The British government's assault on all things Muslim carries on apace. No sooner had the toxic minister Michael Gove smeared five specific Muslim groups as potentially extremist than he widened the attack by turning on Muslims working in the civil service. 

Echoing the shift in policy from individual extremism to targeting Muslim institutions, the Civil Service Muslim Network was in the crosshairs.

The Times reported that meetings held under the auspices of the network 'featured numerous antisemitic tropes.' The only alleged trope the Times was able to identify was “one official involved in the webinars allegedly told staff that the ‘Israel lobby’ had an ‘insidious influence’ on British politics, widely regarded as a common antisemitic trope.”

The Times also reported that the official also shared anecdotes from a lecture given by Lowkey, a controversial anti-Zionist rapper, claiming Western media were covering up US and UK involvement in the war against Hamas… The same official claimed mainstream media were “biased” and “full of lies” None of this is anti-Semitic or even inaccurate.

The only way to make this seem a real story was for the Times to fabricate a quote in its headline by claiming the term “Jewish lobby” had been used. In fact, as we have seen, the term used in the story underneath was the "Israel lobby". The headline was later corrected.

The response was swift. The government claimed the Network suspended itself.

“A government spokesman said: ‘These reported comments are deeply disturbing and totally unacceptable and in no way represent the views of Muslims across the civil service. The Civil Service Muslim Network shares these concerns and has temporarily suspended its activities pending a full investigation.’”

The unions, in objecting, stated simply that the ‘deputy prime minister suspended the Civil Service Muslim Network’.  The action ‘raises deep concerns of Islamophobia at the heart of government,’ they said.

But this was not all.

Fiyaz Mughal, the government’s tame anti-Islam campaigner, was set to be unveiled as the government’s new “anti-Muslim hatred tsar."  After damning information about him was published online, Downing Street reportedly quashed his appointment, leaving Mughal to pretend that he was withdrawn of his own volition as a result of attacks from “Islamists”. He also alleged some officials in Whitehall are sympathetic to Islamists, which, he said, was part of the problem. 

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The narrative was taken up by the extremist Jewish Chronicle, citing ‘leaks of the contents of Gove’s speech in the days before he gave it, including the names of organizations that were to be “assessed”, and second, the leaking of the names … for the post of government “tsar” on Islamophobia.’

The Jewish Chronicle claimed that the source of the leak was ‘likely to work’ in the Department for Levelling Up – Gove’s department. Gove stated, “I deprecate that leaking." He said he had already commissioned a leak inquiry.

And thus was the wave of anti-Muslim panic fanned inside Whitehall.

The witch hunt takes place against a background of historical structural disadvantage facing Muslims in the Civil Service. The latest government data produced by the Cabinet Office shows that no government department has the proportion of Muslim staff that would reflect their percentage in the general population which is 6.5%, according to the 2021 Census. In fact, many departments employ less than 50% of the complement. The Ministry of Defense is the worst. It has 0.7% Muslims in its total staff complement, which is some 89% below a proportionate complement of staff. At senior levels in the MoD, the figures get even worse. In the second top category, there is some 93% fewer staff than would be proportionate. In the most senior category, the senior civil service, there are 520 staff, but not a single Muslim. Meanwhile, over at the Charity Commission, there are 500 staff in total and only 1% are Muslims; i.e. a total of five people. This is the same organization that has over the last decade been at the forefront of the attack on Muslim charities.

The table below shows the overall proportion of Muslims in the department in the first column as a percentage of the 6.5% proportionate complement. The second column shows the proportion in the second top rank (Grades 6 and 7). In every case, this figure is lower in the second column showing that Muslim representation declines as one moves up the grades. Data for the senior civil service (some 1.4% of jobs in the civil service as a whole – just over 7,000 of a total of just 500,000) are given in the third column.  

One can see that pieces of data are missing in four cases as a result of there being too few Muslims to count in this category. (The Cabinet Office which produced the data notes that it suppresses data in cells where the figure is less than five). Thus, in each case, the number of Muslims in the senior civil service is less than five in each of these departments. It is not meaningful to produce percentages based on a high or low estimate in each case. 

As can be seen, the figures in the senior civil service are markedly worse in the Department for Work and Pensions, HM Treasury, the MoD, and the Ministry of Justice, where there appears not to be a single Muslim in the Senior Civil service.  

In most departments, the trend is not so extreme, but there is still a marked decline. Departments declined as follows, ordered alphabetically: Dept for Business (47%-18%), Education (77%-26%), Transport (35%-28%), Home Office (82%-22%).

The picture is slightly different in the Department for Health where there is a decline from 65% to 42% in the top ranks.  This is a drop of a third from the overall level but is actually an increase over the second top level and thus seems anomalous, though a similar picture obtains at the Department for Levelling Up and the Foreign Office. 

Overall Muslims make up just 20% of the proportion of jobs in the civil service, which would be representative. There are 95 Muslims in the senior civil service when a proportionate number would be 480.

Overall the representation of Muslims is extremely poor. There is evidently a serious problem of structural Islamophobia in the civil service. The current witch hunt is likely only to make this worse.