Civil servants can’t down tools if they don’t like Israel

Britain in the nineteenth century pioneered the idea of the professional, impartial civil service independent of politics. In the twenty-first, that same civil service is unfortunately pioneering the notion of a body increasingly independent of the state that employs it, and apt at times to follow its own remarkably political agenda without much control from anyone.

British companies export a good deal of military equipment to Israel. To do so, they require export licences from the Department for Business and Trade (DBT). Yesterday, it emerged that a group of civil servants in that department, backed by the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS), effectively said they were minded to refuse to process any applications for such licences. The reason? It might well be, they said, that Israel was guilty of war crimes and that civil servants could find themselves in hot water if they had worked on export licences to Israel.