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.
Following your conscience is a good deal less impressive when you are doing it on someone else’s dime
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.
This sounds high-minded and righteous. But, as you might expect, the further you dig down, the less there is of high principle and more of what looks like an opportunity to single out Israel.
The chance of any civil servant finding himself or herself in the dock is vanishingly small. Labour MP John McDonnell, a founding member of the PCS union, who supports the civil servants, says: ‘These civil servants should not be put at risk. The Rome Statute covering war crimes is clear that following a superior’s instructions is not a defence when it comes to charges of war crimes.’
Israel’s alleged crimes in the war in Gaza remain unclear. It is also far from obvious that the Rome Statute, which controls the International Criminal Court, where these Whitehall mandarins fear they may end up, affects those who merely process licences allowing third parties to do business. In any case, the ICC has better things to do than chase tiny cogs in the bureaucracy of countries thousands of miles away from the conflict on the basis that they might have played an indirect bit part.
Civil servants should always say no if they are asked to arrange the bureaucracy for UK government mass murder, but that is not the issue here. What is being talked about is the idea of civil servants supposedly owing a duty to international law that transcends their duty to the government that employs and pays them. This is a dangerous doctrine.
Civil servants must follow English (or Scottish) law. They owe duties, first and foremost, to that law: and, if they seriously believe in the rule of law (which one hopes they do) those are the rules they need to follow.
Decisions about policy in the international sphere are for the elected government. True, this may involve judgment calls as to how the UK should approach its international commitments. But on this the UK, like all other countries, needs to speak with one authoritative voice; that voice is that of the government of the day. It is no more the function of the civil service to set up their own interpretation of foreign relations than it is for local authorities or devolved governments to establish their own foreign policies.
Those who work in Whitehall, like everyone else, will have sincerely held principles, and these must be respected. But there are limits: following your conscience is a good deal less impressive when you are doing it on someone else’s dime. Mandarins invoking matters of principle in order to refuse to do the job they are paid by the taxpayer to do are essentially doing exactly that.
If civil servants deeply and conscientiously oppose the way the government is running the country and do not wish to be part of it, they do not have to work for the civil service. There are, one suspects, quite a number of international organisations and pressure-groups who would welcome their skills. They might not pay as well, but there is nothing wrong with the idea that conscience sometimes comes at a cost. If civil servants feel so seriously about matters of political principle, perhaps that is a price they should be both prepared and proud to pay.
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