Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action: Iran

Steve McCabe Excerpts

Tuesday 19th October 2021 Westminster Hall

[Steve McCabe (Birmingham, Selly Oak) (Lab)]

I congratulate the right hon. Member for Preseli Pembrokeshire (Stephen Crabb) on securing this excellent debate. It is good to see you in the Chair, Ms Nokes. I acknowledge the right hon. Gentleman’s comments about Sir David Amess, who I worked closely with on Iran. I miss him, too, and I am reminded of the wisdom and eloquence that he would bring to a debate such as this.

I have always been sceptical about the JCPOA because I feared that the Iranian regime could not be trusted to comply. Reluctantly, I came to accept the view that at its best it might buy a decade in which we could hope to slow Iran’s potential for developing a nuclear weapon, while the search for a better political alignment across the middle east could be pursued.

I am not sure about the wisdom of the Trump presidency’s decision to withdraw from the deal unilaterally, but I do think there were already many questions at that time about Iran’s compliance. The deal, as we have heard, involved a 15-year period over which it said it would reduce its stockpile of uranium and limit its work on centrifuges. We now know that by May 2019, and probably earlier, it had decided to lift the limits on its stockpile of enriched uranium, and that by September 2019, and probably earlier, it had also decided to lift limits on the research and development of centrifuges. By August of this year the IAEA was able to verify that Iran has produced enough enriched uranium metal for some to believe a bomb is imminent.

We are now in a position where Iran says it wants to resume talks on the JCPOA, but appears to be doing everything it can to prevent any real progress while continuing its nuclear weapons programme. Since the summer of this year we have also witnessed, as we heard earlier, the coming to power of Ebrahim Raisi, the mass murderer behind the massacre of political opponents and many others back in 1988 who refused to accept the regime’s extremism. It seems almost certain that he has lost none of his ambition to purify Iran of internal dissent and bolster the position of the IRGC, the brutal and sinister Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

We know Iran is tempted back into talks because of the dire state of its economy and the fear of the impact of further sanctions. We must not give too much too soon and we should be wary of the advantage of a new JCPOA that once again fails to tackle the role of Iran in producing ballistic missiles, and fails to address the regional threats resulting from its arming of Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis in Yemen.

There will also come a point where any gains from the JCPOA will become meaningless if Iran’s research and development passes the threshold beyond which the original agreement was designed to hold it. I do not say that our Government should not continue to work towards a new agreement, but I hope we will make it clear that it does not exclude international bodies from pursuing Raisi for his crimes against humanity, and it must be clear this time that the regime’s enrichment programme must be stopped completely and its nuclear sites closed. There must be verifiable inspections anytime, anywhere. It must also address regional activities and ballistic missiles, and it cannot ignore the behaviour of Iran when it comes to democracy, human rights or hostage taking, like Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe. It cannot ignore the regime’s view that Israel does not have a right to exist.

Our Government should not agree to any conditions that seek to protect the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which I believe should be proscribed in its entirety under our terrorist legislation, as previously recommended by the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee.