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.

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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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I went ahead, I admit, partly for the sheer pleasure of confounding thought-defying ‘progressive’ critics, who’ve stuffed me into the pigeonhole labelled ‘far right colonial apologist’, to relieve themselves of the burden and risk of actually having to listen. “What? Biggar? Liberal!?” But, more seriously, I did it because liberal is what I really am. And by Christian conviction.

That, however, raises hackles on my right. For, of course, liberalism has come under sustained attack in recent years. Not just from the eminent atheist philosopher, John Gray, most recently in The New Leviathans: Thoughts after Liberalism (2024), but also from Christians such as the Roman Catholic political theorist, Patrick Deneen, in Why Liberalism Failed (2018) and Regime Change: Towards a Postliberal Future (2023).

In general, I think it best to avoid talking of ‘isms’ altogether, since it too often obscures the truth by forcing diverse historical phenomena into a single ideological straitjacket. Talk of ‘colonialism’, for example, implies a single, coherent entity, invariably of a pejorative kind—a coherent system of oppression and exploitation, which can be summed up in one word, ‘slavery’. Whereas, in fact, colonial power was not infrequently liberating: after all, the British Empire spent the second half of its life committed to ‘anti-slavery’.

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‘Even Vladimir Putin wants peace—on his own terms.’

Pope Leo is not all wrong to criticise President Trump’s war on Iran.

On the one hand, the Islamic Republic has shown no signs of giving up its intention to acquire nuclear weapons. Were it to succeed, it would pose an existential threat to Israel, which it is publicly committed to destroying. Therefore, the targeted use of armed force to delay or halt its nuclear progress would be justified.

On the other hand, however, the President’s ambitions appear to go well beyond, to reaching for the goal of bringing about regime change. Given the atrociously repressive character of the current Iranian regime—responsible for killing at least 20,000 protesters since January—that would be highly desirable. But only if a better one could be successfully installed in its place. Yet, as far as I can tell, there is no obvious alternative, and, even if there were, bombing from the air alone could not install it.

Moreover, the President went to war without bothering to consult the US’s customary allies, expected them to turn up when things got sticky, and then insulted and threatened them when they refused to do so.

There is plenty to criticise, therefore, in Trump’s reckless belligerency.

But there is, too, in Leo’s response. In a Palm Sunday homily at the end of March, the Pope warned that Jesus “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war”. In his Easter message on April 5^th, noting that Jesus had been “entirely nonviolent” in the face of suffering, he called upon “those who have weapons [to] lay them down”. And two days later he urged “all people of goodwill to always search for peace and not violence, to reject war”.

I confess that this irked me. Its vapidity irked me. It irked me, because everyone wants peace. Even Vladimir Putin wants peace—on his own terms. The crucial question is when peace is sufficiently unjust as to be intolerable. The Pope’s statements suggest that he thinks that any kind of peace is tolerable, that peace of any kind is preferable to war. That implies that he thinks that Ukraine should never have taken up arms to resist Russia’s invasion, that it should stop fighting now, and that it should suffer whatever consequences Putin chooses to impose. For Ukraine, too, had weapons, did not lay them down, and now wages (defensive) war.

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Since I was dragged into the Culture Wars in 2017, because I didn’t think that colonialism was simply wicked, I’ve spent over eight years dealing with ‘woke’ critics, many of them with the title ‘Professor’ or ‘Reverend’ in front of their name, or ‘Church Commissioner’ behind it. My consistent experience has been that they don’t behave like creatures and sinners. They betray no sign of feeling the need to learn or be corrected. They conduct themselves as if they have absolute possession of the truth and the only reason some might disagree is that they’re morally wicked (that is, racist). So, they don’t listen or reflect thoughtfully on what dissenters have to say. Instead, they respond with unscrupulous aggression—smearing critics’ reputations, misreporting their words, twisting them into strawmen the easier to blow down, and seeking to intimidate them into silence. As Priyamvada Gopal, the Cambridge professor who first brought the Culture Wars to my doorstep, tweeted to her comrades after reading about my ‘Ethics and Empire’ project, “OMG. This is serious shit. We need to SHUT THIS DOWN’. In my experience, instead of behaving as if they were subject to God and his moral requirements, ‘woke’ prophets conduct themselves like little gods, subject to none but themselves, tyrannical and merciless. (Readers looking for further substantiation of my claims here can find chapter and verse in The New Dark Age: Why Liberals must Win the Culture Wars.)

A leading feature of decolonising ‘wokery’ is its exaggeration of the sins of Western civilization—the civilization that Christianity has done most to shape. One common expression of this is the wholesale damnation of the British Empire. Now, we can argue about whether the Empire was, all things considered, more a force for evil than good. But no one holding themselves accountable to the facts of history can deny that it chalked up some major humanitarian and liberal achievements. Exhibit A: the Empire was among the first states in the history of the world to abolish the hitherto universal practice of slavery and then led the world in suppressing it from Brazil to New Zealand for over a century. Exhibit B: from May 1940 when France fell, to June 1941 when Germany invaded the Soviet Union, the Empire offered the genocidally racist regime in Nazi Berlin the only military opposition, with sole exception of Greece. But these achievements the ‘woke’ prophets adamantly refuse to acknowledge, lest it muddy the simple waters of their absolute condemnation.

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In November last year, an internal memo addressed to BBC’s Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee was leaked to the press. Its author, Michael Prescott, one of two independent advisors to the committee up until the previous June, detailed concerns about political bias in the Corporation’s coverage, mainly of news, but also of history. One passage said this:

On December 29th, 2022, The Telegraph had an article about a report from History Reclaimed, a group of renowned historians, mainly senior post-holders at Oxford and Cambridge.

They had reviewed four factual BBC programmes containing historical content and found each wanting. The main conclusion was this was caused by producers seeking out non-expert academics who would give good quotes, primarily about racism and prejudice. This was producing an overly simplistic and distorted narrative about British colonial racism, slave-trading and its legacy.

History Reclaimed recommended that in the future the BBC should source the views of expert historians in their relevant fields.

The BBC’s response was dismissive. In its statement, the BBC said: “Cherry-picking a handful of examples or highlighting genuine mistakes in thousands of hours of output on TV and radio does not constitute analysis and is not a true representation of BBC content”.

This defensiveness when challenged over contested areas is something the BBC demonstrates time and time again and was an issue I had raised at the EGSC.

Following The Telegraph’s story, I suggested a meeting of relevant BBC commissioners, producers and editors to review what History Reclaimed was claiming and assess whether any of its recommendations might help improve future programmes.

My own forebears were indentured labourers in Guyana and I personally found the History Reclaimed report both fascinating and compelling.

An initial plan for one senior BBC executive to meet History Reclaimed was first offered and then withdrawn. The EGSC was later told a meeting was now judged inappropriate.

I remain slightly mystified by this. History Reclaimed seemed reasonable, were making limited claims and suggested an easy solution – why ignore the whole thing and allow the questionable practice, apparently identified, to continue?

On 10 December The Critic published my critique of David Olusoga’s three-part, BBC 2 series, “Empire” (“David Olusoga is misrepresenting British history”. Just after Christmas, on 27 December, I sent a copy of my article to Samir Shah, chairman of the BBC, with this covering letter.

Dear Mr Shah,

in the context of heightened public concern about the BBC’s political impartiality, I am writing to you as the Corporation’s chair about David Olusoga’s recent three-part BBC2 series, ‘Empire’.

As I explain in the attached review, published in The Critic earlier this month, the account Mr Olusoga gives of Britain’s 400-year-long imperial career is seriously unbalanced, telling a racially biassed tale of virtually relentless white oppression and black victimhood.

For one egregious example, whereas the evils of the enslavement of black Africans are lavished with attention in a large part of the first episode and some of the second, Britain’s unprecedented abolition of the slave trade and slavery, and its century-and-a-half’s worth of worldwide suppression of them, are allotted an offhand twenty-five seconds.

Not only does this fail to tell the whole truth about Britain’s historical record, gravely distorting British citizens’ understanding of it; it also serves to exacerbate racial tensions at home and promote the malign interests of Britain’s aggressively illiberal enemies abroad.

As I am sure you will agree, the BBC has an enormously important role to play in educating the British public about controversial issues. As it declares, its mission is “to act in the public interest, [providing] … impartial, high-quality … output and services which … educate”. But that requires it to maintain a firmly liberal stance, giving a fair hearing to the full range of evidence-based viewpoints and keeping itself from capture by any single one, no matter how fashionable.

I put to you that it follows that the BBC is now duty-bound to commission an alternative, fairer, more positive telling of the British imperial story. I would be very happy to discuss the matter further.

In case you should wonder, my qualifications are as follows. Like Mr Olusoga, I hold a bachelor’s degree in history, but from Oxford rather than Liverpool University. Unlike him, I also hold a PhD in ethics from the University of Chicago and was until recently Oxford’s Regius Professor of Moral Theology. In addition, I am the author of the Sunday Times bestseller, Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning (2023), which has been described by Sir Trevor Phillips, himself the descendant of African slaves brought to the Americas, as “carrying the intellectual force of an anti-tank missile”. I have been described by John Gray in the New Statesman as “one of the leading living Western ethicists” (November 2020). And Prospect magazine named me one of its Top Thinkers of 2024.

Yours sincerely,

Nigel Biggar

With my consent, Mr Shah, entered my article with its covering letter into the BBC’s formal complaints process. Two months later came this reply, dated 27 February 2026:

Dear Lord Biggar,

Thank you for your recent email to the Chairman of the BBC which has been passed to us to be treated as a formal complaint under the BBC’s complaints process. The BBC’s complaints framework can be found here and sets out how editorial complaints are handled by the BBC.

Your email concerns the BBC series Empire with David Olusoga and your email includes a link to an article you wrote for The Critic in November 2025. We have noted your criticisms of David Olusoga, your views on racism within the UK, and your request to contribute to an alternative series on this subject. However, we have restricted this response to the aspects of your article which could be considered an editorial complaint about this series.

We have understood your main concern to be that the series presents an overly negative depiction of the British Empire. While you acknowledge that the series highlights some examples of its positive impact, you feel that these are insufficient.

This is an authored series which does not set out to tell the story of the British Empire in its entirety. Rather, as stated at the outset, it approaches this 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.
It is within this context that viewers hear about Britain’s participation in the transatlantic slave trade. The 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.

In your email to Samir Shah, you state that “Britain’s unprecedented abolition of the slave trade and slavery, and its century-and-a-half’s worth of worldwide suppression of them, are allotted an offhand twenty-five seconds” and suggest that the relative brevity of this section will distort British viewers’ understanding of Britain’s historical record.

We do not agree that the significance of any statement or sequence within a television programme can be measured solely by its duration. Nor would we agree, in telling this story within this context, 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) must be counterbalanced by allocating an equivalent amount of airtime to Britain’s later abolitionist efforts in order to accurately inform the audience.

In your article you suggest that the programme should have included reference to the humanitarian actions of three colonial administrators in Australia, specifically: Arthur Phillip, Lachlan Macquarie and George Arthur. You also outline your interpretation of the events leading up to and surrounding the Mau Mau uprising and suggest that this perspective should have been covered. However it was the programme’s stated purpose to highlight voices and experiences that have historically been unheard or underrepresented.

We agree with your view that the history of the British Empire is hugely complex, and that to cover every aspect of it – and to capture every viewpoint on each significant aspect – would require more than three hours of television. It is for this reason that the series adopted its particular editorial perspective. While we disagree with your suggestion that the series fails to acknowledge this complexity and focuses solely on its negative impacts, we recognise that there will always be differing views on how its story is told.

The BBC has previously looked at the British Empire from other perspectives, including in the following programmes:

1. A History of Britain by Simon Schama 2000 – 2002 Last shown in 2023 and due to be repeated next month.

2. Seven Ages of Britain, presented by David Dimbleby 2010 Last shown in July 2020.

3. Empire, presented by Jeremy Paxman, 2012 Last shown in 2018.

4. The Birth of Empire: The East India Company, presented by Dan Snow 2014 Last shown in 2019.

5. British History’s Biggest Fibs with Lucy Worsley 2017 Currently being repeated.

6. The Queen: Her Commonwealth Story, presented by George Alagiah. Last shown in 2018.

The following programmes have considered post-Imperial Britain:

1. Simon Schama’s Story of Us. Last shown January 2025 and currently available on iPlayer.

2. Andrew Marr’s History of Modern Britain. Last shown in May 2020.

Other authored programmes currently available on iPlayer include Kenneth Clarke’s Civilisation and The Ascent of Man with Jacob Bronowski which were repeated on BBC Four in 2024 and 2023 respectively. Across our history programming we aim to appeal to a range of viewers and hear from a range of voices. In recent years our history output has been fronted by a range of presenters including Michael Portillo, Boris Johnson, Charles Moore, Rory Stewart, Dan Cruickshank, Mary Beard, David Dimbleby and Simon Sebag Montefiore. You will appreciate that across history, the subjects we cover are continually being reassessed and reviewed, as new voices and perspectives emerge.

A comprehensive list of history programming currently available from both BBC TV and Radio and can be found online: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/genres/factual/history/player

We have shared your views with those responsible for the programme.
Best wishes,

BBC Complaints Team

After mulling the matter over for a while, I eventually decided not to let it lie. On exploring the BBC’s complaints process, I discovered that it has three stages. Stage 1a elicits an “initial response”, Stage 1b, “a response from or on behalf of a BBC manager or member of the editorial team”, and Stage 2, “a response from the Executive Complaints Unit”. Only after pushing a complaint through each of these three stages may a complainant appeal outside the Corporation to the regulator, OfCom. (There is no such restriction, as far as I can see, on complaints to other public service broadcasters such as ITV or Channel 4.)

I also discovered that, in order to proceed to Stage 1b, I should have written “within 20 working days” of the date on which I received the BBC’s reply at Stage 1a (27 February). That period had already lapsed. Nonetheless, since the BBC says that “exceptionally, … [it] may still consider [a] complaint, if it decides there was a good reason for the delay”, I decided to try and push my complaint up to Stage 1b.

Then I discovered that a complaint should “not exceed 1,000 words”, although “in exceptional circumstances, longer complaints may be entertained”. But these cannot be submitted by email. They have to be “sent in writing by post, … identifying the reasons your complaint exceeds 1,000 words and providing a one-page summary of your complaint”. So that is what I did and this is what I sent by recorded delivery, at the expense of £.3.60:

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:

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Against this background, the conversation explores the enduring relevance—and contested limits—of just war theory in contemporary conflicts, where civilian harm, legal ambiguity, and strategic escalation blur the line between necessity and excess. Drawing on Biggar’s long-standing engagement with moral realism, international law, and political responsibility, the interview probes moral uncertainty in decision-making, the doctrine of double effect, humanitarian intervention, and the tension between ethical judgment and legal constraint.

Rather than treating war as a purely legal problem or a tragic inevitability, the discussion situates it at the intersection of ethics, politics, and lived experience—asking whether moral reasoning can still meaningfully constrain violence in a fractured international order, and whether refusing to judge, in the name of skepticism or pacifism, risks becoming its own form of complicity. This interview is offered not as a defense of war, but as a philosophical attempt to think responsibly within its shadow.

With this in mind, JURIST contributor AmirAli Maleki—having witnessed the twelve-day war between Iran and Israel firsthand—approached Nigel Biggar to raise the philosophical questions that emerged from that experience.

AmirAli Maleki: Given war’s inherent unpredictability—civilian casualties, long-term trauma, political instability—how can we ever have sufficient moral certainty to justify initiating it? Doesn’t this uncertainty make “just war” reasoning dangerously permissive?

Professor Nigel Biggar: Since we are creatures and not gods, certainty is a commodity in very short supply in human affairs. ‘Just war’ reasoning—or any ethics of war—constrains and limits war by subjecting it to criteria of justice. Apart from absolute pacifism, the alternative is war that is absolutely unconstrained. So, yes, ‘just war’ reasoning is relatively permissive, but it is still more constrained than its non-pacifist alternative.

The absolute pacifist view is that war is so destructive and uncontrollable that it can never be morally justified and that ‘peace’, however unjust, is always preferable. That is a view that commands some good reason, I think. However, I don’t accept it for two reasons.

The first is that ‘peace’ is quite as morally complicated and ambiguous as war. In 1994, Britons, Americans, and the French didn’t go to war in Africa. They stayed at peace, which was good for them. But it wasn’t so good for the Tutsi, since it left the Hutu at peace to slaughter 800,000 of them in the Rwandan genocide.

The second reason why I cannot adopt the position of a principled pacifist is that injustice and oppression that proceeds uncurbed tends to grow in extent and depth. For example, if Vladimir Putin had provoked military opposition from the US and the UK, when he intervened in Syria in 2011, he would have been discouraged from seizing Crimea in 2014. If he had provoked military opposition in 2014, he would have been discouraged from invading the rest of Ukraine in 2022. If he had provoked more resolute and whole-hearted military opposition from the US and Europe in 2022, he would have been discouraged from prosecuting an atrocious war for over three years and pursuing ‘grey zone’ warfare against NATO members, thereby flirting with the apocalyptic possibility of all-out nuclear war. In brief, more war earlier would have meant less war later

.Maleki: Is the doctrine of double effect—distinguishing intended harms from merely foreseen ones—genuinely robust enough to apply to modern warfare, where the line between intention and foreseeable consequence is often blurred or impossible to verify?

Biggar: If we don’t distinguish intended harms from unintended but foreseen harms, we render the successful prosecution of war impossible. That would be desirable, of course, for pacifists, but not for those of us who think that some kinds of injustice should not be tolerated. As I have argued elsewhere, if we judge only by foreseen harms, the Allied invasion of Italy in 1943-44 and Normandy in 1944 would be considered immoral, with the consequence that the genocidally racist Nazi Empire would have survived, perhaps expanded, or at the very least been prolonged.

I don’t know quite what’s meant by being ‘genuinely robust enough’. I infer that you mean that the difficulty of determining intentionality implies that relying on it makes us unable to reach judgments in a timely manner. We have to wait until we can scrutinize the moral and legal decision-making of military commanders. I think that that is true and just has to be accepted.

That said, there is circumstantial evidence that indicates what the intention of a military act is. For example, if military forces take care to deploy the most accurate and least destructive weapons available when targeting a military objective—or if they warn civilians of an impending strike—that does indicate that killing civilians is not what they intend.

Maleki: You argue that soldiers can act out of justice, love, or compassion rather than hatred. But doesn’t this risk sanitizing violence—enabling self-deception in which individuals or states claim noble intentions while committing cruelty?

Biggar: In my book, In Defence of War, I present empirical and historical evidence that supports my claim that commanders in the field and combat soldiers can act out of love of various kinds, which constrains their use of violence. This justifies that use, but it doesn’t sanitise it. I have always been clear that war is a dreadfully destructive state of affairs, which, for that reason, should be avoided at much cost, although not at all costs. And since war is always conducted by sinners, not saints, it will almost inevitably involve elements of injustice. Nonetheless, like any large-scale human endeavour, a war can still be justified overall and all things considered, notwithstanding those elements.

Maleki: If states may override international law on moral grounds—as you suggest in certain cases of humanitarian intervention—what safeguards prevent powerful states from abusing this license to justify arbitrary or self-interested interventionism?

Biggar: There are no guarantees against abuse, but there can be safeguards. To a large extent, international law just is what the majority of states find acceptable or not. Therefore, it was significant that NATO’s intervention in Kosovo in 1999, undertaken to stop the ethnic cleansing of Muslim Kosovars and regional destabilization, involved forty states, including Greece and Turkey, who are customarily at loggerheads. Contrary to what some on the British left asserted, it was not a case of the US flexing its unilateral muscles just to demonstrate its power. According to the eminent Finnish diplomat and international law jurist, Martti Koskenniemi, the majority of lawyers regarded NATO’s action as unlawful (according to the letter of the UN Charter), but nonetheless morally legitimate. In brief, the intervention attracted widespread retrospective international approval. So, the safeguards against the cynical breaking of international law are the diplomatic costs—the loss of a law-abiding reputation and international trust and consequently diminished cooperation and fewer alliances.

Maleki: When assessing historical wars and deeming some of them “just,” how do you address the fact that hindsight is partial, evidence contested, and motivations often mixed? Can retrospective moral judgment ever truly validate a war’s justice?

Biggar: Very few wars are uncontroversial. For example, while an overwhelming majority of Anglo-Saxons regard the war against the Nazis in 1939-45 as morally justified, some have argued and still do argue that Britain should not have prosecuted the war after the fall of France in 1940 but instead should have come to terms with Hitler. All one can do is to mount as cogent a moral argument as one can, expose it to critical testing, strive to persuade in its favour, and hope that most people will recognize its merits.

There is a distinction to be made between whether the original decision-makers deserve blame for going to war and whether, in retrospect, such belligerency was morally justified. One might judge, in retrospect and all things considered, that certain belligerency was unjustified and yet exonerate the original decision-makers from blame, since factors that render what they did morally wrong, they could not have known. In other words, while their belligerency was in fact unjustified, they had acted in good faith and cannot be blamed for what they did.

As for a mixture of motivations, that characterizes much human action. Unlike quasi-Kantian idealists, I don’t believe that self-interest necessarily corrupts an otherwise moral action. Some national self-interests—say, the security of a national population—are perfectly legitimate. Not all self-interest is selfish. That said, sometimes the motivational mixture does contain selfish as well as moral elements. An action so motivated can still be morally justified, if the moral element predominates and is not subverted by the immoral one.

Maleki: The criteria of “just cause,” “last resort,” and “grave injustice” all rely on interpretation. Who has the authority to decide when injustice is grave enough or when peaceful means have been exhausted—and how do we prevent states from lowering these thresholds to suit their purposes?

Biggar: Unfortunately, the only elements of ‘just war’ thinking that have been formally incorporated into international law are the principles that govern the conduct of war—discrimination and proportionality—not those that govern the decision whether or not to go to war in the first place. Whereas in ‘just war’ thinking ‘just cause’ is fundamentally the defence of the innocent against a grave injustice, according to post-1945 international law ‘just cause’ is primarily national self-defence. Therefore, if one is going to make an ethical—as distinct from a legal—judgement about going to war, one cannot depend on the utterances of bodies of international lawyers.

The ultimate responsibility for making decisions about war must rest with national governments. For it is up to them to decide whether or not to abide by the letter of international law, as laid down by the UN Charter. There is no global government with its own armed forces; the UN only possesses such military force as states lend it. In the end, the use of military force rests with states, each of which must decide for itself. How far the decision-making of a state is informed by ethical principles such as those of the ‘just war’ tradition will depend on how far those principles are present in the bloodstream of public discourse, not least that of the press.

Maleki: Your account relies on moral-ontological realism—a moral order independent of human opinion—to ground just war theory. In a pluralistic world with conflicting moral frameworks, what grants ethicists the legitimacy to declare a war morally justified when those subjected to it may reject their metaphysical assumptions?

Biggar: If there is no universal moral order independent of human opinion, there really is no morality and there are no rights; there are merely human conventions.

All individuals have a duty to act and speak according to their consciences—that is, according to their grasp of what the moral order requires of them. Individual ethicists have a duty to contribute to public deliberation by using their talent for ethical analysis to speak the moral truth as they see it. Sometimes, what individuals think and say is unpopular and attracts widespread criticism and hostility. Nonetheless, they might still be right and public opinion wrong. No one who adheres to an Abrahamic faith—whether Judaism, Christianity, or Islam—can disagree with such a view. After all, that is what defines a prophet.

Note:

AmirAli Maleki is a researcher specializing in international law and the philosophy of law, and the Editor of PraxisPublication.com. He works in the fields of political philosophy, Islamic philosophy, and hermeneutics.

A version of this interview was first published at Jurist News.

Moreover, what is spread in the lecture hall or seminar room doesn’t stay there. It walks out into the streets. For, graduate bankers, businessmen, healthcare staff, military professionals, journalists, civil servants, politicians, and government ministers who, making decisions that are careless with the truth, arrogant, unteachable, impatient, unjust, uncharitable, and cowardly are bad decisions that cause real damage to institutions and to the human individuals who inhabit or depend upon them. For that reason, we cannot afford universities that are morally tongue-tied. We cannot afford them to be eloquent about transferable skills while speechless about transferable virtues.

These vices and the malpractices they generate impede the common pursuit and discovery of the truth, which is the specific vocation of universities. They permit the perpetrator to avoid listening to opposing views, from being challenged by them and provoked into thinking, lest they be provoked to rethink. They allow him to refuse contrary opinion the basic respect of letting it stand on its own terms and of engaging with it honestly, albeit critically. Thus, they corrupt academic dialogue by making its friction throw out heat rather than light.

Universities, therefore, face a choice. Either they appoint and promote professors who display and disseminate intel­lectual vices, or they reward those who exemplify and cultivate intellectual virtues.

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Since the debate took place at the Report stage of the bill, there was no formal list of speakers. I was advised that convention has it that every peer who had laid an amendment or put their names to one should be allowed to speak first. Since I had done neither, I should wait before rising. So, I waited. And waited.

Because Clause 208 is part of a huge bill, there were four hours devoted to other clauses—not least on terrorism—before we arrived at it at 8.40pm. Then, following two hours of debate, the Chief Government Whip, who controls the process and interprets the mood of the House, decided it was time to move to the closing speeches given from the Government and Opposition front benches.

So, the noble Lord Biggar never got to deliver his speech and the six hours he’d spent crafting it came to naught. Well, not quite. For, that speech comprises this week’s episode of The Biggar Picture.

MY LORDS, I rise to speak in favour of amendment 424, tabled by my noble friend, Baroness Monckton of Dallington Forest. I have two comments to make.

First, in recent weeks I’ve read lots of speeches, statements, and letters urging support of Clause 208, which would decriminalise abortion up to birth in the case of the mother. Without exception, every one of them told only half the truth.

Each talked as if the only consideration is whether a mother should have the right to ‘end her own pregnancy’ up to the eve of birth, without having to suffer the distress of a police investigation. Without exception, it failed to mention that what’s involved in ‘ending a pregnancy’ is the deliberate killing of a well-developed fetal human being.

Now, my lords, I’m not against killing human beings as such. Whether it’s right or wrong depends on the circumstances. Sometimes, tragically, it can be morally right. Indeed, some of your lordships may think it morally right for a mother to kill her human fetus on the eve of birth and escape criminal liability. So be it.

But can we at least be frank that that is what we are talking about? Can we not avert our eyes from the moral question, Does the mental wellbeing of the mother justify the killing of her fetal child?

Yes, my lords, it is true that Clause 208 would leave unmoved the legal limit of abortion at 24 weeks, still making abortion a crime when conducted by anyone other than the mother. Nevertheless, to make such maternal killing no longer a crime would be to imply that it’s an act of no consequence. And that, in turn, implies that the life of the human fetus is a thing of no consequence. But if that’s the case, why should there remain any limit on the killing of the unborn at all?

Secondly, my lords, there’s not a noble person in this chamber who wasn’t a well-developed fetal human being. All that separates us from our fetal selves are time, good fortune, and being supported rather than killed. With a fair wind, the human being’s development—from about a fortnight after fertilisation—is a continuous process.

That’s why some people take the very conservative view that we should treat the human being from the very beginning exactly as we treat adult humans, possessing the same rights against deliberate harm.

I don’t myself take that position. But those of us who don’t take it have to face the fact that, shortly after fertilisation, it becomes impossible to draw a thick black line before which we can say with confidence that there doesn’t exist a person with rights, but after it, suddenly, there does.

There is, for example, no significant difference between a human fetus on the eve of birth, and its infant self the day after. Yes, the fetus is physically attached to the mother by an umbilical cord. But the detached infant remains no less radically, physically dependent upon the mother. If she doesn’t feed and protect it, it’ll die.

So, my lords, if we approve Clause 208, decriminalising abortion by the mother up to birth, we will breathe down the neck of decriminalising maternal infanticide. If the law permits a mother to kill her late-term fetus, there’s no strong reason why it shouldn’t also permit her to kill her infant.

Now, your lordships might protest that legalising infanticide is unthinkable. You might even be tempted to consider the noble lord Biggar provocatively alarmist. If so, I imagine the noble lord Biggar might be tempted to consider his colleagues recklessly complacent.

And that, for three reasons.

1. First, plenty of societies have found, and do find, infanticide—especially of females—not just thinkable, but perfectly doable.

2. Second, what’s unthinkable now can easily become thinkable later. After all, to our predecessors on these red benches a few decades ago it would have seemed unthinkable to contemplate decriminalising late-term abortions. And yet here we are.

3. And third, it’s now fourteen years since arguments advocating the morality of infanticide first gained admission to the respectable pages of the Journal of Medical Ethics.

My lords, humane society corrodes by increments. To permit the killing of human beings up to the eve of birth by anyone would be one more increment, and not the last.

So, that’s why I support amendment 424, to exclude Clause 208.

Throughout the debate, not one of those speaking in support of Clause 208 mentioned the inconvenient truth that late-term abortion involves the killing of a well-developed fetal human being. And speeches against the clause were subjected to aggressive interventions. When it came to a division, amendment 424, which would have removed Clause 208, was defeated by 185 votes to 148.

On the Saturday following the House of Lords debate, the Times newspaper published an article by Janice Turner, entitled, “Left has a moral blindspot on human life” (20 March 2026). Although she describes herself as a “lifelong pro-choice advocate”, Turner’s viewpoint echoes my own:

The body of an almost full-term newborn baby is found in a skip, and the mother is traced. After the Crime and Policing Bill gets royal assent later this year, an investigation would take two courses. If she is believed to have, say, smothered the child after birth, she may be charged with infanticide, an offence which, taking into account postpartum mental illness and distress, is tried (if at all) as manslaughter not murder.

But if the mother claims the child died in utero, because she took abortifacient drugs, the case will close. Whatever her reasons for doing this, the baby’s death is not a crime. Indeed, thanks to Clause 208 of the bill, which removed women who end their own pregnancies from the criminal code, it isn’t even a baby. It is nothing at all.

I’m a lifelong pro-choice advocate, have defended abortion rights many times on these pages, yet I find this decision — whose passage in the Lords this week was hailed a feminist triumph — viscerally upsetting. It is one thing to argue that police protocols should change or prosecution guidance appreciate that women who abort late and alone often do so in extremis. It is a huge leap to decriminalise the taking of a fully viable human life.

I’m not surprised. After all, Sussex was the university that so failed to protect the cooly reasonable, gender-critical philosopher Kathleen Stock from a sustained campaign of vilification by students, aided and abetted by some colleagues, that it destroyed her faith in academe and drove her to resign. While the university was fulsome in its posthumous regret at her leaving, it has yet to give any explanation—no matter, make a confession—of its own astonishing failure to defend her. Indeed, it’s currently litigating against a fine imposed by the Office for Students for failures to uphold free speech.

In addition to this, Sussex had moved onto my radar before Emma’s email for two other reasons. One is Alan Lester, the professor of historical geography who has made it his mission in life to discredit me, lest anyone should be seduced by my utterly moderate views of Britain’s colonial record. He it was who wrote a 15,000-word take-down of my book, Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning, in which he could find nothing positive to say either about me or the British Empire. Zilch. Nada. He then organised the counter-publication of a collection of essays, every one of them targeted moi. Emma reports that, judging by the amount of classroom-time he devotes to debunking me, I now live “rent-free in his head”.

The other instance of Sussex I’d encountered is Gurminder Bhambra, a professor of social theory. A few weeks ago, she was on the other side of the table in a recorded discussion about empire staged by the Doha Debates in Qatar. Like Lester, Gurminder simply cannot credit the British Empire with any positive achievement. When the moderator put the topic of the Empire’s benefits on the table, she immediately issued the rhetorical challenge, “What benefits?”.

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Next, he reports that I claim that “Britain … was uniquely virtuous in rapidly abolishing the slave trade” and that “’Britain came first’ is the gist of [my] account of abolition”. But I have never claimed that. What I wrote in Reparations, and have consistently said elsewhere, is that the British were “among the first” peoples in the history of the world to abolish slave-trading and slavery. Again, Anil cannot have missed this, since I repeated it three times (pp. 61, 137, 142). This report, too, is false.

Further, he tells the reader that “[t]here is, in these pages, no sense of the slaves’ own agency—of the part played by the likes of Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines in overthrowing slavery”. Yet I mentioned Louverture on page 62 and Olaudah Equiano on p. 66. On that page I also wrote that the 1791 slave revolt in Saint-Domingue “played an important part” in moving British public opinion in favour of abolishing the slave-trade, and on page 68 I say that the 1823 and 1831-2 revolts in Demerara and Jamaica, respectively, were among the factors that converted abolitionists favouring a gradual approach to demanding it immediately. So, for a third time, Anil is guilty of false representation.

Further still, he reports that I view the Royal Navy’s suppression of trans-Atlantic slavery “as pure do-gooding philanthropy”, whereas it was in fact “a modest premium to ensure that slave societies did not undercut British exporters, who, post-abolition, were obliged to pay wages”. In substantiation, he claims that “Biggar’s anti-slavery humanitarians are nowhere to be found in the Muslim world, where slavery persisted into the twentieth century but posed no threat to British profits”. But Anil knows that none of this is true. He knows that I think that British motives were probably a mixture of humanitarian and commercial interests, because I said so in my response to his Times review in the second edition of Colonialism (p. 302). And we know that Anil knows that, because he admits to having read my response in his review of Reparations.

As for his claim that there was no British anti-slavery endeavour in the Muslim world, that is obviously not true. The British did not only suppress slave-trading on the Atlantic coast of Africa. They also suppressed it on Africa’s east coast—most famously using gunboat diplomacy to shut down the (Muslim) Arab slave-market in Zanzibar in 1873 and later moving to suppress the Arab slave-trade and slavery in East Africa, the Sudan, and Egypt. Anil knows this, because I wrote it first in my response to his Times review (Colonialism, p. 302) and again on pp. 80-1 of Reparations. And yet he ignored it, repeating his false claim on your pages.

I quite understand why the TLS (and the Times) like to publish Dr Anil. He’s a clever chap, opines in strong colours, and writes with brio. But his enthusiasm goes to his head and propels him way out ahead of what he actually knows. For, the book that he, a junior scholar of postcolonial India, dismisses as “pulpit-thumping Podsnappery”, the most eminent living historian of transatlantic slavery, David Eltis, has soberly commended as “a major contribution”. But the basic problem with Dr Anil is that what he reports and claims is too often false, and so what he writes cannot be trusted. And if the TLS continues to publish him, it won’t be trusted either.

Since then, the Republic has executed up to five thousand gays, sworn to wipe Israel off the face of the earth, fostered terrorist violence throughout the Middle East, plotted more than twenty would-be lethal attacks on British soil in the past twelve months, and killed over twenty thousand Iranian protesters since January. And all the while striving to acquire nuclear weapons.

Keir Starmer knows all this. In explaining the UK government’s stance toward the weekend’s US and Israeli attacks on Iran, he freely admitted it. Yet, he refuses to let Britain join the assault, because the attorney-general, Lord Hermer, has told him it would be against international law. Without authorisation by the UN Security Council—which Russia and China would surely veto—the only belligerency the UN Charter permits is self-defence. Arguably, the threat Iran now poses to the US and Israel is not imminent or grave enough to warrant pre-emptive action.

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That’s all Christian moral common sense.

However, when it comes to wrong done two centuries ago by some ancestors of ours, what our responsibility is, corporately, is not straightforward at all. And that’s the main burden of what I have to say in the next few minutes.

Now, I’m a Scotsman. I tend to speak bluntly. Forgive me. It’s possible something I say might offend you. I don’t intend to offend you. I’m just trying to speak the truth as I see it and I speak the truth because I think it’s important. I think I can call in aid Jesus, who said things that lots of people found offensive. He didn’t say them to offend; he said them because they were in his view true and important to say.

So, the first thing I want to say is that we’ve got to reckon with the fact that the past was very, very different from our present. The past, for most people, was dreadful. Dreadful. History is full of an ocean of injustice, most of it completely beyond human repair. And that’s one reason I believe in God. Because I believe in justice and because it is clear to me that in most cases there is nothing you and I can do about injustice in the past. Therefore, there must be an afterlife, there must be a God, there must be a final judgment.

Second, in thinking about historic injustice, there’s the issue of fairness. We have to wrap our modern minds around the fact that up, until abolition in the early 1800s, slavery was a universal institution practiced by people of every skin colour on every continent. Slavery was so common that, when slaves won their freedom, perhaps through rebellion in the ancient world, they frequently went on to take slaves of their own. When the so-called “Maroons” in Jamaica escaped from the plantations into the forested interior in the 1700s, some of them kept slaves of their own. And when I was visiting my wife’s American family in Raleigh, North Carolina, a few Decembers ago, I went to visit the Museum of the History of North Carolina, where I learned that in 1860, on the eve of the American Civil War, there were 30,000 freed slaves in North Carolina, some of whom kept black slaves of their own.

So, my question is, Why pick out from the ocean of injustice the white enslavement of black Africans? Why ignore the fact that black Africans have been involved in enslaving other black Africans for centuries before the Europeans first arrived on the coast of West Africa in about 1450, trading them first to the Romans and then to the Arabs? It’s reckoned that, over about a 400-year period, about 17 million Africans were traded north to the Arab and Muslim Mediterranean. It’s a practical certainty that some of those bought by European traders on the coast of West Africa and transported to the Americas had themselves been slave raiders, even slave traders. The raiders in turn had been raided. It’s also practical certainty that Britons of West African heritage, some of them, are the descendants of slave raiders and traders and owners. And I think I read yesterday that Kemi Badenoch has said as much of her own ancestors.

The story of slavery is not simply a story of white oppressors and black victims. Yet, it does tend to be told in those simplistic—and, I think, divisively racial—terms. So, the question is, if we’re going to get worried about historic slavery, why this laser focus on white oppressors and black victims? Historically, that’s not justified.

My third point is there’s an issue in addition to that of fairness. There’s an issue of justice when considering what we now owe, and to whom, for the involvement in slavery of some of our ancestors. Why do we set at naught the fact that the British, most of them Anglican, repented of slave trading and slavery in the early 1800s, when they were among the first peoples in the history of the world to abolish both? And why set at naught the fact that the British, many of them Anglican, and some of them not wearing white skins, did serious penance for 150 years by spending money and spending lives suppressing slavery from Brazil across Africa, across the Middle East, across India, across Asia to New Zealand? Why do we fail to do their memory justice and proceed as if what they did counts for nothing now?

My fourth point has to do with the question of to what extent we, here in this country, now, benefit from profits made from slave trading and slavery. Early on in Project Spire, unqualified claims were made that Britain’s current prosperity is considerably or largely based on the profits from slavery. Well, anyone who says that without qualification is either ignorant or lying, because the truth is that’s highly contested. It’s not an established fact. So, either you don’t know that, or, you know it and you’re not saying it. Yes, Eric Williams, and other Marxist followers of Eric Williams, will claim the profits, the contribution made by slavery to industrialization, were enormous. On the other hand, David Eltis, who is reckoned to be the leading living historian of transatlantic slavery, when I spoke to him last March, used the word ‘small’ to describe it. And when writing of the contribution of slave trading to the wider economy of Liverpool, which was the major slave trading port in 1750, he uses the word ‘trivial’. And David is a number cruncher. For example, in his latest book he has precisely raised the number of Africans enslaved and traded across the Atlantic from 12.5 million to 12.75 million. And what about last year’s winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics, Joel Mokyr, who reckons that without slavery, Britain’s Industrial Revolution would have proceeded ‘at a marginally slower pace’.

Regarding the Church Commissioners, I notice that whereas, originally, they claimed that the Church’s assets owed a lot to slavery profits, more recently they’ve been talking more weakly about ‘links’. I have no doubt that Anglicans, some Anglicans, had direct links with slavery through investments for example, or through working on plantations, but not most. And as for indirect links, all of us have indirect links with all manner of historical injustice. Almost nothing we have inherited is without the taint of some sin, such is the human condition.

Fifth and finally, do the descendants of slaves in the early 1800s, now living here in Britain or in the Caribbean, suffer intergenerational trauma. Well, I can say that it is evident that not all of them do. If you speak to Trevor Phillips, who is in fact the descendant of African slaves taken to British Guiana, he doesn’t make that fact a central part of his identity. If you speak to Tony Sewell, descendant of slaves taken to Jamaica, he doesn’t make it a central part of his identity. In fact, he campaigns against young black Britons making their status as victims of slavery a major part of their identity. He thinks it’s profoundly unhelpful. So, at least we can say not all descendants of slaves feel that they are traumatized. And secondly, I was talking to someone the other day whose grandparents were in Auschwitz. And he said to me, that was their trauma, it’s not mine.

So, if there is intergenerational trauma, it needs to be demonstrated. In my experience so far, it’s not been. And besides, if it were true that the descendants of slaves all suffered intergenerational racial trauma, they would suffer presumably roughly equally. Yet, people in Barbados, mainly the descendants of slaves, are flourishing compared to slave-descendants in Jamaica and even flourishing compared to Nigerians, some of whom are the descendants of slave-raiders and traders.

To conclude, whether or not you agree with everything I’ve said, or anything I’ve said, I hope you will at least appreciate—and this is my main point—that the issue of our present responsibility for wrongs committed by some ancestors in the very distant past is a complicated one, which needs careful working out. And here is my basic complaint against the Church Commissioners, namely, that before they launched Project Spire, they published no worked out ethical justification for the project. And since then – two-and-a-half years ago - they still haven’t published any carefuly worked ethical justification.

Thank you.

Two weeks ago, I flew to Qatar to take part in a recorded discussion about empire. Funded by the Qatar Foundation, my host, Doha Debates, does the admirable, but sadly rare thing of mounting long-form discussions of controversial issues. In my case, it lasted two-and-a-half hours, of which Al Jazeera will broadcast an edited forty-five minutes. Bearing fresh scars from my recent ‘interview’ with Mehdi Hasan on Al Jazeera, I had initially been wary of the invitation. In Hasan’s case, I had stepped naively onto a stage in London, only to find myself in a gladiatorial arena, where my ‘interviewer’ got to play prosecutor, referee, judge, and crowd-pleaser all at once. The playing field was not exactly level. So, before I agreed to go to Qatar, I asked advice from two friends with experience of the Middle East. They both assured me that the Doha Debates were serious, in -good-faith affairs.

And so was mine.

The discussion took place on a Tuesday afternoon and was moderated by a man named Mohammed. The others around the table were Inaya Folarin Iman, a former GB News journalist and founder of the Equiano Project; Dr Ian Almond, a postcolonial scholar of literature at Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in Qatar; and Professor Gurminder Bhambra, a postcolonial scholar of social theory at the University of Sussex. I had encountered Gurminder before at the Mehdi Hasan event, where she was the panellist who claimed that, before the British came to control Bengal in the 1760s, there had been no famine. At the time, I didn’t know enough to contradict her. But I checked afterwards with the Bengali-born historian of colonial economics at the London School of Economics, Tirthankar Roy. She was wrong: famines occurred intermittently in India throughout the 1600s and into the 1700s. And even after the British had acquired territorial control of Bengal in the 1760s, it occurred in northern India outside their jurisdiction in 1783-4.

Here, I’m going to reflect on the debate in Doha, focussing mainly on my exchanges with Gurminder, since she seems to me a faithful representative of the ‘decolonising’ point of view. I shall try my best to give an accurate account of our encounter. How far I succeed, readers can judge for themselves from the broadcast recordings. But even if we were to agree on who said exactly what, I have no doubt that Gurminder’s interpretation would be very different from mine. However, these are my reflections, not hers.

As she expressed it, Gurminder’s general view is that the post-imperial West, not least Britain, is responsible for present unjust structures that continue to oppress and exploit the Global South; that all empires can be divided into two categories, ones of ‘participation’ and ones of ‘extraction’; and that the British Empire belonged firmly in the latter. At one point, when the moderator put the topic of the benefits of British Empire on the table, she immediately issued the rhetorical challenge, “What benefits?”. Such a starkly absolute judgement I have come to regard as typical of postcolonial academics.

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1. That the problem of drug-smuggling into the United States is a major one, ruining the lives of thousands of Americans and proliferating further crime.

2. That the government of the Venezuelan President, Nicolas Maduro, was not merely unable to prevent cartels from smuggling drugs from his country into the US but was actively aiding and abetting them.

3. That removing Maduro will go a long way toward solving the problem.

4. And that there was no United Nations body able and willing to intervene.

If those assumptions are correct, then I would conclude that the US was morally entitled by legitimate national interest to use force unilaterally, as a last resort, to effect regime-change.

My stance is roughly that of the leader of the Conservative Opposition, Kemi Badenoch, when she said of the US’s intervention that it was “morally right”, even though “the legal certainty is not yet clear” (“Badenoch backs US use of force”, Times, 7 January). I say ‘roughly’, because I’d go one step further. I’d say it was right, even if it was illegal.

International Law & Moral Rights

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