Iran attacked: What the weekend strikes reveal and Britain's anti-migration moment

The Islamabad Memorandum was signed barely two weeks ago. Sanctions relief and $24 billion in unfrozen funds have already reached Tehran. So when an Iranian drone struck a commercial tanker in the Strait of Hormuz this weekend, the US retaliated within hours — and both sides immediately agreed to "stand down for now." Is the MoU already dead — or is Tehran simply testing how far it can push? 

Britain's anti-migration fracture has moved from political rhetoric to street-level reality — and with the 7th Prime Minister in 10 years about to take office, the question isn't whether it escalates, but where. 

This week, Clionadh and Bron break down the weekend's strikes on Iran, why the Hormuz closure matters more than the bombs, and what the MoU's fragility tells us about who really holds the cards. They look at why Tehran gains from the chaos, what the US retaliation did and didn't achieve, and why a ceasefire that was always a stopgap is now visibly in question. 

They also explore the UK's anti-migration escalation, examine how one attack spiraled into nationwide unrest, and connect the deeper thread: state failure, institutional decay, and the erosion of public trust, at home and abroad.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Friday night. There had been attacks by Iran on four different vessels, although three of those attacks had been intercepted. It's very strategic and maybe a bit like a lot of back rooms have been busy. Conflicts of interest brought to you by ACLED. Hello and welcome to another episode of Conflict of Interests. My name is Cleaner Raleigh. I'm here with the lovely Braun. And it is no longer the long hot British summer. It's now just the normal British summer.

SPEAKER_01 0:32

I know. We're actually able to sleep now, which is much, much better. But I remember last year when you were saying that you don't like aircon, all I've been thinking about for weeks is aircon.

SPEAKER_00 0:41

Well it's funny you say that because last week, especially on Thursday, I remember thinking to myself, Christ, that was such a stupid thing to say. Because it was, it was suffocating. It was That's really hot. It was brutal, is the only word for it.

SPEAKER_01 0:54

Yeah. And again, we're just not made for it here. It's not for us. Our houses hold the heat.

SPEAKER_00 0:59

Yeah. That's it. But I mean, it is only like a few days, right? So then you think it's an awful lot to do for just a few days.

SPEAKER_01 1:08

It's true. It's true. And we can't complain because it is grey and raining the rest of the time, right?

SPEAKER_00 1:12

Yeah, that's it.

SPEAKER_01 1:13

So what's on our docket today? Well, I think we better start with Iran, right? Because that's been a lot of kind of tit for tat over the weekend. So maybe you might track us back to what's happened since this memorandum that that I think you did actually say last week that it's not worth the paper it's written on. But also, I think because it was so soon that things started to fall apart, I think people don't really care as much as they would if it had gone a little bit longer and then started again because it just feels like there's not been a break at all in this.

SPEAKER_00 1:44

Well, I mean, it's very strategic and maybe a bit like a lot of back rooms have been busy. So what happened was that on Friday night, I believe, there had been attacks by Iran on four different vessels, although three of those attacks had been intercepted, and one for on the ever-lovely, which is a nice word for that, had been unfortunately successful. Looking more into it, this is what happened. Tehran and Muscat had been very closely allied for this entire conflict season, if you will. And Iran had kind of, of course, had this control of the strait. They had mined the strait, and so there was all sorts of ways in which they were reinforcing their own control of this region. And Oman seemed to be kind of going along with it, in many ways, kind of diverting its position from the rest of the GCC, the Gulf Council community, and really aligning more with Tehran. But it turns out Oman had been kind of engaged in this backroom deal around what's called a southern strategy, which is a way out of the strait, both in and out, that adheres much more to their coast than to what's called the northern route, which is the Iranian route. And it had effectively opened that up, thereby denying quite a bit of Iran's control over the strait since it was recently opened. And of course, if Iran cannot use its chokehold on the strait, both to reinforce its position, but also to potentially charge quite a bit in order for countries and their supplies to go in and out, it really kind of doesn't have a huge number of legs to stand on when it goes into trying to negotiate the actual terms of this agreement. Because the US and Iran are saying very different things about this agreement. And many of the important aspects, whether it be Iranian missile and drones, nuclear work, whether it's about support for the militias throughout the region, and also, of course, control of the strait. If that's not in Iran's favor going forward, because they can hold over these means to control the actions of the US, then Iran is looking in a very desperate position. So that's what that was about.

SPEAKER_01 3:50

When those attacks sort of took place, then Trump was asked, wasn't he, are you gonna let that happen? And then strikes resumed. It was almost like whoever was asking that question alerted him to it. Because he it felt like he was over it a little bit.

SPEAKER_00 4:04

I think he was, but they've gotten so much pushback because of this, right? The finer details of this deal, which involved really Oman and the other Gulf states rather than the US, although the US will oversee the security of this southern lane. The the Gulf states are really trying to organize towards their own collective security here, which I'm sure that Trump isn't particularly interested in. An additional point, which is interesting that happened over the weekend, is that Israel and Lebanon signed an agreement that effectively allows Israel to try to root out Hezbollah and for the Lebanese government and military to secure that territory so that Israel would not have to return to do that again. So, I mean, a very similar agreement was made several decades ago, and it led to quite a lot of trouble because Hezbollah doesn't want Lebanon to be that involved with Israel kind of ensuring each other's collective security. So that could be a sign of more trouble to come, but it is also a sign that these are entities trying to solve problems in their own neighborhoods in the ways that they can, which is a positive development. But also cut Iran out.

SPEAKER_01 5:13

Yes. Well, I was gonna say, because we were saying, weren't we, last week, that when the Iran and US talks were happening, the key players that weren't in the room that were being spoken on behalf of and and were, you know, it depended on what they do and their behavior as to who sticks to what. So so they've gone they've got two separate pieces of paper now.

SPEAKER_00 5:33

Yeah, they've got two separate ways to undermine Iran. There's different ways to end conflicts, or there's different ways to hasten the demise of, let's say, bad governments, and one of them is to decapitate, as was tried earlier. Another is to let them wilt or let them suffer through the consequences of their choices, which is the way it seems to be going now, then you don't have to take the responsibility of replacing the regime. If both of these were to go in the direction that they're intended to, Iran simply becomes a non-entity rather than something or somebody or some entity to be negotiated with.

SPEAKER_01 6:13

Then the news this morning that those peace talks have resumed. So are we still watching this space? Are we expecting there to be any more sort of exchanges in the next couple of days?

SPEAKER_00 6:21

There's some angry, angry IRGC representatives at those peace talks.

SPEAKER_01 6:27

You you mentioned there the demise of bad governments, which reminds me a little bit of what's going on at home for us at the moment. In a very different way.

SPEAKER_00 6:35

Well, it's interesting you would say that because now that a lot of the energy has been moved away from the Middle East, some interest has been started, of course, with what's going on closer to home or what's going on in the world more generally. And we had done an analysis of over a million riots and protests as a way of understanding what was happening with not conflict, but rather kind of public opinion, et cetera. And I just wrote actually the Raleigh report about this today. And it was about what are those riots and protests telling us? And what they're saying is that, you know, as we would expect, this million protests that we have from about 2020 to now tell us that labor concerns, cost of living, student concerns, they always top the protest themes that we see. And riots make up almost 12% of the overall demonstrations, which is a high amount. Elections and governance and concerns about those, especially over contested votes, have a much higher likelihood of turning into a riot than other forms or other themes. But one of the things that I found particularly interesting is that migration, ethnicity, religious issues, etc., they are becoming the fastest rising theme related to riots, but also, in fact, like a huge portion of the overall protests. So we've seen, for example, some of those examples in South Africa just this last week. And South Africa typically has a high rate of those types of protests happening almost on a year-on-year basis. They were particularly violent. And as you just said, closer to home, both in Ireland and in the UK, there has been a real rise in events that are violent, that are believed to be in some ways sparked by or the result of poor policies either on migration or on what we would call equity or identity issues within both countries. There is very high-profile violence or incidence of violence from both of those communities on the British public. And then that gets put through the media environment that creates political salience for certain groups out of those things. That tends to lead to protests and riots, which then leads to a counter by the government, often about the protests and riots, not necessarily about what they're going to do about the original issues, which is the relationship between individual free speech or freedoms and public security, which is, I think, one of the biggest issues here.

SPEAKER_01 9:06

One of the biggest issues when we're looking at what Acclaid does, right? So it's so when we're tracking the the protest and the riot activity, it's the understanding of all of the different kinds of concepts in that. So whilst so many might identify as as far right, if you sometimes look at the actual driving forces and ideology, it's it's not really a left or right issue sometimes and so on and so on. So I think certainly I've seen in the news space anti-immigration, anti-migration has been rising. The South Africa stuff that you mentioned, I haven't seen as much coverage before as I have in recent weeks, which is why I think lots of people are assuming that this is a new phenomenon for them. But then also last month in the Netherlands, I think they had a pretty high spike as well. And then, as you say, we were looking at some of the UK numbers since the latest general election, and they've been enormous. What do you think the drivers are here? What do you think we're heading towards? It doesn't seem to be getting any better.

SPEAKER_00 10:01

Certainly not better, but I would say exactly as you were mentioning, that we're collapsing a whole bunch of things together looking for a theme here. Riots and protests have risen quite a bit, especially within the West, in the last five or six years more broadly. We simply just have more. There's also been issues that have given rise to mass movements. There was the protests related to Gaza. Some of them were anti-Israeli. There's been a rise in anti-Semitic activity, there's been a rise in communities being pro-Semitic, as in coming out and saying we don't want this for our neighbors. There's been a rise in anti-Muslim activity within the UK. There has been a drastic rise in migration, and then the issue of Brexit, which we talked about last week, led to a collapse in European-based migration and a drastic rise in other countries, having quite a number of people come here from those states. There was an incredibly high rise in what's called humanitarian migration. Sometimes also part of that is asylum seeking, both legal and illegal. And what I mean by that is that the real issue for many people, both in Britain, but I think more widely, especially across Europe, where we've seen a lot of these protests, is that there are legal rights to claim asylum. And there is a huge, overwhelming number of people coming here who are claiming asylum, either not getting it or have no basis upon which to claim asylum. And those people have largely stayed in the countries where they attempted to claim this asylum. And that is causing both the system itself to be overwhelmed, but also the public system that offers people asylum rights to be overwhelmed, so provision of housing, et cetera. And also people now living kind of under the radar, underground, are also increasing. So it's been a little bit of a huge multifaceted mess. Coupled with that, in our post-COVID world, there had been what many people believed to be an institutional shift towards equity for different groups living in Britain, British people, that emphasized identity over, let's say, public goods or public security. And that has somehow become entwined with this issue about migration, even though we're often talking about British people and separately we're talking about migrants when we're dealing with both issues. But they've had such an important destabilizing effect on the country. So that's a long way of saying these are many issues that are being lumped together and this kind of extreme like othering, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 12:38

It's really polarizing. And I think the conversations that we've had over the last weeks about the driving forces of this and how it's increasingly complicated and not necessarily political, but then it spills over. The arrests in Brighton, for example, like that is about as to the streets British people get. But it's not clear what it is that they're asking for. But when you're talking about the multifaceted of what's going into it, it's also for me like there's so much missing from maybe public awareness of how the system works. Like the concept of leave to remain, we've spoken about that before. That sentence, that that phrase makes no sense. And it applies to a student as much as it does to anybody else, right? When it comes to the temporary status. And so I really also believe that people don't always know exactly what they're wanting or demanding from the government.

SPEAKER_00 13:31

Two things to keep in mind is that the people who protest and the people who riot don't necessarily represent the general opinion of the country at large or even a particularly large number. In fact, Britain has the highest rate of concern about migration of any country within the OECD. Now, as a person who is an immigrant several times over in different countries, I'm a bit worried, I guess, about how people talk about immigration here and that change in the last few years. In the States, it's always been that there's always this kind of constant fight about justifying migration, despite the fact that, you know, almost everybody is there because of migration to some degree at some point in in life. But what I would say in Britain is that there is a sense that there is a real concern here and that the government, again, this comes back to people believing that the government in various ways has failed in its duty to either police borders or to process asylum quickly or to be fair to people they have granted asylum to, or to remove those that they haven't granted asylum to, or balance public security and individual rights. Now, separately, there's a concern that the institutions themselves have been overtaken by a form of bias against what people on the right, or increasingly even people on the center right, will call white Britons, right? And that's a really worrying, pervasive concept at the moment, which is, as you said, it's all about division. So you're somehow now different from your neighbor or the people you work with. And it that's been very debilitating, I think, for the British public consciousness. But the response has been from the government to leave some aspects of the European Human Rights Act to revise, the Equalities Act within Britain, and to have a wholesale revision of the rules around refugee and asylum status. And all of those are being kind of treated like they are right-coded, but they they have widespread support amongst the populations. You know, I would say that the population that tends to not want this are typically considered either quite far left or leaning in that direction, whereas the majority of the country kind of want the government to have laws that are then followed, which is not too much to ask, I think, if you're a citizen.

SPEAKER_01 15:54

No, well, you'd hope not. And so then towards the end of last week, we were hearing a lot, weren't we, about the new kind of captain and legal routes that they were hoping to put some more effort into in a kind of Canada style. Do you think that would make a a difference to how people understand this? Do you think that the the message of the complexity of this and it's not as simple as them and us? I think British people have kind of resorted to form here and they are treating it a little bit like a football tournament. It's not your team, my team, and they're all separate. There's there's lots of different layers.

SPEAKER_00 16:24

Yeah, I mean, I say this now not as a conflict expert, but really as a person living as an immigrant in a country. I will say that immigrants are the most conservative people when it comes to immigration rules. And what I mean by that is people who have followed the process to get in someplace often really believe that the process should be followed and that you shouldn't benefit those who did not follow the process. There is an asylum process, there is an immigration process. And the question is whether or not there can be the ability of the government to have an orderly process, not just in Britain, but in Denmark, in Ireland, you know, in Canada, wherever the case, right? There is also biases amongst certain governments about it. So, for example, just on Friday, there was a Supreme Court ruling in the states that I believe overturned a rule they voted with the Trump administration, who wanted a rule overturned that both Syrian and Haitian people would be protected from deportation, right? So that was a bias in favor of Syrian and Haitian people so that they could avoid some of the believe me, the quite complicated US migration rules. Don't know if anybody listening has tried to migrate to the US. It is not straightforward. But they overturned that. Many immigrants would have seen that as a bias in favor of certain communities, right? And think that this is now a fairer process. But it's considered by others as unfair because these people no longer have this protected route, right? In Britain, there are people with protected routes to come in. There is also what you mentioned earlier was a new rule that you could be sponsored. In fact, sponsorship is often a very, very common way for people to migrate. For example, a workplace could sponsor people. That happens all the time in the state. That is, I think, going to be more common. But Shabana Mahmood, who in the UK is the person overseeing the home office, overseeing these changes, she is getting quite a lot of pushback, even from her own party, in how she wants to make some of these rules stick or be more aligned with, I think, what European partners are doing with regard to migration. One of the things I really want to emphasize here is that almost everybody is happy with migrants. They don't have a problem with the notion that your neighbor might be from a different country. What people have increasingly said that they have an issue with and why they might support a more extreme political party or even go to the streets in terms of a protest. What they have an issue with is widespread demographic change that is very sudden and that they have not been a party to. They have not agreed upon, you know, a slow matriculation, for example, within their neighborhood, or they have not been able to have sufficiently good homes and jobs for people who are moved some places. In Ireland, this has been particularly bad in that the Irish government has sought to move sometimes hundreds of unaccompanied young men to very small villages where all of a sudden these people who do not know anything about Irish culture, they cannot recognize or engage with the people who live there are suddenly the majority, right? You can't impose that upon people who've lived there for generations and have their own communities.

SPEAKER_01 19:40

Because it's not about where that new what would be the majority is from. It's not about who they are. It's about the the way that the community is set up originally, right? And so I think that was one of the claims that they were making about the sponsorship, is that it would mean communities would be involved in who might we be able to have here and who would add to this community and all of those things, which is obviously the positive side that lots of people talk about.

SPEAKER_00 20:03

Yeah, and many people will speak really, really positively of, for example, Ukrainian migration. When people in Ireland, for example, spoke positively of it, that was also seen as a racist statement because they were worried about having a huge number of Eritreans or Pakistani men, but they were okay with having Ukrainians. And that's because Ukrainian people came with families, so they could integrate into the school and the community and become involved in the overall fabric of that society in a way that unaccompanied young men struggle to, not only in new places, but also in their own. So it's, I think that the worst reading of this is not the correct one. But I do think that calling those people racists pushes them into the arms of the right and maybe the further right, because you have to take these concerns about demographic change seriously in order to get solutions, which everybody wants. Everybody wants solutions to it, right? The riots and protests are not a solution. They're really a sign, you know, potentially a narrow sign, but increasingly it looks like they're a publicly supported sign of immense frustration, especially with how the migration system has been distorted over the last 10 years or so, let's say. The other issue, which you were talking about about the failed state or the broken Britain, that that is different enough, but there's ties into it, especially when it feels like the institutions of the state are no longer responsive to British concerns, people who live here and their concerns. That is also being taken by the right, especially the far right and the furthest right, as being something they want to capitalize on.

SPEAKER_01 21:41

And so it's interesting when you say that, you know, branding that with a kind of racist badge pushes people further in that direction. Because I think there was similar lines of conversation when we were talking about Charlie Kirk all that all those months ago, because he was very vocal, wasn't he, about EDI or DI, wh however people refer to that. And That caused a lot of issues in the UK because I think the the scope that he had or the audience that he was able to reach online was hearing that and starting to panic. But of course, it that quota doesn't happen in in businesses based in this country. So you can't apply the same theories. But those sort of voices were driving up that sort of outrage at some of these issues that are then being blended with very real ones.

SPEAKER_00 22:24

Yeah, I mean, what I guess I would say to that is like most people consider themselves fair and they don't necessarily want to have to prove it through metrics or, you know, KPIs dictated by others about their engagements with others. And they don't consider you a better or worse citizen depending on which religion you follow or which race you are or whatever the case. They don't do that. And so there's been a real backlash against that type of institutionalization of equality and diversity and all the rest of it. And, you know, some of its excesses are well publicized and considered to be fodder, you can say, for getting people to take like a bit of a look, let's say, at the right. But you know, Kemi Badnock in Britain has done a really phenomenal job of navigating these very tricky waters by emphasizing fairness for everybody over any sort of institutional bias that would have been the focus point of the last few years. So I would highly recommend listening to what she says. In the Broly report this month, I've got some links to some of the things that she was mentioning, and they're yeah, they're very good.

SPEAKER_01 23:31

I could listen to her all day.

SPEAKER_00 23:33

She's got a beautiful voice.

SPEAKER_01 23:35

Yeah, she has. And the the way that she is with words, I love it. Um, I don't know. I mean, again, this you've spoken as uh a conflict expert and as an immigrant. I'm gonna speak as a journalist. I spent a lot of time with a guy called Sam when I was at working around uni's, and he was a student at Warwick Uni because he had been given a sanctuary scholarship. But Sam, he arrived in the UK on a small boat and fled the Taliban from Afghanistan. And it was, I mean, just I could listen to him as well all day. So his his dad was a politician and he'd gone missing, and he got his sister and his mother to the other side of the border, and then they were like, you need to get further away. So the trip that he took kind of to get to the UK was unbelievable to hear about. But what was really interesting for me is what happened once he got here. He was working with um the Red Cross. At that point, he was asking whether he could have a job and he wasn't able to have a job, so what could he do? So he started volunteering for them and then found out about the sanitary scholarship. But there was such a huge period of time where he felt like he really couldn't contribute if he wanted to, and that went into his time as a as a student then. And so what he ended up doing was volunteering at local asylum hotels and teaching English because he wanted to kind of encourage the integration. And so when you hear extreme stories on one side, you don't always hear all of them. And the the kind of mass painting with the same brush in both positions on on this argument, whatever your stance, is not actually addressing the root of the issue at all, is it?

SPEAKER_00 25:07

I would agree with that. And just also, you know, people both consider themselves fair, but I think people are typically quite generous. And if given the opportunity to help somebody who's been in such a desperate situation, I can't think of anybody who wouldn't take that opportunity out. I think that the sense that it became highly institutionalized, closed off, unknown, and then obscured because the numbers were getting far higher than what the government in this case could deal with, that contributed to this notion that there was something wrong with it. Because the the public were simply being kept from engaging with this issue, both saying how much they wanted and how much they didn't want, but also to be offering other support. You know, not allowing asylum seekers to work, even when you have issued them with asylum status, is a really awful situation that I think every country has to deal with. Some countries have done that better than others, but that is one of the worst outcomes for everybody involved, which is this notion that you've created a dependency and you've not allowed people to kind of get on with their lives, which is the reason that they came in the first place.

SPEAKER_01 26:13

Yeah, no, absolutely. And then the the kind of triggering moments that that people are responding to are, of course, the reports on the crime rates, the the volume of population versus crime against women and girls is one that comes up quite a lot because the proportionality of who is behind those is skewed. It just is. I don't know whether the people taking to the streets and being so vocal and using various terms to to uh attribute to different bits fully understand what they're talking about or what they're asking for.

SPEAKER_00 26:44

Yeah, I mean, I would agree with that wholeheartedly. It's just frustration many of the times, right? And frustration can be uh seized upon, especially by parties outside of the government, to shape their message and recruit more. But equally, it's a continuing sign that the government in Britain at the moment was just woefully underprepared for the policies it itself had put in place and their consequences.

SPEAKER_01 27:05

No, absolutely. So, okay, what are we looking at then next? We've obviously got one eye on Iran a little bit, and then maybe some more fallout to the plans with what they're gonna do about this.

SPEAKER_00 27:16

Ooh, I really don't know. In the US, now it's about to be July 4th. You know, there's always so much going on. Like what happened in Venezuela, for example, has taken up quite a bit of the focus within the US. And it's a really kind of make or break time, I think, for the Trump administration to prove that they are able to help a country that they have forcibly removed the leader. So we'll see how that goes and whether or not that leads to instability. July 4th, as I mentioned, is coming up. I am worried that the US is ripe for a moment of destabilization from any one of the nefarious groups that might be seeking to do that. So I certainly hope that that week goes by without major incidents in a course Iran. Although I will say that there's the Pakistan-Afghanistan situation, it kind of goes like that week on week, but it it's it's having a particularly dangerous point at the moment.

SPEAKER_01 28:10

I think the context sometimes goes missing, doesn't it? Because it's so there's so many different chapters. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 28:16

Yeah, there's a lot of chapters. That's a nice way to put it. So maybe we'll catch up about that next week. That would be lovely. Thank you very much.

SPEAKER_01 28:25

You've been listening to Conflicts of Interest with Professor Cleaner Raleigh, brought to you by ACLED, the world's leading source of political violence and protest data. Subscribe so you never miss an episode, and follow us on socials for updates in the meantime.