Nigel Biggar

Lord Biggar of Castle Douglas is the Regius Professor Emeritus of Moral Theology at the University of Oxford.

Wednesday

Nigel Biggar

Who decides if a word is racist?

I swear Rod Liddle was smiling down on me last week, as I found myself tussling with an editor. I’d written a sentence containing the word ‘Chinamen’. She wanted me to remove it, because, she said, ‘Chinaman’ is widely acknowledged to be a racial slur. In my view, words have no single intrinsic meaning. Within limits, they can mean a variety of things, differing according to context – not least the tone of voice in which they’re delivered. Even ‘Yes’ can mean ‘No’, when said by an Englishman trained in the subtle art of oblique speech.

Friday

Nigel Biggar

Wokery is a Christian heresy

From our UK edition

‘Progressive’ or ‘woke’ politics is undoubtedly religious. But not in a good way. In championing transgender, ethnic minority or postcolonial ‘victims’, it fully embraces the zeal of the Hebrew prophets and Jesus to raise up the downtrodden. And it shares their righteous ire against those who do the treading down. But there’s a problem. Prophetic zeal unrestrained by other elements produces a distorted Christianity. Wokery is a Christian heresy.

Friday

Nigel Biggar

The University of Sussex must stop force-feeding students bad history

From our UK edition

Earlier this month, an SOS dropped into my inbox. It came from a student at the University of Sussex. Lest her repressive professors punish her for what I am about to report, let’s call her ‘Emma’. 'I am in a mild state of despair,' she wrote. This week alone I have been told that the history of kinship theory has been, up until now, ‘Eurocentric and cisgendered’, and another anthropology module must be viewed through a ‘queer and trans lens’. The word ‘decolonisation’ comes up in almost every lecture. If university campuses represent a microcosm of the greater society, then I fear we are doomed.  I’m not surprised.

Monday

Nigel Biggar

David Abulafia was a rare, truth-seeking historian

Death arrives on a day just like any other, often rudely unheralded. We all know that, but it never ceases to shock. So it was with news that David Abulafia had died on Saturday night. Notwithstanding his lifelong fascination with the Mediterranean, David was a Brexiteer in 2016 Readers of The Spectator will know him as one of the shockingly small number of professional historians who care enough about the historical truth – and the public’s perception of it – to risk woke ire in exposing ideologically fabricated history for the corrupting trash it is. So, last June here he was, in these pages, debunking yet another attempt to make the past a boring, narcissistic mirror of ourselves, by claiming that the ‘diverse’ Vikings were sometimes black and Muslim.

Thursday

Nigel Biggar

Reparations: the tyranny of imaginary guilt, with Nigel Biggar & Katie Lam

From our UK edition

19 min listen

The past few years have seen growing calls for countries in the global west to pay reparations to former colonies for their role in the transatlantic slave trade. The debate over reparations was already part of the so-called ‘culture wars’, but became louder following the Black Lives Matter movement, as many groups sought to re-examine their histories. Calls for reparations have been embraced by the Church of England which set up a £100 million fund, with the aim of raising £1 billion, to pay reparations for the role the Church played in the slave trade. But do the arguments in favour of reparations really stand up?

Friday

Nigel Biggar

Easter special: in praise of faithful dissent, a conversation with Nigel Biggar and Mary Wakefield

From our UK edition

24 min listen

The Easter issue of the Spectator includes two provocative articles exploring aspects of Christianity.  Nigel Biggar, Regius professor emeritus of moral theology at Oxford University, now a Conservative peer, celebrates the heroic ‘faithful dissent’ of Christian heroes such as Thomas More and Helmuth von Moltke, who lost their lives rather than defend injustice.  Meanwhile Spectator columnist Mary Wakefield interviews Roman Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury. She’s inspired by his holiness but depressed by his use of ‘C of E bureaucratese’ to uphold liberal orthodoxy on subjects such as gender ideology. But, she says they can share an uncomfortable space together within faith.

Thursday

Nigel Biggar

How I found Christianity

From our UK edition

I wasn’t brought up in the faith. My maternal grandfather was a Methodist lay-preacher, but when my mother left County Durham for marriage in south-west Scotland, she left the religion of her childhood behind. My Scottish father’s experience of church gave him an odd penchant for the electric organ, but that was about it. So when, at the age of 12, I screwed up my courage and came out as a Christian, Dad put his hand on my shoulder – for the only time – and said: ‘It’s OK, son; it’s just a phase.’ Now, as my Christian phase approaches its seventh decade, I find myself looking back and wondering what had happened to me. What caused me to risk that first venture of exposed dissidence? There were mediating institutions and people, of course.

Monday

Nigel Biggar

What the ICC gets wrong about Israel

From our UK edition

Legal reasoning is only as good as the ethical concepts it uses. That’s why the International Criminal Court’s decision to issue arrest warrants for Israel’s Prime Minister and former defence minister is basically flawed. The ICC claims reasonable grounds for believing Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant guilty of the war crimes of ‘intentionally and knowingly depriv[ing] the civilian population in Gaza of objects indispensable to their survival’, creating ‘conditions of life calculated to bring about [their] destruction’. The grounds are these: Israel’s failure to facilitate relief ‘by all means at its disposal’ and to ‘ensure that the civilian population... would be adequately supplied with goods in need’ amounts to a violation of the ‘fundamental rights...

Sunday

Nigel Biggar

The risk of ‘loaning’ the Elgin Marbles to Greece

From our UK edition

Sir Keir Starmer’s government looks ready to smile upon the British Museum's apparent desire to by-pass the legal prohibition of the return of the Elgin Marbles to Athens by negotiating a ‘long-term loan’ instead. Since Greece believes that the Marbles were stolen, that ‘loan’ is bound to be permanent.   The first hint of this came four days after the general election, when Dennis McShane, Labour’s Europe minister from 2002 to 2005, published an article in the Times on 8 July: 'It would be smart politics to return Elgin Marbles now'.

Thursday

Nigel Biggar

Macron’s game: can he still outplay Le Pen?

From our UK edition

45 min listen

This week: Macron’s game. Our cover piece looks at the big news following the European elections at the weekend, President Macron’s decision to call early parliamentary elections in France. Madness or genius, either way the decision comes with huge risk. And can he still outplay Le Pen, asks writer Jonathan Miller. Jonathan joins the podcast to analyse Macron’s decision alongside Professor Alberto Alemanno, who explains how the decision is realigning French politics, and argues it must be seen in its wider European context. (01:58) Then: Will and Gus take us through some of their favourite pieces from the magazine, including Catriona Olding’s Life column and Sam McPhail’s notes on Madri.  Also on the podcast: who decides how we see the past?

Nigel Biggar

Who dictates how we see the past?

From our UK edition

Three weeks ago, I received an SOS from a distressed citizen of Glasgow, urging me to protest against a recently installed display at the Kelvingrove Museum, ‘Glasgow – City of Empire’. Predictably, the exhibition falls over itself to clock every conceivable association between the city and slavery, inviting the visitor to envisage appropriate reparations. Scraping the barrel of shame, it complains of one of Glasgow’s greatest benefactors, William Burrell, that ‘his business partners exploited enslaved Africans’. Enslaved Africans? Burrell was a shipping magnate around 1900, almost 70 years after slavery’s abolition in the British Empire and at least a generation after emancipation in the United States.

Thursday

Nigel Biggar

Palestinians in Gaza are suffering. That doesn’t mean it’s genocide

From our UK edition

Last week Lord Cameron, the Foreign Secretary, expressed his concern that Israel ‘may have breached international law’ in its three-month bombardment of Gaza. Two days later, at the International Court of Justice, South Africa’s lawyers presented their case accusing Israel of genocide.  The number of civilian casualties is indeed horrifically high. According to the ministry of health in Gaza on 9 January, more than 23,000 Palestinians had been reported killed since the start of the conflict. However, since the ministry is run by Hamas, that figure can’t be taken at face value. Indeed, it’s a practical certainty that it contains Hamas combatants – according to one reckoning, as many as 8,500.

Friday

Nigel Biggar

The British Museum is the best home for the Elgin Marbles

From our UK edition

Should the Elgin Marbles be returned? Greece's argument, put forward recently by the country's foreign minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, is well rehearsed: the Marbles, he claimed, were 'essentially stolen' from their rightful owners by Lord Elgin at the turn of the 19th century – and they belong in the Acropolis, not the British Museum. Only when the looted sculptures are reunited with their siblings in Athens, we're told, can the ensemble reveal its authentic meaning. The reality is rather more complex. The case for the British Museum returning the Marbles to Athens – albeit by the legal fiction of a ‘loan’ – is weak.  The facts are these. The Acropolis, on which the Parthenon stands, had been used by the Ottomans as a strategic military base for centuries.

Saturday

Nigel Biggar

Melissa Kite, Nigel Biggar and Matt Ridley

From our UK edition

24 min listen

This week Melissa Kite mourns the Warwickshire countryside of her childhood, ripped up and torn apart for HS2, and describes how people like her parents have been treated by the doomed project (01:15), Nigel Biggar attempts to explain the thinking behind those who insist on calling Britain a racist country, even though the evidence says otherwise (06:38) and Matt Ridley enters a fool’s paradise where he warns against being so open-minded, that you risk your brain falling out (13:01). Produced and presented by Linden Kemkaran.

Wednesday

Nigel Biggar

What really motivates the ‘new progressives’

From our UK edition

Kemi Badenoch is right to say that Britain is not a racist country. The data simply does not support the claim that black and ethnic minority (BME) people in the UK are generally disadvantaged because of the racial prejudice of white Britons – that ‘systemic racism’ is the cause of the problem. It also suggests that some ethnic minorities tend to perform better than others because of internal cultural factors – not least, strong families and high educational aspirations. By the same token, the cause of relative disadvantage often lies in culture, not racism.

Thursday

Nigel Biggar

How will it end?

From our UK edition

42 min listen

On the podcast this week: How will the war on Ukraine end? This is the question that Russia correspondent Owen Matthews asks in his cover piece for The Spectator. He is joined by Rose Gottemoeller, former deputy secretary general of Nato, to discuss whether the end is in sight (01:02). Also this week: Matthew Parris interviews the theologian and ethicist Nigel Biggar on the legacy of Empire. They have kindly allowed us to hear an extract from their conversation, printed as a dialogue in this week's issue. They discuss Nigel's motivations for writing his controversial new book Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning, and reconsider the economics of colonialism (18:52).

Wednesday

Nigel Biggar

Kemi Badenoch is right about colonialism

From our UK edition

Kemi Badenoch, the equalities minister (and, now, for Levelling Up) has come under attack for an off-hand remark she made on colonialism some years ago. In a leaked WhatsApp exchange, according to VICE World News, Badenoch wrote, ‘I don’t care about colonialism because [I] know what we were doing before colonialism got there. They came in and just made a different bunch of winners.’ What did she mean? The reporter from VICE offers an interpretation:, ‘The British Empire and its European counterparts believed in the superiority of white people, and indigenous groups experienced extreme exclusion, displacement and violence in order for the British to take control.

Sunday

Nigel Biggar

Britain’s slave trade and the problem with ‘decolonisation’

From our UK edition

Colonialism and slavery. There is, of course, a connection between them. Yet the reason for our present interest in the topic assumes something stronger – not merely a connection, but an equation. That is why we are told we have to ‘decolonise’ ourselves. Because until we do, the vicious racism that slavery incarnated will continue to be our own. The assumption, however, is mistaken. It is true that the British were heavily involved in trading slaves across the Atlantic from Africa to the Caribbean and the southern colonies of North America, mostly between 1660 and 1807. Britain transported around 3 million Africans in conditions that were infamously dreadful, with human cargo packed like sardines below decks. Maybe 450,000 slaves did not survive the voyage.