To live in England in 2025 is to live in a strange land, where the headlines read like the most lurid, unbelievable, low-status conspiracy theories of a decade ago. The largest and most regime-threatening example of this is, of course, the scandal of the Pakistani rape gangs and the decades-long complicity of the British regime in their horrific crimes. But every day it seems as though there’s a new story which reveals that the country is even more rotten than we feared.
This is how I read the Times’s story last week about the “Civil Service Muslim Network“. In Zoom meetings attended by hundreds of (seemingly primarily Muslim) civil servants, the group’s leader, a Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) employee named Sami Rahman, made many remarks which seem obviously antisemitic, such as describing Israel as Shaitan (Arabic for ‘the Devil’). He also openly encouraged Muslim Network members to influence and even oppose government policy, saying: “Whether it’s Islamophobia or anti-Muslim hatred, whether it’s Palestine, or OPT [occupied Palestinian territories], whether it’s any other thing… it’s a time for both setting agendas, but resisting them as well.” He added that “working in central government, we do have responsibility to be that voice and to have conviction”.
This story was first reported by the Times last year after it received a memo of the meetings. The civil service then suspended Sami Rahman and conducted an internal investigation. Rahman was represented by the Public and Commercial Services (PCS) Union, and was exonerated because, according to Mohammed Shafiq, Chair of the union’s national black members’ committee, “the Times had a transcript that was handed to them but no recording. And people at that meeting disputed the transcript”.
But now the Times has obtained full video recordings of the meetings and has published excerpts confirming its earlier reporting, and Rahman has been suspended again. I discovered that Rahman’s role at DEFRA is in HR, which makes his apparent antisemitic remarks particularly astonishing – it’s presumably up to him to enforce diversity and harassment policies. I hope his remarks now prompt the civil service to do the right thing and fire him, but I fear that nothing will change.
The Civil Service Muslim Network isn’t just some informal gathering. It is promoted on the official Civil Service blog, which says the network seeks to “represent, support, connect and champion Muslim civil servants across government”, “de-mystify Islam and tackle (un)conscious bias” and “create a network of senior allies [to] help improve… respect” of Muslim officials.
The whole thing is chilling. This is a network of civil servants seeking to organise on religious grounds, influence government policy and advance the interests of their co-religionists – yet far from being called out by the powers that be in the civil service, it is officially recognised and promoted. If Mr Rahman was happy to speak like this on a public Zoom call, one also wonders how much more extreme in his views and overt in his lobbying he might admit to being in private.
Groups like this are common within Whitehall, although the goals of the CSMN seem particularly extreme. The Civil Service Hindu Connection doesn’t seem to concern itself with influencing policy or ensuring “respect”, rather it seems concerned with ensuring that Hindu staff aren’t discriminated against, as well as things like encouraging yoga within the civil service. That being said, I understand from senior civil servants that it is considered entirely normal that civil servants would seek to shape, influence and oppose government policy if it is contrary to their values or their group’s perceived interests.
It’s this detail that I find particularly concerning. Who elected these activist groups to lobby for their sectarian interests within the corridors of power? No one. What this reveals is how government by administrative state ends up being profoundly undemocratic, with the whims of the professional civil service paying little heed to the will of the people as expressed at the ballot box. Sami Rahman may well leave the system, but groups like the Muslim Network will continue to oppose and shape government policy. A new government which hopes to save Britain must reform the civil service, ending the myth of political neutrality by ensuring that senior roles are held by ideologically aligned appointees, while removing the right of junior and mid-level civil servants to oppose the government according to their own agendas.
David Shipley has sold fork lift trucks, worked in corporate finance, produced a film and served a prison sentence for committing fraud. He now campaigns for prison reform and works as a prison inspector. You can find his website here.
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