Catherine Perez-Shakdam

The mullahs are learning – again – that one can beat a crowd, but not indefinitely beat a people. A state founded on permanent emergency eventually discovers that emergency is its only language, and coercion cannot persuade forever. The protests convulsing Iran, met with familiar brutality, are not just street politics. They are a referendum on clerical rule, the terror apparatus sustaining it, and the international indulgence keeping it alive. Britain’s complacency in the face of Tehran's terror isn’t naïve; it’s strategic self-harm Britain’s response to foreign despotism is tepid: 'urge restraint,' 'call for calm,' 'monitor closely.

Iran’s clerical establishment has spent nearly half a century insisting – always with that brittle certainty peculiar to ideologues – that history culminated in 1979. That the Shah is a hushed embarrassment, monarchy a quaint relic, and the very notion of a crown something to be packed away with mothballs and other discarded finery. Yet politics, like biology, evolves in defiance of official catechisms. And Iran, in these final days of 2025, looks less like a regime in command than a contraption still whirring chiefly because no one has yet found the off-switch.

There are moments in the life of a democracy when ambiguity becomes complicity. On Sunday, in the heart of London, such a moment unfolded with eerie precision and devastating clarity. During the annual Quds Day rally – an event imported from the revolutionary streets of Tehran – demonstrators hoisted images of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran. In a city that prides itself on liberty, tolerance, and pluralism, the figurehead of a regime known for repression, hostage diplomacy, antisemitism, and extraterritorial assassination plots was paraded as an icon of defiance. One might ask, defiance of what? Of Zionism? Of oppression? No. Of Britain itself: its laws, its values, its sovereignty.