(MENAFN) Liz Truss, the British foreign minister and front-runner for the Conservative Party leadership, has come under fire from the FDA union for senior civil and public servants after promising to "protect British Jewry" from "creeping antisemitism" and "woke culture" in the civil service. Dave Penman, general secretary of the FDA, referred to her comments as "insulting" and indicative of "a lack of leadership."
“The Conservatives have been in government for more than 12 years now and, for most of that time, Liz Truss has been a minister. So, accusations of ‘civil service wokeism’ are a little ironic, given it’s essentially a criticism of their own leadership,” Penman informed the British media on Friday, highlighting that Truss’ comments go “further than the usual dog-whistle politics” and many civil servants find them “both insulting and abhorrent.”
In the current race to succeed Boris Johnson as party leader and prime minister of the UK, Truss is competing against former Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak. She reportedly had a 26-point lead over her opponent in the polls the previous week. Penman, however, asserts that her most recent comments indicate she might not be the best candidate for the position.
“A prime minister is also minister for the civil service,” he asserted, noting that leveling “unfounded inflammatory accusations” shows an absence of leadership. Such tough criticism has been sparked by a written announcement Truss made after her speech at a Manchester synagogue. There, she blasted the “woke” civil service culture that supposedly “strays into anti-Semitism” while praising the “Jewish values” she claimed were “Conservative values and British values too.”
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