Forty Years On

Were human rights in Iran better before the Revolution? Would they be better under any of the potential alternatives to the present regime?

For example, would they be better under John Bolton's preferred PMOI/MEK, which has a reasonable claim to be the weirdest political cult in the world?

Are human rights better in our existing allies in the region than they are in Iran? For example, are they better in Saudi Arabia?

Iran is allied to Russia, to China, and to the side that has for all practical purposes won in Syria. Sanctions or no sanctions, it continues to sell oil to India. Europe is even now devising ways of rendering the American sanctions regime irrelevant. Some isolation.

Now we just need to secure the release of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe. As the Member of Parliament for North West Durham, I would board a plane to Tehran and simply refuse to leave without her. But she really does not have that long to wait.

As his MP in Glasgow, George Galloway once got Hassan Rouhani a council house. Yes, really. They go back a very long way. If George boarded a plane to Tehran and simply refused to leave without Nazanin, then he could bring her home.