Across Iran, brave men and women are once again risking their freedom – and their lives – to protest against one of the most repressive regimes in the world. Their demands are clear and unambiguous: basic liberty, accountability, and an end to rule by fear. These aspirations should resonate deeply with liberals everywhere. They also have far-reaching implications beyond Iran’s borders, including for the prospects of peace in the Middle East.
The Islamic Republic of Iran is not simply a domestic authoritarian state. It is a dangerous and insidious Islamist actor whose ideology and actions have destabilised the region for decades. The protesters on Iran’s streets understand that their struggle is not only about social or economic grievances, but about ending a system that represses its own people while exporting extremism abroad.
A fundamental change in Iran would be transformative for regional stability. Tehran has consistently worked to undermine any realistic prospect of peace between Israelis and Palestinians, not out of concern for Palestinian welfare, but because reconciliation would weaken its influence. Through sustained financial, military and ideological support for Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis, Iran has fuelled conflict, entrenched rejectionism and prolonged violence.
The removal of this malign influence would not in itself resolve the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, but it would eliminate one of its most determined spoilers. Without Iranian backing, armed groups dedicated to perpetual conflict would be significantly weakened, and the political space for dialogue, compromise and co-existence would expand. A Middle East less shaped by Tehran’s revolutionary agenda would be one with greater opportunity for peace.
It is therefore notable how little visible support there has been on London’s streets for the Iranian protesters. Since the appalling Hamas terrorist attacks of 7 October 2023, large-scale demonstrations focused on the Palestinian issue have rightly or wrongly become a regular feature of public life. Whatever one’s view of those protests, the contrast is stark. Campaigns that mobilise hundreds of thousands have largely fallen silent when confronted with a movement seeking to overthrow one of the world’s most brutally repressive regimes.
This disparity risks undermining the credibility of those who claim to stand for universal human rights. Iran is a state where dissent is met with imprisonment, torture and execution; where women are beaten and killed for defying compulsory laws; and where political opposition is extinguished by force. That reality should command sustained international attention and solidarity.
Supporting Iran’s protesters is not about geopolitical point-scoring. It is about recognising that their success would remove a central driver of regional violence and hatred. A future Iran that respects its citizens would be far less likely to fund terror, spread antisemitism or deliberately sabotage peace efforts.
As liberals and internationalists, we should be clear: standing with Iran’s protesters is both a moral imperative and a strategic necessity. Their courage offers hope not only for Iran, but for a more peaceful Middle East.
* Gavin Stollar OBE is the Honorary Chair of Liberal Democrat Friends of Israel. He is a former Parish and District Councillor, Parliamentary Candidate and parliamentary aide to Rt. Hon Charles Kennedy during his first two years as Party Leader.
Follow @libdemvoice.org on Bluesky
Like us on Facebook
Subscribe to our feed
Sign-up for our daily email digest
Why non-fiction books need their indexes
Changes in status: Local Elections wrap up
What should the Liberal Democrats stand for?
Ben Wood
Ed Sanderson
Jack
Matt (Bristol)
John Grout
7 Comments
“Across Iran, brave men and women are once again risking their freedom – and their lives – to protest against one of the most repressive regimes in the world. ” Absolutely agree it is an awful regime and it would be good to see it fall. One could justifiably make the same comment about the West Bank whose Palestinian population have their lives (and deaths) controlled by a regime in Israel that is very repressive if you’re a Palestinian – except they get locked up or killed not just if they protest but just for being in the way of violent settlers.
As to the false narrative about the lack of interest by UK protesters for Palestinian rights in the situation in Iran. Those who protest for Palestine (and I include myself in that group) are generally great believers in human rights. In the peace marches they are protesting not just as a gesture of sympathy but because they want to challenge the complicity of the UK Government in the genocide still being committed by Israel and which has been recognised by our Party but not by Labour. We have not given up hope that the UK Government will respond to overwhelming public horror at what Israel has been doing and will start to put serious pressure on Israel to change its ways and prepare to end the illegal occupation. The Iran protesters have the same objective – to build pressure on their own government to change.
I share Gavin Stollar’s dismay at the appalling human right situation in Iran, but as with France and Russia (after 1789 and 1917), these are ghastly but unforeseen consequences of revolution. The oppression also reminds me of that of the previous Shah in the 1960s and 70s, on which Britain was silent and no wonder, for the US and UK had engineered the overthrow of Iran’s only secular nationalist prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh, in 1953, who promised a brighter and less dogmatic future for Iran. We also, perhaps, forget that the UK knowingly supplied Saddam with the ingredients for poison gas in 1985, used against Iranian troops and Kurds most notably at Halabja in 1988. Iranians are very conscious of Britain’s history of bullying, ever since the late 19th century. Their government is awful to its own people, but it hasn’t dropped poison gas on others, nor has it supplied the equivalent of six Hiroshima bombs, as the US and UK have helped to do in Gaza. Nor does it occupy another country, nor practice apartheid.
Gavin wonders why pro-Palestine demonstrators are not protesting about Iran. But Iran’s situation is far more akin to that of Venezuela, subject to internal tyranny, than with Palestine, where the situation is like apartheid South Africa and South West Africa (now Namibia), the latter like the Occupied Palestinian Territory, which is criminally held in subjection as the ICJ formally opined only eighteen months ago.
A major gap in David McDowall’s analysis is the absence of any reference to Iran’s deliberate use of proxies to project violence and suppress opponents beyond its borders, including in ways that have intensified suffering and repeatedly pushed the region towards wider war. This is not incidental to the discussion: it is central to why Iran’s internal protest movement matters for peace, as the article argues.
Historical wrongs by Britain and others help explain Iranian mistrust, but they do not account for the regime’s present-day choices. Decades on from 1979, Iran’s leadership actively maintains a system that combines domestic repression with external destabilisation. These are not unforeseen consequences of revolution but strategic decisions taken to preserve power and ideological influence.
By focusing almost exclusively on past Western crimes, your comment risks sidelining the agency of Iran’s rulers and, crucially, the courage of those Iranians now challenging them. The protesters are confronting not only a brutal internal order but a foreign policy that feeds conflict and legitimises repression at home. The article’s case is that supporting them is neither selective nor ahistorical: it recognises that meaningful peace depends on weakening authoritarian systems that thrive on perpetual confrontation, rather than excusing them through historical deflection.
One striking omission in John Kelly’s comment is any acknowledgement of Iran’s own role in deepening regional conflict, including through its long-standing support for armed proxies whose actions have worsened suffering for Palestinians and repeatedly provoked wider violence. The article’s argument is precisely that Iran’s internal repression and its external behaviour are linked: the same unaccountable regime that jails and kills its own citizens also exports instability beyond its borders.
The article does not deny injustice elsewhere, nor does it question the sincerity of those motivated by human-rights concerns. Its focus is narrower and more specific: Iranian protesters are confronting a regime that exercises power without consent, suppresses dissent with lethal force, and uses foreign confrontation to bolster its domestic legitimacy. That struggle deserves attention on its own terms, rather than being deflected into comparisons that leave Iran’s agency unexamined.
Iranian protesters are appealing to external governments to act for them; they are risking their lives to force change from within. Ignoring the regime’s regional conduct while highlighting only the ‘alleged’ crimes of others inadvertently mirrors Tehran’s own narrative of permanent victimhood. The article argues that supporting Iran’s protesters is both morally right and strategically important, because weakening an authoritarian, proxy-driven state would reduce repression at home and tension abroad.
No-one should doubt that the theocratic regime in Iran harms more people than just its own, but regarding its funding of proxies, perhaps it might be helpful to remember that in 2019 Benjamin Netanyahu opposed moves to cut off funding to Hamas, and assured fellow members of the Knesset that Hamas was doing a good job preventing unity among the Palestinians.
Cynics would say that while Netanyahu can’t have actually welcomed the loss of Israeli lives in October 2023, the Hamas attack was useful to his goal of annexing the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, so to if Iran’s leaders played a part in it they have a great deal to answer for.
Iran’s theocrats are, of course, not focused purely on Israel, and have ambitions to promote Shia over Sunni Islam in the wider Middle East, for reasons that, as a devout Atheist, I find hard to fathom.
However, I suspect that now the ayatollahs are so obviously hated by the Iranian people, their vicious response to protest is less about dogma and more about a simple fight for survival.
I agree with most of the article but there seems to be a bit of score settling here as well.
You will find that on international issues there will be people protesting when * our government * is complicit with tyranny, for example by selling arms to brutal regimes.
In the case of Iran, the policy of the British government is to support the protesters, something that the vast majority of British people agree with. So there is nothing to protest about as far as our government is concerned.
However if the UK supporters of the government of Israel want to protest about the regime in Iran, why don’t * they * organise the protests? If they were to do so, who knows I may come along myself.
Gavin Stollar rightly points out that Iran is a malign actor way beyond its borders. Israel is one thousand miles from Iran and has no logical reason to be its enemy, were it not for the deranged hatred of its theocratic rulers.
The Holocaust denying Iranian regime is a sponsor of terror whose tentacles are embedded in Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Houthis. The Iranian regime works to prevent any sort of peace between Israel and the Palestinians and its aim for forty plus years has been to wipe Israel off the map.
Iran through its proxies was responsible for the bombing of a Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires in 1994 which killed 85 people and prior to that, the bombing of the Israeli Embassy there in 1992 which killed 29 people. Numerous Iranian Government inspired plots to murder in our country and abroad have been exposed or foiled. Others have succeeded, like the murder of Israeli tourists in Bulgaria in 2012.
The Times’ Christina Lamb reports that since the latest protests began, the regime may have killed 16,500 people and injured over 300,000. The IRGC are said to have roamed the streets randomly machine gunning bystanders. It is a mystery to me why those who march against Israel at the drop of a hat, cannot even summon a little demonstration in sympathy with Iranian exiles in the UK.