subject to scrutiny and that citizens cannot be expected to accept official judgment as the final measure of truth.

That inheritance is worth rather more than the temporary comfort of avoiding an offensive conversation.

I would sooner endure a thousand foolish opinions than entrust any government with the authority to decide which opinions may safely be heard. The former requires patience, argument and occasionally a sense of humour. The latter requires confidence in the permanent wisdom of political institutions, an article of faith for which history offers remarkably little supporting evidence.

And there is something rather pathetic about a political establishment that possesses the power to legislate, tax, prosecute and command the resources of the state, yet trembles at the possibility that a private citizen might express himself in terms it considers improper.

A confident democracy answers its critics.

An insecure one develops procedures for managing them.

The freedom to speak becomes meaningless when its exercise depends upon the prior approval of those who govern.

If Britain wishes to recover public confidence in its institutions, it must begin by remembering that the law exists to regulate conduct within legitimate boundaries, while political disagreement belongs primarily to the citizens who constitute the nation.

Governments have sufficient responsibilities without appointing themselves custodians of the public conscience.

And citizens have endured sufficient lectures about the proper language of democratic participation without being expected to surrender the freedom that makes such participation worthwhile.

The right to offend will sometimes produce unpleasant consequences. The right of the state to determine what may be said would produce consequences far more serious.

For once political authority assumes the power to prescribe acceptable thought, freedom becomes a privilege granted upon conditions, and the citizen is reduced to the rather humiliating position of asking permission to disagree.

Britain did not spend centuries limiting arbitrary power merely to entrust the policing of conscience to a more politely dressed bureaucracy.

The state should remember its place.

And the citizen should never be required to forget his.

Sources and legal references

1. Court of Appeal, 20 December 2021. R (Miller) v College of Policing, [2021] EWCA Civ 1926. The judgment addresses perception-based recording, Article 10 and the chilling effect of police scrutiny upon lawful political expression. (https://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWCA/Civ/2021/1926.html)

2. College of Policing, 31 March 2026. Major reforms for police hate incident recording. Official announcement of proposals to replace the existing non-crime hate-incident system with a more proportionate framework. (https://www.college.police.uk/article/major-reforms-police-hate-incident-recording)

3. UK Parliament, 21 September 2026. Written parliamentary answer confirming that the replacement framework is expected in early 2027 and that existing recording arrangements remain in force pending implementation. (https://questions-statements.parliament.uk/written-questions/detail/2026-09-10/28678)

4. House of Commons Home Affairs Committee, 14 April 2025. Police response to the 2024 summer disorder.Parliamentary examination of public-order policing, allegations of unequal enforcement and the distinction between peaceful protest and violent disorder. (https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm5901/cmselect/cmhaff/381/report.html)

5. House of Lords Library, 2025. Select communications offences and concerns over free speech. Examination of communications law, reported arrest figures and limitations in the available national statistics. (https://lordslibrary.parliament.uk/select-communications-offences-and-concerns-over-free-speech/)

6. Crown Prosecution Service. Communications offences. Guidance concerning potentially criminal communications, evidential thresholds, context and freedom of expression. (https://www.cps.gov.uk/legal-guidance/communications-offences)

7. European Court of Human Rights, 7 December 1976. Handyside v United Kingdom, Application No. 5493/72. Foundational authority concerning Article 10 and the protection of expression capable of causing offence or disturbance. (https://www.bailii.org/eu/cases/ECHR/1976/5.html)

8. Equality and Human Rights Commission. Article 10: Freedom of expression. Explanation of the legal rights protected under the Human Rights Act and the circumstances in which restrictions may lawfully be imposed. (https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/human-rights/human-rights-act/article-10-freedom-expression)

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By Catherine Perez-Shakdam

To the magnificent people of Iran, wherever in the world you may be, today is yours.

There are kings whose names survive because they conquered territories, others because they accumulated extraordinary wealth, and a rather depressing number because they inflicted sufficient misery upon their fellow human beings to earn themselves a permanent place in the history books.

And then there is Cyrus.

Kourosh. Cyrus the Great. Father of Persia, architect of an empire, and a man whose memory has travelled across twenty-five centuries with a dignity that time has neither diminished nor exhausted.

Today, as Iranians celebrate his birth and honour his extraordinary legacy, I want to speak of the inheritance he left you, because I fear that the world has spent so many years discussing Iran through the language of war, revolution and repression that it has almost forgotten the civilisation which gave the country its soul.

And what a magnificent civilisation it is.

In 539 BC, Cyrus entered Babylon, one of the greatest cities of the ancient world, and accomplished something that would distinguish his name across generations. He restored religious sanctuaries, respected the traditions of the peoples who came under his authority, and became remembered as a sovereign who understood that the greatness of an empire rested upon the lives and cultures of those who inhabited it.

For the Jewish people, his legacy carries a particular tenderness. Cyrus is remembered in the Hebrew Bible as the king who made possible the return of the Jewish exiles to Jerusalem and the rebuilding of their Temple. His name became part of their sacred history, an enduring reminder of the ancient friendship between Persia and the Jewish people.

Imagine that for a moment. A Persian king whose memory would be cherished by another nation thousands of years after his death. A sovereign whose greatness reached beyond the borders of his kingdom and entered the prayers, histories and collective memory of peoples far removed from his own.

I can think of few more beautiful expressions of what Persia contributed to the world.

But perhaps what moves me most about Cyrus is the extraordinary affection with which Iranians still speak his name.

Twenty-five centuries have passed. Empires have risen and collapsed. Dynasties have disappeared, borders have been redrawn, and the political certainties of one age have become the curiosities of another. Yet Kourosh remains, as familiar to the Iranian heart as the poetry of Hafez or the arrival of spring.

There is something almost miraculous about such endurance.

For Iran has known more than her fair share of historical upheaval, and yet her people have preserved a cultural inheritance of almost unimaginable richness. They have guarded their language, their poetry, their customs and their memory with the kind of devotion that cannot be commanded by decree.

One finds Persia in the verses of Ferdowsi, who devoted his genius to preserving the memory of Iran’s ancient kings and heroes. One finds her in the gardens of Shiraz, in the splendour of Isfahan, in the ruins of Persepolis, and in the quiet magnificence of Pasargadae, where Cyrus rests beneath the same Persian sky that once stretched above his empire.

And one finds her, perhaps most touchingly, in the homes of Iranians scattered across the world.

In the mother who prepares the Haft-Sin every Nowruz, however far she may be from home. In the grandfather who insists that his grandchildren learn Persian because he cannot bear the thought of them growing up without the language of their ancestors. In the family gathered around a table in London, Paris or Los Angeles, speaking of Tehran, Shiraz, Tabriz or Isfahan with an affection that distance has only made more profound.

I have always thought that exile reveals something extraordinary about the human attachment to home. A person may leave a country, cross oceans, acquire another nationality and build an entirely new life, yet still carry within them the sound of a familiar street, the smell of a childhood garden and the peculiar sweetness of words first heard upon a mother’s lips.

For so many Iranians, that is what Persia represents.

An inheritance carried in the heart.

And this, my dear friends, is why I believe the time has come for Iranians to reclaim their history.

Iran did not begin in 1979. Her greatness cannot be confined to the ambitions of any government, nor can her identity be surrendered to those who would reduce twenty-five centuries of civilisation to a single political doctrine.

Long before the Islamic Republic existed, Persia had given the world Cyrus. She had produced scholars, poets, physicians, philosophers, architects and astronomers whose achievements helped shape human understanding. Her civilisation had influenced empires, inspired artists and preserved traditions that continue to enrich humanity.

Your history belongs to the Persian, the Kurd, the Azeri, the Baluch, the Lur, the Arab and every other community whose ancestors contributed to Iran’s extraordinary story. It belongs to Iranians of every faith and to those of none. It belongs to those who remained and those who were forced to leave.

It belongs to every Iranian child who deserves to know that the country of their ancestors once stood at the centre of one of the most remarkable civilisations the world has ever known.

This is the conviction behind Reclaiming History, our initiative at The Western Front.

We want to help restore the historical inheritance of the Iranian people, to recover the stories that have been neglected or obscured, and to ensure that the next generation grows up knowing the full measure of the civilisation from which it descends.

I want Iranian children to know Cyrus as intimately as they know the names of their grandparents. I want them to understand why Pasargadae matters, why Persepolis still commands such wonder, and why the poetry of Ferdowsi remains a precious inheritance more than a thousand years after it was written.

I want them to know the extraordinary breadth of their history, from the ancient Persian empires through the centuries that followed, to the cultural achievements, constitutional aspirations and struggles of modern Iran.

Above all, I want them to grow up proud.

Proud of their language. Proud of their heritage. Proud of the immense contribution their ancestors made to the world.

For there is something deeply unjust about a generation being taught to look upon its country principally through the suffering of its present. Iran deserves to be remembered for her beauty, her learning, her generosity and the extraordinary accomplishments of her people.

And no figure embodies that inheritance more powerfully than Cyrus.

I think of his tomb at Pasargadae, standing with such quiet dignity beneath the open sky. There is no need for theatrical grandeur. The man who rests there has been remembered for more than two millennia, and the affection of generations has proved a far greater monument than any stone.

How many rulers can claim such a legacy?

How many men have managed to reach across the centuries and inspire entire generations to rediscover their own worth?

Today, I want to honour every Iranian who has kept that memory alive. Every parent who taught their children about Kourosh, every teacher who preserved the stories of ancient Persia, every family that continued to celebrate its heritage when doing so required courage.

And I want especially to honour those Iranians who dream of one day returning to a country in which they can celebrate their history freely, without fear, without apology and without having to seek anyone’s permission to love their homeland.

You are the children of Cyrus. You are the heirs of one of humanity’s greatest civilisations. Never allow anyone to make you forget it.

Your ancestors built cities that still astonish the world. They gave humanity poetry that has survived a thousand years, wisdom that crossed continents, and a history whose influence reaches far beyond the borders of modern Iran.

There is an immeasurable dignity in such an inheritance, and I hope that today, wherever you find yourselves, you will feel every ounce of it.

So, on this day dedicated to the birth and memory of Cyrus the Great, I wish my Iranian friends something far more precious than the passing satisfaction of political victories.

I wish you the joy of rediscovering your own magnificent history. I wish your children the freedom to learn it, your families the happiness of celebrating it, and your country a future worthy of the civilisation that Cyrus helped bring into being.

And when the world speaks of Iran, may it once again speak of her poets, her scholars, her ancient cities and the extraordinary people who have carried her greatness through the centuries.

Happy birthday, Kourosh.

May your name forever remind the Iranian people of the greatness they have inherited, the dignity they possess and the history that will always belong to them.

To my beloved Iranian friends, I send you my affection, my admiration and my deepest respect.

Long live Cyrus the Great.

Long live the Iranian people.

Long live Persia.

پاینده ایران

Payandeh Iran.

— The Western Front

Reclaiming History | Because a nation’s future deserves the truth of its past.

Iran’s history was stolen. Together, we shall give it back.

A book. A documentary. A tribute to Iran and its people.

For nearly half a century, the Islamic Republic has claimed ownership of Iran’s history, demanding that generations accept its version of 1979 as the glorious birth of a nation reborn.

We believe the truth is far more painful. What the mullahs celebrated as a revolution became a clerical seizure of power, aided by an alliance of ideological forces whose ambitions betrayed the hopes of countless Iranians. A country looking towards modernity, independence and the restoration of its ancient greatness was delivered into the hands of men who would seek to remake it in their own image.

And with that betrayal came another: the theft of Iran’s memory.

We are launching Reclaiming History to give that memory back to its rightful owners: the Iranian people.

Through a major book and a documentary film, we intend to investigate the events surrounding 1979, recover forgotten testimony, examine the forces that brought down the Shah, and tell the story of a nation whose extraordinary civilisation deserves to be remembered beyond the mythology imposed upon it.

We want to honour the Iran that was, understand the future that was lost, and preserve its history for the generations who will one day inherit a free Iran.

But we cannot undertake this journey alone.

We are calling upon Iranians everywhere, at home and across the diaspora, to help us bring this project to life.

Your generosity will allow us to gather historical evidence, preserve precious archives, record the memories of those who witnessed these events and transform our research into a book and a film capable of reaching audiences across the world.

And because history should remember those who helped reclaim it, every founding supporter will, with their permission, be honoured by name in the foreword of our book.

Their names will stand as a lasting acknowledgement of the people whose faith, generosity and love for Iran made this undertaking possible.

Imagine, years from now, an Iranian child opening that book and discovering the story of the country their grandparents remembered, the freedoms for which generations longed, and the names of those who refused to allow that history to disappear.

That is the legacy we hope to create together.

We cannot give back the years that were taken, nor restore the lives that were lost. But we can preserve the truth, challenge the lies and ensure that the history of Iran belongs to its people rather than to those who claimed the right to speak in their name.

Let this be our gift to Iran. Let this be our promise to future generations.

Help us write the book. Help us make the documentary. Help us reclaim History.

For Iran. For Iranians. For the generations still to come.

Become a founding supporter of Reclaiming History.

Catherine Perez-Shakdam
The Western Front

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On the extraordinary industry of liberating a people while ensuring that their freedom remains indefinitely postponed.

There is something almost touching about the number of people who have discovered their life’s purpose in the suffering of the Palestinians. From the lecture theatres of Oxford to the revolutionary salons of Paris, from Tehran’s clerical establishment to the corridors of the United Nations, Palestine has become the indispensable moral accessory of our age, a cause so obligingly adaptable that almost anyone can find within it a reflection of his own prejudices, political ambitions and desire to be thought a thoroughly decent human being.

Were independence awarded according to the number of demonstrations organised in its name, Palestine would by now possess an empire extending from the Mediterranean to the outer reaches of Saturn. If sovereignty could be secured through celebrity endorsements, university encampments and the industrious waving of flags, its independence would have been proclaimed several hundred thousand placards ago, with ample time remaining for the inaugural Eurovision entry.

Yet the Palestinian people remain conspicuously short of the liberties their admirers so extravagantly promise them, while the international industry devoted to their emancipation continues to enjoy the most remarkable health.

One begins to wonder whether the prolonged existence of the problem has become rather too valuable to those who have appointed themselves its solution.

The beauty of Palestine as a political enterprise lies in its extraordinary versatility. Everybody possesses a Palestine of his own, usually bearing only a passing resemblance to the country in which actual Palestinians might wish to live.

For the Western Marxist, Palestine is the final glorious campaign against capitalism and colonialism, an interpretation requiring a considerable suspension of intellectual discipline when applied to Hamas, whose conception of revolutionary freedom contains rather fewer provisions for social liberalism than the average British university students’ union.

For the Islamist, Palestine offers the promise of religious victory and the restoration of an imagined political order in which the question of dissent may be settled without the irritating formality of an election.

For the Islamic Republic of Iran, Palestine is an inexhaustible source of revolutionary legitimacy, an ideological inheritance that can be invoked whenever Tehran requires a justification for its regional ambitions or a distraction from the rather less inspiring circumstances of life under its own government.

And for the European progressive, having exhausted the revolutionary possibilities of recycling, dismantling the patriarchy and explaining to the working classes why they ought to be ashamed of their cultural preferences, Palestine provides the intoxicating pleasure of imagining oneself on the barricades of history without having to experience anything more dangerous than an unexpectedly vigorous encounter with campus security.

It is the genius of revolution by proxy that one may enjoy the prestige of resistance while delegating its consequences to someone else.

The Palestinian civilian, meanwhile, has been assigned a part rather more demanding than those of his admirers.

He must endure the conflict, furnish the statistics, appear in the photographs and provide the suffering upon which the whole elaborate theatre of international indignation depends. His ruined neighbourhood becomes the setting for somebody else’s ideological performance, while the life he might have wished to lead receives considerably less attention than the uses to which his tragedy may be put.

One might think that a people so insistently spoken for would occasionally be permitted to speak for themselves, although the results might prove inconvenient.

They might ask for competent government, free elections, secure homes, working hospitals and the opportunity to raise children without being instructed that their generation has inherited a sacred obligation to continue the struggle of the last.

These are worthy aspirations, certainly, but they suffer from a fatal political defect.

There is very little revolutionary glamour in a functioning sewage system.

The liberation movement that misplaced the ballot box

Let us begin with Hamas, whose conception of political freedom has always displayed an admirable economy when it comes to extending that freedom to its opponents.

The Palestinians last participated in national legislative elections in 2006, an occasion apparently judged so magnificent that the political establishment has been reluctant to risk diminishing its splendour through repetition.

Following its violent takeover of Gaza in 2007, Hamas established an authoritarian system in which political opposition, independent journalism and personal autonomy faced restrictions that ought, in ordinary circumstances, to provoke considerable alarm among the international guardians of democratic virtue.

One searches, however, for the great feminist uprising against Hamas’s social conservatism, or the thunderous campus demonstrations demanding the protection of gay Palestinians, with a sense of growing disappointment.

The fashionable revolutionary has developed an astonishing capacity to avert his gaze from the abuses of those whose rhetoric he finds agreeable.

A movement that deliberately attacks civilians, represses dissent and elevates armed struggle above ordinary democratic accountability would seem an unlikely candidate for the affections of people who claim to regard human rights as universal. Yet political fashion has always proved capable of producing moral spectacles which, had they been invented by a satirist, would have been dismissed as excessively implausible.

We have watched people who cannot endure the presence of an insufficiently progressive speaker on a university campus display extraordinary indulgence towards an armed Islamist organisation whose own understanding of freedom of expression is unlikely to satisfy the requirements of the National Union of Students.

Presumably the right to dissent becomes a regrettable bourgeois affectation when exercised against the wrong sort of revolutionary.

The contradiction deserves examination because its consequences are borne by Palestinians themselves, who must live under systems their foreign admirers are rarely required to experience.

A Palestinian journalist ought to enjoy the right to investigate corruption and criticise armed factions without fearing imprisonment or intimidation. A Palestinian woman deserves personal freedoms without reference to whether her choices accord with the ideological preferences of men claiming to defend her nation. A Palestinian family should be able to demand accountability from its rulers without being accused of betraying the struggle for national liberation.

None of this diminishes the responsibility of Israeli authorities to respect Palestinian rights, protect civilians and answer for policies concerning occupation, settlements and military conduct. Such responsibilities remain real regardless of the atrocities committed by Hamas.

But criticism of Israel becomes a rather peculiar exercise in humanitarian concern when it is accompanied by a reluctance to examine the conduct of Palestinian political leaders.

A people cannot be considered sufficiently human to deserve independence yet somehow too fragile to deserve accountable government.

There is a word for the assumption that certain populations should be excused the democratic standards we demand for ourselves, although I hesitate to deploy it in polite company.

The people most likely to object are generally the ones who use it most enthusiastically against everybody else.

Tehran’s export-quality freedom

No study of the Palestinian cause as an international political commodity could be complete without acknowledging the Islamic Republic of Iran, whose solicitude for the liberties of foreign populations has developed in almost exact inverse proportion to its enthusiasm for liberty at home.

There is something exquisitely Iranian, in the peculiarly theatrical sense cultivated by the clerical establishment, about a government that claims to champion Palestinian self-determination while regarding the self-determination of Iranian women as an intolerable affront to public order.

A woman in Tehran may find that the authorities possess deeply held opinions concerning her hair, clothing and permissible forms of dissent, while those same authorities assure the international community that their foremost concern is the freedom of another people.

Perhaps liberty is an export commodity, best appreciated abroad and altogether too dangerous for domestic consumption.

One might expect a regime so passionately committed to national independence to respect the aspirations of its own citizens to choose how they are governed. Instead, it has developed a political theology in which the freedom of Palestine is elevated to a sacred international obligation while the freedom of Iranians is treated as a regrettable concession to Western decadence.

The contradiction ought to trouble those Western activists who regard Tehran as a natural ally in the struggle against oppression.

It seldom appears to detain them for long.

The Palestinian cause has served the Islamic Republic as a source of ideological legitimacy and a justification for supporting armed movements beyond its borders, allowing Tehran to present its regional interventions as acts of revolutionary duty rather than exercises in political power.

A missile, apparently, becomes an instrument of liberation when accompanied by the correct theological explanation.

The Iranian people, who must endure the economic and political consequences of their government’s regional ambitions, are invited to take pride in this remarkable contribution to international justice, even when their own demands for elementary liberties are met with the less lyrical instruments of state coercion.

One is therefore entitled to ask a question that ought to feature rather more prominently in discussions of Tehran’s commitment to Palestine.

Would a peaceful, democratic and genuinely independent Palestinian state be nearly as useful to the Islamic Republic as a Palestinian cause perpetually available for revolutionary mobilisation?

A settlement offering Palestinians secure borders, accountable institutions and the prospect of peaceful relations with their neighbours would represent a tremendous achievement for the people concerned. It might prove rather less convenient for a government whose claims to regional importance rely so heavily upon confrontation with Israel and the United States.

The Iranian establishment has demonstrated considerable skill in converting another people’s national aspirations into an instrument of its own strategic policy, while much of the Western activist class remains so preoccupied with denouncing imperialism that it has neglected to notice the geopolitical ambitions of the clerics enthusiastically applauding its slogans.

There is something rather magnificent about condemning the interference of Western powers in Middle Eastern affairs while treating Iranian interference as an expression of indigenous solidarity.

Consistency, it seems, is a principle that must occasionally be sacrificed in the interests of ideological convenience.

Revolution, now available with student discount

Then there is the Western campus revolutionary, that extraordinary creature who has managed to acquire absolute certainty about the future of the Middle East while remaining remarkably uncertain about the location of its principal countries.

Equipped with a keffiyeh, a smartphone and several infographics whose relationship to historical scholarship is best left unexplored, our young tribune approaches international politics with the serene confidence of a person for whom an argument becomes incontestable once it has acquired sufficient likes.

The history of Ottoman rule, British administration, Arab nationalism, Palestinian factional politics, regional wars and competing claims to sovereignty may all be safely compressed into a slogan, preferably one that rhymes and can be shouted repeatedly without requiring its author to explain what its implementation might entail.

This economy of thought has obvious attractions.

The problem with history is that it contains complications, and complications have an unfortunate habit of making absolute moral certainty look rather silly.

Should anyone enquire what political system is expected to emerge from the proposed revolution, whether Hamas would permit competitive elections, or what safeguards would protect dissenters and minorities, the questioner risks being accused of attempting to distract attention from Palestinian suffering.

It is one of the great achievements of contemporary ideological culture that an enquiry into the practical meaning of freedom can itself be regarded as an offence against freedom.

The undergraduate revolutionary is, of course, entitled to his opinions. One merely wishes he would occasionally display a comparable interest in the consequences of implementing them.

It is easy enough to demand the abolition of an existing political order when someone else will be responsible for surviving the transition.

There is considerably less romance in designing the institutions that must follow, ensuring that political opponents can compete without fear and preventing the victorious revolutionaries from appointing themselves permanent custodians of the national will.

Revolutions are splendid subjects for posters. Constitutions are harder to chant.

One might also hope that the international champions of Palestine would cultivate a little more curiosity about what Palestinians themselves believe, particularly those who challenge Hamas, criticise the Palestinian Authority or object to the appropriation of their national cause by foreign governments.

Such voices occasionally complicate the preferred narrative, which may explain why they receive less attention than their suffering deserves.

There are certainly principled advocates of Palestinian rights who reject terrorism, defend democratic accountability and recognise the rights of both Palestinians and Israelis. Their work deserves respect, especially when it demands intellectual consistency from their own political allies.

They are ill served by the professional exhibitionists who have converted a legitimate national struggle into an occasion for displaying personal righteousness.

One suspects that the latter are less interested in the creation of a Palestinian democracy than in the maintenance of a political theatre in which their own moral importance remains secure.

After all, what becomes of the heroic revolutionary once the people he claims to represent acquire the freedom to disagree with him?

The diplomatic priesthood of perpetual concern

Meanwhile, the international community performs its familiar ceremonies with the solemnity of a religious order whose sacred duty consists of ensuring that every catastrophe receives the appropriate adjective.

Governments express concern, international organisations urge restraint, ministers call for dialogue and distinguished officials assemble to announce that the situation is unacceptable, usually before returning to their offices to prepare another announcement when the situation continues to be accepted.

Should matters deteriorate, concern may be upgraded to grave concern, a diplomatic condition whose practical effects have remained one of the great unsolved mysteries of modern international relations.

In truly desperate circumstances, there is always the possibility of a strongly worded statement, the political equivalent of threatening a house fire with an exceptionally stern glance.

To suggest that humanitarian agencies achieve nothing would be both unfair and absurd. Their personnel often work under dangerous conditions, providing food, medical treatment and shelter to civilians whose suffering is very real, and their efforts deserve recognition.

But the diplomatic performance surrounding the conflict has acquired a dispiriting predictability, as though the repeated declaration of good intentions were itself an adequate substitute for the difficult business of achieving political results.

The production of resolutions, conferences and communiqués can create an appearance of activity while leaving the institutions necessary for a durable settlement conspicuously underdeveloped.

A Palestinian family searching for safety has little use for another assembly rediscovering that children ought not to be killed, just as an Israeli family grieving victims of terrorism gains precious little comfort from intellectuals explaining why deliberate attacks upon civilians should be understood through the more flattering vocabulary of resistance.

The moral seriousness required by such suffering demands an examination of conduct rather than a competition over the ideological credentials of perpetrators.

Instead, we are repeatedly treated to the spectacle of people whose principles appear to change according to the identity of the victim or the political affiliation of the assailant.

Some can identify terrorism instantly when its victims are Palestinian, yet become astonishingly philosophical when the victims are Israeli. Others display boundless sympathy for Israeli security concerns while finding Palestinian civilian suffering an unfortunate administrative inconvenience.

Both approaches demand that moral judgement submit to tribal loyalty.

It is a dismal achievement for an age that congratulates itself so tirelessly upon its devotion to universal rights.

A cause too valuable to resolve

There is a cruel political economy at work in the perpetuation of conflict, because prolonged suffering can furnish legitimacy, visibility and institutional purpose to actors whose interests do not necessarily coincide with those of the population they claim to defend.

Hamas has drawn political authority from the language of resistance, while the Iranian regime has incorporated the Palestinian cause into its regional strategy and revolutionary identity.

Certain political figures elsewhere have discovered that outrage over Palestine provides an excellent means of rallying supporters, embarrassing opponents and avoiding examination of failures closer to home.

Western activists can acquire prominence through a cause whose emotional force is undeniable, while institutions organised around responding to the crisis may find themselves perpetually occupied with managing its consequences.

These actors differ considerably in power, responsibility and conduct, and the work of humanitarian organisations must not be confused with the ambitions of armed movements or cynical politicians.

Yet the overlapping incentives deserve scrutiny, because the interests created by a prolonged conflict are not always aligned with the interests of ending it.

The most disturbing feature of the spectacle is the extent to which Palestinian suffering becomes useful as political evidence.

A devastated neighbourhood provides a compelling image; a grieving mother supplies an irresistible moral appeal; a hungry child becomes the centre of an international campaign.

There is a profound obligation to document these experiences and to demand accountability for the actions that caused them.

But the obligation to bear witness can be corrupted when suffering is valued primarily for its capacity to vindicate a political argument, while the practical conditions necessary to prevent its recurrence are treated as a rather tedious secondary concern.

The child becomes a symbol, the mother becomes a quotation and the destroyed home becomes an accusation, all circulating through political discourse long after the individuals concerned have disappeared from the attention of those who found their misfortune so useful.

It is possible to sympathise with a people while treating them as instruments of one’s own ideological ambitions.

Indeed, a considerable portion of the modern political industry appears to depend upon precisely that arrangement.

One wonders how many of Palestine’s most theatrical international champions would greet the establishment of a peaceful, accountable and prosperous Palestinian state with uncomplicated enthusiasm.

Imagine the dreadful anticlimax of a country in which politics concerned taxation, municipal planning, school examinations, agricultural exports and the perpetual inadequacy of public transport.

Imagine Palestinian journalists investigating their own ministers, opposition parties campaigning without intimidation, women exercising personal freedoms, and children contemplating futures that had very little to do with the unfinished grievances of their grandparents.

There would be no shortage of political disagreements, and doubtless a flourishing industry of complaints about the competence of government.

It would be glorious.

Yet such a future would rob the professional revolutionary of something he has come to cherish: the opportunity to imagine himself indispensable to another people’s emancipation.

Peace has always been a singularly inconvenient development for those who have built their reputations upon the perpetuation of war.

The scandal of an ordinary life

Perhaps the truly subversive proposition would be to permit Palestinians the same unromantic aspirations we take for granted elsewhere, without demanding that every aspect of their political existence serve the ideological requirements of Tehran, the revolutionary fantasies of foreign admirers or the interests of rulers whose accountability remains decidedly theoretical.

A Palestinian should be able to vote out a government, criticise a minister, raise a family, open a business, write an article hostile to the authorities and enjoy the ordinary pleasures of living in a society where political disagreement does not threaten one’s livelihood or survival.

Such aspirations also require security, freedom from violence, respect for civilian life and a political settlement that takes Palestinian national rights seriously, while recognising that Israelis possess equally legitimate expectations of safety and self-determination.

These are difficult objectives, burdened by history, competing claims and the consequences of generations of bloodshed.

Their difficulty ought to encourage seriousness rather than provide an excuse for theatrical certainty.

But the modern politics of Palestine has become crowded with people who appear more enamoured of the grandeur of liberation than interested in the modest necessities of liberty.

The distinction would be less troubling were its consequences confined to those who enjoy discussing revolution from the comfort of a European café.

Unfortunately, the people whose lives are most intimately affected have rather less freedom to treat the matter as an intellectual performance.

They must endure the consequences of decisions made by governments, armed organisations and foreign patrons who may have very different ideas about what their future should contain.

And so we arrive at the most uncomfortable question of all.

Who, among Palestine’s innumerable self-appointed champions, is genuinely prepared for the possibility that the Palestinians might one day cease to require their services?

For the successful liberation of a people should eventually deprive its liberators of their claim to speak on that people’s behalf, and this is a prospect that political movements organised around permanent struggle have seldom greeted with particular enthusiasm.

The achievement of ordinary freedom would mean that Palestinians could define their interests without seeking the approval of foreign ideologues, dismiss leaders who fail them and make political choices unconstrained by the demands of an international audience hungry for another demonstration of revolutionary purity.

Some would choose policies their Western admirers disliked. Others might reject the priorities of Tehran, criticise Hamas or demand compromises that offend those who prefer their revolutions morally immaculate and indefinitely unfinished.

That would be their right.

Indeed, it would be rather compelling evidence that liberation had finally acquired some practical meaning.

The Palestinian people have suffered enough from war, political failure, authoritarian rule and the competing ambitions of those who regard their homeland as a stage upon which history must be performed.

Their future deserves to be something more substantial than an inexhaustible source of political slogans, diplomatic ceremonies and opportunities for moral self-congratulation.

The great scandal of Palestine is that so many people have acquired a purpose, a reputation or a political advantage from its struggle that one begins to wonder how many would welcome the day when Palestinians no longer needed them.

And should that day arrive, one hopes the Palestinians will be far too busy enjoying the tedious magnificence of an ordinary life to attend the inevitable international conference convened to lament the end of a perfectly good revolution.

By Catherine Perez-Shakdam

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22 October 2026 | France | Security Assessment Ahead of 24 October

France is preparing for another weekend of violence, and this time the government has summoned military reinforcements. Soldiers are being assigned to protect sensitive sites, police deployments have been reinforced, and the authorities are hurriedly revising a security strategy that proved painfully inadequate only days ago.

There is something profoundly unsettling about the spectacle of a government having to summon additional forces to protect its institutions while ordinary citizens are left wondering whether anyone will be available to protect them.

The danger this Saturday, 24 October, lies in the possibility that organised groups will once again exploit the limits of the state’s resources, drawing security personnel into simultaneous confrontations while businesses, residential communities and less conspicuous locations face increased exposure to criminal violence.

This is not a prediction that particular neighbourhoods will be attacked. The public record does not establish that residential districts have been stripped of police protection, and the revised deployment may improve the authorities’ ability to respond. But the vulnerability exposed last weekend is sufficiently serious to warrant an immediate warning.

On 17 October, France witnessed the consequences of organised violent activity operating within a much larger movement of legitimate protest. Public buildings were attacked, businesses looted, police officers assaulted and entire commercial districts disrupted. The state struggled to contain incidents occurring across several locations, while the political establishment spent much of the aftermath arguing over who should shoulder the blame.

The government has since acknowledged that some groups deliberately sought to disperse security resources through planned movements.

That admission deserves rather more attention than it has received.

According to confidential intelligence examined and reported by the author, preparations for the first disturbances began well before demonstrators assembled. Groups allegedly spent considerable time organising participants, preparing for confrontation and identifying prospective targets. The intelligence has been assessed by the author, but its underlying material cannot be published without compromising confidential sources. Its full scope and reliability consequently cannot be independently examined by readers.

The information nevertheless raises questions that demand investigation, particularly when considered alongside what French ministers have already acknowledged publicly.

The central concern is that violence may be employed to exhaust the state: to occupy its police, consume its resources, interrupt commerce and gradually persuade ordinary citizens that their government can no longer guarantee the conditions necessary for daily life.

There are historical precedents for the consequences of such sustained pressure. Iran in 1979 and Egypt in 2011 offer two particularly sobering examples, although neither should be mistaken for a prediction of France’s political future.

The warning is urgent because the next mobilisation is only days away.

The violence had a method

France has a venerable tradition of public protest. It has also produced enough revolutions, barricades and constitutional upheavals to furnish several countries with their entire political histories.

There is nothing especially remarkable about French citizens taking to the streets to express their dissatisfaction with government.

What occurred on 17 October, however, demands a more exacting examination than another meditation upon the national temperament.

Approximately 550,000 people participated in demonstrations across France, according to the Interior Ministry. Organisers estimated considerably more. Many were protesting deteriorating educational conditions, the cost of living, public services and the government’s political direction.

The overwhelming majority had no evident intention of burning municipal buildings or helping themselves to the contents of luxury boutiques.

Yet alongside those demonstrators operated groups prepared for confrontation.

In Limoges, the historic town hall was devastated by fire. In Marseille, rioters entered the municipal building. In Lyon, the tourist office was attacked. Across Paris and other cities, commercial premises suffered damage and looting while police were drawn into repeated clashes.

These incidents differed in character and cannot automatically be attributed to the same organisation. Some involved attacks upon public authority; others appeared principally criminal and acquisitive. What united them was the pressure they placed upon institutions already struggling to manage an unexpectedly large mobilisation.

The scale of the demonstrations had been badly underestimated. According to reporting by Le Monde, France’s territorial intelligence services had warned of a substantial risk of violence and property damage, yet the operational arrangements proved unequal to the combination of large crowds and dispersed disturbances.

By 20 October, Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez was acknowledging before the National Assembly that violent groups had sought to disperse police resources through planned and strategic movements. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu alleged that an insurrectionary pattern had been organised in certain locations by elements of the radical left.

Such statements mark a significant development in the government’s understanding of the unrest.

A crowd can become violent spontaneously. Individuals may lose control, confront police or commit acts of vandalism without instruction. But groups that prepare their movements and deliberately attempt to stretch security resources present a different challenge.

Their behaviour suggests an appreciation of the limitations under which police commanders operate.

It also raises the question of preparation.

The confidential intelligence informing this report indicates that at least some participants were engaged in organisation before the first demonstrations, including the identification of potential targets. This allegation cannot presently be supported with publishable details concerning named organisers, specific premises or the extent of any wider command structure.

Nevertheless, the publicly acknowledged planning of violent movements provides an independent basis for examining whether particular attacks were anticipated rather than improvised.

Did groups share information before the demonstrations? Were public buildings selected for their symbolic significance? Did some incidents develop in circumstances deliberately intended to draw police away from other locations?

These questions require evidence, including authenticated communications, financial and logistical relationships, and the investigation of identifiable suspects.

The possibility of coordinated action should not be confused with proof of a single national command. Equally, the absence of one identifiable headquarters does not mean that the violence was spontaneous.

Several groups can pursue compatible objectives, imitate methods and exploit one another’s activities without taking orders from the same individual.

That possibility is particularly relevant to the relationship between political violence and looting.

A militant group may seek confrontation with the police while criminal opportunists take advantage of the resulting disorder. The latter need not share the former’s ideology to profit from its activities.

For a shopkeeper standing amid the wreckage of a business, however, the distinction offers precious little consolation.

How to exhaust a state

The problem confronting France is rather more serious than the number of windows shattered or vehicles burned.

It concerns the ability of organised groups to place simultaneous demands upon institutions whose resources, however formidable, remain finite.

A police officer engaged in a confrontation cannot answer an emergency call elsewhere. A unit protecting a government building cannot simultaneously secure a distant commercial district. Firefighters responding to an arson attack may be unavailable for another incident developing across the city.

These are elementary constraints, but they become strategically significant when disorder occurs in several locations at once.

The pressure is cumulative.

Security personnel are deployed, redeployed and held in reserve. Businesses close as a precaution. Transport routes become difficult to maintain. Emergency services face competing demands while officials attempt to establish where the greatest danger lies.

If the incidents are deliberately coordinated to exploit these limitations, the objective may extend beyond the immediate confrontation.

The state can be compelled to devote increasing amounts of money, personnel and administrative attention simply to preserving the conditions of ordinary life.

Consider what happened last weekend.

The government had prepared for demonstrations on a scale substantially smaller than the one that materialised. Its deployment was subsequently criticised as too static, leaving officers struggling to respond to violent groups moving between locations.

Businesses suffered extensive damage while the police were occupied elsewhere.

By the following week, the authorities were announcing reinforcements, revised deployments and an expanded role for Operation Sentinelle.

The response is understandable, and may prove effective. Yet it also illustrates the considerable demands that sustained violence can place upon a government.

Each additional security commitment must be accommodated within a larger system that still has to perform its ordinary duties.

The danger arises when a succession of disturbances makes emergency deployment habitual, obliging the authorities to devote ever greater resources to containing violence whose organisers may have incurred only a fraction of those costs.

The economic consequences do not disappear when the streets are cleared.

Commercial operators must repair damaged premises, replace stock and negotiate insurance claims. Employees may find themselves unable to work. Suppliers lose business, customers alter their habits, and the wider neighbourhood begins to acquire a reputation for insecurity.

There are costs which can be calculated to the nearest euro and others which resist the accountant’s attentions.

A shattered window can be replaced. Public confidence is rather less obliging.

Once citizens begin to doubt whether the police will arrive when needed, the consequences extend beyond the particular incident that first gave rise to that doubt.

This is why the state’s capacity to respond matters so profoundly. Authority depends upon more than institutions possessing legal powers. It depends upon the reasonable expectation that those powers can be exercised when required.

A government may retain every constitutional prerogative while finding the practical exercise of its responsibilities increasingly difficult.

And history shows where such deterioration can lead.

The warning from Tehran, 1979

I have spent enough time examining the political machinery of the Islamic Republic to appreciate how poorly the Iranian Revolution is sometimes understood in the West.

It is frequently presented as an almost inevitable religious uprising, with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini emerging as the natural representative of a people united in their desire for an Islamic state.

The reality was considerably more complicated.

By the closing months of 1978, the Shah confronted an opposition encompassing religious movements, leftist organisations, liberals, students, nationalists and many others whose political aspirations were fundamentally incompatible.

What united them was their determination to end the monarchy.

Strikes disrupted the economy. Demonstrations multiplied. Oil production suffered severe interruptions, while political confrontation progressively weakened the government’s authority.

The security services faced mounting pressure, and the regime struggled to determine when to negotiate, when to concede and when to employ force.

The revolutionary movement possessed several centres of organisation. Khomeini and his supporters nevertheless succeeded in building the networks and political authority necessary to exploit the monarchy’s deterioration.

By February 1979, the government had lost the ability to sustain the existing order. The armed forces’ declaration of neutrality removed what remained of the monarchy’s effective protection.

The consequences are now painfully familiar.

The revolution had drawn upon a multitude of grievances and political traditions. The state that emerged from its aftermath would be dominated by a faction whose ambitions many of the original demonstrators neither shared nor properly anticipated.

Iran’s collapse cannot be reduced to the deliberate exhaustion of its security forces. The monarchy’s repression, political isolation, loss of legitimacy and divisions within the ruling establishment all contributed to its downfall.

Nevertheless, the cumulative effect of strikes, repeated mobilisation and the deterioration of administrative capacity was central to the crisis.

As governing became progressively more difficult, organised political actors acquired opportunities that had previously been unavailable to them.

The lesson for France lies in the relationship between sustained disruption and the weakening of public authority.

A movement’s initial grievances tell us surprisingly little about which actors may ultimately benefit from the disorder that accompanies it.

The citizens who begin a protest need not be the people who determine its political consequences.

And those most capable of exploiting a weakened state may have entirely different ambitions from the crowds that first assembled in its streets.

Cairo, 2011: when the police vanished

Egypt offers an even more immediate warning concerning civilian security.

During the uprising against Hosni Mubarak in January 2011, confrontations between protesters and security forces intensified until, on 28 January, the police effectively disappeared from many streets.

What followed was an experience ordinary Egyptians would remember long after the government had fallen.

Police stations were attacked. Detention facilities were breached. Reports of looting and criminal violence spread through Cairo and other cities.

Families found themselves wondering whether anyone would answer if their homes were attacked.

Residents began organising neighbourhood patrols. Makeshift checkpoints appeared outside apartment blocks and at street entrances. Men armed themselves with whatever was available and stood watch through the night.

The sight of citizens assuming duties normally performed by the police offered a particularly stark illustration of the state’s collapse.

The circumstances surrounding that security vacuum remain contested. Allegations circulated that elements associated with the regime had encouraged disorder, while other incidents appear to have involved opportunistic criminals taking advantage of the absence of law enforcement.

The motives were not uniform.

The effect upon ordinary people was unmistakable.

Once reliable policing disappeared, communities altered their behaviour almost immediately.

Egypt in 2011 was an authoritarian state experiencing a revolutionary crisis. France today possesses different institutions, legal safeguards and security capabilities. Its police have not withdrawn from ordinary neighbourhoods on anything resembling the Egyptian scale.

The comparison is therefore concerned with a specific vulnerability: what happens when citizens lose confidence in the availability of protection.

The answer is that uncertainty itself begins to shape public behaviour.

Businesses close earlier. Families reconsider their movements. Residents rely upon rumours and informal information networks. The expectation of disorder can become damaging even in places where no attack ultimately occurs.

That is precisely why the French government’s decision to concentrate additional resources upon sensitive sites must be accompanied by a credible plan for the protection of civilian communities.

It is perfectly possible for a capital city to look reassuringly well guarded on television while residents elsewhere remain uncertain about the resources available to them.

An imposing military presence outside a government building may demonstrate the state’s determination to defend its institutions. It tells us comparatively little about response times in a residential district several miles away.

The distinction deserves scrutiny.

Who is protecting the homes?

The decision to reinforce Operation Sentinelle forms part of the government’s attempt to correct the failures exposed on 17 October.

Military personnel are expected principally to undertake static protection duties, freeing police and gendarmes to respond to public-order incidents.

That may substantially improve operational flexibility.

But the authorities have an obligation to explain how ordinary policing, emergency response and civilian protection will be maintained should multiple disturbances develop simultaneously.

The question is especially pressing for areas outside the principal demonstrations.

Residential neighbourhoods, smaller commercial centres and logistics facilities may have different security requirements from the institutions around which the most visible protective deployments are arranged.

Their exposure depends upon local conditions, the nature of any specific threats and the resources available to respond.

At present, the public evidence does not demonstrate that these areas have been abandoned or that residential protection has been reduced to unacceptable levels.

There is likewise no established nationwide campaign against private homes.

Those qualifications matter because an assessment intended to protect the public must not become an additional source of unnecessary alarm.

Yet the absence of evidence for a systematic residential campaign should not encourage complacency about the consequences of dispersed violence.

Last weekend showed how rapidly pressure upon police resources can coincide with criminal attacks against commercial premises.

A similar pattern on Saturday could create renewed difficulties for businesses and emergency services, particularly if serious incidents occur at the same time in different locations.

The confidential intelligence concerning advance planning and prospective targets deserves further investigation in this context. Without publishable details, however, it cannot responsibly be used to identify particular residential districts, warehouses or individual properties as imminent targets.

For the public, the appropriate response is sensible preparation.

Residents should follow official local security notices and report specific, credible threats. Businesses should ensure ordinary access controls and fire precautions are functioning, establish procedures for temporary closure and make certain that employees are never expected to confront violent offenders in defence of merchandise.

Unverified reports of target lists or premises being marked for attack should be referred to the authorities where there is specific evidence, rather than circulated as established fact.

The protection of life must remain paramount.

No shop assistant should be expected to risk serious injury over a stolen handbag, however splendidly expensive the handbag may have been.

It remains the responsibility of the state to protect its citizens.

What did the authorities know?

The French government’s difficulties began before the first barricade appeared.

According to contemporary reporting, territorial intelligence had warned of the possibility of serious violence and property damage ahead of the demonstrations.

The estimated size of the mobilisation nevertheless fell substantially short of the numbers that appeared on 17 October.

The consequences were compounded by a deployment subsequently acknowledged to have lacked sufficient mobility.

These failures demand an explanation.

Were the intelligence warnings adequately communicated? Did decision-makers underestimate the likelihood of organised confrontation? Were resources allocated according to assumptions that had already become doubtful? And why did the government find itself announcing substantial changes to its security arrangements only after extensive destruction had occurred?

There is an important distinction between an authority that proves unable to manage a threat and one that knowingly declines to address it.

The available public record demonstrates shortcomings in forecasting and preparation. It does not establish deliberate indifference.

That question requires examination of decisions, communications and the weight accorded to intelligence warnings before the demonstrations began.

Yet the distinction does little to diminish the seriousness of the result.

The authorities had received warnings of disorder, and their response proved inadequate in important respects.

This weekend, they will no longer possess the excuse of unfamiliarity.

They now know that organised violent groups operated within the previous mobilisation. They know that some employed planned tactics intended to disperse the police. They know that businesses and public institutions suffered substantial damage.

The revised deployment must be judged against that knowledge.

If similar weaknesses appear again, the government will face questions considerably more difficult to answer than those arising from the first weekend.

The political contest over responsibility

The struggle over the meaning of the violence has already begun.

The government has accused elements of the radical left of encouraging confrontation and contributing to an atmosphere in which organised violence could develop.

La France Insoumise has challenged the police response, while Jean-Luc Mélenchon has argued that the authorities’ tactics aggravated the disorder.

Such arguments are hardly surprising in a country whose political class possesses an almost inexhaustible talent for quarrelling.

Nevertheless, they raise serious questions about responsibility.

Mélenchon has explicitly rejected looting and destruction by those claiming to share his political objectives. Allegations of excessive police force also warrant proper investigation; France’s police inspectorate opened six investigations into incidents arising from the disturbances.

Neither fact should be omitted.

But neither should political controversy obscure the organisation of the violence itself.

A government may mishandle a demonstration without bearing responsibility for every criminal act committed during it. Equally, a violent offender cannot excuse arson or assault by invoking legitimate dissatisfaction with public policy.

The danger is that the argument over policing becomes so consuming that the individuals responsible for planning and carrying out attacks receive comparatively little attention.

That would be an extraordinary inversion of investigative priorities.

The state must account for its own failures while identifying those responsible for criminal violence.

It should be perfectly possible to do both.

A further complication comes from abroad.

Russia-linked information networks have reportedly exploited the French unrest to amplify divisive narratives. Such activity demonstrates the interest hostile actors may take in a period of domestic instability.

It does not establish that Russia organised the demonstrations.

Nor is there public evidence sufficient to attribute the violence to operational direction by Iran or another foreign government.

The distinction deserves care, especially when the geopolitical consequences of the unrest are so substantial.

Hostile states can exploit disorder without having created it. Authentic images of violence may be repackaged, misleading claims introduced and political divisions intensified through information operations.

The resulting uncertainty can serve strategic interests even where no direct relationship exists between the foreign operator and those responsible for the original criminal acts.

Investigators must therefore examine possible foreign relationships through evidence of actual assistance, communications, financing or direction.

Ideological affinity and political advantage cannot substitute for proof.

Saturday’s test

The government has now reinforced its security posture, revised its public-order arrangements and introduced restrictions upon gatherings assessed to present unacceptable risks.

These measures may prove effective.

They may also be tested if violent groups again attempt to generate incidents across several locations.

The outcome cannot be known in advance, and the intelligence available for public examination does not justify predictions of attacks upon particular homes, businesses or districts.

What it does justify is heightened attention to the possibility of organised violence and the demands that several concurrent incidents could impose upon emergency services.

Saturday’s success must therefore be measured against more than the number of arrests or the protection of prominent public buildings.

The authorities must demonstrate that legitimate demonstrations can proceed safely, that violent offenders are prevented from exploiting them and that the surrounding civilian population remains adequately protected.

The government also needs to communicate clearly with the public.

Rumours flourish where official information is absent, especially after a weekend during which the authorities appeared to lose control of events in several locations.

Residents and businesses need accurate local guidance, not dramatic declarations about nationwide danger unsupported by specific evidence.

And the police require the resources and operational flexibility necessary to respond to genuine emergencies.

That is the practical challenge confronting France.

It will not be resolved by political accusations or the theatrical display of military strength.

A Republic under pressure

History rarely repeats itself with sufficient courtesy to preserve the costumes.

France is not Iran in 1979, and its streets are not Cairo in January 2011. The political circumstances differ too profoundly for either comparison to serve as a prediction of revolutionary collapse.

But the experience of both countries illuminates a vulnerability that modern European governments would be unwise to dismiss.

When disorder becomes sustained, governing grows more difficult. When security resources are repeatedly diverted, other responsibilities become harder to discharge. When ordinary people begin to doubt whether the authorities can protect them, political authority suffers damage that may outlast the immediate crisis.

The French state remains powerful. Its institutions are functioning, its security services are operational and its government has the capacity to respond.

Yet last weekend exposed serious shortcomings, and Saturday will test whether those lessons have been understood.

The intelligence described by the author raises concerns about advance preparation, organised participants and prospective target selection. The public record independently confirms planned violent tactics directed at dispersing police resources.

The outstanding investigative questions concern the extent of the organisation, the identities and relationships of those responsible, and whether the violence was intended to achieve broader political or strategic effects.

Those questions must be pursued without allowing speculation to masquerade as established intelligence.

Equally, they must not be ignored because their implications are uncomfortable.

The government has already acknowledged that its previous response was inadequate. It has called for reinforcements and revised its security arrangements.

Now it must demonstrate that the defence of the Republic includes the protection of the people who live within it.

For organised chaos becomes especially dangerous when the state is compelled to spend an ever greater share of its strength merely preserving the conditions of ordinary life.

A country cannot indefinitely treat extensive destruction, disrupted commerce and extraordinary deployments as the normal accompaniment to political disagreement.

Nor should citizens be expected to regard uncertainty about their safety as an acceptable price of maintaining public order elsewhere.

France has several days to prepare for another difficult weekend.

Its leaders know what happened on 17 October. They know that some of the violence was planned. They know that the previous deployment failed to protect numerous premises from criminal damage.

The warning has been delivered.

What matters now is whether the authorities have understood it.

And whether, when Saturday arrives, the Republic can defend its institutions without leaving its citizens to wonder who is defending them.

Principal references

French National Assembly, 20 October 2026. Parliamentary statements concerning organised violence and the revised security response.
https://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/dyn/17/comptes-rendus/seance/session-ordinaire-de-2026-2027/premiere-seance-du-mardi-20-octobre-2026

Le Monde, 20 October 2026. Intelligence forecasting failures, advance warnings and public-order preparations.
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2026/10/20/french-protests-from-intelligence-failures-to-insufficient-police-presence-overview-of-a-security-disaster_6760327_7.html

French Ministry of the Economy, 20 October 2026. Support measures for businesses affected by the disturbances.
https://presse.economie.gouv.fr/le-gouvernement-met-en-place-des-mesures-de-soutien-aux-commerces-touches-par-les-degradations-du-samedi-17-et-dimanche-18-octobre-2026/

Zoltan Barany, How Armies Respond to Revolutions and Why. Princeton University Press, 2016. Historical analysis of military institutions during the Iranian Revolution.
https://doi.org/10.23943/princeton/9780691157368.003.0002

The Guardian, 30 January 2011. Reporting on neighbourhood patrols and the collapse of police protection during Egypt’s uprising.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jan/30/egyptians-makeshift-militias-looters

Reuters, 22 October 2026. French government restrictions and security preparations ahead of 24 October.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/frances-macron-tightens-curbs-protests-blaming-hard-left-unrest-2026-10-22/

Euronews, 21 October 2026. Reporting on foreign information operations exploiting the unrest and the limits of public attribution.
https://www.euronews.com/2026/10/21/france-and-italy-blame-foreign-powers-for-riots-but-wheres-the-evidence

THE WESTERN FRONT

Catherine Perez-Shakdam - Strategic Intelligence | Geopolitics | National Security | Society

The Western Front | 21 October 2026

The new geography of warfare

On the morning of 12 October, supermarket managers across France arrived at work to discover that their refrigeration systems had developed a rather extraordinary ambition: instead of preserving food, they had begun cooking it.

In some installations, temperatures had climbed to 80°C. Refrigerated goods were ruined, equipment damaged, and hundreds of shops found themselves dealing with the consequences of an intrusion that had required neither a burglar nor a bomb.

Someone had interfered with the digital controls governing their refrigeration equipment.

The ingenuity of the attack lay in its modesty. There was no need to penetrate a ministry, compromise a military installation or disable the national electricity grid. An inadequately secured commercial system offered sufficient opportunity to turn an everyday convenience into an instrument of economic destruction.

On 20 October, Britain experienced a different form of vulnerability when a power failure affecting Google’s London cloud infrastructure disrupted banking applications, online services and even elements of the court system. Customers of financial institutions including Revolut, Lloyds and HSBC encountered difficulties accessing services or conducting transactions.

A day later, Orange reported a major interruption to its French mobile network, affecting calls, text messages and mobile connectivity.

The causes of these events matter enormously. The supermarket refrigeration incident was a confirmed malicious intrusion. Google attributed its disruption to a power event at a third-party facility. Orange had not established a malicious cause when it issued its statement on 21 October.

There is no public evidence that all three incidents were coordinated.

And yet, for the security analyst, they present an important common problem. Each exposed the dependence of modern society upon systems whose failure can migrate rapidly from the technical environment into the economic and social one.

A refrigeration controller becomes a threat to food supplies. A cloud outage interrupts access to money. A telecommunications failure compromises the ability of businesses and citizens to communicate.

These incidents also unfolded while France was confronting serious civil disorder and European authorities were examining evidence of hostile foreign information operations seeking to exploit the unrest.

The question is therefore more demanding than whether a single adversary orchestrated every incident.

What happens when the vulnerabilities of a digital economy coincide with political unrest, and when hostile powers possess both the means and the incentive to exploit the resulting disorder?

For Britain, that question is no longer theoretical.

I. The cold chain as a strategic vulnerability

The French supermarket attack deserves examination well beyond the commercial losses it inflicted.

Reporting established that hundreds of outlets belonging to major French retail networks, including Intermarché, Carrefour, Monoprix and Coopérative U, were affected by malicious interference with refrigeration controls.

The attackers manipulated defrosting functions and temperature settings. In some locations, the resulting damage was compounded by delays in the activation of alarms. Food was destroyed before staff could intervene.

France’s national cybersecurity agency, ANSSI, drew attention to inadequate protections surrounding connected equipment.

The immediate lesson concerns operational technology, the machinery and control systems that increasingly govern physical processes.

Much of Europe’s economic infrastructure now operates through equipment connected to networks that were originally designed for efficiency, convenience and remote maintenance. Refrigeration, warehousing, manufacturing, logistics and energy management have all benefited from these arrangements.

Their security has not always kept pace with their connectivity.

A supermarket’s payment systems may be carefully protected while its refrigeration controls remain accessible through an ageing external interface or poorly supervised maintenance arrangement.

The consequences of exploiting such weaknesses are unusually tangible.

Data stolen from a company may eventually be recovered or its exposure contained. Food destroyed by a compromised refrigeration system is simply lost. The business must absorb the cost, replace the stock and restore equipment before normal operations can resume.

The intrusion itself may be brief. Its economic effects can last considerably longer.

There is an additional consideration.

Public reporting has not established the identity of the perpetrators or demonstrated that the operation was conducted on behalf of a foreign government. Nor has an identifiable ransom demand been confirmed.

That leaves the attackers’ purpose unresolved.

They may have sought destruction for its own sake. They may have been testing a vulnerability. The incident may have involved criminal motives that have not yet become apparent.

A state-directed sabotage hypothesis is conceivable, but presently unproven.

Nevertheless, the operation demonstrates a capability that hostile actors would have reason to study: the ability to inflict physical economic damage through comparatively modest interference with civilian technology.

The significance becomes greater when such systems are deployed at scale.

A shared weakness across multiple businesses can generate a far larger impact than the compromise of one isolated installation. The French attack demonstrated how quickly an ordinary commercial vulnerability can become a sector-wide problem.

II. Economic disruption does not require an economic target

The importance of the French incident becomes clearer when placed alongside recent intrusions affecting major retailers elsewhere.

On 12 October, Ahold Delhaize, the Dutch-Belgian group operating supermarket businesses across Europe and the United States, disclosed a cybersecurity incident that subsequently proved to involve malicious activity.

The company took systems offline to contain the threat, disrupting online ordering, websites, applications and other functions across several brands.

Its physical stores continued operating. Nevertheless, recovery proved sufficiently complicated that some digital services remained unavailable more than a week later.

Britain has already witnessed the financial consequences of comparable disruptions.

In April 2025, cyberattacks against Marks & Spencer and the Co-op interfered with essential business functions and exposed customer information. The Cyber Monitoring Centre subsequently estimated the combined financial consequences at between £270 million and £440 million.

That estimate is worth considering carefully.

The attackers did not need to destroy hundreds of millions of pounds’ worth of physical infrastructure. Their intrusions caused damage through interrupted operations, remediation costs, lost business and the effort required to restore confidence.

This exposes a weakness in the way economic security is sometimes understood.

An attacker seeking to damage a country’s productive capacity has traditionally been imagined striking factories, transport hubs or energy installations. Yet an increasingly digital economy can lose substantial productive capacity while those physical assets remain standing.

The machinery may be intact, the employees available and the customers willing to purchase goods. If the systems coordinating those activities cannot function, the business may still be unable to operate effectively.

The potential strategic value is considerable.

An adversary could impose economic costs without occupying territory, confronting armed forces or necessarily revealing its involvement.

It is essential, however, to distinguish the existence of that capability from evidence that it was employed for a political purpose in any particular case.

The recent retail incidents establish vulnerability and malicious intent. They do not establish a common foreign sponsor.

III. The hidden concentration of the digital economy

The Google Cloud outage on 20 October exposed a different weakness, perhaps an even more consequential one.

A power event at a third-party facility in London’s europe-west2 region affected services used by banks, businesses and public institutions.

The initial failure was localised within infrastructure operated by a major technology provider. Its consequences were distributed across organisations that, to their customers, appeared to have little in common.

This is the problem of concentrated dependency.

Financial institutions may compete fiercely, maintain separate management structures and advertise entirely different technologies, while remaining dependent upon common suppliers for cloud infrastructure, identity services, telecommunications or payment processing.

The same concentration exists elsewhere in the economy.

A retailer may depend upon a cloud platform for stock management, a telecommunications provider for connectivity and a banking service for transactions. A logistics company may rely upon several of those same providers.

Commercial independence can therefore conceal operational interdependence.

For national security purposes, this creates the possibility of a common-mode failure: disruption at one shared point produces simultaneous consequences across otherwise separate systems.

The significance of the Google incident lies precisely here. A failure attributed to ordinary infrastructure conditions was capable of affecting essential services across institutional boundaries.

The United Kingdom has already acknowledged the danger. In July, the government brought four major technology providers within a new critical-third-party regulatory regime designed to address systemic risks to financial services.

Such oversight is overdue, but regulation alone cannot eliminate dependency.

A country may possess numerous financial institutions while relying upon a much smaller number of technology providers to keep them functioning.

That concentration generates efficiency in normal circumstances and creates a potentially disproportionate exposure during crises.

The same principle applies to telecommunications.

Orange’s disruption on 21 October affected mobile communications across France. Although emergency calls remained available, the incident demonstrated how quickly an interruption to ordinary connectivity can become a matter of public concern.

The modern citizen increasingly requires a functioning telephone to manage money, authenticate transactions, receive official information and access essential services.

The economic system has acquired a remarkable degree of technological sophistication, accompanied by dependencies that most people scarcely notice until something fails.

A hostile actor studying these arrangements would have little difficulty identifying their potential significance.

The operational question is whether governments have established effective alternatives when those shared systems become unavailable.

IV. Britain is already inside the threat environment

There is a persistent tendency in British security discussions to regard hostile-state activity as something occurring elsewhere, only occasionally intruding upon domestic affairs.

The available intelligence assessments permit no such complacency.

In June 2026, Richard Horne, Chief Executive of the National Cyber Security Centre, disclosed that his organisation had managed more than 200 incidents affecting Britain’s critical national infrastructure and its supporting ecosystem during the preceding twelve months.

Approximately 75 per cent were believed to be linked to state actors.

The figure is not a measure of all cybercrime in Britain, nor does it imply that every incident involved destructive activity. It concerns a defined set of incidents affecting sensitive infrastructure and supporting organisations.

Its significance remains considerable.

The country’s principal cybersecurity authority has publicly acknowledged that state-linked activity accounts for a substantial proportion of the serious incidents within this category.

Horne also warned of adversaries establishing access within technology underpinning critical infrastructure, potentially enabling disruption during a future confrontation.

That observation deserves attention because it shifts the intelligence problem from immediate attack detection towards the possibility of hostile access being established before any overt crisis.

An adversary may derive strategic value from possessing a capability it has not yet exercised.

For Britain, the concern extends beyond cyberspace.

On 12 October, the Prime Minister told Parliament that the activity investigated near RAF Fairford was highly likely to have been coordinated in Iran and almost certainly directed by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

On 20 October, Counter Terrorism Policing re-arrested two men on suspicion of assisting a foreign intelligence service in connection with the September incident near the airbase. Investigators described Iranian state involvement as highly likely, while continuing to examine its extent and purpose.

These are serious official assessments involving an ongoing investigation, rather than judicial findings of guilt.

A joint statement issued by the United Kingdom and numerous international partners also condemned Iranian involvement in forms of hostile activity including violent plotting, arson, sabotage and cyberattacks.

None of this connects Iran to the French refrigeration attacks or the recent banking and mobile-network outages.

It does establish that the British authorities regard hostile activity conducted through covert networks, intermediaries and cyber capabilities as an immediate national security concern.

Russia presents a separate and extensively documented challenge.

The NCSC has warned of Russian cyber operations against NATO countries and their critical infrastructure. Russia’s experience in Ukraine has also demonstrated the relationship between cyber operations, attacks upon energy systems and efforts to influence the information environment.

Britain is consequently exposed to several overlapping threats: state-directed activity, criminal cyber operations, ideologically motivated hacktivism and the possibility of attacks occurring during periods of international confrontation.

The United Kingdom is already being targeted. What remains uncertain is whether its existing safeguards could withstand sustained disruption across several essential sectors at once.

That uncertainty should be treated as a planning problem rather than a reassurance.

V. France and the political exploitation of disorder

The violent unrest across France introduces a dimension that conventional cybersecurity assessments frequently understate.

Technical disruption acquires a different significance when it occurs within a society already experiencing deep political antagonism.

France’s demonstrations have emerged amid economic hardship, rising living costs, dissatisfaction with public institutions and wider political discontent.

Some protests have escalated into serious violence, looting and attacks upon public and private property.

The government has responded with substantial security measures, including preparations to use military personnel for the protection of sensitive sites.

Against this background, European authorities have been examining foreign information operations associated with the unrest.

Reporting published on 21 October identifies Russia-linked disinformation networks exploiting the disturbances, circulating misleading material and amplifying narratives calculated to increase division.

French officials have also expressed concern about malign information activity linked to other foreign states.

There is, however, an important evidential boundary.

The European Commission has not established that foreign governments organised the French protests. President Macron has acknowledged foreign manipulation of information following the unrest while stating that evidence of foreign interference in the events themselves has not been demonstrated.

This distinction must be preserved.

It also reveals something important about the contemporary threat.

An adversary does not necessarily need to organise civil unrest in order to benefit from it.

A government confronting demonstrations, economic pressure and declining public confidence already faces competing demands upon its attention and resources.

A hostile influence operation can exploit those circumstances by magnifying legitimate grievances, circulating false claims, promoting distrust and encouraging the perception that public institutions have lost control.

The operation may be successful even if its organisers had no involvement in the original demonstrations.

This is particularly relevant when technical disruption enters the picture.

An interruption to financial services can generate anxiety about access to money. A supermarket attack can create fears concerning food availability. A communications outage can prevent people from obtaining reliable information.

In an atmosphere of political tension, these concerns may become entangled with existing grievances.

Rumours can develop more rapidly than official explanations. Images of local shortages or vandalism may circulate without adequate context. False claims can be introduced into an information environment where public trust is already fragile.

It would be analytically careless to assume that such conditions automatically produce further violence. Public behaviour depends upon many factors, including the duration and severity of disruption, the availability of alternatives and the credibility of official communication.

Nevertheless, the potential for exploitation is clear.

The decisive point is that foreign manipulation, economic disruption and domestic disorder can reinforce one another without having been initiated by the same actor.

A hostile government may therefore find opportunities in circumstances it did not create.

That possibility should concern European intelligence services every bit as much as a formally coordinated operation.

VI. The architecture of cumulative coercion

The emerging threat can be understood through three mechanisms.

The first is functional disruption: the direct interruption of an essential service, whether through malicious action or technical failure.

The second is economic propagation: the movement of consequences beyond the affected system into businesses, households, supply chains and public services.

The third is political exploitation: the deliberate amplification of the resulting uncertainty or frustration by actors seeking to weaken confidence in public institutions.

These mechanisms are analytically distinct, but their consequences can overlap.

Consider an incident affecting supermarket distribution. The immediate problem may involve inventory or logistics systems. Its wider effects could include delayed deliveries, interrupted commercial activity and temporary shortages in affected locations.

In ordinary circumstances, these consequences might be managed through alternative suppliers and clear public communication.

If the same period also sees banking interruptions, unreliable communications and widespread political unrest, the environment becomes considerably more difficult.

The pressure on public institutions increases. Commercial recovery becomes more complicated. Malicious information operations acquire more material to exploit.

An adversary would not necessarily need to produce a catastrophic failure. Repeated interruptions, each limited in scale but costly to resolve, could impose a cumulative burden.

The strategic advantage would lie partly in exhausting recovery capacity.

An attack might require hours to execute while its consequences occupy an organisation for days or weeks. If interruptions recur before normal operations are restored, the accumulated costs can become more serious than those of any individual incident.

This creates a potentially attractive model of coercion: sustained pressure through relatively limited actions, with the target required to absorb recurring financial, administrative and political costs.

It would be particularly effective where systems share infrastructure, where alternatives are inadequate and where public confidence is already weakened.

There is an important caveat.

The existence of these conditions does not prove that an adversary has adopted such a strategy in the present crisis.

What it establishes is the feasibility of a broader disruptive approach, the availability of relevant capabilities and the existence of political circumstances in which their effects might be magnified.

The intelligence task is to determine whether those opportunities are being deliberately exploited.

VII. One campaign, several campaigns, or dangerous coincidence?

There are three plausible explanations for the current convergence of events.

The first is that the incidents are principally independent. Criminal intrusions, ordinary infrastructure failures and domestic unrest have occurred within the same period, creating an impression of coordination unsupported by operational evidence.

This explanation deserves serious weight. Complex economies experience technical failures regularly, and unrelated cyberattacks often occur simultaneously.

The second is opportunistic convergence.

Different actors exploit different vulnerabilities, while hostile information networks amplify the consequences of incidents they did not necessarily cause.

This interpretation is consistent with the established presence of cybercrime, the documented foreign exploitation of French unrest and the absence of evidence connecting the infrastructure incidents to one command structure.

The third is a coordinated campaign involving deliberate economic disruption and associated political manipulation.

Such a campaign is operationally plausible. Hostile states possess relevant capabilities, and European governments have documented their willingness to employ cyber operations, sabotage and covert intermediaries.

But plausibility cannot substitute for attribution.

To establish coordination, investigators would need evidence connecting the incidents through common infrastructure, shared operational methods, communications, financial arrangements, direction or intelligence indicating prior knowledge.

The same standard should apply to allegations that foreign powers directed the riots.

Evidence of amplified propaganda is not equivalent to evidence of operational control over demonstrators.

The most defensible assessment at present is that Europe faces demonstrable hostile-state pressure and a growing possibility of opportunistic exploitation across multiple sectors, while a single coordinated campaign linking the October incidents remains unproven.

This does not weaken the case for urgent preparation.

A state whose essential services are vulnerable to cascading failures has a security problem irrespective of whether the next interruption originates with a foreign intelligence service, a criminal group or a failed component.

Indeed, a capable adversary can exploit all three.

VIII. The intelligence indicators that matter

The next phase of analysis should focus upon developments that would materially alter the assessment.

Repeated attacks against essential-service operators employing common tools, infrastructure or methods would increase concern about a broader campaign.

So would evidence that malicious actors had established access to operational systems before the onset of public disorder or a major geopolitical confrontation.

Particular attention should be paid to the relationship between incidents and the information environment.

If hostile networks circulate accurate, non-public information before an attack becomes known, that could suggest prior knowledge or operational coordination.

Similarly, evidence that apparently independent campaigns share financial sponsors, organisers or communication channels would justify a higher level of concern.

The timing of incidents may provide useful context, although timing alone rarely constitutes persuasive attribution.

Investigators should also examine whether attackers deliberately interfere with recovery processes. Such behaviour could indicate an objective extending beyond immediate commercial gain.

Equally, analysts must identify evidence that weakens the coordination hypothesis: independent technical causes, unrelated methods, conventional criminal incentives and the absence of common operational links.

A credible intelligence assessment should explain what might change its conclusions.

Without that discipline, virtually any disruption can be made to fit a preferred theory.

IX. Britain’s strategic response

Britain’s immediate priority should be to reduce the opportunities available to hostile actors, regardless of whether the present incidents ultimately prove connected.

This requires a shift in how national resilience is assessed.

The government should begin with a cross-sector examination of the dependencies connecting financial services, food distribution, telecommunications, energy and cloud infrastructure.

The relevant question is whether these sectors can continue providing essential functions when common technology providers or communications networks become unavailable.

Existing contingency arrangements should be tested against simultaneous failures, including scenarios in which public disorder complicates recovery.

Food retailers and logistics operators require particular attention because their operational technology can produce physical losses when compromised. Secure remote access, effective network separation and the ability to revert to safe local operation should become central considerations.

In financial services, the emphasis should extend beyond preventing intrusions to ensuring that customers can continue conducting essential transactions during serious outages.

Telecommunications operators should similarly demonstrate the reliability of their fallback arrangements and the capacity to communicate with customers during network failures.

The National Cyber Security Centre, MI5, Counter Terrorism Policing and relevant regulators already possess substantial expertise in their respective fields.

The challenge is to ensure that their assessments capture how threats and failures move between sectors.

A cyber incident affecting a commercial supplier may have consequences for financial stability. A disruption to communications may impede public-order management. A hostile information operation may magnify the effects of an otherwise limited technical failure.

These relationships demand joint planning.

The government must also improve its capacity to communicate during emergencies.

A brief, credible explanation of what has failed, which services remain available and when further information will be provided can prevent uncertainty from becoming unnecessary alarm.

Public confidence should not be manufactured through reassurance unsupported by facts. It is preserved by competence, transparency and evidence that institutions can continue functioning under pressure.

Finally, the distinction between legitimate protest and hostile interference must remain intact.

Democratic governments have an obligation to investigate foreign manipulation and violent criminal activity without treating political dissent as evidence of subversion.

Confusing those categories would weaken public trust and hand hostile information operators an additional opportunity.

X. The strategic warning

Europe’s security establishment has spent decades refining its understanding of military deterrence, intelligence penetration and terrorist violence.

Its appreciation of economic and technological interdependence has developed more slowly.

The recent incidents suggest that this imbalance is becoming dangerous.

A criminal attack against refrigeration controls can destroy food across hundreds of supermarkets. A power failure within a cloud provider can interrupt banking and public services. A telecommunications outage can suddenly impair everyday communications across a substantial population.

Each incident may have a different cause.

Their consequences reveal common vulnerabilities.

Meanwhile, hostile states have demonstrated both their interest in Western critical infrastructure and their willingness to employ covert activity below the threshold of conventional war.

France’s unrest adds another element: the opportunity to exploit economic anxiety and political division through information manipulation.

For Britain, the warning is particularly serious because the country’s own security authorities have already documented the scale of state-linked activity directed at sensitive infrastructure.

The prospect of cumulative disruption should therefore be approached as an operational risk demanding immediate attention.

There is no need to assert that every outage is sabotage, or that every riot has been organised abroad.

The more unsettling possibility is that an adversary could achieve substantial political and economic effects by selectively exploiting a society’s existing weaknesses, including failures for which it bears no responsibility.

Modern states have made their economies extraordinarily efficient by connecting almost everything to almost everything else.

They have not always given equal consideration to what happens when those connections fail.

The resulting exposure is strategic.

A hostile power seeking to weaken Britain need not begin by attacking Parliament, a military base or a government ministry. It may find sufficient opportunity in the commercial and technological systems through which ordinary life is sustained.

The task for government is to identify those dependencies, reduce their vulnerability and ensure that essential functions can survive their interruption.

The task for intelligence is to determine whether hostile actors are exploiting them deliberately, to what extent and under whose direction.

And the task for political leadership is to understand that economic confidence, technological resilience and public order can no longer be defended in isolation.

The present evidence establishes a serious warning, although it does not yet prove a centrally directed campaign.

That warning should be sufficient.

Britain’s vulnerability will not be measured by the sophistication of the next cyberattack, but by how much of the country can be disrupted when one essential system fails, and how effectively hostile actors can exploit the consequences.

The next major confrontation may already be taking shape within those dependencies. A government that waits for an adversary to declare its intentions will have misunderstood the nature of the threat.

Source dossier

Primary sources and official assessments

1. National Cyber Security Centre, Richard Horne, RUSI Annual Security Lecture, 17 June 2026. Includes the assessment of more than 200 critical-infrastructure incidents and the approximately 75% state-linked figure. (https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/speech/richard-horne-speaking-at-the-rusi-annual-security-lecture)

2. National Cyber Security Centre, Annual Review 2025: Countering the Cyber Threat. Assesses threats from hostile states and financially motivated criminals, including attacks upon critical infrastructure and operational technology. (https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/collection/ncsc-annual-review-2025/chapter-01-cyber-threat-to-the-uk)

3. Prime Minister’s statement to the House of Commons, 12 October 2026. Contains the government’s attribution concerning RAF Fairford and its assessment of Russian hybrid activity. (https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pm-statement-to-the-house-of-commons-12-october-2026)

4. Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, Joint Statement on Iran, 12 October 2026. International condemnation of Iranian-linked violence, sabotage, cyberattacks and hostile operations. (https://www.gov.uk/government/news/joint-statement-on-iran-12-october)

5. Counter Terrorism Policing, Two Men Re-arrested in the RAF Fairford Investigation, 21 October 2026. (https://www.counterterrorism.police.uk/news/new-arrest-made-in-the-raf-fairford-investigation/)

6. Google Cloud, Incident Report: Europe-west2 Service Disruption, 20 October 2026. (https://status.cloud.google.com/incidents/Xs2XTHzAVC9YnafnPyzj)

7. Orange Group, Incident technique majeur affectant le réseau mobile d’Orange France, 21 October 2026. (https://newsroom.orange.com/incident-technique-majeur-affectant-le-reseau-mobile-dorange-france/?lang=fra)

8. European Union Agency for Cybersecurity, ENISA Threat Landscape 2026, 22 September 2026. Examines geopolitical cyber activity, critical-service exposure and shared technology dependencies. (https://www.enisa.europa.eu/publications/enisa-threat-landscape-2026)

9. Cyber Monitoring Centre, Statement on Ransomware Incidents in the Retail Sector, 20 June 2025. Financial assessment of the Marks & Spencer and Co-op incidents. (https://cybermonitoringcentre.com/2025/06/20/cyber-monitoring-centre-statement-on-ransomware-incidents-in-the-retail-sector-june-2025/)

Contemporaneous incident reporting

10. Le Monde, A Disastrous Day for French Supermarkets After Massive Cyberattack Targets Refrigeration Systems, 13 October 2026. (https://www.lemonde.fr/en/economy/article/2026/10/13/a-disastrous-day-for-french-supermarkets-after-massive-cyberattack-targets-refrigeration-systems_6758535_19.html)

11. Ahold Delhaize, Update on Status of Cybersecurity Incident, 19 October 2026. (https://newsroom.aholddelhaize.com/ahold-delhaize-update-on-status-of-cybersecurity-incident/)

12. Reuters, Europe’s Financial Regulators Query Google Over Cloud Outage That Hit Banks, 21 October 2026. (https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/europes-financial-regulators-query-google-over-cloud-outage-that-hit-banks-2026-10-21/)

13. Financial Times, EU Probes Pro-Kremlin Disinformation Around French Riots, 21 October 2026. (https://www.ft.com/content/d95609cd-1bb9-4995-937b-875277de3a42)

14. Euronews, France and Italy Blame Foreign Powers for Riots, But Where’s the Evidence?, 21 October 2026. (https://www.euronews.com/2026/10/21/france-and-italy-blame-foreign-powers-for-riots-but-wheres-the-evidence)

Intelligence assessment

Overall judgement: The combination of demonstrable critical-infrastructure vulnerabilities, established hostile-state cyber activity and foreign exploitation of political unrest creates a credible risk of cumulative disruption across European economies.

High confidence: The United Kingdom faces sustained state-linked threats to its critical infrastructure. Recent incidents demonstrate vulnerabilities in essential commercial and technological services.

Moderate confidence: Hostile actors have opportunities to exploit separate infrastructure failures and domestic unrest in ways that magnify economic and political consequences.

Low confidence: The recent French supermarket attacks, banking outages, mobile-network disruption and civil disorder form part of one centrally directed operation. No publicly available evidence establishes that relationship.

Priority intelligence requirement: Determine whether hostile actors are establishing operational links between attacks on essential services and coordinated efforts to amplify their economic and political consequences.

Assessment prepared from open-source material available on 21 October 2026. Confidence levels express analytical judgements rather than statistical probabilities. Attribution of individual incidents remains subject to ongoing investigation.

THE WESTERN FRONT - Catherine Perez-Shakdam
Geopolitics | Security | Economy | Society

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By Catherine Perez-Shakdam

The Western Front | Strategic Analysis | October 2026

By the evening of 17 October, parts of France looked as though the country had entered an unusually violent argument with itself. Smoke rose above barricades, shopfronts were smashed, vehicles burned, and police struggled to contain groups moving through the streets of Paris. In Limoges the historic town hall was set ablaze. In Marseille rioters forced their way into the municipal building. Estimates of participation ranged from 550,000 to 800,000. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu reported roughly 1,200 arrests and 150 injured officers in the immediate aftermath; later figures pushed total arrests toward 2,400.

The familiar explanations arrived quickly. The government blamed ultra-left agitators and opportunistic criminality. Its opponents pointed to austerity, failing schools, and a remote political class. Both accounts contain truth. Neither fully describes the organisational machinery that had already gathered around the original protests.

For several weeks a dispute that began with missing teachers and overcrowded classrooms had been acquiring a larger political identity. Pupils demanding a functioning education found themselves sharing space with trade unions, revolutionary socialist groups, established parties, and international campaigns whose ambitions ran from redistribution to the dismantling of Western military alliances. A student asking for a mathematics teacher is engaged in an intelligible dispute with the education ministry. When that demand is absorbed into a campaign against capitalism, NATO, and the legitimacy of the Republic, someone has done more ambitious work.

The children who wanted teachers

The first notable school protests emerged around 21 September at the Saint-Exupéry lycée in Créteil. Teachers were missing, classes were overcrowded, and facilities were inadequate. By the end of the month blockades had spread across the Paris region. Louis Boyard of La France Insoumise visited the original site and publicly supported extending the movement.

On 28 September the intelligence directorate of the Paris police prefecture prepared an assessment of school blockades in Seine-Saint-Denis. Of twenty-seven actions examined between 21 and 25 September, the report identified six occasions on which outside unionists, university students, or left-wing elected representatives were present. At the Suger lycée in Saint-Denis, students from Paris-VIII were reportedly distributing Communist Youth leaflets. In Stains, university students arrived chanting for Macron’s resignation before local pupils joined them. Le Monde noted disagreement inside French intelligence: some officials still judged the mobilisation largely spontaneous, with political organisations attaching themselves as visibility grew.

That distinction matters. The absence of a revolutionary organiser at the start of a protest does not determine who later profits from it. Established organisations offer contacts, experience, media platforms, and the capacity to sustain activity after the first surge of enthusiasm fades. A campaign for teachers can become a campaign against austerity, then an indictment of capitalism and the constitutional order. The original participants may keep their demands while others attach new ones. Real suffering is more persuasive than invented grievance; a schoolchild describing a failed education system supplies emotional force no pamphlet can manufacture.

The political machinery

Asra Q. Nomani’s investigation for Fox News Digital mapped an extensive network of organisations participating in, supporting, or amplifying the French unrest. The inventory, initially fifty and later expanded to fifty-four, included only sixteen student and youth groups. The rest comprised labour unions and professional federations, communist and revolutionary socialist organisations, established political parties (including the French Communist Party and La France Insoumise), advocacy groups, and international media platforms.

These organisations did not share a single programme, and their presence does not prove joint responsibility for the violence. Their combined effect is still significant. A spontaneous protest begins with a grievance. An established network possesses mailing lists, social-media audiences, legal support, transport, and the ability to keep political activity alive. The CGT may seek concessions on wages and conditions. A revolutionary socialist formation may regard those concessions as inadequate because its objective is systemic rupture. They can march together while desiring incompatible outcomes.

Nomani’s map is therefore most useful as a description of the environment in which the protests developed, not as a list of alleged riot organisers. It shows considerable capacity for mobilisation, ideological interpretation, and international communication, and it illustrates how readily a domestic dispute acquires significance far beyond its original circumstances.

The Singham connection

Neville Roy Singham, the American technology entrepreneur based in Shanghai, has been linked by earlier reporting - including a 2023 New York Times investigation—to financial support for a network of left-wing and anti-imperialist organisations and media projects. In July 2026 the House Ways and Means Committee issued subpoenas to BreakThrough News, Tricontinental, and The People’s Forum seeking information on funding and foreign relationships. Those proceedings remain investigative; a subpoena is not a finding of wrongdoing, and Singham has denied acting under instructions from any government.

The French connection concerns presentation. BreakThrough News, identified within the Singham-associated network, circulated coverage of the protests, including footage from 17 October, framing the events inside an explicitly anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist narrative. A school protest can be reported as a dispute about public education or presented as one more episode in a worldwide revolt against capitalism and Western authority. Selection, commentary, and repetition are often sufficient. International coverage enlarges the perceived significance of domestic demonstrations; activists elsewhere draw encouragement; their own actions are then cited as evidence of a wider awakening. The movement acquires coherence through the organisations describing it.

None of this establishes that Singham financed the French violence or that BreakThrough News directed rioters. It does establish a professional capacity for amplification that places local events inside a pre-existing global story.

November was already on the calendar

For 20 November 2026, twenty-eight communist and socialist youth organisations across at least twelve European countries have promoted an international day of action under the slogan “Fight for Our Future, Not Their Wars.” The campaign calls for walkouts, demonstrations, blockades, and occupations, linking failures in education, housing, and public services to opposition to military expenditure and NATO. It was launched publicly on 10 August - more than a month before the first notable French school blockades.

The November infrastructure therefore cannot be described as a response to the violence of 17 October. Its political vocabulary and intended date were already in place. The French protests supplied an event that fitted the narrative the organisers were already promoting. Separate complaints - missing teachers, high rents, strained services - were given a common explanation. This is not evidence of a conspiracy that manufactured the riots. It is direct evidence of organised actors seeking to turn discontent across several countries into coordinated mobilisation. The organisers have published their programme.

Where the red meets the green

Palestinian flags and keffiyehs have appeared at demonstrations whose primary stated purpose was French domestic policy. Nomani’s inventory includes Palestine-solidarity organisations. Their presence establishes participation in the wider protest environment. It does not establish Islamist operational direction of the violence, nor does a flag prove affiliation with the Muslim Brotherhood or direction from Tehran.

France’s 2025 government-commissioned report on the Muslim Brotherhood examined concerns about institutional entryism. That is a serious subject. It is a different evidential question from responsibility for the October street violence. Ideological affinity cannot supply missing operational evidence. A secular revolutionary and a religious conservative may both oppose aspects of Western foreign policy or particular institutions; agreement about what to resist reveals little about what either intends to build afterward. Iran in 1979 remains a cautionary illustration of coalitions whose members discovered, after the old order fell, that their visions were incompatible and that organisational discipline decided the outcome. The analogy should not be stretched into a claim that France stands on the threshold of a similar revolution. It remains relevant whenever movements with incompatible ends find common advantage in weakening the same institutions.

What the evidence establishes

The material supports a serious case for deliberate political agitation and amplification around the French protests. It is weaker on the claim that a coordinated network manufactured the violence itself. School protests began with identifiable educational grievances. Political representatives and organised activists subsequently appeared at some blockades, as the DRPP assessment recorded. Trade unions and parties supported broader demonstrations; revolutionary organisations connected the unrest to existing campaigns. International platforms associated with established networks circulated footage that presented French events as part of a larger confrontation with capitalism and Western authority. Preparations for an international youth strike were already under way.

This is evidence of political mobilisation, ideological reframing, and attempts to expand an existing movement. It is not yet evidence of a single operation directing arson, looting, or assaults on police. Le Monde reported that France’s foreign-interference monitoring service had detected no artificial foreign amplification of the early school-blockade material at the stage examined. That finding complicates claims that the school movement itself was covertly manufactured. The more defensible conclusion is that an authentic domestic protest became an attractive opportunity for organisations whose broader objectives were already set.

A government that treats every genuine grievance as a foreign conspiracy will alienate the citizens whose trust it needs. A government that dismisses organised attempts at political appropriation as ordinary democratic enthusiasm may fail to notice when ideological actors are working to deepen a crisis. The distinction between peaceful demonstration, disruptive civil disobedience, and criminal violence remains indispensable. So does the obligation to investigate credible allegations of misconduct by either side.

The question before November

The planned mobilisation of 20 November offers a practical test of whether the networks surrounding the French protests can convert episodic unrest into something more durable. A single international day of action may produce little more than speeches and rearranged timetables. It may also strengthen relationships, habits of cooperation, and a shared political identity that outlasts November.

France has experienced serious disorder. It has not demonstrated the collapse of administrative or security institutions. The danger lies further along the path if repeated crises weaken confidence in those institutions. A crowd can bring pressure to bear; it cannot administer a country. In periods of uncertainty, organisations that already possess personnel, resources, communications, and discipline may enjoy an advantage greater than their public support would otherwise justify.

The flames in Limoges will be extinguished and the streets of Paris swept. What remains is the infrastructure. Some participants will continue to pursue ordinary democratic reform. Others will seek to convert the discontent into a more enduring challenge to the institutions of the Republic. France’s government would do well to understand the difference - and to remember that political authority more often erodes through successive failures and confrontations than through a single dramatic moment. Organised movements recognise such opportunities. They may not have created the circumstances. They may not control the violence. They can still prepare to benefit from the weakening of the order that exists.

The question is no longer simply who brought people into the streets. It is who intends to remain organised after the crowds have gone home, and what they hope to achieve with the influence they have acquired.

By Catherine Perez-Shakdam

The Western Front | Strategic Analysis | October 2026

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There is something faintly absurd about the way we imagine revolutions. We picture the barricades, the banners, the magnificent indignation of the crowd, and somewhere in the background a government official peering nervously through the curtains while considering whether the family silver might travel safely to Switzerland. History, being considerably less obliging than its admirers, tells a rather different story.

Revolutions do not begin when governments fall. By then the important work has usually been done. They begin when the state loses the confidence of those it governs, when its institutions cease to command the obedience they once took for granted, and when people whose grievances have little in common discover a shared conviction that the existing order has forfeited its right to rule.

The streets provide the spectacle. The real struggle concerns authority.

Consider Europe today. France has endured successive waves of unrest over pensions, policing, public services and the cost of living. Britain has seen increasingly bitter confrontations over immigration, national identity, the war in Gaza and the legitimacy of its political institutions. Governments across the continent are caught between public expectations they cannot satisfy and financial constraints they appear unwilling to explain. The citizen pays more, receives less and is then invited to admire the administrative ingenuity with which his disappointment has been managed.

It is hardly surprising that discontent should follow.

A family struggling to pay its electricity bill does not require a revolutionary theorist to explain that something has gone badly wrong. Nor does a student attending a school without sufficient teachers need instruction from an agitator before concluding that the government has failed her.

These grievances are real, and their authenticity is precisely what makes them politically valuable.

For between the original complaint and the eventual demand for the overthrow of an entire political order lies a territory inhabited by organisers, ideologues, activists and movements whose ambitions extend considerably beyond the conditions that first brought people into the streets.

An unpaid worker seeks his wages. A revolutionary seeks to explain why the entire economic system must be destroyed. A student demands a teacher; someone else suggests that the absence of one exposes the inherent illegitimacy of the Republic.

The grievance remains unchanged. Its political function has been transformed.

What interests me is the possibility that Europe is witnessing an increasingly sophisticated exploitation of this process by movements whose ultimate political objectives are profoundly different from those of the citizens whose anger they seek to harness.

Among them are the Islamic Republic of Iran and Islamist political networks associated, in different circumstances, with the Muslim Brotherhood. Both have demonstrated an interest in extending influence beyond their traditional territories, though their structures, methods and ambitions differ substantially. Both understand the utility of grievance. And both operate in a political environment where sections of the radical Left have developed their own, frequently uncompromising indictment of Western institutions.

The resulting convergence deserves attention. So does the temptation to exaggerate it.

There is no established evidence of a unified command directing Europe’s protests from Tehran, Brotherhood-associated networks and the headquarters of the radical Left. Indeed, the historical relationship between Iran and the Brotherhood has often been marked by rivalry and competing strategic interests.

Yet the absence of a common command does not prevent several political movements from benefiting from the same deterioration of authority.

And here lies the more serious question: what happens when the weakening of the democratic state serves several organised interests simultaneously, even though those interests disagree about who should eventually inherit its power?

How a revolution acquires its ingredients

The historian of revolution is obliged to be something of a spoilsport. While popular memory celebrates the courage of the crowd, serious scholarship tends to dwell upon less romantic considerations: empty treasuries, divided elites, administrative paralysis and the uncertain loyalty of the men carrying guns.

Jack Goldstone’s work on revolutionary conditions identifies several recurring pressures, among them fiscal strain, popular discontent, elite alienation and the emergence of a persuasive narrative capable of bringing disparate grievances into political alignment.

Individually, such pressures are commonplace. Governments survive recessions, strikes, demonstrations and periods of considerable unpopularity. Democracy would be a fragile arrangement indeed if every ministerial scandal or railway stoppage threatened its continued existence.

Trouble begins when these difficulties reinforce one another.

Economic insecurity weakens confidence in government. Declining confidence makes institutional failures appear deliberate rather than incompetent. Political movements supply an explanation that connects seemingly unrelated disappointments, while divisions among governing elites suggest that those in authority have begun to doubt their own ability to govern.

The decisive development occurs when citizens cease to regard their difficulties as problems that institutions might remedy and begin to see those institutions as the principal obstacles to a remedy.

A dispute over housing becomes a condemnation of capitalism. A controversy involving police conduct becomes proof that the state is irredeemably oppressive. An argument about religious accommodation is converted into evidence of systematic persecution. An overseas conflict becomes a domestic test of political legitimacy.

The government finds itself confronted by demands that grow less negotiable precisely as they become more ambitious.

One can bargain over salaries or taxation. It is rather harder to negotiate with someone whose opening position is that the entire constitutional settlement constitutes an intolerable injustice.

At this stage, the success of political mobilisation depends less upon the number of original grievances than upon the capacity to give them a common interpretation.

Revolutions require a story.

That story must identify the cause of suffering, explain why ordinary reform is inadequate and offer some idea of what should replace the existing order. It must also persuade people who disagree about almost everything else that their immediate interests are served by the same political rupture.

This is why revolutionary movements have so often depended upon alliances that appeared, in retrospect, to have been assembled by people who had never discussed what victory might involve.

The contradictions can be overlooked while everyone is marching in the same direction.

They become rather more troublesome when the destination is reached.

Tehran and the politics of permanent grievance

The Islamic Republic has understood the political value of grievance since its foundation.

Its revolutionary identity depends upon the claim that Iran stands in permanent resistance to an international order characterised by Western domination. The regime presents itself as the defender of oppressed peoples, the enemy of imperialism and the champion of a justice whose precise meaning is generally determined by the interests of those governing Tehran.

There is an obvious contradiction in a political system that celebrates resistance abroad while suppressing it at home.

The contradiction has survived nearly half a century without troubling the regime’s public conscience.

Iranian women are imprisoned for resisting compulsory dress codes. Dissidents face harassment, prosecution and violence. Political freedoms are constrained by institutions whose authority is grounded in the preservation of the Islamic Republic. Yet the same government invokes the language of liberation when speaking about movements that challenge its adversaries.

The language is useful because it allows Tehran to frame strategic competition as a moral obligation.

The regime’s activities outside Iran provide a more concrete indication of its ambitions.

The British Intelligence and Security Committee’s July 2025 report described Iran as a persistent and unpredictable threat, with particular concern over attacks and intimidation directed against dissidents and opponents abroad. British intelligence has also warned publicly about Iranian operations involving espionage, threats to Jewish and Israeli interests, hostile activity against Iranian media organisations and attempts to exploit intermediaries.

These are documented matters of national security, however much one might wish they belonged to the more lurid pages of a spy novel.

They demonstrate that Tehran’s willingness to project power into European societies extends well beyond diplomatic persuasion.

The important distinction concerns what the available evidence proves.

Iranian operations against dissidents do not establish Iranian control over European protest movements. The regime’s exploitation of anti-Western narratives does not demonstrate that every activist repeating similar arguments has received instructions from Tehran.

But hostile states rarely require complete control of a political movement to derive advantage from its activities.

A European government paralysed by domestic disorder may be less able to sustain a coherent foreign policy. A society consumed by arguments over identity and Israel may struggle to distinguish legitimate political criticism from antisemitic intimidation or foreign-directed activity. Security services required to manage an expanding range of domestic threats face competing demands upon their attention and resources.

These are advantages Tehran can recognise without having created the underlying conditions.

Consider the regime’s ideological vocabulary. Western military action is imperial aggression; Iranian regional intervention becomes resistance. The repression of a dissident at home is a matter of national sovereignty, while action against a group sympathetic to Tehran abroad may be presented as an assault upon freedom of expression.

The inconsistency is so thoroughly institutionalised that one suspects it has ceased to be noticed by those practising it.

What matters is the effect upon Western political debate.

Where the regime’s preferred interpretations gain currency, Tehran’s adversaries may find themselves defending their legitimacy before they can even begin to address the security problem.

A government can survive an accusation of hypocrisy. Repeated accusations, delivered across several political disputes and amplified by different actors, can nevertheless corrode public confidence.

Iran has every reason to appreciate the value of that corrosion.

It does not need Europe to collapse in order to profit from Europe’s difficulties.

The Brotherhood and the slower acquisition of influence

The Muslim Brotherhood belongs to a different political tradition.

Founded in Egypt in 1928, it developed through religious activism, social organisation and political mobilisation. Brotherhood-associated movements have varied greatly across countries and periods, particularly in their attitudes towards electoral participation, violence, constitutional arrangements and relationships with established governments.

Any serious examination must begin by recognising these differences.

There is no defensible basis for treating every Muslim organisation as an extension of the Brotherhood, nor does religious conservatism establish participation in an anti-democratic political project.

Nevertheless, the relationship between Islamist activism and European institutions has become an increasingly important subject of official inquiry.

In May 2025, the French Interior Ministry published a government-commissioned report examining the Muslim Brotherhood and political Islamism in France. Its concerns included forms of entryism: the gradual acquisition of influence through associations, local institutions and religious or educational structures, potentially affecting the application of republican principles.

The report generated considerable controversy. Organisations discussed within it disputed allegations of affiliation, and specialists questioned elements of its interpretation and methodology.

Such objections deserve examination, since the distinction between political influence and unlawful subversion is too important to be settled by association or suspicion.

Yet the French government’s decision to investigate the issue, followed by the European Parliament’s October 2026 resolution calling for an EU strategy concerning Islamist entryism and Brotherhood influence, demonstrates that the subject has entered mainstream institutional debate.

The relevant question concerns the means through which an organised political movement may gradually acquire authority within institutions that do not formally belong to it.

Religious associations, charities, educational bodies, community organisations and local political networks all have legitimate roles in democratic society. Indeed, their independence from the state is one of the characteristics that make pluralism possible.

They can also become channels of political influence.

That possibility is scarcely unique to religious movements. Trade unions, corporations, political parties, lobbying organisations and ideological campaign groups all seek to shape public decisions through institutions beyond their direct control.

The difference lies in the objectives pursued and the methods employed.

Where a movement seeks to subordinate equal citizenship to coercive religious authority, restrict freedom of conscience or undermine the constitutional rights of those outside its ideological community, its activities warrant scrutiny proportionate to the evidence.

The attraction of gradual institutional influence is easy to understand.

Political legitimacy accumulated through years of community engagement may eventually confer access to decision-makers, influence over public policy and authority to speak on behalf of constituencies whose actual opinions are more diverse than the movement acknowledges.

Such influence does not require the seizure of a parliament building.

Nor does it necessarily require public confrontation.

Indeed, discretion and patience may prove more useful than revolutionary enthusiasm.

This is where Iran and Brotherhood-associated movements invite comparison, although their organisational differences should remain central to the analysis.

Tehran possesses the machinery of a hostile state, including intelligence capabilities, diplomatic channels and relationships with coercive actors. Brotherhood-associated movements have historically developed forms of political and social organisation through which influence may accumulate over time.

Their approaches can intersect, particularly when Israel or Western foreign policy supplies a common grievance.

They can also compete for ideological authority, regional influence and the loyalties of the movements with which they maintain relationships.

The interesting possibility is that both may derive advantage from the weakening of liberal democratic institutions, even when neither wishes the other to determine what follows.

That rivalry should not reassure us unduly.

Political competitors have often found it profitable to weaken the same opponent before resuming their quarrel over the spoils.

The peculiar usefulness of victimhood

There is a technique common to movements of many political persuasions that deserves rather more attention than it receives.

It consists of transforming scrutiny into persecution.

An institution raises questions about an organisation’s financing, political objectives or conduct. The organisation responds by challenging the legitimacy of the questions themselves. Attention moves away from what it has done and towards the alleged prejudice of those who have asked.

The method succeeds when public authorities become more anxious about the accusation than about the matter under investigation.

In European societies, this dynamic is particularly sensitive wherever religious identity is involved.

Freedom of worship and protection against discrimination are essential constitutional principles. Anti-Muslim hatred is a genuine problem, documented through attacks upon individuals, mosques and other expressions of religious life. Its victims are entitled to the same protection afforded to those targeted by antisemitic or other forms of religious hatred.

But the existence of prejudice cannot mean that organisations pursuing political objectives enjoy immunity from examination.

A Muslim citizen has an unconditional right to equal protection under the law. An Islamist political organisation may be asked to explain its programme, finances, affiliations and activities, just as any other political organisation may be asked to do.

Confusing these two propositions serves neither religious liberty nor democratic accountability.

Yet the confusion is politically useful.

Where criticism of an organisation is routinely presented as an attack upon an entire community, officials may become reluctant to investigate legitimate concerns. Other citizens, observing that reluctance, may conclude that the state applies different standards according to the identity or political influence of those concerned.

Public trust deteriorates from both directions.

One group sees persecution; another sees favouritism. Political entrepreneurs then assure each that the other’s suspicions confirm everything they have been saying for years.

The argument becomes self-sustaining.

There is scarcely a shortage of European politicians willing to make a career of it.

The same mechanism can operate around immigration, national identity and public order.

European governments face serious difficulties concerning border control, asylum procedures, integration, housing and the capacity of public services. These difficulties cannot be addressed adequately by pretending that every concern is animated by prejudice, any more than they can be solved by portraying migrants as a collective security threat.

The deliberate exploitation of migration by hostile states is an established phenomenon. Belarus, for example, has been accused by the European Union of facilitating migrant movements towards its borders as an instrument of political pressure.

That case demonstrates how vulnerable people can be used within a strategy of coercion.

It does not establish that Iran or the Muslim Brotherhood controls irregular migration into Europe, and the distinction should be observed.

But disorder surrounding immigration policy provides opportunities for organisations seeking to inflame public resentment.

An extremist nationalist movement may use administrative failure to cultivate hostility towards immigrants. An Islamist political movement may exploit genuine incidents of anti-Muslim prejudice to persuade communities that the state will never protect them. Foreign information operations may amplify whichever interpretation produces the greatest antagonism.

The result can be politically poisonous.

Each movement points to the excesses of its adversaries as proof that its own warnings were justified. Every new confrontation supplies material for recruitment, fundraising and the assertion of moral authority.

The state, meanwhile, finds itself judged less by its laws than by the accumulated grievances of those who have ceased to believe it will enforce them fairly.

At such a moment, the distinction between a real injustice and its political exploitation becomes essential.

The injustice must be addressed. The exploitation must be recognised.

A democracy incapable of doing both will struggle to preserve the confidence of either side.

Why the Red and the Green cannot accomplish the task alone

The relationship between the radical Left and political Islamism has inspired a great deal of commentary, some perceptive and some rather too delighted with the discovery that ideological contradictions exist.

It is certainly striking to see activists committed to secularism, feminism and sexual autonomy cooperating with movements whose political interpretations of religious authority may sit uneasily with those commitments.

The differences are substantial, and there is no reason to minimise them.

Yet tactical alliances are rarely constructed by people who agree about the ideal constitution of society.

They are constructed by people who agree about whom they wish to defeat.

A radical anti-capitalist may regard the liberal state as an instrument of class domination. An Islamist may object to its secular foundations. Both may consider Western support for Israel evidence of a wider political injustice, although their reasons and intended remedies differ.

They can therefore appear at the same demonstration, endorse the same campaign and denounce the same government without possessing a shared vision of the future.

The arrangement works rather well until somebody asks what victory would look like.

But such alliances, however visible, cannot by themselves produce the conditions necessary for revolutionary change.

A state with functioning institutions, a professional security apparatus and sufficient public legitimacy can withstand even sustained political opposition.

For a revolutionary situation to become plausible, discontent must spread beyond those already committed to radical politics.

Teachers must lose confidence in the education system. Workers must cease to believe their economic grievances can be resolved through negotiation. Students must regard ordinary political participation as futile. Businesses must begin to doubt the state’s capacity to provide stability. Civil servants and local authorities must experience the central government as increasingly incapable of making decisions that command compliance.

Most importantly, elements of the political establishment must begin to question whether the existing order can be preserved.

The significance of such a development lies in its breadth.

A government can survive being disliked by a substantial minority. It faces a different predicament when people with incompatible interests and no common ideological programme begin to share the conviction that government itself has become incapable of performing its elementary duties.

This is the point at which a skilled political movement may attempt to supply the missing common purpose.

A student demanding better schooling, a worker demanding higher wages and a resident demanding effective policing need not share an ideology.

All three can nevertheless be persuaded that their grievances originate in the same institutional failure.

The consequences depend upon what happens next.

If political institutions respond credibly, grievances may return to the ordinary business of democratic negotiation. If they fail, the explanation supplied by more radical movements acquires a certain plausibility.

The crisis deepens when reform itself is dismissed as impossible.

Here, the revolutionary imagination performs its most consequential manoeuvre. It persuades citizens that the solution to their immediate difficulties requires the destruction of institutions upon which their broader security continues to depend.

At that point, the original grievances may become almost incidental.

The cause has acquired a life of its own.

The state and the slow loss of obedience

The political philosopher can spend an agreeable afternoon explaining why citizens owe obedience to the state. The policeman trying to restore order to a burning street has rather more immediate concerns.

Yet both are confronting the same fundamental question.

Why do people comply?

Much of democratic government depends upon habits so ordinary that they are rarely noticed. Citizens obey court judgments they dislike. Employers comply with regulations they consider unreasonable. Public officials implement decisions made by elected governments they did not support.

A society cannot function if every instruction requires the state to demonstrate, afresh and through force, its authority to issue it.

The power of the state rests partly upon the expectation that most people will continue to recognise its legitimacy.

When that expectation weakens, the cost of government rises.

Police deployments become more frequent. Public services require additional protection. Local authorities postpone decisions likely to provoke confrontation. Officials spend increasing amounts of time preparing for the consequences of policies they have not yet implemented.

The machinery of administration begins to revolve around the anticipation of disorder.

This is a dangerous condition because it can reward the most confrontational actors.

An organisation learns that disruption produces concessions more quickly than ordinary representation. Another discovers that public authorities are reluctant to act against it for fear of accusations of discrimination. A third uses every confrontation to persuade supporters that the state has declared war upon them.

Government becomes increasingly reactive.

The ability to determine the political agenda passes, in part, to those most capable of creating difficulties.

It would be misleading to describe every campus occupation, street protest or dispute with a local authority as evidence of revolutionary dual power. The concept has a specific historical meaning: rival institutions claiming authority over the same population and possessing some practical ability to secure obedience.

Russia in 1917 provided a classic example, when the Provisional Government confronted the competing authority of the soviets.

Europe has not reached an equivalent condition merely because an activist committee dictates who may speak at a university or because protesters block a road.

But these episodes raise a narrower question worth investigating.

Are public institutions increasingly surrendering decisions that properly belong to them because organised pressure makes lawful administration politically costly?

And when that happens, are particular networks acquiring lasting influence from the concessions they secure?

The answers require evidence: identifiable organisations, decision-making records, financial relationships, correspondence, institutional appointments and observable changes in policy.

There is a considerable difference between demonstrating that a government is unpopular and demonstrating that another organisation has begun to exercise its authority.

Likewise, there is a difference between political movements exploiting disorder and evidence that they organised it.

These distinctions may seem tiresome to those eager for a grand theory capable of explaining every disturbance from Paris to Birmingham.

They are indispensable if the theory is to survive contact with reality.

A fire does not become part of an Iranian operation because it occurs during a demonstration whose organisers criticise Israel. Nor does the presence of Islamist rhetoric establish that the Muslim Brotherhood has directed the event.

One needs evidence of coordination, financing, instructions or other attributable conduct.

Without such evidence, the phrase manufactured revolution risks becoming an explanation so elastic that nothing can disprove it.

And a theory that accommodates every possible outcome has usually ceased to be a theory worth having.

The lesson Europe has failed to learn from Iran

There is one historical episode to which I return repeatedly, partly because of my own years studying the Islamic Republic from within its political circles and partly because it offers a particularly severe warning about the relationship between revolutionary enthusiasm and organised power.

Iran, 1979.

The opposition to the Shah brought together secular nationalists, liberals, Marxists, religious activists and revolutionary Islamists. Their ideological differences were enormous, but the demand for the monarchy’s removal temporarily overshadowed their disagreements.

The revolution acquired momentum through mass demonstrations, strikes, elite fractures and the progressive collapse of the monarchy’s ability to command obedience.

By the time the Shah departed, the political order he had governed was already disintegrating.

The crowds celebrated liberation. Different factions imagined different futures.

Some expected parliamentary democracy. Others anticipated socialism, national independence or a new political settlement combining religious identity with representative institutions.

Ayatollah Khomeini and his allies possessed a rather more definite understanding of where authority ought to reside.

Their advantage extended beyond the religious language through which they addressed the population. The clerical movement could draw upon networks of mobilisation, recognised leadership and organisational relationships that became instruments of political consolidation once the monarchy had fallen.

Revolutionary committees emerged. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was established in 1979. New institutions developed the capacity to enforce decisions while rival movements competed over the meaning of the revolution they had helped bring about.

For a time, the remaining machinery of government existed alongside revolutionary structures whose authority did not derive from the ordinary constitutional order.

The outcome became increasingly clear.

The clerical leadership consolidated power. Secular liberals, nationalists and left-wing organisations discovered that their contribution to the Shah’s overthrow conferred no right to determine the character of the state that replaced him.

Many were subsequently repressed.

The revolution had required a broad coalition to succeed. Its consolidation demanded something rather different: the elimination or subordination of competing centres of authority.

Those who helped bring down the old order were not necessarily those equipped to govern the new one.

That is the lesson.

A crowd can paralyse a country. It cannot necessarily administer one.

Government requires institutions, disciplined personnel, communications, resources, legal authority and, ultimately, some capacity to enforce decisions. In a revolutionary vacuum, organisations possessing those assets may enjoy an advantage entirely disproportionate to their numerical support.

The clerical movement understood this with a clarity that many of its former allies acquired only after the opportunity to resist had passed.

Europe is not Iran in 1979. Its constitutional systems remain functional, its security institutions retain substantial capacity, and there is no evidence of an imminent continental revolution.

But the history illustrates a mechanism that remains relevant whenever disorder begins to undermine established authority.

The critical question concerns the organisations capable of surviving the breakdown.

Who possesses the networks, discipline and resources to act when other institutions are exhausted? Who can coordinate followers, supply services, enforce decisions and claim legitimacy when the government is no longer trusted to do so?

And who has been preparing for that possibility while everyone else was absorbed by the latest crisis?

A revolution without a director

The most unsettling possibility is that nobody needs to manufacture the whole upheaval.

We tend to picture hostile influence as a neat sequence of instructions. Somewhere a strategist approves a plan, intermediaries distribute funds, activists receive their orders, and the streets obediently descend into chaos.

Real political life is seldom so considerate.

Foreign states can exploit crises they did not create. Political movements can benefit from demonstrations they did not organise. Ideological networks can attach their preferred explanations to genuine grievances, amplifying resentment and directing attention towards institutions whose authority they seek to weaken.

The process requires opportunity more often than omnipotence.

Tehran does not need to manufacture a housing shortage to benefit from a European government overwhelmed by public anger. An Islamist political movement need not invent an incident of anti-Muslim discrimination to exploit it for recruitment or political influence. A revolutionary faction need not create every labour dispute to present widespread industrial unrest as evidence that the existing economic order is beyond repair.

The grievances supply the material. Organised movements seek to determine what the material will mean.

Occasionally their efforts may intersect. Sometimes they may compete for the same audience, institutional access or political advantage. Their activities can reinforce one another without being coordinated.

There is nothing mysterious about this.

Indeed, the tendency to imagine a single directing intelligence may obscure the real danger by encouraging us to look for an elaborate conspiracy where a collection of opportunistic strategies would explain the evidence rather better.

A government can be weakened by actors who have never met, never exchanged instructions and would be horrified at the suggestion that they belong to the same political movement.

What unites their effects is the progressive erosion of confidence in democratic authority.

That erosion may benefit hostile foreign powers, revolutionary movements or organisations hoping to expand their influence over institutions that have become too timid to defend their own rules.

But one must resist the temptation to attribute every social disturbance to them.

A genuine crisis of legitimacy can arise from bad government, corruption, economic failure and the ordinary consequences of institutions neglecting their responsibilities.

Sometimes the state has made itself unpopular through the old-fashioned expedient of doing its job badly.

Political exploitation then follows because the opportunity exists.

This is why the distinction between organised subversion and governmental incompetence matters so much.

If an investigation discovers foreign financing, covert coordination or directed intimidation, the authorities should respond accordingly.

If it discovers only the consequences of failing public services, inadequate housing or political arrogance, the remedy belongs to a different category.

Mistaking one for the other serves nobody except those who prefer grand accusations to practical solutions.

When disorder becomes a political asset

The most revealing measure of revolutionary vulnerability is the extent to which disorder begins to confer political advantage upon those producing or exploiting it.

When governments negotiate because disruption has become unbearable rather than because a demand is legitimate, they risk teaching organised groups that coercion works.

When authorities refuse to enforce established rules for fear of controversy, they encourage further challenges.

When public institutions treat the avoidance of confrontation as their overriding responsibility, the people willing to provoke confrontation acquire influence over decisions they were never elected to make.

This can occur gradually.

A concession is made to resolve a local dispute. A precedent is established. Another organisation demands equivalent treatment. Officials become accustomed to asking which groups are likely to react most forcefully before deciding how the law should be applied.

Eventually, government begins adapting itself to the anticipated displeasure of organised minorities.

The question then concerns whether those adjustments remain compatible with equal citizenship and accountable administration.

The state cannot preserve legitimacy through force alone. It requires public consent, fair institutions and a credible capacity to respond to genuine grievances.

But a government that makes ordinary legal enforcement dependent upon the ideological sensitivities of those most willing to disrupt public life invites a particularly corrosive form of inequality.

Citizens who comply with the law find themselves ignored. Those who impose the greatest costs upon the authorities receive the most attention.

The resulting lesson is unlikely to improve civic behaviour.

The temptation to politicise every source of discontent becomes stronger as the government’s capacity to resist organised pressure appears weaker.

This is the point at which apparently unrelated disorders begin to matter collectively.

A strike, an immigration controversy, a university occupation and a campaign against police legitimacy may have entirely separate causes.

If their cumulative effect is to persuade citizens that the state cannot maintain order, enforce its own laws or resolve disputes through legitimate institutions, they can contribute to a broader crisis of authority.

The danger need not involve a revolutionary conspiracy directing each event.

The accumulation itself can create openings for organisations willing to offer certainty and structure where government appears incapable of providing either.

And those organisations may have political ambitions very different from the demands that first brought the country to the edge of crisis.

Who will inherit the disorder?

There is an irony in watching movements denounce the liberal democratic order while relying upon the freedoms it provides.

They assemble because the law protects assembly. They criticise governments because political speech remains comparatively free. They organise associations because pluralism allows institutions to exist independently of the state. They demand rights whose protection depends upon constitutional arrangements some of them regard as fundamentally illegitimate.

One is tempted to ask whether they have considered what life might be like under the political systems they would prefer.

Would their preferred authorities tolerate religious conversion, criticism of religious doctrine, satire, political opposition or the right of women to reject prescribed social roles?

Would they permit their opponents to organise against them?

Would the liberties employed to undermine the existing order survive its disappearance?

These questions should be directed at every political movement, secular or religious, whose programme involves the replacement of democratic institutions.

The experience of Iran supplies a sufficiently grim illustration of what can happen when a revolutionary coalition discovers that its victorious leadership has no intention of sharing power.

For Europe, the immediate challenge is less dramatic but no less demanding.

Governments must recover the ability to perform their ordinary duties. Public services must function. Borders must be administered according to law. Citizens must be protected against violence and intimidation. Religious liberty must be defended without granting political organisations immunity from scrutiny. Foreign interference must be investigated through evidence rather than ideological assumption.

A government that cannot provide these basic conditions will struggle to persuade citizens that its authority deserves respect.

Nor can public confidence be restored indefinitely through speeches about resilience when people continue to encounter institutional failure in their daily lives.

The threat posed by hostile states and anti-democratic movements becomes more serious when government itself supplies a succession of reasons for citizens to abandon confidence in the political order.

This is where I believe Europe remains dangerously complacent.

The Islamic Republic has demonstrated its willingness to employ coercion and intimidation beyond Iran’s borders. European governments have begun to examine the activities and influence of Brotherhood-associated Islamist networks. The political convergence of radical movements around certain grievances is visible, even where their ultimate objectives remain incompatible.

None of these developments establishes that a single manufactured revolution is under way.

But together they raise questions that governments would be foolish to dismiss, particularly while public confidence in democratic institutions is under sustained pressure.

Who benefits from recurring disorder? Which organisations convert temporary grievances into lasting influence? Where are foreign resources, ideological networks or coercive methods involved? And what institutions would retain the authority to act if the existing government lost its capacity to command obedience?

The answers will not be found by counting flags at demonstrations or treating every act of dissent as evidence of subversion.

They require evidence of relationships, financing, organisational capacity and political intent, examined with the seriousness appropriate to a national-security question.

What should concern us most is the possibility that a state may become so accustomed to managing disorder that it forgets its first obligation is to govern.

A society can survive considerable political anger. It can endure strikes, protests, scandal and economic disappointment. What it cannot endure indefinitely is the evaporation of confidence in the institutions through which citizens settle their differences without resorting to force.

Once that confidence disappears, the argument changes.

The question ceases to be which government should hold office and becomes which organisation possesses the means to exercise power.

Iran in 1979 should have taught us that the answer is seldom determined by the nobility of the slogans, the size of the crowds or the sincerity of those who first demanded change.

The people may supply the grievance. Organisers may supply the language. A succession of failures may bring the existing order to its knees.

But when authority finally begins to collapse, power does not wait politely for the most deserving applicant.

It passes towards those who possess the organisation, discipline and determination to take it.

History has demonstrated this often enough that our continued surprise borders upon negligence.

Europe may spend so long debating who lit the fire that it neglects to discover who has been preparing to occupy the building once the flames have died down.

Sources and further reading

Jack A. Goldstone, Revolutions: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2013; and “Toward a Fourth Generation of Revolutionary Theory,” Annual Review of Political Science, 2001.

UK Intelligence and Security Committee, Iran, July 2025.

House of Commons Library, Iranian State Threat Activities in the UK, June 2026.

MI5 Director General’s public threat assessment, October 2026.

French Ministry of the Interior, Frères musulmans et islamisme politique en France, May 2025.

European Parliament, The Need for an EU Strategy to Counter Islamist Entryism and the Influence of the Muslim Brotherhood Network, October 2026.

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Mismatched Expectations: Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood After the Arab Uprisings, 2019.

Council of the European Union, materials concerning Belarus and the instrumentalisation of migration.

OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, reporting on anti-Muslim hate crime.

By Catherine Perez-Shakdam

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A Palestinian flag can express grief and solidarity . When it accompanies an explicit demand for Israel’s destruction, the demand deserves scrutiny of its own. The flag cannot absolve it.

A movement calling itself a liberation struggle should be prepared to explain what happens to the people who stand in the way of its victory. Will they remain? Will they retain equal rights? Can they reject the new political order without becoming its enemies?

These questions become urgent when the continued existence of Jews as a sovereign people is presented as the injustice that must be corrected. An old hatred does not become unrecognisable merely because it has acquired a more fashionable vocabulary.

Context still matters. A disputed slogan cannot establish every speaker’s intentions. Peaceful proposals for different constitutional arrangements must be distinguished from threats of destruction, expulsion or violence. Where those threats are explicit, however, appeals to ambiguity begin to look like an unwillingness to hear.

The IHRA’s non-binding working definition identifies denial of Jewish self-determination as a possible manifestation of antisemitism, while distinguishing criticism of Israel comparable to criticism of other countries. The definition’s application is contested. The question beneath it remains unavoidable: are Jews being granted rights the speaker recognises for everyone else?

That question also exposes a wider inconsistency. National attachment is celebrated as liberation in some circumstances and treated as evidence of inherited guilt in others. Palestinians are understood to need a home, a history and a political identity. British and French citizens expressing similar attachments can find themselves required to explain what they mean before their affection is considered respectable.

The distinction cannot simply be asserted. But where it can be demonstrated, it deserves a better answer than the suggestion that some peoples have earned the right to belong while others should have outgrown the desire.

When criticism becomes a complete account

Nationalism has supplied ample grounds for suspicion. Governments have invoked national greatness to justify conquest, persecution and obedience. Anyone defending patriotism must reckon with the people who suffered under its banner.

Anti-colonial thought is also less accommodating to romanticism than some of its contemporary admirers suggest. Frantz Fanon warned that national elites could take possession of independence while reproducing domination and neglecting the people in whose name they had fought. Liberation could be betrayed by its own leaders.

The trouble begins when examining a country’s crimes becomes the only respectable way to discuss its history.

A flag is reduced to conquest. Borders signify exclusion. Citizenship conceals majority power. Institutions capable of correcting injustice are treated chiefly as instruments for perpetuating it.

Each criticism may be warranted in a particular case. Together, offered as a complete explanation of national life, they leave little room for the attachments through which people accept obligations towards strangers.

Why should a prosperous district contribute to a poorer one? Why should citizens accept an election result they regard as disastrous? What persuades people with different religions, ancestries and ambitions to keep investing in the same institutions?

Law establishes duties. A sense of belonging helps people continue accepting them when they would rather not.

Patriotism can sustain that commitment without requiring obedience to the government. Affection for a country often supplies the reason to object to what is being done in its name.

Lose that distinction and patriotism becomes almost indistinguishable from chauvinism. The citizen wishing to appear enlightened learns to qualify every expression of national affection. Criticism needs no such introduction.

The result is a cramped account of democratic life. It knows why a country should be distrusted but has less to say about why its citizens should continue taking responsibility for one another.

The flag granted an exemption

An established state and a people seeking statehood occupy different positions. Their powers differ, and so do their vulnerabilities. A government exercising military force should face scrutiny appropriate to that power.

That explains why political demands require different judgements. It does not settle whether national attachment itself is legitimate.

A Palestinian may cherish a flag because it represents family history and the hope of recognition. A British or French citizen may find meaning in their own flag without wishing to subordinate anyone.

The useful test is what each attachment asks of others.

Does it admit equal membership? Can minorities dissent? Are other peoples allowed legitimate histories and political futures? Does loyalty to the country leave room to criticise its government?

A movement that celebrates Palestinian self-determination while categorically rejecting Jewish self-determination owes an explanation of its principle. So does a commentator who applauds national pride abroad while treating the comparable affection of fellow citizens as presumptively sinister.

Many supporters of Palestine apply their principles consistently. The argument should concern those who do not, rather than making everyone carrying a flag answer for everyone else.

Solidarity becomes dangerous when it grants an exemption from ordinary moral scrutiny. A cause’s suffering cannot answer every objection to the programme advanced in its name.

Those who intend to replace the state

For some Islamist organisations, replacing existing states with religious government is an explicit ambition.

Hizb ut-Tahrir provides a clear example. The British government describes its long-term objective as unifying Muslims worldwide under a caliphate governed by its interpretation of Islamic law. Britain proscribed the organisation in January 2024 following the government’s assessment that it promoted and encouraged terrorism.

Here, the proposed alternative to national sovereignty belongs to the organisation’s programme. A critic does not have to invent it.

The word Ummah should not become shorthand for that project. It refers to the worldwide Muslim community. A Muslim’s sense of religious solidarity across borders establishes no support for abolishing states or imposing a caliphate.

The political claim comes from organisations seeking authority over that community, including over Muslims who reject their interpretation.

Their proposals deserve practical questions. Who makes the law? Can citizens reject the prescribed religion? Can a woman possess the same civil status as a man? What happens to someone who leaves the faith? Can the rulers be removed?

An account of restored unity tells us little about the freedom available within it.

That is where a defence of sovereignty acquires substance. A state must be able to protect citizens against people claiming powers over them that the law has never granted.

Allies until the argument is won

A secular radical may regard religion as a source of hierarchy. An Islamist may regard secular government as illegitimate. They can still find cooperation useful against a shared adversary.

Such cooperation must be established through identifiable relationships, statements and conduct. Appearing at the same demonstration is insufficient evidence of an alliance.

Tehran’s use of Palestine shows how a common cause can be employed to reach across those differences. At the 2017 conference supporting the Palestinian Intifada, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei encouraged cooperation among movements divided by political and religious outlook. Agreement on the struggle could sustain relationships without resolving every other disagreement.

That is a method of mobilisation, not proof that Iran commands Western solidarity movements.

Its attraction is precisely that participants need agree on relatively little. They can postpone their arguments about women’s freedom, religious authority and pluralism while concentrating on the government or state they oppose.

But those disagreements will eventually concern somebody’s life.

A campaigner for women’s rights should ask what women would be permitted under the authority of a movement being endorsed. A secular activist should establish whether secular people could still organise. A defender of minorities should examine the treatment of dissenters within the movement’s own community.

Calling these questions divisive merely postpones the reckoning.

My years gaining access to circles connected to Iran’s political establishment made me wary of the ease with which the language of justice could coexist with the denial of individual liberty. Revolutionary certainty offered its own justification. Those expected to endure the consequences had considerably less say.

That experience informs my judgement. It cannot substitute for evidence about a particular organisation or political relationship.

The slow burn

The incremental process need not resemble an instruction issued from a headquarters.

A genuine grievance brings people together. A broader explanation gives the grievance political meaning. Over time, accepting that explanation can become a condition of remaining in good standing within the cause.

Questions begin to carry a social cost. Scrutiny of an ally is called disloyalty. Concern about intimidation becomes a distraction from the original injustice. An objection that might once have been discussed is treated as evidence of the objector’s bad faith.

Where this occurs, the movement’s moral language narrows the range of acceptable judgement.

The evidence should be concrete. What happens to a member who dissents? Are allegations against allies investigated as seriously as allegations against opponents? Which speakers are invited, which objections are dismissed, and on what grounds?

Without such examples, “indoctrination” becomes a label that explains too much too easily. With them, it becomes possible to show how people learn which conclusions are rewarded and which questions they should stop asking.

Repetition does the rest. A national institution’s achievements always require qualification; its failures speak for themselves. An allied movement’s abuses are exceptions; its declared intentions are accepted as evidence of its character.

Individual criticisms may remain true. The distortion lies in what is repeatedly left out.

A country becomes difficult to defend when its history is encountered only as a prosecution.

Identity without a common home

Demands for recognition have exposed genuine exclusions. Citizens should never have been expected to conceal their ancestry, religion or family history as the price of belonging.

The problem arises when identity becomes a permanent allocation of moral authority. People are assigned guilt or innocence before their conduct is examined. Some must continually explain their inheritance; others are presumed to speak with the authority of historical injury.

A politics conducted on those terms has difficulty explaining what citizens owe one another across the categories.

Shared citizenship offers an answer, though it requires more work than declaring solidarity with people who already agree.

It allows particular identities to endure within institutions responsible for protecting everyone. A British citizen should be able to cherish Pakistani, Nigerian, Indian or Jewish family history and regard the Union Jack as their own. A French citizen with Algerian or Senegalese grandparents should not have to choose between that inheritance and the tricolour.

Citizens whose families have lived in those countries for generations deserve the same freedom to belong without automatic suspicion.

The common flag cannot guarantee equal treatment. Government must give the promise substance. But abandoning the promise leaves citizens with fewer means of demanding that equality be honoured.

Minorities have particular reason to care about the state’s capacity to protect them. A dissident needs protection from a foreign government. A woman needs protection from coercion justified in religious terms. A Jewish citizen needs protection from threats presented as anger about Israel.

British assessments describe Iranian threats against people in the United Kingdom and the use of intermediaries to pursue perceived enemies. Such activity challenges the authority of the state in which the targets live.gov

For the person threatened, sovereignty means that Tehran does not get to decide whether they may speak safely in London.

What remains after the slogans

Western countries can acknowledge grave wrongs without treating their continued existence as an embarrassment.

They can also oppose coercive political projects without turning Muslim citizens into suspects. The protection of religious freedom requires both judgements.

There is no evidence of one hidden alliance directing the dissolution of the West according to a timetable. Different actors can nevertheless weaken the same safeguards while wanting incompatible things to follow.

Some seek a caliphate. Others seek revolutionary change. Many people attending the surrounding protests seek neither. Treating them as one movement would obscure the organisations whose objectives can actually be established and estrange people who have every reason to oppose them.

The danger worth confronting is the loss of a common political language: the ability to explain why equal citizenship matters, why lawful authority must be defended and why a country’s failures do not exhaust its meaning.

A society that can no longer make that argument leaves an opening for movements offering a more coercive form of unity.

No flag should exempt its bearers from explaining the society they intend to create.

And no people should be required to despise their own country as proof that they care about someone else’s.

By Catherine Perez-Shakdam

There is something almost magnificently French about a national political confrontation beginning with an argument over a school timetable. A teacher fails to appear, pupils gather at the gates, and before long Jean-Luc Mélenchon is discussing the future of the Republic while the Islamic Republic of Iran offers advice on the treatment of demonstrators.

The grievances deserve better than the spectacle.

Missing teachers, overcrowded classrooms, deteriorating buildings and anxiety about university admissions brought pupils into the streets. Then a fifteen-year-old boy suffered a catastrophic hand injury during a police operation outside a school in Lens. An argument about education became an argument about what the state was prepared to do to its children.

That change made the dispute harder to resolve. Appointing teachers and repairing classrooms can answer practical demands. Restoring confidence after a serious injury takes longer, especially once politicians and foreign governments have begun offering their own explanations of what went wrong.

The pupils remain in the photographs. Who gets to speak for them is another matter.

The grievance before the grandstanding

The protests began in September around schools in Créteil and spread through the disadvantaged suburbs of Paris before reaching other parts of France. Pupils complained of cancelled lessons, inadequate facilities, exhausting timetables and uncertainty surrounding Parcoursup, the university admissions system. At Lycée Paul-Éluard in Saint-Denis, pupils and teachers described deteriorating conditions and interruptions to teaching. These complaints preceded the attention of politicians and television crews.

A teenager approaching examinations needs no introduction to revolutionary theory to understand the consequences of an absent teacher. Frustration with a damaged classroom requires no outside encouragement either.

The promise of equal opportunity becomes rather thin when a school cannot supply the adults required to deliver an education.

By early October, demonstrations and blockades had spread widely. The Interior Ministry estimated participation on 13 October at 161,500, below the previous week’s mobilisation; organisers claimed a higher figure. That decline matters. A movement can dominate political discussion while losing people on the streets. Its capacity to sustain disruption cannot be measured by the enthusiasm of its spokespeople.

Lower turnout would nevertheless leave the government with the same complaints to answer.

France approaches its next presidential election with strained public services and little goodwill to cushion another failure. Promising money is easier than finding it. Asking for patience is unconvincing when pupils have already spent weeks waiting for lessons.

The state risks appearing most energetic when policing those who complain about its failures.

When the police become the argument

The injury in Lens gave the confrontation a terrible focus. According to the reporting cited in this analysis, a police grenade caused the boy’s injury, prompting an investigation and a suspension of the weapon’s use in the school protests. The circumstances require proper investigation. The political damage was immediate.

A wounded teenager makes an accusation visible. Parents imagine their own child. An official explanation of operational necessity must compete with an injury nobody can explain away.

Ministers cannot answer that by saying the police have a difficult job, although they plainly do. Officers must respond to violence, protect people and property, and safeguard pupils who wish to attend school. Demonstrating confers no entitlement to assault them. A government that abandoned those responsibilities would soon lose public confidence for a different reason.

Yet disproportionate force can enlarge the conflict it is meant to contain. A serious injury gives weight to the belief that the authorities see young people as a public-order problem before recognising their complaints.

Anger over a failing service then becomes an accusation against the government’s right to command trust.

Replacing a teacher addresses an identifiable failure. Persuading families to trust the authorities after a child has been gravely injured is a slower undertaking. Announcing an investigation begins that work; it does not finish it.

Proportionality and accountability have to be visible in the conduct of police operations and in what follows when something goes wrong. Scrutiny of an injury cannot be dismissed as hostility towards the Republic. Equally, the wider cause cannot provide cover for attacks on officers.

Neither responsibility disappears because the other side has behaved badly.

Mélenchon and the ownership of anger

Jean-Luc Mélenchon did not create the school protests. The evidence discussed here does not establish that La France insoumise controls them.

He has recognised their possibilities.

LFI has spent years courting younger voters through campaigns on education, inequality, discrimination and distrust of established institutions. When pupils entered the streets, the party had parliamentarians, organisers and a familiar political vocabulary ready to meet them. Its figures appeared at demonstrations and school blockades, while Mélenchon placed the grievances within his wider programme.

Political parties seek supporters. Pupils who feel ignored may reasonably welcome one prepared to listen and offer help.

But support can become a claim to speak on someone else’s behalf.

An established party has communications staff, legal knowledge, parliamentary access and relationships with broadcasters. A loosely organised student movement has fewer resources. When a television studio needs someone to explain the protest, the experienced politician is available. His account reaches people who will never hear directly from a pupil.

A demand for better teaching can gradually acquire the language and priorities of a campaign against the government. Some pupils may welcome that. Others may simply want their lessons restored.

A police-intelligence note concerning far-left involvement in Seine-Saint-Denis, examined by Le Monde, described activists distributing material and encouraging blockades. Its scope was limited. The newspaper’s examination also allowed for a less dramatic interpretation: established organisations were trying to attach themselves to a fragmented movement rather than directing it from the outset.

There is enough there to examine who is organising what. There is no basis for treating every pupil as an unwitting party recruit.

Mélenchon’s position carries risks of its own. The closer he stands to the movement, the more convincingly he can present himself as the representative of an abandoned generation. He will also face demands to answer for disorder he may neither endorse nor control.

For the pupils, the bargain deserves equal scrutiny. A champion can bring their complaints into Parliament and onto television. He also has an election to fight.

Their interests may coincide for a time. The pupils should be free to decide when they no longer do.

Tehran discovers the French schoolchild

The Iranian government arrived with a different interest in the proceedings.

On 6 October, Tehran summoned the French ambassador over allegations concerning the treatment of demonstrators. The following day, France summoned Iran’s ambassador and accused official Iranian Foreign Ministry accounts of circulating false and deliberately misleading material about the unrest. That remains the French government’s stated assessment of the information activity.

The diplomatic exchange establishes that Tehran intervened in the controversy. It provides no evidence that Iran organised the protests.

Iranian officials needed neither to invent the grievances nor to persuade pupils that cancelled lessons mattered. The dispute was already attracting attention. Tehran could present itself as a defender of young demonstrators and accuse France of betraying its professed principles.

The hypocrisy takes some overlooking. United Nations investigators documented grave abuses during the Islamic Republic’s repression of the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising, including unlawful killings, arbitrary detention and sexual violence. Its concern for French pupils should be read alongside its treatment of young Iranians.

Still, a government’s hypocrisy does not render every accusation it makes ineffective. Images of injured demonstrators retain their force even when an authoritarian state finds them useful.

France must therefore answer misleading material while dealing honestly with whatever happened on its own streets. Foreign exploitation cannot become an excuse to evade scrutiny at home.

My years in circles connected to Iran’s political establishment taught me to pay attention to its use of moral language. Officials could invoke justice with great conviction while defending conduct that denied it to their own citizens.

That experience informs my judgement. It cannot supply evidence of an operation that has not been established.

The record discussed here supports an Iranian attempt to influence the interpretation of French unrest. It does not show that Tehran financed the pupils, instructed their organisers or determined their demands. France had produced the dispute; Iran found a use for it.

Who decides when the protest has succeeded?

International attention has widened the audience for the pupils’ complaints. It has also brought arguments that reach well beyond the condition of their schools. None of this establishes a common command structure or places France on the brink of revolution.

The evidence presented here shows no rival authority claiming the power to govern, no established fracture in the security services and no coherent student organisation seeking to replace the constitutional order.

The more immediate contest concerns representation. Who can define the pupils’ demands? Who gets to announce that they have been met?

If teachers are appointed, buildings repaired and admissions concerns addressed, will the pupils regard that as a victory? Or will their campaign have acquired objectives so broad that improvements to education seem insufficient?

Those questions belong to the people who began the protest.

The government cannot prevent every attempt to appropriate their anger. It can make appropriation harder by answering complaints credibly and promptly. Accusations of manipulation are no substitute for explaining when a class will have a teacher.

A political movement owes the pupils some honesty too. If it seeks a wider confrontation with the government, it should say so rather than assume that everyone at a school blockade has endorsed its programme.

Foreign information activity requires its own evidence and its own response. Folding lawful opposition, student anger and Iranian messaging into one allegation would make for a simpler story. It would also make a serious investigation harder.

France’s young people should be able to demand improvements, reject ambitions attached to their cause and accept a settlement that makes their lives better. The Republic owes them functioning schools and lawful policing. Neither should depend on their usefulness to a party or their willingness to sustain a confrontation.

A student asking for a mathematics teacher should not be required to become a revolutionary in order to obtain one.