UK Civil Servants Revolt Over “Israel’s Genocide”
Union bosses have told UK civil servants to stop helping Israel with “potential war crimes” in Gaza and demanded the Government give them legal immunity from liability under “international law”. The Telegraph has more.
The Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union, which represents almost 200,000 civil servants across Whitehall, has advised members to “stop all work within the civil service and its related areas which in any way potentially enables acts of genocide”.
It has pledged to support civil servants who refuse to work on Israel and demanded that mandarins be given legal immunity for aiding potential “war crimes”.
Union chiefs want an urgent meeting with the Cabinet Office and have written to officials to “seek assurances that members are protected from legal liability for any acts carried out by the state of Israel”.
The move comes just days after about 300 Foreign Office officials were told to consider resigning after sending a letter to David Lammy, the Foreign Secretary, warning against “complicity” in Israel’s actions.
The letter cited the killing by Israeli forces of 15 aid workers in March and the blockade on aid into Gaza as examples of concerns.
Sir Olly Robbins and Nick Dyer, two of the most senior mandarins in the Foreign Office, suggested that the complainants step down if they disagreed with the Government’s policy.
The response was said to have been met with fury in Whitehall, with one insider telling the BBC that there was a “deep sense of disappointment that the space for challenge is being further shut down”.
In a letter sent on Friday to Cat Little, the Cabinet Permanent Secretary, the PCS union said the Government’s response to the concerns raised this week by civil servants was “dismissive and inadequate”.
It argued that the Government “may be putting UK civil servants at risk of liability for crimes committed by the Israeli state and placing them in a position of conflict given their obligations under the civil service code”.
Fran Heathcote, the General Secretary of the PCS, said the union was “extremely concerned that the Government continues to ignore our members’ concerns that they may be held liable under international law for the war crimes being committed daily by the state of Israel”.
Civil servants really throwing their weight around now.
Worth reading in full.
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Fire the anti-semites.
Fire most of Whitehall – they must not be political and must do as they’re instructed by government. It’s what they’re for.
Looking at the history of PCS it does seem that it’s an overtly left wing political organisation. The last general secretary was a rabid leftie. I think it’s time to have a sort out. Lefties love banning things, it’s time to adopt their radical policies and ban them before they destroy the country entirely.
It’s almost certainly not the bulk of the Civil Servants themselves but their union’s bosses.
In my own experience some union bosses are more concerned about their own political career progression than the wellbeing of their members. Doesn’t prevent them winding their members up over some confected concern – though I note that the article does not mention similar concerns about “potential war crimes” by other governments or terrorist groups. What happened to the Civil Service ideals of impartiality?
Destroyed by the runt Blair and his Liar-in-Chief Alistair Campbell.
Yes, they were people who can only be described by a word I can’t use. But we have to give some credit to the Tories. The Scotsmen got into power because John Major completely screwed everything up. When people realised what a bunch of absolute a…….s New Labour were they elected the heir to Blair Cameron, followed by the utterly hopeless May, Johnson etc. They all did such a bad job that people voted with their feet and let the current bunch of Commie (expletives) in by accident.
The post war damage done by lefties is continuing apace. just look around the world, Cuban missile crisis caused by JFK, Vietnam war, Johnson, Ukraine coup, caused by Obama and Irish Joe Biden, continuing the policies set in motion by Clinton being of course advised by Madeline Albright and influenced by Zbigniew Brzezinski. All left or left leaning, the latter two of course having a visceral hatred of the Russians when Russia was on its knees!
There are still people around who think these people were nice. I despair.
I do not want my taxes being used to pay these people any more, get shot of them, I do not pay them to bring their politics and ideology to work, do the job properly or get out.
Yes.
Do NOT bring your whole self to work.
are we paying 200000 of these idiots?
If they genuinely believe they are helping a genocide, resign! If they stay in their jobs, with or without immunity, it isn’t the moral thing to do.
If they don’t believe it, then they have nothing to worry about.
Back in Egypt with the deluded numpties, this clip has specific comedy value because the guy is having a meltdown via a translator as the police look on, decidedly unbothered. The fact he’s Welsh provides bonus points.
”A Mocha Choca Latte drinking, bowl headed Hamas loyalist begs the not at all arsed Egyptian militia to let him “march for gaza”.
I’m shocked this hasn’t worked.
He might want to consider the big guns and show the armed forces of Egypt’s authoritarian state the flags in his twitter bio, and if all else fails call them far right and racist.”
https://x.com/TezTruth81/status/1933815007784939555
Wow, that video really is puke inducing.
If Fred Flintstone was a Welshman…😬
The state of Israel cannot commit any crimes because there’s no legal authority which could prosecute it for anything. At worst, it could be argued that something which was done in the name of Israel would violate the terms of some treaty Israel agreed to be bound by. This means that Fran Heathcote is either ignorant or lying. But that’s not exactly surprising for a union boss trying to interfere with political decisions and actions of the legitimate government despite he has absolutely no mandate for that.
Fran Heathcote elected with less than 11,000 votes on a membership of about 190,000. She’s less representative of her membership than Labour (Commies) are of the country.
This doesn’t really matter. She’s the elected head of some private club which has the exact same special political rights as some local association for the preservation of black field slugs, namely, none at all. That her private opinion happens to be a copy of the lies invented by Starmer & Hermer to justify the Chagos deal, namely, that the United Kingdom is not a sovereign state and that its private citizens must bow to so-called international courts doesn’t improve anything, either.
From Caitlin Johnstone’s substack: Israel’s Own Actions Invalidate All Pro-Israel Arguments I didn’t make Israel be this way. It’s not my fault that this is what the Zionist project looks like. You can call me an antisemitic monster all day for criticizing Israel’s genocidal atrocities and insane warmongering, but I didn’t force this on Israel. This is what Israel chose to be. This is what a state full of Zionists looks like when you let the Zionists do everything they want to do. You can talk all you want about the historic persecution of the Jewish people. You can try to argue that Jews for some reason need a state that’s all their own in the geographic location where Jewish people used to live back in ancient history. But what we see before us today is what it looks like when that occurs. This is it. This is the result. This is the only result on offer. And it isn’t my fault that that’s the case. All arguments made in defense of Israel ultimately rest on the unquestioned assumption that the Jewish people must definitely have a homeland where Jewish people are in control, and that this homeland must definitely… Read more »
Who is Caitlin Johnstone to ‘end’ a state or to give equal rights to anyone or grant Palestinians anything? By what authority?
Yes it’s a mess.
As an Englishman I am glad that I live in a country where English people are in a majority (though not for long).
Caitlin Johnstone sounds like she’s either a) a bit thick, b) antisemitic, or c) both.
Both. She appears to have dubious cultural roots. Likes Islamists for their support in the past.
Sack them.
I’ve got bad news for them. Israel will destroy Iran and it will soon be renamed Persia.
The Persians are overjoyed!
IIRC, just as the Persians rescued the Jews from the Babylonians, 2500 years ago, so Israel is rescuing the Persians, today.
It will succeed, as the Persians don’t support the Islamists, at a minimum, whilst the Gazans have done.
Yep. Time to kick the Islamists out of Persia, see how they will like it.
Sack the lot of them.
If members of the armed forces can be prosecuted for legal acts carried out at the behest of the government of the day, why should civil servants get immunity?
They unlike members of our armed forces are quite at liberty to resign if they won’t or can’t do their jobs properly.