I bear my old club no ill will. I enjoyed many a cup of silver service tea as I read in a corner of its splendid drawing-room. The library often afforded me a desk on which to scribble away a spare hour or two. And from time to time, I’d lay my head to rest in one of the tastefully refurbished bedrooms. Yet, last December, after fifteen years of membership, I decided to resign from the Athenaeum.

The reasons were several. My needs had changed: I no longer had cause to use the library or stay overnight. And my inner Scotsman had noticed I could afford membership of three other clubs for only slightly more than the Athenaeum’s annual fee. But the underlying reason was disillusionment.

Four years ago, almost all my politically conservative friends became alarmed at the management and direction of the club. In response, they formed a dissident ‘1824 Group’, named after the date of the club’s founding, and invited me to sign up. Inclined to trust their judgement, I joined. But since I’d been embroiled in the culture wars over colonialism since 2017 and then in the miserable civil war at Christ Church from 2018, I lacked stamina for yet another conflict. So, I watched the turbulence at the Athenaeum from a concerned distance, without getting involved. Gradually, all of my friends abandoned the club for more congenial alternatives.

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Readers of this substack will remember that, in February, I launched a formal complaint to the BBC about the political bias of David Olusoga’s three-part BBC2 documentary, ‘Empire’. Dissatisfied with the responses to my complaint by the Beeb’s Complaints Team at the first two stages of the process, I escalated it to the third and final one, sending it to the Executive Complaints Unit.

Normally, the BBC promises to respond within 20 working days, but in special cases within 35 days. By Day 42, I had received no response from the ECU to my complaint. So, I escalated it further on 14 July, by diverting it to the media regulator, OfCom. Six days later, I also wrote to Lisa Nandy, MP, the Secretary of State for Culture, Media, and Sport.

I await their responses.

Rt Hon. Lisa Nandy, MP
Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport
House of Commons
London, SW1A 0AA

Dear Secretary of State:

The BBC’s complaints system

Aware that you are reviewing the BBC as part of the Royal Charter Review process, I am writing to draw your attention to a serious flaw in the Corporation’s complaints system.

In January of this year, I submitted a formal complaint to the BBC, in which I claimed that the political bias of BBC 2’s three-part series, “Empire”, which had been broadcast the previous November, violated the Corporation’s own Editorial Guidelines.

Unsatisfied with the response from the BBC’s Complaints Team, I escalated my complaint from State 1a to Stage 1b. The response to that was so careless that I then escalated it to the final stage, submitting it to the Executive Complaints Unit.

The ECU normally aims to make a response within 20 working days, and in exceptional cases 35 days. Not having received a response within 42 working days, I escalated my complaint last week to the Office of Communications.

Of course, I do not intend to bother you with the details of my complaint.

However, I do want to report to you that the nature of the responses I have received from the BBC’s Complaints Team have persuaded me that it regards its role as that of defending the BBC against complaints, come what may, not arbitrating impartially between complainants and the Corporation. I think that that is a huge strategic error.

I value the BBC and I want to see it thrive. It is a major engine of Britain’s soft, cultural power. And when it performs its public service duty and gives a fair hearing to all points of view on controversial matters, it plays a vital role in educating the British public politically and in helping to limit our political polarisation.

However, if it is going to perform its duty to give a fair hearing to all the public, and if it is thereby going to retain broad public confidence, it is absolutely vital that it is seen to deal with complaints of political bias with scrupulous impartiality. This, in my experience, it is failing to do.

Therefore, I urge you to examine the BBC’s complaints system and reform it, so that it is sufficiently independent to deal with complaints impartially. For only then, in my view, will the Corporation become able to be genuinely responsive, to learn from what in-good-faith critics report to it, and to command the widespread public confidence it needs.

If I can help you any further in this matter, I should be glad to do so.

Yours sincerely,

Professor Nigel Biggar, CBE, the Lord Biggar

• European (and British) transatlantic slave-trading and slavery was a crime against humanity unique in scale and brutality;

• The enslavement of Africans made an enormous contribution to British industrial prosperity.

• Contemporary Caribbeans and Africans now suffer economic and other disadvantages because of British colonialism, especially slavery.

• Therefore, the British owe Caribbean and African states reparations.

• However, …

  The Biggar Picture is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

2. The universality of slavery

• Slavery and slave-trading were universal practices from the dawn of history, conducted by peoples of every skin-colour on every continent—from ancient Mesopotamia to the Ottoman Empire in the early 20^th century, and from Brazil to New Zealand.

• Of an estimated minimum of 41m Africans enslaved and mostly transported across the Atlantic, the Sahara, and the Indian Ocean, Europeans were responsible for 31% (12.75m); Arabs, for 53.6% (21.96m); the Sokoto Caliphate in the year 1860 alone, for 9.76% (4m); and the Ottomans in 1800-1900, for 3.14% (1.3m) .^[1]

• One authoritative estimate has it that, in 1804, there were 45m chattel slaves worldwide, most of them (37m) in Asia.^[2] That is to say, in that single year there were almost 14 times the total number of chattel slaves traded by the British (3.258m) mostly in one hundred and thirty-five years (overwhelmingly from 1672 to 1807).

• Otherwise put, the annual average number of African slaves transported by the British was about 24,000. In 1804, this amounted to 0.05% of the 45m chattel slaves worldwide.

3. African complicity

• Since most African slaves were brought to traders by Africans, the latter were the primary enslavers of almost all 34.71m slaves traded to Europeans and Arabs.

• When the British sought to end the slave-trade in the 19^th century, African rulers resisted. According to the Beninese historian, Abiola Félix Iroko, “[w]hen the slave trade was abolished [by the British], Africans were against abolition. King Kosoko of Lagos was against abolition at the time .… Of those who were sold and had offspring … [s]ome returned home … [and] became, in turn, slaveholders and bought slaves for their correspondents who remained in Brazil. Africans resumed this trade after abolition”.^[3] John Iliffe, Professor of African History at Cambridge University, agrees, writing that “[m]any African leaders resisted the abolition of the slave-trade. Kings of Asante, Dahomey, and Lunda all warned that unsold captives and criminals would have to be executed”.^[4]

• The notorious ivory- and slave-trader in Congo, Hamed bin Mohammed al Mujabi (‘Tippu Tip’), protested against abolition in 1881: “White people have quite false ideas about our customs and habits. Everything which doesn’t exist with them – even if it has ended recently – they insist on abolishing immediately everywhere else!”.^[5]

• In the years before 1850, the Fulani people of what is now northern Nigeria ran vast slave plantations employing perhaps 4m African slaves—more than the total number of slaves traded by the British over a century-and-a-half.^[6]

• The ancestors of the President of Ghana, John Dramani Mahama, who is leading the campaign for reparations from Britain, were probably slave-owners.^[7]

4. British involvement in slavery

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I lament Jason Ardey’s suicide. I shake my head at the dreadful pity of it. Yes, he’d been serially dishonest. And yes, the immediate responsibility lay with him: the hand that killed him was his own. Yet his death was still a tragedy. He’d become so trapped in a fantasy about himself, it seems, that when reality finally broke in, Nemesis came with it. A terrible reckoning caused the self he’d invented to disintegrate. It must have seemed to him that black nothing remained.

But Jason’s responsibility is widely shared. It also belongs to all the adults who indulged him. Who failed to make him reckon with the truth. Who lowered the threshold so he could clamber over it. Who encouraged him to dismiss criticism as expressions of racist bad faith. Who, year after year, aided and abetted the elaboration of his fantastic claims. Who patronised him.

Why did they do it? For many, no doubt, because uncaring kindness was so much easier than telling the truth. For some, evidently, because their own academic standards were hardly higher than his. For others, because he was a useful poster-boy for their ‘decolonising’ crusade.

But is it credible that not one of the seasoned teachers or academics who vetted him in the course of his career failed to see what is now so glaringly obvious—that the emperor was stark naked? I think not. I’d wager a modest fortune that some did see it, but knowing what it would cost them to say so, suppressed the thought and bit their tongues. Why? Lest they be accused of racism, their friends step away, and their careers suffer.

There’s a warning in this sorry tale for the leadership of the Church of England. The Church Commissioners, including both archbishops, persist in their support for ‘Project Spire’, the policy of devoting £100 million to paying reparations for the church’s alleged profiting from transatlantic slavery. Reliable sources report that the decision to proceed with the project was made in the febrile wake of the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May 2020 and the consequent anti-racist, knee-bending panic. Apparently, only one of the Commissioners’ twenty-seven board members voiced an objection to it. Was that because all the others were convinced supporters? I don’t think so. So why didn’t the sceptics speak up? Could it have been because—as I’ve been told—they had reason to fear being branded as racist?

My own ‘lived experience’ tells me that’s entirely plausible. Sometime during the covid epidemic—late 2021 or early 2022, I think—I was invited to join in a Zoom call to discuss the Church of England’s responsibility for making slavery-reparations. Of the four people present, three (including me) were white. The fourth was a black clergyman. Most of the meeting was taken up with him and me arguing. I remember pulling my punches, partly because my view of the historical and ethical nonsense of reparations was not as clear and firm as it is now. But mainly because I was aware how bad I would look, if I said what I honestly thought. In the current, emotionally manipulative climate, when claims of racial harassment are so easily made and readily believed, it’s very risky for a white person to speak up candidly to a black person about race and slavery. So, I tied my tongue.

Since its public launch in January 2023, the wheels have come off the rationale for Project Spire. Richard Dale, an historian of international banking, has shown that the Commissioners misunderstood the data: the 18^th century church fund, the Queen Anne’s Bounty, neither invested in nor profited from slave-trading. I, until recently holder of the Anglican world’s premier university chair in Christian ethics, have pointed out the astonishing failure of the Commissioners to publish any considered ethical justification. And Charles Wide, KC, has exposed their failure of due diligence in launching the project before discovering that it’s beyond their lawful powers to divert money from resourcing the Church of England’s ministry to supporting black-led businesses in the Caribbean and Africa.

How have the Commissioners and the project’s officers responded? Mainly by retreating into a bunker and saying as little as possible, hoping no one will notice the fuss and the critics will tire and go away. But also by complaining that forensic questioning is a form of harassment and refusing to answer it. By indirectly threatening critics with litigation. By refusing to name them. And on one (aurally recorded) occasion, by publicly defaming them as deliberately spreading disinformation—that is, lying. Recently, Bishop Arun Arora, deputy-chair of the church’s Racial Justice Board and public champion of Project Spire, has gone to the desperate length of invoking in its defence the authority of none less than Alan Lester. ‘Desperate’, because Professor Lester, an historical geographer, is no expert on transatlantic slavery and, in my long experience of him, his rational mouth is more gum than teeth.

I am a Christian convert. I’m an active member of the Church of England. I’m even an Anglican priest. I wish the leadership of my church no ill. But they’re stubbornly leading us into our very own Arday Affair, where the nakedness of Project Spire will be exposed for all to see and those responsible for stewarding the church’s assets will be called to public account. I know that the reputational costs of rowing back will be high, but the costs of rowing onward will be much, much higher. Commissioners—and bishops, clergy, and laity—who’ve been harbouring doubts and biting their tongues need to muster the courage, take the risk, and speak up now. Before it’s too late.

I had chosen to use it, knowing that some people find it offensive. Its appearance in a journal article of mine some years ago had provoked a couple of Asian students to make a complaint. So, I was—I admit—testing the waters here. I had thought they were safe from what I regard as the authoritarian policing of language. Not so, it seemed.

My view is that words have no single, intrinsic meaning. It’s not that they’re empty vessels and have no meaning at all. But, within limits, they can mean various things, and what they mean varies according to context, including tone of voice. Even ‘Yes’ can mean ‘No’. Listen carefully to any well-brought up Englishman.

I accept that ‘Chinaman’, given a certain intonation, can be spoken in a deliberately derogatory way—rather as I learned as a youngster in Scotland to use ‘Sassenach’ to refer to the English. It just means ‘Saxon’ in the Gaelic and when non-Anglophobic Gaelic-speakers want to refer to the people living south of the border, that’s the word they use. But out of an English-speaking Scotsman’s mouth, you can be sure that’s not all it means. Uttered with a certain, semi-spitting vigour, it also means ‘snobbish, morally degenerate wankers’.

So, yes, I accept that ‘Chinaman’ can be used as a slur and that it has been. But there’s nothing necessarily or intrinsically slurry about it. It’s the verbal equivalent of ‘Frenchman’, ‘Dutchman’, and ‘Irishman’. Indeed, in the sentence to which my editor took exception, ‘Chinamen’ appears nine words after ‘Englishmen’.

So, who pronounces it a forbidden word? According to my editor, the Oxford English Dictionary. So that settles it. The authoritative oracle has spoken.

Well, actually, no. Mercifully, the OED has not yet gone to the politically correct dogs. It’s still sensible enough to report the variety of ‘Chinaman’s definitions—including, first of all, the entirely innocent, “A man who is Chinese by descent, birth, or naturalization”. It does go on to add, however, “Frequently disparaging or derogatory (see also John Chinaman n. Johnny Chinaman n.)”.

Wikipedia, of course, is less circumspect. It tells us, without qualification, that “Chinaman is an offensive term”. But it also informs us, indicatively, that its usage is “strongly discouraged by Asian American organizations”. What that indicates is that the original energy for the policing of language here comes from certain ethnic minority groups in the US. I suspect that this is true in general: that the movement for linguistic censorship springs from America, perhaps from certain groups of members of ethnic minorities, often from ‘decolonising’ academics who presume to represent them.

These are the kinds of people currently trying to busy-body us into abandoning the word ‘slave’ for ‘enslaved person’, on the entirely spurious ground that the former necessarily dehumanises, implying that someone is a slave by nature. This is nonsense. And we can easily see that by observing that, in English, if we want to refer to the idea that someone is a natural slave, we have to qualify ‘slave’ by putting the word ‘natural’ in front of it. No, ‘slave’ is not intrinsically racist.

Frankly, my contextual view of verbal meaning extends even to the ‘n’ word taboo. Anticipating the dishonest twisting of what I am about to say, let me state clearly and loudly, so that no one in good faith can doubt it, that I object thoroughly to the racist use of the word ‘nigger’ to disparage people with non-white skins. That is always and everywhere morally wrong.

Nonetheless, I was appalled years ago, when I read of a woman high up in some British organisation—a nursing one, I think—being sacked just for referring explicitly to the original title of Agatha Christie’s 1939 detective novel, Ten Little Niggers. And I have read of similar cases more recently. That people should be so punished is stupidly unjust. For, to use the word ‘nigger’ just to refer to what someone else has written or said in no way endorses the racist disdain usually attached to it. That’s obvious—at least to anyone who dares to think.

I say ‘usually’, because, according to Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 film, Pulp Fiction, and the excellent 2002 tv series, ‘The Wire’, African Americans often use ‘nigger’ to refer to each other—but in an ironic, not a racist, manner. Therefore, I find it plausible that a white person might even use it in jest when speaking to a very close black friend, without racist contempt being either expressed or perceived. Evidently, Tarantino thought so, too.

I don’t make these points because I’m keen to revive the use of the word. Not at all. I myself have had cause to use it on only two occasions that I can think of: now, and when reporting in my book, Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning, what Cecil Rhodes is sometimes supposed to have said (but even then, my publisher insisted I disguise it).

No, my concern is that people are being unjustly and gravely penalised through a combination of malice, thoughtlessness, and fear. Some who belong to historically ‘victimised’ groups are eager to exploit the power that membership confers. They’re on the lookout for opportunities to wield that power unscrupulously, by working themselves up into being ‘offended’ and daring others to call them out on it. But the others don’t dare. Terrified of the accusation of lacking compassion or being racist, they can’t afford the luxury of thought. Instead, they uncritically defer to the ‘offended’ party and signal their antiracist credentials by punishing the alleged offender. It’s a morally disgusting dynamic, in which malice triumphs and innocence suffers through the cowardly thoughtlessness of those in authority. And the result? The bullies strut around while everyone else is made to tiptoe on eggshells. Fear dominates the field.

All that was at the back of my mind, when I chose to make a fuss about my use of ‘Chinamen’. In the end, my editor was overruled by her boss, who, with some reservations, said I was free to go ahead and use the word if I wanted to. Upon reflection, however, I satisfied myself that a mellifluent alternative was available. That, together with uneasiness at the thought of making myself look even more cantankerous than usual, by going to war over a word, moved me to drop the controversial noun.

It was probably a wise decision. Yet, part of me is aware that that is how the authoritarian ideologues win. Someone says something they don’t like. They kick up a fuss, attacking the offender as ‘divisive’. Conflict-averse onlookers, wedded to a quiet life, perceive the person upsetting the offended parties as the source of trouble. Unwilling to become a social pariah, the offender then backs down and shuts up. Thus, the air chilled is and tongues are tied. And the illiberal bullies win.

The centre of gravity in the Arday Affair has shifted. Public discussion no longer focuses on evidence that Cambridge University’s youngest black holder of a professorial chair plagiarised considerable portions of his PhD, embellished his c.v. with three academic appointments at institutions that now deny it, and claimed to be the author of a book that was never written. The focus has moved on to the question of why he was appointed in the first place, and what that tells us about the state of academe.

This is good. For Jason Arday himself I feel somewhat sorry. Yes, he’s been serially dishonest. And yet, from what I’ve observed, he really believes his own lies. In brushing aside critics as “racially motivated”, he sounds as if he sincerely means what he says. He’s trapped in a world of fantasy. Whatever his personal guilt, there’s a tragic quality to his predicament. For, when reality does finally break through, Nemesis will enter, too. A terrible reckoning will cause the self he’s constructed to disintegrate. I fear for his life.

And that makes me angry—but not with his critics. It makes me angry at all the adults who failed to call him out. Who indulged him. Who lowered the threshold so he could clamber over it. Who encouraged him to dismiss criticism as expressions of ‘eurocentric’, colonialist, racist bad faith. Who aided and abetted the elaboration of his fantasy, year after year.

Latest among them are the eight professors and the vice-chancellor’s deputy on the committee that unanimously recommended his Cambridge appointment. Evidently, they failed to scrutinise him. But why? One leading candidate for the answer is the identity of the applicant: an autistic man of African heritage, possessing double membership of historically marginalised and victimised groups.

I find this explanation entirely plausible. I’ve witnessed at first-hand how some professors, even at our most prestigious universities, use their victim-identity as a get-out-of-gaol card. How they deploy it to trump intellectual standards and by-pass accountability before the bar of reason. And how their anti-rational behaviour prevented neither their appointment nor their promotion.

Several years ago, I was invited to take part in a panel discussion about empire in Oxford. One of my fellow panellists was a female professor of international relations. At one point in our discussion, I turned to her and said, “A few moments ago, you said X. Now you’ve just said Y. They’re not consistent”. Waving her hand imperiously, she swept my complaint off the table, exclaiming, “Enough of your donnish, tutorial tactics!”

I was struck dumb, feeling—and I use the word advisedly—unmanned. But, later, I reflected, “Are there no rules to this game any longer? And if not, what on earth is the point?” Clearly, our discussion had not been a searching out of the truth together by common submission to the disciplines of logic and evidence. It was merely the occasion for the declamation of a preferred narrative and silencing criticism by the insinuation of bad faith. Hence, ‘tactics’.

But there was more. For, my tactics had also been described as ‘donnish’, which connotes fusty white males in tweed jackets, reeking of pipe smoke circa 1950. My fellow panellist was also exploiting her political power as a member of a group commonly stereotyped as victims (women) over a member of a group commonly stereotyped as victimisers (men). I was aware that, in response to the dismissal of my criticism, my tongue was tied, partly because the one doing the dismissing was a woman and I was a man. And her choice of words took care to remind me of that. Rather than a forum for finding out the truth, our discussion had been an arena for the exercise of power.

This was no isolated incident. In my recent book, The New Dark Age: Why Liberals must Win the Culture Wars, I report one of many similar cases on the far side of the Atlantic. After serving as a professor of political science at Alberta’s Mount Royal University for fourteen years, Frances Widdowson was fired in 2021. Why? Because she challenged the university’s policy of requiring its members to ‘respect’ and ‘value’ indigenous ways of knowing. When she disagreed that traditional native American ‘star knowledge’ should be viewed in the same way as astronomical science, indigenous studies professors accused her of racist harassment, making the campus ‘unsafe’ for them. Widdowson sees her particular experience as an instance of a wider phenomenon in universities, where differential treatment on the basis of one’s identity “is becoming the norm”.

The silver lining of the Arday Affair’s dark cloud is that it has lifted the lid on this problem in academe, just as the murder of Henry Nowak exposed it among the police. Now it’s up to us to get the measure of it. A local investigation by the University of Cambridge isn’t enough. We need a national inquiry into the corrupting effect of identity politics on our universities.

The current mania for ‘decolonisation’ puffs itself up as the champion of the West’s victims. So, when a dark-hued woman, born in Morocco with a Muslim background, speaking Arabic and French, and now settled in Oxford, declares her love for the heritage of Britain and the West, exposes the historical distortions of their ‘woke’ critics, and warns of their racial divisiveness, she commands attention.

While her book (which you can and should purchase here) treats the gamut of Culture War issues—statues, diversity, and cultural appropriation—its beating heart lies in the deconstruction of the ‘progressive’ narrative of White oppression and Black victimhood. Hence the title: ‘Not Your Victim’.

observes how this tale exalts the agency of the Westerner by depressing that of the African. It makes of European transatlantic slavery a unique evil. Yet, this ignores the fact that of the 41 million Africans enslaved, Europeans traded 30 per cent (the British, under 8 per cent). Arabs drove the majority across the Sahara or sailed them across the Indian Ocean. And since Africans did virtually all the initial enslaving, they were complicit in 100 per cent.

In her observation, Daouda echoes another Francophone, Pascal Bruckner. In The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism (2006), Bruckner explains the excess in European (and by extension, Western) self-criticism as “the paternalism of the guilty conscience: seeing ourselves as the kings of infamy is still a way of staying on the crest of history…. Europe is still messianic in a minor key … Barbarity is Europe’s great pride, which it acknowledges only in itself; it denies that others are barbarous, finding attenuating circumstances for them (which is a way of denying them all responsibility)”.

While ‘progressive’ Westerners feed their own sense of moral superiority by infantilising non-Western Others, the latter see their opportunity and exploit it. “Victimhood”, writes Daouda, “is power”: it confers political and diplomatic advantage. So, the African Union, with nary a hint of embarrassment, starts to lobby Britain for reparations.

Apart from the historical nonsense and inequity of it, the ‘decolonising’ narrative sets White against Black. So, while victimhood may give “a sense of purpose …. it does so through fostering divisive anxiety through blame.” It tempts members of ethnic minorities to give themselves over to racial resentment, and members of the white majority, feeling unjustly slandered, to respond in kind. Thus, it “nurtures the very prejudices it claims to fight”.

Addressing the false ‘decolonising’ prophets, Daouda writes, “Your self-flagellation hurts you while doing nothing other than patronizing and infantilizing people like me, the supposed victims of your empires. We become, in your mind, eternal props in your indulgent theatre of cultural self-harm. Many of us respect, cherish, love the culture and history that you hate.” Then, turning to the rest of us, unconvinced by the ‘decolonising’ narrative but too intimidated to say so out loud, she offers words of salvation: “I hope to help you be grateful for what you have, through the eyes of an immigrant grateful to have received it”.

I’ve long been fascinated by civil conflict and what’s required to navigate it successfully. It doesn’t take much reflection to bring to mind that my interest springs from personal experience. As a youngster, I was burdened with the role of mediating between my unhappy, warring parents. And since then, I’ve found myself playing the same role, again and again. It’s emotionally exhausting, trying to discern where fault and justice lie, straining to be fair, persuaded by the last party I listened to, sure that I’ve finally got it right, then realizing I got it wrong, and having to go back and look again. Sometimes, I’ve finally had to take the side of one party and incur the resentful disappointment of the other. It’s really not a lot of fun. But there are some conflicts one just can’t walk away from. You just have to go through them, not around.

So, it’s not surprising that I became fascinated by the story of Lucius Carey, Second Viscount Falkland, which I first encountered two decades ago when reading the plaque on the south wall of St Michael’s Church, Great Tew, about twenty miles north of Oxford. A short man with a high-pitched voice, Falkland was born in 1609 or 10 at Burford Priory and educated at St John’s College Cambridge and Trinity College Dublin. After a bruising quarrel with his father, who disapproved of his marriage, he stormed off to fight with the Dutch against the Spanish in the Netherlands, but he returned shortly afterwards to the estate at Great Tew, which he had inherited from his maternal grandfather.

During the 1630s Falkland built up a considerable library and kept open house for literary, philosophical, and theological folk who would regularly troop up from Oxford—among them the playwright, Ben Jonson, and the political philosopher, Thomas Hobbes. And of a summer’s evening, they would walk and talk in the walled garden that still stands. (The house itself was pulled down and completely rebuilt in the 19^th century).

The core of those whom Falkland gathered around himself shared a common set of values and attitudes. The ‘Great Tew Circle’ (as they later came to be called) were much disturbed at what one of them, Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, termed “the brawls which were grown from religion”. In response to these ‘brawls’, Falkland’s Circle identified itself with the Christian humanist tradition stemming from Erasmus and Richard Hooker. They championed the use of reason in matters of religion; they followed St Paul in distinguishing between fundamentals and adiaphora (or matters indifferent), advocating tolerance on the latter; and they looked for the reunion of Christendom.

Falkland’s own mother was converted to Rome, as were all his brothers and sisters. He himself refused; but another of the Great Tew fellowship, William Chillingworth, was briefly converted, sent to Douai in northern France, and put to writing an apologia for Roman Catholicism. Some short way into this project, he decided he’d made a mistake, returned to Great Tew, and wrote The Religion of the Protestants a Safe Way to Salvation.

Falkland’s pacific nature, and its Christian witness, is well captured by his close friend Clarendon, who wrote of him: “in all those controversies, he had so dispassioned a consideration, such a candour in his nature, and so profound a charity in his conscience, that in those points, in which he was in his own judgment most clear, he never thought the worse, or in any degree declined the familiarity, of those who were of another mind; which without doubt is an excellent temper for the propagation and advancement of Christianity”.

And here is Falkland himself writing in his discourse, Of the Infallibility of the Church of Rome:

… it is plaine, that [the emperor Constantine] thought punishing for opinions to be a mark, which might serve to know false opinions by…. I am sure Christian Religions chiefest glory being, that it encreaseth by being persecuted; and … me thinks … everything is destroyed by the contrary to what settled and composed it… I desire recrimination may not be used; for though it be true, that Calvin had done it, and the Church of England, a little (which is a little too much)…, yet she (confessing she may erre) is not so chargeable with any fault, as those which pretend they cannot, and so will be sure never to mend it; …

I confess this opinion of damning so many, and this custome of burning so many, this breeding up those, who knew nothing else in any point of religion, yet to be in a readinesse to cry, To the fire with him, to hell with him …These I say, in my opinion were chiefly the causes which made so many, so suddenly leave the Church of Rome.… If any man vouchsafe to think, either this [discourse], or the authour of it, of value enough to confute the one, and informe the other, I shall desire him to do it … with that temper, which is fit to be used by men that are not so passionate, as to have the definition of reasonable creatures in vaine, remembering that truth in likelyhood is, where her author God was, in the still voice, and not the loud wind ….

And here he is, again, in a remarkably gracious response to a Roman Catholic critic:

I am also to thank you … for not mixing gall with your inke; since I have ever thought that there should bee as little bitterness in a treatise of controversie, as in a love-letter, and that the contrary way was void both of Christian charity, and humane wisedome, as serving onely … to fright away the game, and make their adversarie unwilling to take instruction from him, from whom they have received injuries, and making themselves unabler to discover the truth (which Saint Au[gu]stine sayes is hard for him to find who is calme, but impossible for him that is angry) ….

Late in the 1630s Falkland, a naturally contemplative and reflective sort, got himself elected to Parliament, where he became one of the most prominent and eloquent critics of King Charles I’s arbitrary government and a consistent defender of the rule of law. In one parliamentary speech he said, “the cause of all the miseries we have suffered, and the cause of all our jealousies we have had, that we should yet suffer, is, that a most excellent prince hath been infinitely abused by his [counselors], telling him that by policy he might do what he pleased”.

Nevertheless, when civil war began to loom, Falkland was reluctantly persuaded to side with the king and eventually became his Secretary of State. King Charles may have lived to regret his choice, because he was heard on several occasions to complain bitterly about how rudely Falkland sometimes spoke to him.

In the early stages of the conflict, Falkland and other members of the Great Tew Circle were involved in several, secret, politically risky initiatives to reconcile king and parliament—but all in vain. Conscious that his peace-making reputation was being mistaken for cowardice, Falkland made a point of putting himself at the very front of battle. In 1642 at the end of the battle of Kineton (better known as Edgehill), about ten miles north of Great Tew, Falkland interposed himself between his own victorious royalist comrades and a group of sorry parliamentarians, to stop the former slaughtering the latter. Through such a courageous demonstration of self-sacrificial charity, he implicitly gave the lie to the cynical view that his one-time guest, Thomas Hobbes, would develop, namely, that at bottom all that motivates human beings is the individual’s fear of pain and death.

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Historical case I: The Peace of Vereeniging, 1902

The first case is the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902. This was the final settlement of the Second Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902, fought in South Africa between the British and the two Afrikaner or Boer republics of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. The war had been launched by the Boers with an invasion of Natal and Cape Colony. Yet their invasion was preemptive, because they perceived, with some good reason, that the British were angling for a show-down. What were the primary motives and intentions of the British? These varied among the leading agents, but, with due respect to Marxist historians, seizure of the diamond and gold mines in the Rand was not, I think, among them. British policy was led by Sir Alfred Milner who was an Apostle of the superior virtues of fair, efficient, and modernising British administration. Milner wanted to give South Africa the benefit of such virtuous government, and to secure regional peace between Afrikaner and British, White and Black, by creating an imperial confederation of states, as had recently been achieved in Canada. Initially, Milner had hoped to woo the Boers to his scheme, but eventually he came to the conclusion that it would either have to be forced upon them or abandoned altogether. One of the reasons that the Boer republics resisted absorption into the British Empire, even with confederal autonomy, was that they deeply resented British criticism of their mistreatment of black Africans and correlative interference by the imperial authorities to secure African rights. Cape Colony had granted black Africans the vote, under certain conditions, as early as 1853 (seventeen years before the U.S.A.). And in the 1881 Convention of Pretoria, which ended the First Anglo-Boer War, the British had insisted on the suzerainty of the Empire, partly to secure the right of imperial authorities to intervene in defence of black Africans.^[i]

However, at the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902, which ended the Second Boer War, the British agreed to let the question of African rights be decided by the Boer republics, after they had been removed from post-war imperial supervision and granted confederal autonomy. That is, it was agreed that the republics should decide the matter for themselves. Some judge this to have been a lamentably bad compromise, because it involved the simple surrender of a humanitarian cause and demonstrated that the British had never really cared about African rights in the first place. It exposed their humanitarian claims as mere rhetoric. Such is the view of the Anglo-Irish historian Thomas Pakenham, whose fine book on the Boer War would be even better, were it not for the unmistakeable sound of an anti-British axe grinding.^[ii]

I agree with Pakenham that the treaty would have been a bad compromise, if it really had expressed a simple or casual abandonment of the good of justice for Africans. However, there is a plausible, alternative reading. The Second Boer War had taken the British far longer, and cost them far more, to win than they had expected. In its latter stages it had moved into a guerrilla phase and was accordingly very bitter indeed. The Boer republics attracted a lot of international sympathy, and the British a correlative amount of opprobrium. At its end, both Milner and Herbert Kitchener, the senior British military commander, were extremely keen to make a sustainable peace and to bind up the deep wounds inflicted upon the relationship between Afrikaner and Briton. They perceived that to insist on African rights would be to pour salt in those wounds and could result in the resumption of war. They also perceived that for the imperial authorities to try and enforce such rights in the republics would require a level of military and financial commitment that could not sustain domestic political support. So, they compromised. But they did not compromise for trivial reasons: they wanted to avoid the resumption of bitter war and the futile imposition of military occupation. Nor did they simply surrender the cause of African well-being. Rather, they compromised in the hope that, long-term, once the Boer republics had settled down in the British Empire and discovered the benefits of its administration, and once immigration had increased the British proportion of their populations, the issue of the rights of black Africans could be successfully addressed by political means.^[iii]

How does this story further our understanding of what makes for a bad compromise? It draws our attention to the moral distinction between, on the one hand, a case where the pursuit of a human good is abandoned entirely or suspended for insufficiently weighty reasons and, on the other hand, one where the pursuit of such a good is prudently and tactically suspended in the face of current political realities, but not abandoned strategically. The former involves a bad compromise; the latter, a good one. Here a good compromise is revealed to be an instance of Realpolitik in its original sense—that is, not at all the cynical, ruthless pursuit of power, but rather the canny pursuit of liberal, humane goals by politically realistic, patient, gradual means.^[iv]

Historical case II: The Yalta Agreement, 1945

My second historical case is the agreement between Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin at Yalta in February 1945, which resulted in the forced repatriation of Soviet soldiers and citizens to the USSR, where many of them were executed, and also in the establishment of repressive Soviet rule over Central and Eastern Europe. This is the subject of extended analysis by the Israeli philosopher, Avishai Margalit, author of a rare book-length treatment of the ethics of compromise.^[v]

Margalit’s basic criterion of a bad compromise is that it is one that agrees, actively or passively, to “establish or maintain a [permanent] regime of [systematic] cruelty and humiliation—in short, an inhuman regime”.^[vi] “A compromise to establish or maintain racist regimes is”, he writes, “the epitome of rottenness”.^[vii] That is rather low-hanging fruit, but it does at least give us a clear extreme against which to measure less black-and-white, more ambiguous phenomena. Nevertheless, it needs some qualification, because it would probably—and to my mind, wrongly—judge the Peace of Vereeniging to have been a rotten compromise.

Margalit goes on to develop his criterion, when he distinguishes memorably between compromise that is “a cockroach in the soup” from that which is “a fly in the ointment”.^[viii] The war-guilt clause in the Versailles Treaty he reckons a fly, because it was a flaw, but not one that morally disqualified the treaty as a whole. Yalta’s agreement to the “systematically cruel and humiliating rule” of Stalin over Eastern Europe, however, he considers a cockroach.^[ix]

Margalit acknowledges that the text of the Yalta agreement itself only agreed to ‘repatriation’, not ‘forced repatriation’, and it did agree that “the liberated peoples could freely choose their own form of government”.^[x] He also acknowledges that the agreement was concluded in part to sustain the justified Allied war against Nazi Germany.^[xi] Nevertheless, Margalit argues that it was generally understood that the repatriation would take place with or without the consent of the displaced Soviet citizens; that the Americans and British knew what lay in store for the returnees; and that “[t]here is not a shred of evidence” that Western insistence on voluntary repatriation would have jeopardised the war-time alliance with Stalin or that it would have jeopardised the return of British and American prisoners of war from East Prussia and Poland. ^[xii]Moreover, he shows evidence that Anthony Eden was keen to avoid permanent responsibility for Soviet citizens who did not wish to return.^[xiii] In the end, therefore, he judges that the West’s acquiescence in Stalin’s demand for forced repatriation was a matter, not of necessity, but of expediency.^[xiv] It was a bad compromise.

Margalit might be right. Nevertheless, I think that his reading needs further complication, at least. First, insofar as the returnees were Soviet citizens, the responsibility of the Western allies for them was limited and secondary.

Second, since the Soviet returnees had fought for the Nazis, they were traitors and so, arguably, deserved some punishment. Certainly, the British themselves saw fit to execute a number of their own citizens who had been found guilty of working for the enemy during the Second World War. Nevertheless, if we suppose that the mass execution of Soviet returnees was disproportionately harsh, the blame for that lies first and foremost with Stalin. Pace utilitarians, we are not primarily responsible for the effects of other agents’ choices.

Third, does not Margalit go too far in claiming that the Anglo-Saxon Allies knew what would befall the returnees? They might have suspected, even strongly suspected, but surely they could not have known. So, if there was doubt, were they wrong, under the fraught circumstances, to give Stalin benefit of it? In sum, it is true that Roosevelt and Churchill did not have to compel repatriation. However, given their limited responsibility, given uncertainty about how the Soviets would treat the returnees, given the arguable propriety of capital punishment for treason in wartime, and given the priority of maintaining the anti-Nazi alliance, it is not clear to me that their complicity in forced repatriation was rotten.

Regarding Stalin’s “systematically cruel and humiliating rule” over Eastern Europe, I note that this is the main reason that Margalit judges Yalta to be more cockroach than fly. And yet he recognises that the treaty itself agreed to the political self-determination of the liberated peoples, and that “[t]he Western Allies could do very little in Yalta to loosen the grip of Stalin on Eastern Europe”.^[xv]

So what lessons should we learn from Yalta about the character of bad compromises?

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The human condition often lands us in situations where there is no morally pure option. We often find ourselves in situations that are more or less walled in by historical fate. As Joseph Chamberlain, British Colonial Secretary, commented on imperial policy in South Africa in 1900, “We have to lie on the bed which our predecessors made for us”.^[1] In situations thus constrained every choice is fraught with risk, sometimes the stakes are very high, and ethical clarity about the right way forward does not lie easily to hand. Therefore, those who nevertheless have to wrestle their way to a decision deserve our sympathy. Indeed, insofar as they have deliberately chosen to make themselves liable to such wrestling—whether in government or the military—they deserve our admiration.

It was such admiration that caused me to move from the academic discipline of History to Theology forty years ago. During my undergraduate career as an historian, I stumbled into a course on the life and times of St Augustine in the Late Roman Empire. Augustine, who was bishop of Hippo in what is now Tunisia, wrote a letter in the year 408, in which he touched upon the dilemmas of judicial interrogation, which in those days often involved what we would call ‘torture’. So he writes:

On the subject of punishing or refraining from punishment, what am I to say? It is our desire that when we decide whether or not to punish people, in either case it should contribute wholly to their security. These are indeed deep and obscure matters: what limit ought to be set to punishment with regard to both the nature and extent of guilt, and also the strength of spirit the wrongdoers possess? What ought each one to suffer?… What do we do when, as often happens, punishing someone will lead to his destruction, but leaving him unpunished will lead to someone else being destroyed?... What trembling, what darkness!… [And then he quotes Psalm 55:] ‘Trembling and fear have come upon me and darkness has covered me, and I said, Who will give me wings like a dove’s? For then I will fly away and be at rest’….”.^[2]

But Augustine did not flee. He did not run away. He stayed. He continued to shoulder the responsibilities of bishop, which, as the Roman Empire crumbled around him, were increasingly those of government. He kept up pastoral correspondence with military tribunes like Boniface and Marcellinus, whose Christian consciences were troubled by having to use the sword to keep the peace. With them he lamented the tragic dilemmas of government, but he did not flinch from facing them. And for that I have loved him ever since—and I admire those like him.

There needs, however, to be a limit to sympathy, unless we are to bless every compromise. Some compromises, surely, are bad ones. We may sympathise with those forced to make them but still judge their decision to be wrong. So, what is it that makes a compromise bad? When does it become morally wrong? What are the moral bottom-lines that should constrain our compromising? And, by implication, when is it morally okay to compromise? These are the questions whose answers I shall pursue here.

Compromise, evil, and regret

I take a compromise to be a decision that deliberately involves a loss of good—that is, an evil. It involves either conceding an opportunity to maintain or promote a good or becoming a part-cause of evil. Therefore, compromise should always cause one who consents to it to feel regret—or, more specifically, what Stephen de Wijze calls ‘agent-regret’: the agent should regret that he himself has become party to a loss of good.^[3]Straightaway we discover the first feature of bad compromise: a lack of regret on the part of the one who makes it.

Regret, however, is not the same as moral guilt. It is not always morally wrong to permit or even to cause evil. Sometimes, there is what certain Roman Catholic ethicists call ‘non-moral evil’. When it is morally right, the unavoidable causing of evil is non-moral, cannot be culpable, and should not attract feelings of guilt. Therefore, with due respect to the proponents of the idea of ‘dirty hands’, a compromise that it is morally right to make, all things considered, cannot retain elements of moral wrongness. A paradigmatic case of ‘dirty hands’ is the so-called ‘ticking bomb’ scenario, where a politician authorises the torture of a terrorist, who is known to have accurate information about the location of city-centre bombs intended to kill masses of civilians.^[4] De Wijze’s ‘dirty hands’ view is that torture is always and everywhere wrong, but that there might rare cases—such as the ‘ticking bomb’ scenario—where it is the right thing to do. It can be right to do wrong, to get one’s hands morally dirty: that is the paradox.

I tend to resist paradoxes. Temperamentally more Jesuit than Lutheran, I tend to think that paradoxes are merely the point at which a certain line of thinking has run into the sand, and that there must be an alternative line of thinking that will resolve them. That is what I think here. For example, if there are cases where it is morally right to torture, then these are cases when torturing is not morally wrong. Consequently, we should be moved to reconsider the absolute rule, the kind of action it intends to prohibit, and why the action in this case does not belong to that kind. In other words, such cases should provoke us to tighten the scope of the rule, so as to exclude them. I myself have argued elsewhere that we should distinguish ‘torture’, which is wicked by definition, from ‘aggressive interrogation’, which intentionally inflicts pain on another human person, not out of sadism, but intending to preserve the innocent against grave injury, and as a necessary and proportionate last resort. Such ‘aggressive interrogation’ should remain illegal, to prevent institutional habituation and corruption, but it can still be moral, and courts should prepare themselves to recognise it, somehow, as such.^[5]

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As a Briton, I rejoice that the United States was born. But I would have preferred a different, bloodless birth. As is so often the case with conflict, the one between Britain and her American colonies in the 1770s had tragic elements. The British—rightly—thought that the colonists should make a greater contribution to the cost of their own defence during the French and Indian Wars through taxation. Understandably, however, the colonists resented the high-handed means by which the taxes were imposed. (Although, let’s be frank, some of them simply resented having to pay taxes at all, while others resented imperial constraints on invading Indian lands west of the Appalachians.) The result was a civil conflict—as much between Americans as against the British—which is typically the bitterest kind of war.

That said, the bloody rupture that was the birth of the US had several beneficial side-effects. If the American colonies had remained part of the British Empire into the 19^th century, it would have made Britain’s abolition of the slave-trade and slavery in the early 1800s, and its subsequent role in suppressing them worldwide, politically impossible.

Further, the American example of mass democracy surely heartened democrats in Britain and France and promoted their cause.

And further still, the American War of Independence taught the British the important lesson that London couldn’t impose tight control on far-flung colonies. It had to allow greater autonomy. That’s why, starting with Canada in 1867, all the ‘dominions’ (New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa) acquired increasing self-control, so that by 1931 they were virtually autonomous states. After a failed attempt in the early 1900s to bind the disparate members of the Empire in a US-style federation, the view prevailed that the Empire should relax into a voluntary association of independent members, ‘the British Commonwealth of Nations’.

During the 20^th century, the United States proved itself a consistent champion of political liberty, first against Prussian militarism in the first world war, then against Nazism and brutal Japanese imperialism in the second, and finally against Soviet and Chinese Communism in the Cold War. Without the US’s commitment of resources of manpower and materiel in the last two cases, the free world would have struggled to survive outside of North America. So, we in Britain and in the other liberal democracies have needed American aid—desperately in 1940-45—and we are grateful to have received it. America’s ascendancy has served us well.

Nonetheless, even hegemons are seldom self-sufficient. The British Empire almost never fought a war all by itself and when it did in 1775-83, we all know what happened. Similarly, if Britain hadn’t held out in 1939-41, the US’s ability to dislodge Nazism would have been severely diminished. Imagine trying to invade Europe across a U-boat-infested Atlantic against an enemy who’d got to the atom bomb first. And when Americans fought in Korea in 1950-3, they did so alongside Britons, Canadians, Australians, and New Zealanders. The Antipodeans even took part in the Vietnam War. More recently in Afghanistan, the British spent almost as much blood per capita of population as the US: 0.00068, as against 0.00074.

The US needs allies. For sure, it needs allies who bear their fair share of the military burden, and so it has had every reason to rattle Europe’s complacent cage. Yet, let American exasperation be tempered by the thought that, once upon a time, it was the exasperated British who rattled the American colonial cage for exactly the same reason.

Yet, if the US needs us to help keep Russia at bay in the North Atlantic, as well as on the European continent, we certainly need the US. But we need a reliable, consistent US. We need a US that doesn’t scuttle from Kabul without informing us. We need a US that doesn’t attack Iran without consulting us and then threaten punishment when we decline to help clear up the Gulf of Hormuz.

So, happy 250^th birthday, America! We’re glad you were born. We’re grateful for what you’ve done for us. And we sincerely hope to march shoulder to shoulder with you into the anxious future. For, if we don’t hang together, we will surely hang separately.

In its choice of bank-note design, the Bank of England displays the same dereliction of patriotic duty typical of so many of our elites. When trying to justify the Bank’s decision to drop famous historical figures such as Winston Churchill and Alan Turing in favour of assorted wildlife, its Governor, Andrew Bailey, first argued that the “foremost objective” was security. “To ensure the public can trust the money we print,” he wrote in the Daily Telegraph, we have to change the design of our notes from time to time: no design can be permanent if we are to stay ahead of the counterfeiters” (“We must take Churchill off banknotes for security reasons”, 3 June).

But, of course, a change of design doesn’t require a change of subject: a different version of Churchill and Turing could easily have been chosen. Security, therefore, cannot have been the main motive.

So, the Governor moved on to another justification. He acknowledged that celebrating people who’ve made exemplary contributions to the Britain we’ve all inherited—and doing so on banknotes—is important. Immediately, however, he turned around and surrendered what he’d just asserted, apparently in democratic deference to the popular will. A poll, he said, had revealed a “clear” preference for wildlife.

Yet again, things are not quite as they appear. For, what the Governor didn’t mention was that the poll had been so structured as to diffuse preferences for history, while concentrating those for nature. History had been divided into three separate categories—figures, landmarks, and events. Because it had not been similarly divided—into, say, fauna, flora, and landscape—nature was enabled to attract the highest proportion of preferences.

What is more, the Bank had not simply deferred to the people’s will. It had not let the people choose whatever they pleased. It had asserted its authority, made a judgement, taken a stand: the people could choose between history or nature, but not between the King’s portrait and one of Mickey Mouse. So why didn’t it also make the patriotic judgement that it’s more important to celebrate the people who spent their lives building and defending the national heritage we’ve all been privileged to receive, than to showcase wildlife that would happily scurry about the landscape whether or not the British nation-state existed at all. Wildlife represents the ‘country’ only as apolitical nature, not as a political nation. It is not a symbol of national identity.

So why did the Bank choose to abandon Britain’s national heritage?

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BREXIT TEN YEARS ON (Part II)

Last week I explained why I voted in 2016 for Britain to remain in the EU. This week I explain why, if there were another referendum, I’d vote to stay out.

I

Ten years after Brexit, it is clear that it didn’t usher in the End of the World, although a certain ‘progressive’, post-nationalist vision of the future has suffered a shocking blow. And deservedly so. In the immediate wake of the referendum result, I was very struck by how viscerally some Remainers responded, and how inarticulate their response was. I remember one incipient Twitter-spat with a former student of mine, who was apoplectic over Brexit. I kept pressing him to explain what belonging to ‘Europe’ meant to him, because I wanted to understand what was so precious that he thought he had lost. Eventually he abruptly declared that he was not obliged to tell me, and the line went dead. This, from a man with an Oxford University education.

I have been struck, too, by the lack of honest—no matter, generous—curiosity on the part of Remainers about why so many of their fellow-citizens voted to leave the EU. Too often, like Richard Drayton and Vince Cable, they reach for prefabricated tropes, such as ‘imperial nostalgia’—for which there is no empirical evidence at all. They don’t care to look or listen. Neither the frothing inarticulacy nor the bigoted dismissiveness of Remainers have done anything to warm me to their cause.

II

Nor have their prophesies of economic disaster. On the economic effects of Brexit, I am certainly no expert, but I read a lot. My settled impression is that the immediate economic effects of Brexit have been negative, but not severely so. Disruptions to trade with the EU in goods, especially by smaller British producers, have contributed to a lowering of the rate of economic growth. But then, so has Covid, the war in Ukraine, and President Trump’s tariffs. Quite what Brexit’s particular contribution has been, is hard to isolate and consequently controversial. As for the City of London, apart from losing a few thousand employees and some business to Paris and Frankfurt, it has maintained its position of European leadership. The advantages of English language and corporate law, and the attractiveness of the city’s multicultural life, all remain. According to Wolfgang Munchau, formerly of the Financial Times, Brexit has been an economic “non-event”.^[1]

It seems entirely plausible to me that Britain could make up for its loss of European trade in the course of time. Its freedom to make independent trade-deals has already enabled it to join, in March 2024, Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam in theComprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP). Then, in July 2025, there was the signing of a comprehensive Free Trade Agreement with India, which promises to give British service businesses entry to an economy on course to become the world’s second largest.

Moreover, Brexit is now enabling Britain to take a significantly less cautious and more venturesome stance toward AI than the EU. With a tech sector valued the third highest globally (after the US and China) and some of the world’s best research universities, Britain is well placed to exploit the next technological revolution that could treble global wealth. And Brexit gives it much greater freedom to do so.^[2] Even a still convinced Remainer such as Rohan Silva finds himself forced to admit that “the EU’s AI laws are … astonishingly bureaucratic” and “that the EU’s lamentably awful new tech regulations do materially increase the costs and downsides of some day rejoining”.^[3]

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What follows largely comprises the first half of a chapter that appears in The Brexit Effect, 2016-2026 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2026), edited by Anthony Seldon. In it I explain why I voted (by a narrow margin) in the 2016 referendum for Britain to remain in the European Union. Next week, I’ll explain why I’ve changed my mind and would vote to stay out now.

I

I am an icon of Brexit, it seems. In 2019 Richard Drayton, Rhodes Professor of Imperial History at King’s College London, contributed “Biggar vs Little Britain: God, War, Union, Brexit and Empire in Twenty-First Century Conservative Ideology,” to a collection of essays entitled, Embers of Empire in Brexit Britain.^[1] In this he wrote: “[A] journey into the mind-world of Biggar can help us to understand the larger, and less articulate and visible cultural currents in late twentieth and twenty-first century Britain. It may provide insight into how some of the embers of empire continue to burn, and even to kindle obscure new flames…. The Biggar phenomenon is a sign of the times to which we should pay attention”.^[2]

Awfully flattered as I am by the cultural importance Professor Drayton attaches to me, I regret to say that he is mistaken. First of all, I am not aware of any hard and comprehensive empirical data that substantiates the claim that voters were generally moved to vote Leave in the June 2016 referendum by “imperial nostalgia”, in the vain hope that Brexit would liberate Britain to recover the kind of global dominance she enjoyed in 1900.

Next, while Drayton claims that my 2016 blog, “The Nation-State and the Case for Remaining in the EU,” comprised an argument for leaving the European Union,^[3] my concluding two sentences ought to have shown him otherwise: “There may well be good reasons for Britain to remain in the EU But if that is so, the unchristian nature, or the obsolescence, of the nation-state is not one of them”. ^[4]

Yes, it is true that I believe that Britain should continue its imperial tradition of playing a global role, sometimes deploying hard power in faraway places to uphold international order and halt massive atrocities. I also believe in the value of the United Kingdom as a remarkably successful multinational state. But those are views shared by plenty of Remainers and repudiated by lots of ‘Little England’ Leavers.

Finally, by far the largest fly in Professor Drayton’s narrative ointment is that I actually voted to remain in the EU in 2016. Indeed, I went so far as to wager a lunch and a dinner on a 52/48 per cent victory for Remain. (I got the figures right, but not the bias.)

Let me explain.

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Reference CAS-8297457-C1L2F8

Stage 2 complaint re. David Olusoga’s “Empire” (November 2025, BBC2)

In its lackadaisical response to my 1b Stage complaint, the BBC Complaints Team made a series of unargued or irrelevant assertions that:

1. David Olusoga is an ‘established’ historian;

2. viewers do not need additional signposting to recognise that Mr Olusoga’s series expressed his particular interpretation;

3. the focus on ‘under-explored’ voices is a legitimate editorial choice; and

4. none of the topics covered are “active matters of political controversy or relate to current public policy”.

To these assertions, I answer that:

1. The issue is not whether Mr Olusoga is a journalist who has been ‘established’ as a popular historian. He has been, not least by the BBC. No, the issue is whether he is a journalist whose representation of history can be trusted to be fair and not unduly distorted by political prejudice. In section 3 (c) of my Stage 1b Complaint, I explained the political bias of his treatment of the Mau Mau Emergency, commenting that either he deliberately suppressed half of the truth or he didn’t know it. In either case, he is not a reliable historian, behind whom the BBC should put the weight of its reputation. The Complaints Team evaded this point entirely.

2. Again, the issue is not whether viewers can be expected to know that ‘Empire’ represents an interpretation of history. Of course, they can. The issue is whether a typical viewer, with little or no knowledge of the subject-matter, has been sufficiently alerted to the politically partisan and controversial nature of the interpretation. I substantiated my claim about its partisan, distorted nature in sections 3 and 5 of my Complaint. The Complaints Team did not even attempt to engage with my argument.

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“Of a total of at least 41 million African slaves transported, the British were responsible for just under 8%, whereas Africans and Arabs were responsible for almost 70%.”

The pressure on Britain to pay reparations for the historic enslavement of Africans is mounting. Following the Church of England’s commitment to atone for its sins by diverting £100m of its assets to black-led enterprises, last Saturday the Church of Scotland formally apologised for its part in slavery, resolving to take appropriate penitential action. The previous Monday, the former prime minister of St Vincent and the Grenadines, Ralph Gonsalves, had declared it “inconceivable” that the issue won’t be at the heart of next November’s gathering of Commonwealth leaders in Antigua and Barbuda.

At the last such meeting in October 2024, Keir Starmer and his foreign secretary, David Lammy, struggled to keep the topic off the agenda. In July 2025 Caricom, the Caribbean Community of 20 states, supported Jamaica’s petition to King Charles, urging him to request legal advice from the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, the final court of appeal, on whether Britain is obliged to provide a remedy for slavery and its enduring consequences.

This year, in February, the African Union adopted a resolution proposed by its champion for reparations and Ghana’s president John Dramani Mahama, which identifies slavery as a crime against humanity. In March, the UN General Assembly passed his resolution describing transatlantic chattel slavery as “the gravest crime against humanity” and calling for reparations as “a concrete step towards remedying historical wrongs”. One hundred and twenty-three states supported it, only three (Argentina, Israel and the US) opposed it, and 52 (including the UK) abstained. Next month Ghana will maintain the momentum by hosting a reparations conference to coordinate the global campaign.

Those pressing Britain from without have allies within. In March 2023, Clive Lewis, MP, supported by Labour colleagues Nadia Whittome and Dawn Butler, called for the UK to enter into “meaningful negotiations” with Caribbean countries about reparations. The following month, Bell Ribeiro-Addy, MP, demanded that then prime minister, Rishi Sunak, apologise “for our country’s role in colonialism and slavery”. And since August 2023 the Irish billionaire Denis O’Brien has been funding a parliamentary lobbying campaign for slavery reparations based in Lewis’s office.

Even Lammy has expressed sympathy. Speaking as a backbench MP in June 2018, he said: “The Caribbean nations have been united in wanting to put the issue of reparations back on the table… It is important that this country hears and listens… Let us consider: what do reparations look like for those Caribbean nations? How do we make that work?” Then, as shadow justice secretary in 2020: “The starting point is truth and reconciliation… we’re no longer in a society where we question notions like white privilege… And then we get to a point where we have to discuss power and reckoning and repairing—and that to some extent is obviously financial.”

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Yet, Africans—not least in West Africa—had been busy enslaving other Africans and selling them to the Romans, and then the Arabs, for centuries before the British arrived. According to former anti-apartheid activist, Martin Plaut, in his 2025 book, Unbroken Chains: A 5,000 Year History of African Enslavement, the total of African slaves traded across the Atlantic, the Sahara, and the Indian Ocean amounted to more than 41 million. Of these, the British were responsible for under 8 per cent. In the early 19^th century, the Fulani people in what’s now northern Nigeria ran slave-plantations employing around 4 million slaves—more than all the British had transported in over 150 years.

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I have now received the BBC’s response (8 May) to that. I find it entirely unsatisfactory, for reasons that I shall explain when I take my complaint to the third and final stage in the internal complaints process, by writing a third letter, this time to the Executive Complaints Unit. After I have dispatched the letter, I shall post it here.

In the meantime, I am posting the BBC’s latest response below. But immediately before it, so that readers can see what it is responding to and measure it against my complaint for themselves, I am reposting my letter of 30 March. Here it is.

Stage 1b complaint re. David Olusoga’s “Empire” (November 2025, BBC2)

30 March 2026

ONE PAGE SUMMARY

Dissatisfied with your letter of 27 February replying to my Complaint at stage 1a, I now raise it to stage 1b. I have not written within the requisite 20 working days because (a) while referring me to the BBC’s website, your letter gave no warning of urgency; (b) I became aware of the 20-working-day stipulation only after its expiration; and (c) the preparation of this response has taken a lot of time.

In brief, your reply of 27 February contains two factually inaccurate reports, twice responds to a strawman of your own making rather than what I actually wrote, and makes one specious argument and another implausible one.

Moreover, Mr Olusoga’s “Empire” contravenes the BBC’s own Editorial Standards regarding impartiality in four respects:

(a) It treats a set of historical and political issues that are highly and actively controversial (at least, outside the BBC), without acknowledging and giving voice to an appropriate range of significant views.

(b) Insofar as it claims to tell marginalised or overlooked histories, Mr Olusoga’s selection is racially discriminatory and political biassed.

(c) “Empire” is not clearly signposted as Mr Olusoga’s personal view and does not acknowledge an appropriate range of alternative views or give them their proper weight.

(d) Not one of the other programmes listed as offering balance over time is as overwhelmingly positive as “Empire” is overwhelmingly negative.

Therefore, Mr Olusoga’s “Empire” failed to meet the BBC’s own standards of impartiality.

My response exceeds the normal limit of 1,000 words, because that was necessary to demonstrably substantiate my criticisms.

Professor the Lord Biggar, CBE

House of Lords SW1A 0PW

Stage 1b complaint re. David Olusoga’s “Empire” (November 2025, BBC2)

30 March 2026

Dissatisfied with your letter of 27 February replying to my Complaint at stage 1a, I now raise it to stage 1b. I have not written within the requisite 20 working days because (a) while referring me to the BBC’s website, your letter gave no warning of urgency; (b) I became aware of the 20-working-day stipulation only after its expiration; and (c) the preparation of this response has taken a lot of time.

My response exceeds the normal limit of 1,000 words, because that was necessary to demonstrably substantiate my criticisms.

1. According to the BBC’s Editorial Standards regarding impartiality, when treating a matter of public controversy over historical issues, content-makers must “ensure a wide range of significant views and perspectives are given due weight and prominence, particularly when the controversy is active” (2.4.7). When treating highly controversial issues, “an appropriately wide range of significant views must be included and given due weight in each programme … or in clearly linked and timely programmes” (2.4.8). And where a single, personal view is expressed “[t]his should be clearly signposted …. The existence of a range of views and their respective weights should be acknowledged, and neither those views nor their respective weights should be misrepresented” (2.4.9). Moreover, “an opportunity for response or alternative perspectives, … in a pre-arranged and signposted discussion programme” should be provided (2.4.34-35).

Both Britain’s imperial history, and the views of David Olusoga about it, qualify as actively and highly controversial topics—certainly, in the British public at large, if not within the BBC itself.

2. In your letter you argue that “Empire” is “an authored series that does not set out to tell the story of the British Empire in its entirety”. By ‘authored series’ I infer one that purports only to present David Olusoga’s personal viewpoint.

(a) However, to the unsuspecting viewer, the phrase ‘with David Olusoga’ that follows ‘Empire’ in the title merely communicates that Mr Olusoga will present the series. It does not warn the viewer that what they are about to watch is a personal, highly controversial interpretation.

(b) Of course, the series cannot be expected to tell the story of the Empire “in its entirety” in the sense of treating every significant element in it. Nonetheless, the introduction to each episode paints a bird’s-eye overview of the whole of the Empire, its extent both in time and space. Clearly, the series purports to tell a coherent narrative about the British Empire as a whole. And that is what it does—in an overwhelmingly negative way that does violence to significant parts of the whole truth.

3. You write that the programme’s stated purpose” was to approach the subject “from the viewpoint of those whose ancestors were part of the story of empire, but whose history has often been marginalised or overlooked in the past. This included hearing the views of individuals for whom the British Empire is part of their family history, talking about how the legacy of Empire continues to shape people’s lives today”.

(a) That contains two inaccuracies. First, in the introductory minutes of the first episode, no mention is made of focussing on marginalised and overlooked histories. Second, the individuals whose views are sought do not talk about “how the legacy of Empire continues to shape people’s lives today”. They talk about their perceptions of that legacy and what they say is allowed to suffer no critical interrogation by alternative, better informed viewpoints. At least one of those perceptions is, according to eminent historical authorities, false. Twice it is claimed that Britain’s wealth “derives very significantly from profits made from slavery”. And yet the most eminent living historian of transatlantic slavery, David Eltis, reckons the contribution of slavery to Britain’s industrial prosperity somewhere between small and trivial. And the winner of the 2025 Nobel Prize for Economics, Joel Mokyr, judges that, without slavery, Britain industrial growth would have proceeded at a “marginally slower pace”.

(b) Among the ancestors who were part of the history of the British Empire and whose history has been marginalised and overlooked in the recent past are British abolitionists and those who took part in the Empire’s anti-slavery endeavours during the second half of its life. Most were white, though some were not. Younger Britons know almost nothing about them. Yet, Mr Olusoga has chosen to exclude them.

(c) Even if we grant the dubious assumption that only the voices of people with non-white skins go unheard, Mr Olusoga’s selection betrays political bias. For while he chooses to mediate the stories of 18^th century slaves, he chooses not to mediate the stories of emancipated African slaves, some of whom who stood outside Government House in the Seychelles in June 1897 holding a large Union Jack printed with the words, “The Flag that Sets us Free”. And while he chooses to mediate the stories of 20^th century Mau Mau insurgents tortured in a detainment camp, he chooses not to mediate the stories of the much larger number of black Africans who supported the British and opposed the insurgents, because of their terroristic methods, including the disembowelling and decapitation of women and children. Only the ‘victims’ of empire are given a voice, while the stories of indigenous beneficiaries and supporters are excluded. Either Mr Olusoga deliberately suppressed alternative, indigenous viewpoints or he was ignorant of them. Whatever the reason, his politically partisan story serves to confirm the historically simplistic and racially divisive BLM ‘White-Oppressors-of-Black-Victims’ narrative that now dominates many public and cultural institutions.

4. You write that “[t]he programme is not intended as a broad exploration of slavery and given its particular focus on the British Empire, and within its defined timeframe, it does not aim to cover other forms of slavery that existed in different eras and regions”. That is specious. It would not have taken Mr Olusoga more than sixty seconds to put British involvement in slavery in its historical context, alerting viewers to its universality and its practice by Africans for centuries before the British arrived.

5. Regarding my complaint that allotting “an offhand twenty-five seconds” to “Britain’s unprecedented abolition of the slave trade and slavery, and its century-and-a-half’s worth of worldwide suppression of them”, you say you “do not agree that the significance of any statement or sequence within a television programme can be measured solely by its duration”.

(a) That argument implies that you would regard as acceptable a programme about the British Empire that allotted only twenty-five seconds to the topic of British involvement in slavery. That strains credulity and is quite implausible.

(b) In the current cultural climate, when the whole of British colonial history tends to be identified with slavery—as witness the popular phrase, ‘colonialism and slavery’—historically uneducated viewers, especially younger ones, will emerge ignorant of the fact that Britain was among the first states in the world’s history to abolish slave-trading and slavery, and that it spent the second half of its life suppressing them from Brazil to New Zealand. No African, Arab, or Asian country did anything like that. Mr Olusoga’s narrative therefore leaves British viewers with a seriously biassed and unbalanced perception of their own country’s past.

(c) You argue that “more than two centuries of Britain’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade (and the profound and lasting economic, social, and human consequences of that history) [need not] be counterbalanced by allocating an equivalent amount of airtime to Britain’s later abolitionist efforts in order to accurately inform the audience”. First, you misreport my complaint and erect a distracting strawman: I did not claim that a balanced picture requires an equal quantity of time. It would be perfectly possible to give a sufficiently even-handed account, while devoting more time to discussing slavery than its abolition.

Second, you appear to accord Britain’s involvement in slavery a predominant weight (“more than two centuries … profound and lasting”). In fact, Britain’s involvement in the slavery from circa 1650 to 1833 was comparatively minor in extent. Of the more than 40 million Africans enslaved and exported worldwide, according to Martin Plaut (Unbroken Chains: A 5,000 Year History of African Enslavement, 2025, p. 2), some Britons were responsible for trading 3.25 million. In 1850 the Fulani people in what is now northern Nigeria ran vast plantations employing as many slaves as in the whole of the then American South—4 million. If you disagree with that statement, it is only because you have taken a highly controversial, politically biassed position. You are not impartial.

6. You write that you “disagree with your suggestion that the series … focuses solely on its negative impacts”. Again, your reporting is inaccurate and sets up a distracting strawman. In the opening paragraphs of the article I sent Samir Shah I say plainly, “Viewers of his [Olusoga’s] three-part BBC 2 series, ‘Empire’, do learn many things that are true about the British Empire…. positive truths are voiced”. However, “they’re all incidental to the central story, which is overwhelmingly negative”. That was my actual complaint.

7. You provide a list of past programmes that treat the British Empire “from other perspectives”.

(a) Of these, only one is fronted—and its content controlled—by a professional historian of any authority, who can be trusted to know what he’s talking about: Harvard University’s Professor, Simon Schama, whose 2003 History of Britain devoted two of his fifteen episodes to the Empire.

(b) None of the other programmes tells a story as overwhelmingly positive as Mr Olusoga’s is overwhelmingly negative. All of them show a degree of balance that “Empire” lacks. That is to say, “Empire” is uniquely unbalanced.

8. On the relevant webpage of BBC iPlayer (https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/m002hytf/empire-with-david-olusoga?seriesId=more-like-this), viewers are directed to 12 other programmes. Five are presented by Mr Olusoga himself, one of them devoted to British slaveowners. None concerns the British Empire as such or British abolitionists. Simon Shama’s 2003 History of Britain appears at the bottom in eleventh place. The “Empire” webpage, therefore, neither communicates to unsuspecting viewers the controversial nature of Mr Olusoga’s programme, nor alerts them to the need to seek out alternative, counterbalancing viewpoints, nor clearly direct viewers to any other programme about the British Empire, which presents such a viewpoint.

9. In sum, your reply of 27 February contains three factually inaccurate reports, twice responds to a strawman of your own making rather than what I actually wrote, and makes one specious argument and another implausible one. Moreover, Mr Olusoga’s “Empire” contravenes the BBC’s own Editorial Standards regarding impartiality in four respects:

(a) It treats a set of historical and political issues that are highly and actively controversial (at least, outside the BBC), without acknowledging and giving voice to an appropriate range of significant views.

(b) Insofar as it (implicitly) tells marginalised or overlooked histories, Mr Olusoga’s selection is racially discriminatory and political biassed.

(c) “Empire” is not clearly signposted as Mr Olusoga’s personal, highly controversial view and does not acknowledge an appropriate range of alternative views or give them their proper weight.

(d) Not one of the other programmes listed as offering balance over time is as overwhelmingly positive as “Empire” is overwhelmingly negative.

Therefore, Mr Olusoga’s “Empire” failed to meet the BBC’s own standards of impartiality.

Professor the Lord Biggar, CBE

House of Lords SW1A 0PW

To this, the BBC’s Complaints Team has offered the following response. I consider it wholly inadequate. Readers, of course, can make up their own minds.

Reference CAS-8297457-C1L2F8 

8.5.2026.

Dear Lord Biggar,

Thank you for your further complaint regarding ‘Empire with David Olusoga’.

David Olusoga is an established historian and broadcaster, well known to BBC audiences through a wide range of previous work. We appreciate your view that the authorship and editorial aims of this series should have been set out more explicitly. However, in light of the programme’s format, presentation, and title, we believe that viewers would recognise the nature of the series without the need for the additional signposting that you suggest. We are also confident that audiences recognise the interpretative nature of history and understand that individual historians will approach their subject from a particular perspective.

This programme’s focus on certain stories, voices and experiences, that have previously been under‑explored, represents a legitimate editorial choice and our Editorial Guidelines allow for such an approach. We appreciate however that there are other individuals that you feel the programme would have benefited from hearing from.

We do not consider that any of events covered, or the broader discussions surrounding them, to constitute active matters of political controversy or to relate to current public policy, where the guidelines would require awide range of significant views and perspectives to be given due weight and prominence.

We of course accept that there will be differing views on how the complex history of the British Empire is told and that there will be legitimate disagreement around the emphasis placed on varying narratives. However, we do not believe that failing to satisfy every viewer in this regard amounts to a breach of the BBC’s editorial standards.

This concludes Stage 1 of our complaints process. That means we can’t correspond with you further here. If you remain unhappy, you can now contact the BBC’s Executive Complaints Unit (ECU). The ECU is Stage 2 of the BBC’s complaints process. You’ll need to explain why you think there’s a potential breach of standards, or if the issue is significant and should still be investigated. Please do so within 20 working days of this reply.
Full details of how we handle complaints are available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/complaints/handle-complaint/.

How to contact the ECU:

We’ve provided a unique link for you in this email. This will open up further information about how to submit your complaint. You’ll be asked for the case reference number we’ve provided in this reply. Once you’ve used the link and submitted your complaint, the link will no longer work.

This is your link to contact the ECU if you wish: Click Here

Kind regards,

BBC Complaints Team

Three years ago, the acting vice-chancellor of Cambridge University, Dr Anthony Freeling, made a confession, widely reported in the British press. He confessed that he was baffled by ‘decolonisation’. The word, he said, “has been misused to such an extent that I don’t think, if I’m honest, I can give an accurate definition”.

I sympathise—as, I strongly suspect, do millions of others. That’s because ‘decolonisation’ can mean a variety of different things, some of which make good sense, but others, very bad sense indeed. And the bad ones have smuggled themselves into schools and university departments under cover of the good.

The original and most natural home of ‘decolonisation’ is in former European colonies. There it can mean something entirely reasonable. For example, in 1986 the Kenyan novelist and playwright, Ngugi wa Thiong’o published a book with the title, Decolonising the Mind. Here he argued that African literature should be written in African languages, such as his own Gikuyu. Why? So that Africans can recover a sense of self-respect and stop being in thrall to the assumption that whatever comes out of Europe is better. To which the only sensible response is surely, “Yes, of course.”

When translated out of its original, post-colony context and into contemporary Britain or Canada, ‘decolonisation’ can still make some good sense. It can mean correcting the neglect in school curricula of the history of immigration and the contribution of immigrants to our country.

Or it can mean that important texts that have been excluded from reading lists in schools and universities, just because of prejudice against the race of their authors (and not because of their poor quality) should be included.

If it is true that the history of immigration and the multicultural reality of Britain and Canada have been neglected, and if it is true that important texts have been excluded just because of the colour of an author’s skin-colour, then curricula should indeed be ‘decolonised’. If those things are true—and have been shown to be true.

So far, so much good sense.

Much less reasonable, however, is the opposition of ‘decolonisation’ to ‘Eurocentricity’ and its insistence on shifting attention to non-European histories and cultures. On the contrary, a certain Euro-centricity in British and Canadian education is entirely justified.

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I was dumbstruck. I felt—and I use the word advisedly—unmanned. Later, when I’d restored my poise and gathered my thoughts, I said to myself, “Are there no rules to this game any longer? And if not, what on earth is the point?” For what had been revealed was that the ’discussion’ was not a searching out of the truth together by common submission to the discipline of logic and evidence. It was merely the occasion for the telling of preferred narratives and for silencing criticism by the insinuation of bad faith. Hence, ‘tactics’.

But my ‘tactics’ were also described as ‘donnish’, connoting old white males wearing tweed jackets and reeking of pipe smoke circa 1950. This suggests that my fellow panellist was also exploiting her political power as a member of a group commonly stereotyped as victims (women) over a member of a group commonly stereotyped as victimisers (men). I was aware that, in response to the dismissal of my criticism, my tongue was tied, partly because the one doing the dismissing was a woman and I was a man. And she knew that, for her choice of words took care to remind me of it. Instead of reasoning with me, she’d leveraged her superior political power.

II

That’s a problem, especially in universities. For if reason and its rules are repudiated, the only way of resolving disagreement is by the imposition of superior power. And that, in my decade-long experience of the Culture War over colonial history, is what the ‘progressive’ zealots do. They shout and scream and smear. They intimidate and silence. They tackle the man, not the ball. They behave like little tyrants, aping the Red Guards in Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

By why?

One charitable possibility is the idea that the only way to understand a situation of injustice is through the eyes of its victims. Undoubtedly, there’s some truth to this. Often, the perpetrator of a wrong is oblivious to its wrongness, whereas those one who suffer it experience it directly. It makes sense, therefore, to heed their cry and open our eyes to their suffering.

But we oughtn’t do so naively. For, not everyone who claims to be a victim really is one. Sometimes, claimants manufacture grievances for profit or power. Sometimes, they misdiagnose the causes of their misfortune or injustice. So, we shouldn’t assume that an alleged victim is the sole possessor of reason, even while being open to insights they might have.

At least, we shouldn’t assume it, if we care. For those who really care to put injustice right or relieve misfortune, will take care to understand their causes accurately, because otherwise their attempts at remedy will fail. When presented with evidence that their diagnosis is incorrect, they will react with curiosity, albeit with scepticism. Too often, however, the self-appointed ‘progressive’ champions of the oppressed meet doubt and contradiction with knee-jerk dismissal.

I first noticed this in December 2015, when the Rhodes Must Fall (RMF) agitation began in Oxford. The protests involved several hundred students, mostly overseas postgraduates privileged with scholarships to study at one of the world’s most prestigious universities, who were clamouring for the downfall of an obscure statue of Cecil Rhodes, the British imperialist who had been lying in his south African grave for well over a century. Some were even Rhodes Scholars, cheerfully biting the hand that was feeding them. Their case against Rhodes was that he was racist, had built concentration camps, and perpetrated genocide. In short, he was South Africa’s Hitler.

As it happened, in late 2015 I was half-way through reading Robert Rotberg’s monumental biography of Rhodes, and I knew that what the protesters were claiming was a mishmash of half-truths and falsehoods. So, in March 2016 I published a five-thousand-word correction of the RMF narrative in Standpoint magazine, “Cecil Rhodes and the Abuse of History”.

Did this move the student protesters—and the professional academics who supported them—to pause and engage with me in a rational exchange about the historical truth of their claims? Not at all. On the contrary, six years later, when the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the consequent upsurge of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement revived the RMF campaign, the same distorted and false allegations were revived, utterly unchastened.

Clearly, it wasn’t the truth about the colonial past that motivated the RFM protesters. The past was merely a useful resource to pillage for political ammunition. But to what end? Evidently not for addressing South Africa’s present woes. For, while RMF’s co-founder and Rhodes Scholar, Ntokozo Qwabe, was happily protesting in Oxford, back in his home country Jacob Zuma and the African National Congress were busy looting the state, driving South Africa to the verge of insolvency and exposing its people to destitution. About that real-time political scandal and looming human crisis, what did Oxford’s ‘progressive’ warriors for social justice have to say?

Nothing at all.

III

So, what was driving them?

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