Articles

How the British Left Dismisses Iran’s Uprising: The Campist Playbook, by Duncan Chapel – 8 January 2026

From Red Mole

The message arrived in a left WhatsApp group on January 6th, 2026. A member asked if anyone had “a source for what’s actually happening in Iran,” having seen reports of mass protests on Instagram. Within minutes, the replies crystallised a worldview:

“There are legitimate protests against Iran’s government but to my understanding they are vastly less than is being reported. The common belief is that there are foreign agitators organising some of the anti-government protests in the interests of the usual suspects USA and Israel.”

Craig Murray, the former diplomat turned left commentator, weighed in: “I don’t buy it. Exactly the same narrative as we got over the toppling of Assad. And what has been the result? Israel occupying southern Syria and Southern Lebanon and the new Zionist leader of Syria feted in the White House.”

Another participant agreed: “Bears very little resemblance from what I’m hearing from back home and follows the same old narrative which should now be very clearly recognized as propaganda.”

This is the campist reflex in its grassroots form. Before any serious examination of what is happening in Iran, before any engagement with the demands of Iranian workers and students, the left-wing instinct is to ask: who benefits? And if the answer might be Washington or Tel Aviv, to dismiss the entire phenomenon as manufactured.

The problem is that people are dying. The receipts exist. And the British left’s refusal to read them constitutes a political betrayal.

Ten Days that Shook Iran

The protests that erupted across Iran on December 28th, 2025 were triggered by the Pezeshkian administration’s abolition of the 28,500-toman preferential exchange rate: a subsidised system used for importing basic goods.1 The immediate effect was a tarifazo, a shock price hike that sent bread and fuel costs through the roof in a country where annualised inflation had already reached 52%.2

This was not a colour revolution manufactured in Langley. It was a bread riot with political characteristics, emerging from material conditions that no amount of “foreign agitator” rhetoric can explain away.

The numbers tell the story. By late 2024, over 57% of the Iranian population experienced malnourishment.3 By early January 2026, the rial had collapsed to 1.46 million against the dollar. Capital flight since 2018 totalled $116 billion.4 The military and security budget increased by 150% while public sector wages were adjusted by only 20%: less than half the inflation rate.5 When meat becomes a luxury and medicine prices double, people take to the streets. They do not require instructions from the CIA.

By January 6th, the tenth day of the uprising, protests had spread to over 110 cities across 27 of Iran’s 31 provinces.6 Unlike the 2022 “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement, which concentrated in major urban centres and Kurdish regions, this uprising is particularly strong in medium-sized towns and rural areas. The geographical spread indicates something the campist analysis cannot accommodate: a poly-crisis in which the regime’s capacity to impose control has fractured across the periphery.

The regime’s response tells its own story. At least 36 people have been killed, including four minors, and over 2,000 arrested.7 On January 4th, Revolutionary Guards raided the Imam Khomeini Hospital in Ilam City, using shotguns and tear gas inside the hospital grounds, smashing glass doors to drag wounded protesters directly from their beds.8 Reports indicate that approximately 800 members of Iranian-backed Iraqi Shiite militias, including Kataib Hezbollah and the Badr Organization, have been deployed to assist in suppression: evidence that the regime fears defections within its own security forces.9

The dominant slogans are not “Bring Back the Shah.” They are: “Neither Shah nor Supreme Leader: democracy and equality” and “Death to the oppressor, be it the Shah or the Supreme Leader.”10 And this one, which should give the campist left pause: “Not for Gaza, not for Lebanon, I give my life for Iran.”11 The Iranian masses are explicitly rejecting the regime’s expenditure on regional proxy wars. They are not asking for permission from the “axis of resistance.”

The Monarchist Trap

The campist left has seized on the figure of Reza Pahlavi II, the Shah’s son, as evidence that the protests serve imperialist interests. One WhatsApp participant noted seeing “photos of the Shah’s son at the Wailing Wall a couple of days ago with quotes about his love for Israel. Nothing like it to make one assume CIA/Mossad at work.”

The assumption is understandable. It is also wrong.

Trotskyist researchers have documented that much of the “pro-monarchy” element in current protests is manufactured: not by Western intelligence, but by the Islamic Republic itself. Reports indicate that plainclothes IRGC and Basij agents have been sent into crowds to chant pro-Pahlavi slogans as a divide-and-rule strategy, designed to hijack the anti-regime narrative and suggest that the only alternative to the mullahs is restoration of the old dictatorship.12 Iranians have exposed deepfake videos and recycled footage from 2022 using voice-overs to falsely suggest protesters are calling for the Shah.13

The Fourth International’s French section warns against “attempts at recuperation” by monarchist currents, describing Pahlavi’s programme as “authoritarian and ultraliberal” and noting that his supporters have manipulated protest videos.14 The regime and the monarchists share an interest in erasing the third option: independent working-class power.

The British Campist Response

How has the British left responded to this uprising? The pattern is now familiar from Ukraine, from Syria, from every case where genuine popular resistance inconveniently targets a regime that opposes Western imperialism.

Stop the War Coalition has framed the uprising primarily as a precursor to Western intervention. On January 5th, 2026, National Convenor Lindsey German published “Trump’s Return to Colonial Conquest,” which subordinates the Iranian protests entirely to the threat of American military action.

German acknowledges, in passing, that the regime is “repressive and authoritarian.” But her analytical energy is directed elsewhere: “It is up to the Iranian people to decide how to deal with that, not the discredited monarchists and their friends the imperialists.”15

Note the grammar. The Iranian people are granted agency in the abstract, then immediately disappeared. The only concrete actors in German’s framing are “monarchists” and “imperialists.” The workers facing 52% inflation, the women demanding freedom, the students with “nothing left to lose”: they exist only as a passive mass at risk of being “hijacked” by foreign powers. The possibility that they might be political subjects with their own demands and capacities does not register.

Craig Murray has been more explicit. In a December 2024 interview with The National, following the collapse of the Assad regime, Murray described the Syrian government as “flawed but pluralist.”16

Let that phrase settle. A regime that barrel-bombed Aleppo, used chemical weapons on Ghouta, and operated an industrial torture apparatus at Saydnaya prison was, in Murray’s telling, “pluralist.” The word has been evacuated of meaning; it now signifies nothing more than “opposed to Israel.”

Murray applies the same framework to Iran. The 2026 protests represent “exactly the same narrative” used to topple Assad, he argues: a “fraudulent” pretext for “Greater Israel” and US regional dominance.17 The material conditions, the economic triggers, the documented scale of mobilisation: none of this penetrates the analysis. If Western media reports it, it must be propaganda.

George Galloway has used his platform to host Prof. Seyed Mohammad Marandi, a prominent defender of the Islamic Republic, to discuss whether Washington is “preparing for confrontation.”18 His commentary focuses on the “collapse of international law” and frames the protests within the regime’s own narrative: an external attempt to “strike at the axis of resistance.”

David Miller and Chris Williamson, co-hosting Palestine Declassified on Iranian state broadcaster Press TV, have described the protests as part of a “Zionist and imperialist propaganda” effort intended to destroy the “multi-polar world.”19 Miller characterises internal dissent within the “axis of resistance” as an “epistemic alliance” against the liberal order: academic jargon deployed to dismiss hunger and repression as Western fabrication.

When Ali Khamenei claimed that “rioters” were being “incited or hired by the enemy,” Miller echoed the framing.20 The Supreme Leader’s word, apparently, requires no verification.

The More Defensible Positions

Not all British left coverage has been equally bankrupt.

[READ THE REST]

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