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CBS News
05-05-2025
- CBS News
U.K. police arrest 7 Iranians in what government calls biggest counterterrorism operations in years
London — British counterterrorism police officers arrested four Iranian men over an alleged plot to attack an unspecified target, and three others over an undefined national security threat, London's Metropolitan Police said Sunday. The government called the operations the biggest "counter-state threat and counterterrorism" in years. The Met, as London's police force is often known, said five men between the ages of 29 and 46 were detained Saturday in various parts of England under the Terrorism Act on suspicion of preparing "a terrorist act." Four are Iranian citizens and the nationality of the fifth was still being established. Police said the attack plot was targeting a single location that was not being named "for operational reasons." They said people at the premises in question were being given "advice and support." All the suspects were being questioned at police stations and had not been charged as of Monday morning. Police said they were searching several properties in London, the Manchester area in northwest England, and Swindon in western England. Police forensic officers search a house in Rochdale, in northwest England, on May 4, 2025, as London's Metropolitan Police said five men, including at least four Iranian nationals, were arrested in pre-planned counterterrorism raids in the Greater Manchester area, Swindon, and London, as part of an investigation into "a suspected plot to target a specific premises." Ryan Jenkinson/Getty Forensic officers in blue overalls were seen at a house in Rochdale, Greater Manchester, where one of the men was detained. Three of the arrests took place in the Greater Manchester area, one in London and one in Swindon. Rochdale resident Kyle Warren told Britain's Sky News that he "heard a massive bang" and saw "20 or 30 police with guns" drag a man from a house in his neighborhood. "We've seen a man getting pulled out from the back, basically got dragged down the side entry and thrown into all the bushes and then handcuffed," he said. Video shot by bystanders and obtained by CBS News' partner network BBC News showed armed police removing a man from a home in Rochdale, while another clip showed a man being dragged through a street in Swindon with his hands bound and covered in plastic bags. The BBC said military personnel took part in the Rochdale arrests. An eyewitness in Swindon told the BBC they saw six men go into a cafe and order coffee and donuts before following a suspect who had been inside out of the business, where they "jumped on him." Commander Dominic Murphy, head of the Met's Counter Terrorism Command, said police were still working to establish a motive, "as well as to identify whether there may be any further risk to the public." Police forensic officers search a house in Rochdale, England, May 4, 2025. Ryan Jenkinson/Getty Separately, three other Iranian men, aged 39, 44 and 55, were arrested in London on suspicion of a national security offense as part of an unrelated investigation, police said. Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said "these were two major operations that reflect some of the biggest counter-state threat and counterterrorism operations that we have seen in recent years." Britain's domestic intelligence service, MI5, has warned of a growing threat from attackers linked to Tehran. Cooper said "the ongoing investigation is immensely important" to determine whether the arrests were connected to the Iranian state. "This reflects the complexity of the kinds of challenges to our national security that we continue to face," said Cooper. MI5 chief Ken McCallum said in October that his agents and police had tackled 20 "potentially lethal" plots backed by Iran since 2022, most aimed at Iranians in the U.K. who oppose the country's authorities. He said at the time that there was a risk "of an increase in, or broadening of, Iranian state aggression in the U.K." if conflicts in the Middle East deepened. In March 2024, Pouria Zeraati, a presenter at a Farsi-language television station critical of the Iranian government, was stabbed in the leg outside his home in London. Two men were later arrested in Romania and charged over the attack. The U.K.'s official terror threat level stands at "substantial," the middle of a five-point scale, meaning an attack is likely.
New Statesman
22-04-2025
- Business
- New Statesman
Who killed industrial Britain?
A view of British Steel's Scunthorpe site. Photo by Ryan Jenkinson / Getty Images. This article was originally published as an edition of the Green Transition, our weekly newsletter on the economics of net zero. To see more editions and subscribe, click here. When he was Prime Minister, Boris Johnson caused a minor stir (no pun intended) by suggesting that Margaret Thatcher should be commended for having given Britain a head start on net zero by closing down the coal mines. It was a characteristically flippant, tongue-in-cheek remark from a PM that had recently scored a historic victory by taking chunks out of Labour's Red Wall, not least in former coalfield constituencies. But it presaged a debate that has only accelerated since, and one that has now reached fever pitch with the government's effective nationalisation of the Scunthorpe steelworks to rescue the UK's virgin steelmaking capabilities: who, or what, killed industrial Britain? There are, roughly speaking, three schools of thought that have emerged. First, a net zero-sceptic crowd, which now includes Kemi Badenoch, places blame squarely on climate policy, and even on one individual in particular as its lead evangelist: Ed Miliband. That analysis seems a little unfair given that industrial manufacturing's share of total UK economic output and employment has been in decline since roughly the 1970s, when young Ed was merely a nipper. But the agenda is being pushed relatively successfully in the right-wing press and broadcast media. It says that climate policies and renewable subsidies are adding costs to energy bills, making the UK uncompetitive for energy-intensive industries like steel, glass, ceramics, chemicals, cement, and much else besides. Countering this tendency, we have a second school that responds with the following: UK manufacturing and energy-intensive industries are indeed being hampered by sky-high energy costs, this much is true, and agreed by all parties. But, they say, these high costs are a result of Britain's over-reliance on fossil fuels, specifically gas. Bringing down prices requires a rapid transition to low-carbon, cheaper, home-grown forms of energy production, namely renewables. This is the government's position. And gas prices have certainly risen dramatically, particularly since sanctions against Moscow cut off supplies from the world's biggest natural gas exporter. It is only since Putin's invasion that UK and European prices have begun to diverge significantly. Yet while this gas price spike has had an adverse impact, the anti-net zero grouping does have a point, in that a significant proportion of customer bills are made up of renewable subsidies, carbon taxes, and grid balancing and transmission costs. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Even net zero advocates admit this much. Shaun Spiers, executive director at the Green Alliance, says 'there are policy costs added to bills – the green levy and so on… but it's important to say in terms of industry costs that the policy cost of industry's energy bills is lower than it is in, say, Germany'. Re-wiring Britain's electricity grid will cost money. We have an over-centralised system set up to accommodate a small number of large, coal-fired power stations. A renewable grid requires a new, more decentralised network, with countless new connections. That won't come cheaply and is currently being delivered through a combination of public and private investment (which, yes, is linked to your bills). 'There is definitely an initial outlay', says Spiers. 'There is obviously a cost in infrastructure.' But he hastens to add, 'there are lots of jobs and growth opportunities one can leverage from that as well'. And that's the promise of the so-called green industrial revolution: a regional jobs and growth boom with climate policy as the catalyst, as turbines, solar panels, pylons and cables are produced and laid in every corner of the country. Once that grid is in place, bills will start to come down. So, is net zero destroying British industry? Not really, even though there's a kernel of truth to claims that climate policy is adding to costs, and that a total re-jig of the UK's electricity grid will require significant amounts of capital investment. But what about the other side of the debate? Is our reliance on costly gas imports killing industry? Well, again, not really. This is only part of the story. As mentioned, British heavy industry has been in decline for a long time. The more complex, nuanced reality goes back to Boris Johnson's Thatcher jibe. For it was Mrs T who turbocharged the decline of manufacturing Britain, and not, as Johnson jokily claimed, because she was an enthusiastic eco-warrior. It was because she was integral to the formation of a political consensus that her Conservative Party heartily promoted. That consensus basically stated: it doesn't matter where goods are produced, we should buy them as cheaply as possible; it doesn't matter who makes things, the market and the price mechanism should dictate our decisions; it doesn't matter that we're losing manufacturing jobs, the high-value-added future is in services and the 'knowledge economy', and so why should we subsidise British production when we can import commodities from elsewhere? And that's the third school of thought, which the Green Transition is bravely getting behind. It's not net zero, or even the post-Ukraine gas price spike, that's killing industrial Britain. It's an economic philosophy that's now coming apart at the seams, one that says globalisation is an unalloyed good, that it doesn't matter if the Chinese own our steel plants or that we rely on the kindness of strangers to keep the lights on. And that's the philosophy that needs to change. Related
