Dissenting civil servants are silenced, says UK diplomat who quit over Gaza

Mark Smith resigned last August over the UK’s failure to stop selling arms to Israel.

London, United Kingdom – Mark Smith, a diplomat who quit his Foreign Office job over the UK’s refusal to stop selling arms to Israel, said civil servants who question the onslaught in Gaza are routinely silenced by their seniors.

“Thousands of conversations within the walls of the Foreign Office on the most controversial aspects of our arms sales policy will never be seen by the public [and] never be put to a court,” he said on Friday in London, at an unofficial inquiry probing alleged UK complicity in Israeli war crimes.

He said he was repeatedly warned by colleagues against documenting his concerns in writing, as he worked on a report assessing whether the government is legally compliant in exporting arms to certain countries.

“I was routinely asked to go to senior directors’ offices and told to, quote, ‘make the situation look less bad,” said Smith, who was a diplomat and policy adviser at the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office. “Sections that I’ve written which talked about civilian casualties, for example, I was asked to kind of play them down, make them smaller.”

He described the office’s working culture as “very strange” and “different to anything I’ve ever experienced in the civil service”.