Does Trump’s Iran war make the UK less safe?

·42 min·2 clips

The terror threat level has five categories, and JTAC sets it by pooling GCHQ, MI6, MI5 and counter-terrorism policing intelligence.

1. The Crime Agents episode "Does Trump's Iran war make the UK less safe?" examines the domestic terror risk after a joint US-Israeli strike killed Iran's supreme leader over a weekend. 2. Hosts are crime journalist Andy Hughes and Neil Basu, a former head of UK counter-terrorism policing who says he dealt with the Salisbury poisonings and sat in Cobra meetings. 3. The central question is whether the UK's decision to let the US use British bases for "defensive" purposes makes the country a target, which Basu answers by saying geopolitics "eventually comes back to bite us." 4. Basu compares the situation to 9/11, Afghanistan and Iraq, which he says brought "terrorism, radicalization, more generations of terrorists" to Britain regardless of the UK's role. 5. Hughes cites a 35% rise in state threats and 20 foiled Iran-backed plots in 2025, and the pair check that figure against Ken McCallum's October 2025 statement; Basu calls them late-stage plots. 6. Basu describes the IRGC as a roughly 190,000-strong force, over three times the size of the British military, and says Iran targets some of the 140,000 to 150,000 Iranian exiles in London. 7. The pair explain the five threat levels from low to critical and how JTAC feeds a chain of joint MI5 and police meetings, including a weekly review called the grid. 8. Basu recalls that critical status after the 2017 Manchester bombing brought armed soldiers to Westminster and the Tower of London, freeing armed police to make arrests, and says severe lasted from August 2014 to January 2021. 9. On why the IRGC is not banned, Basu says UK terrorism law was designed for non-state actors, that prescription is largely a "political statement," and that governments were still negotiating with Iran until the Friday-Saturday strikes. 10. Suited to listeners following UK security policy and counter-terrorism.

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