Iran's hidden network of influence in Britain
Lord Walney joins the show to discuss his new 100-page report, Undue Influence
There’s a line from our conversation with Lord Walney today that’s been ringing in my head since we stopped the recording…
He was describing what happens when evidence of Iranian-linked extremism gets brought to the Charity Commission — the regulator responsible for overseeing charitable organisations in England and Wales. And he relayed a conversation that United Against Nuclear Iran, a research group, had privately with Commission staff. The response, paraphrased: We just don’t really want to get into this because we’re young civil servants. If we get branded as Islamophobes, that’s going to be very difficult for us to get on.
It’s the kind of calculation that, when multiplied across thousands of officials in dozens of institutions over the course of years, produces a system that looks away.
Walney’s report, Undue Influence, documents a network of as many as 30 charities, cultural centres, and religious institutions in Britain with alleged ties to the Iranian regime. He examined 10 in depth. Eight are under active investigation by the Charity Commission. All continue to operate. One of them — the Islamic Centre of England — had a governing document that literally required a trustee be appointed by Iran’s Supreme Leader. A former Iranian Deputy Minister of Culture described it to Walney as a kind of headquarters coordinating the wider network. (The Centre denies this.)
None of these organisations are accused of involvement in terrorism or assassination plots. But his argument is that the violent threat and the influence network are, as one analyst he cites puts it, “two sides of the same strategy.” The charities embed the regime’s worldview. They confer legitimacy. They provide access to decision-makers, to universities, to communities. And they create an environment in which the harder edge of Iranian operations — the 20-plus plots MI5 tracked in a single year — can flourish.
I’d encourage you to listen to the full conversation and read the report yourself. Walney walks through the specifics with real clarity, and Andrew — who raised concerns about several of these organisations directly with the Met Police and the Charity Commission during his time in Parliament — brings the kind of firsthand frustration that makes the regulatory failure feel concrete.
But what I want to explore here isn’t the specifics of the network. It’s the thing that allowed the network to operate unchallenged for so long.
The fear of being accused of racism — or more precisely, of Islamophobia — has become one of the most consequential forces in British public life.
Sir William Shawcross, who chaired the Charity Commission between 2012 and 2018, told Walney directly that there was a “real nervousness about talking about suspicions of Muslim organisations” — a “widespread fear amongst police, amongst schools, the headmasters and others of being accused of being racist.”
Walney expanded on this in our conversation. He described how Islamist actors — a small minority, far removed from the lives of most British Muslims — have weaponised the accusation. Anyone who scrutinises extremism gets accused of promoting a conspiracy theory, of suggesting that all Muslims are bad. And that accusation, Walney argued, has had a “really significant chilling effect on the willingness of political leaders and then also civic public life” to engage with these issues.
Andrew made a point on the show that I think cuts to the heart of it. He asked: can you imagine a scenario in which neo-Nazi organisations were allowed to operate as registered charities, poisoning the minds of young white kids, and regulators just looked the other way? The answer is obviously no. That would be shut down immediately. But when the extremism comes wrapped in religious identity, the institutional response is paralysis.
And it’s not because officials are sympathetic to extremism. Most of them are, as Walney put it, “generally quite tolerant. They want to be seen as decent people. They genuinely don’t want to offend people. They’re not experts on Islam.” So when someone stands up and angrily accuses them of Islamophobia, their instinct is to recoil. To back off. To find a reason not to pursue it.
That instinct is human. It’s understandable. And when it becomes institutional culture, it’s devastating.
This isn’t only a UK problem. In Canada, we’ve had our own version of this dynamic — though it’s publicly played out more around Chinese foreign interference. The Hogue Commission exposed how officials at multiple levels of government were aware of interference operations and either failed to act or actively chose not to escalate, partly because of sensitivities around how interference allegations would land in diaspora communities.
The pattern is the same even if the actors are different. A liberal democracy’s openness — its freedom of association, its charitable sector, its instinct toward tolerance — becomes the vector for the threat. And the institutions designed to protect that openness freeze up precisely because the threat is wrapped in the identity politics that those institutions have been trained to navigate with maximum caution.
Walney made an interesting observation about why the centre and the left of British politics struggle with this more than the right. He said they’re “much more comfortable at talking about right-wing extremism because it largely involves white people and a culture for which they sort of feel familiar with and able to speak out against.” Islamist extremism requires a different kind of confidence — the confidence to say, as a white, non-Muslim official, no, I’m not an Islamophobe, and you’re the one who’s wrong about these extremists. That takes thick skin. Most people in public life don’t have it, or don’t want to spend it on this fight.
What makes the timing of all this particularly charged is that the UK government just introduced a new definition of anti-Muslim hostility. Walney was clearly concerned about it. He gave the government some credit for walking back the worst elements of earlier proposals and enshrining freedom of speech protections on paper. But his worry — and Andrew’s — is about how it gets applied in practice.
The risk isn’t that the definition itself is extreme. The risk is that institutions with knowledge gaps and risk-averse cultures will default to the most cautious possible interpretation. A health trust director, a police chief, a school head — they get a new definition, they’re not experts in Islam, and they think: I’ll just apply this as broadly as possible so no one can accuse me of anything. That’s how a well-intentioned policy becomes a tool for silencing exactly the kind of scrutiny Walney’s report calls for.
So where does this leave us?
The UK government has announced new powers for the Charity Commission — the ability to shut down charities promoting extremism, to disqualify trustees convicted of hate crimes, to speed up investigations. That’s welcome. Walney said so himself.
But the tools aren’t the problem. The tools have never been the problem. As Andrew pointed out, successive governments have stood at podiums after terrorist attacks and said “this can’t go on, we have to change.” And then nothing changed. Not because the laws were insufficient, but because the institutional culture — the career incentives, the fear of accusation, the sheer discomfort of the work — made the path of least resistance look a lot like the path of doing nothing.
Walney put it well: “Even when at the top the political will has been there... there was nothing that got close to how do you drive change successfully through a large organisation or multiple large organisations that have their own cultures embedded in them.”
That’s the real challenge. Not writing new legislation. Not publishing new definitions. But building the institutional confidence to actually use the powers that already exist — and the ones being created — without flinching when the accusations come. Because they will come. They always do.
Canada proscribed the IRGC. The EU proscribed the IRGC. The US did it years ago. Britain still hasn’t. And until it does, the Charity Commission will keep operating in a framework where it can only act on governance failures and compliance breaches — not on ideological alignment with a regime that has plotted assassinations on British soil.
The fear of being called a name kept the door open for decades. The question now is whether anyone has the nerve to close it.