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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Exactly a year ago, I joined the platform somewhat skeptically. Today we have seven thousand followers, a large proportion of which are regular readers. We’ve seen several articles go viral on social media, where at least some part of what I have to say gets noticed by tens of thousands.

In the grand scheme of things, it’s not a huge audience. But it’s growing steadily, month by month.

Since this is an important milestone, my editor went through the year and collated a list of my best. Some of it did very well; some was overlooked. Here are ten you may have missed:

1. In Defence of the American Empire, in which I argue that, bad as the Yanks can sometimes be, what would follow would be much worse.

2. Why I am a Conservative, in which I give you the story of my conversion to conservatism, and the five main forces that pushed me along.

3. Elite Narcissists are Trashing History, in which I lay out how degenerate forms of Christianity lead to the death of the discipline of history.

4. The History Culture War and How to Fight it Justly, in which I detail how a Christian historian ought to respond to the degeneration.

5. The Canadian Atrocity Myth, in which I discuss the scandals leftist activists fabricated.

6. On Shame and Guilt, in which I contrast the German and Japanese views on their own past.

7. Giving Cover to Genocide, in which I discuss the (largely outrageously false) charges laid against the Jewish State.

8. Slavery: What’s the Matter with ‘Whataboutery’?, in which I answer some criticisms of the British Empire.

9. Olusoga’s ‘Empire’, in which I go over the moral travesty once known as the British Broadcasting Corporation and its new programing.

10. Last but not least, It’s ‘Bombay’ not ‘Mumbai’, in which I make a relatively minor point about nomenclature, to the surprising delight of everyone on Twitter.

Thank you all again. Here’s to a great first year, and to the even better one to come!

Readers will know him as one of the shockingly small number of professional historians who care enough about the historical truth—and the public’s perception of it—to risk woke ire in exposing ideologically fabricated history for the corrupting trash it is. So, last June there he was, in The Spectator, debunking yet another attempt to make the past a boring, narcissistic mirror of ourselves, by claiming that the ‘diverse’ Vikings were sometimes black and Muslim. “Decolonising the Vikings is, admittedly, a difficult task”, he wrote. “They were very good at colonising other people’s lands, including large swathes of the British Isles, Normandy and the kingdom they founded in Kyiv, even if the Faroes, Iceland and Greenland were largely empty of people when the Vikings turned up”.

Observe the fluent mastery of the historical territory. Note, too, the wry humour. And then the rigorous, blunt, uncompromising judgement: “One of the first requirements of a competent historian is the attempt to be accurate. When arrant nonsense is taught in the name of ‘decolonisation’ political ideology has taken over from history, and ignorance has triumphed over truth”. All three features were characteristic of him.

Many readers will have enjoyed his article without being aware just how much academic heft lay behind it. David was one of Britain’s most distinguished historians, having developed pioneering expertise in the history of the Mediterranean. He became a fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge at the age of 25. And he was made a University professor in 2000, fellow of the British Academy in 2010, winner of one of three inaugural British Academy Medals in 2013, winner of the Wolfson History Prize for The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans in 2020, and, “for services to scholarship”, Commander in the Order of the British Empire in 2023.

While David was rooted in Cambridge, his work and reputation traversed seas and oceans. In 2003, he was appointed Commendatore dell’Ordine della Stella della Solidarietà Italiana by the President of the Republic of Italy. And in late 2022, his book, The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean—published in 2011 and now translated into twelve languages—was spotted on the bookshelf behind President Xi Jinping, when he delivered his New Year’s address. David was very chuffed by that: I heard him chuckle over it several times.

But I came to know him primarily, not as an academic historian, but as a bold British patriot and defender of free speech. Notwithstanding his lifelong fascination with the Mediterranean, David was a Brexiteer in 2016. In the run-up to the referendum on EU membership, he chaired Historians for Britain, arguing that the European project was a deterministic myth used to silence other visions of European community, and that British legal and parliamentary traditions are incompatible with the EU’s regulatory framework. In 2015, when History Today sought to open a debate about Britain’s place in Europe with an article by David, he (and Historians for Britain) became the target of a mass online pile-on. A stampede of almost 300 historians nationwide signed an open letter, dismissing his views by smearing them with the thought-numbing label, ‘British exceptionalism’. Word has it that the historian colleagues in his own college have since ostracised him. If that’s true, it’s but one more ugly instance of the political bigotry that conflict-shy academics allow to operate with impunity in their ranks. But if it upset David, it never twisted him. I never heard him speak bitterly; he only sighed. He wasn’t unnerved at being isolated in a maligned minority, nor was he particularly surprised by it. After all, he was a Jew.

In recent years, I had the privilege of working alongside him in the exciting new venture that is the Pharos Foundation, of which he was the President and I, the chairman of the board. Pharos’s mission in life is to generate a renaissance in the arts and humanities in the English-speaking world’s culturally strategic universities, by promoting thinking and scholarship that cares about the truth of things, is disciplined by traditional norms of intellectual rigour, is free from fashionable obsessions such as ‘decolonisation’, and believes that Western civilisation has a lot to be said in favour of it. Far from remaining a decorative figurehead, David quickly made it clear he wanted to make an active contribution, helping to select bright young fellows, fostering intellectual community among them, and taking a close interest in their progress.

The Abulafias are Sephardic Jews, expelled from Spain in 1492 and initially scattered around the Mediterranean. Evidently, they pitched up in Thessaloniki (Salonica), for, when visiting the Jewish Museum there two years ago and standing before the wall down which cascaded the names of deportees to Auschwitz, my eye lighted again and again upon ‘Abulafia’. The name, originally Arabic, means ‘father of wellbeing’. That David lived up to it has blessed us all. That he’s no longer able to give more, we lament. But what he has given was true and brave, and it remains. For that we give thanks, and from it we take heart.

Both see the obvious solution as the legalisation of assisted suicide. (I avoid talking of “assisted dying”, because it hides the truth that what’s envisaged is helping someone kill themselves.) So, Jonathan is angry at what he considers the unwarranted delay in the passage of Kim Leadbeater’s Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, which would legalise assisted suicide for the dying, through the House of Lords. After all, the bill has already received “exhaustive scrutiny” in the Commons and is, he implies, fit to become law.

But that’s not true. On 9 May, shortly after the Commons had finished its clause-by-clause deliberations, the Royal College of Physicians made this statement: “Whilst the bill has undergone a number of changes during the… committee phase, there currently remain deficiencies that would need addressing to achieve adequate protection of patients and professionals”. Four days later, the Royal College of Psychiatrists, which had been refused the opportunity to present evidence, voiced “serious concerns” and declared that “with too many unanswered questions about the safeguarding of people with mental illness, the College has concluded that it cannot support the Bill in its current form”.

This external vote of no confidence was reflected inside the Commons, where, during the bill’s passage, confidence in its safeguards against abuse plummeted. Before the final vote, its majority halved and had only 12 MPs changed their votes from Yes to No, the Lords wouldn’t be discussing it at all. Hansard records that some MPs only voted it through on the assumption that the Upper House could somehow sort out what they had failed to. Since then, the reports of three Lords select committees have confirmed doubts by exposing serious deficiencies in the legislation. The committee on the constitution found the Commons’ poor scrutiny of a bill of such consequence “especially concerning”.

Jonathan also tells us that “the British public… have consistently shown overwhelming support” for the bill. That’s true, but it obscures important qualifications. Many members of the public don’t understand what they’re supporting. In November 2024 a Focal Data poll of over 5,000 people found that 40% do not properly understand what “assisted dying” means, unable to define it as providing those within six months of death lethal drugs. One in six wrongly thought it included hospice care, and over half thought it included the right to refuse life-prolonging treatment. It also found that 66% wanted the provision of social and end-of-life care “sorted out first” before any thought is given to permitting assisted suicide. The same month a More in Common poll of over 2,000 people confirmed that, while a solid majority support “assisted dying”, their support is conditional on the provision of robust safeguards. It also revealed that 74% don’t believe that the NHS is currently fit to provide them.

While it’s understandable that Jonathan’s vision is dominated by the distressing experience of his brother’s dying, Members of Parliament cannot legislate simply on the basis of individual cases, however harrowing. They must consider the wider and long-term social ramifications of a law and weigh up its risks. That’s why parliamentary support for legalising assisted suicide has always been lower than the general public’s. That’s also why Anthony is wrong. “It’s my death I’m talking about,” he writes, pleading that he should be free to exercise his autonomy. But the law cannot be made just for him or for individuals like him; it has to be made for everybody.

Consequently, when the Leadbeater bill reached the House of Lords last September, noble parliamentarians faced a dilemma. On the one hand, they heard the persistent concern of advocates for the disabled and several Royal Colleges about the risks of coerced ‘autonomy’ and corrosion of humane social norms that legalisation entails. On the other hand, their compassion was aroused by stories of individuals suffering grievously, whose plight couldn’t be assuaged by palliative care. The bill, urged its champion Lord Falconer of Thoroton, would resolve this intolerably cruel situation.

Except that it wouldn’t. By limiting assisted suicide to the terminally ill, the bill excludes those who aren’t dying but are still suffering grievously. So, anyone who supports the bill, genuinely intending that terminal illness should remain a condition of eligibility, accepts that some people, tragically, have to suffer grievously – because the social dangers of wider access are just too great. But if this tragically imperfect situation is supposed to be tolerable, why is the tragically imperfect status quo not so?

Of course, many supporters view terminal illness, not as a permanent limitation, but as a tactical beachhead for later strategic expansion.

Which it would be.

Because although the bill’s text doesn’t mention the relief of “unbearable suffering” or respect for “autonomy”, no one reading Hansard can doubt that those are the principles driving some of the legislative intent. So, after the law has approved assisted suicide for the terminally ill, the argument would soon be heard – with appeal to Articles 8 and 14 of the European Convention of Human Rights – “Why the unfair discrimination? If autonomy for the terminally ill, why not also for the chronically ill? And if the physically ill, why not also the mentally distressed? Don’t they suffer unbearably, too?”

Several speakers in the Lords’ Second Reading asserted the individual’s “fundamental right to autonomy” as an axiom, turning a completely deaf ear to warnings of legalisation’s social dangers. Were axiomatic autonomy to dominate the field, the end of its logic would be the right to assisted suicide for all sane, mature adults. Which, if they’re deemed mature enough to elect governments – as Keir Starmer’s No 10 intends – might one day include 16-year-olds. If we were serious about reducing the quantity of human suffering, we wouldn’t be focussing on legalising assisted suicide, probably accessed by a maximum of 7,500 people within a decade. Rather, we’d focus on the universal provision of good palliative care, which more than 100,000 citizens every year need, but don’t get.

Indeed, if Parliament were to pass the bill before securing that, it would create a grave inequality of autonomies. For, while some – typically more privileged – would have a choice between decent palliative care and assisted suicide, others – typically poorer and less white – would have to choose between grievous suffering and killing themselves. As Gordon Brown has argued, there is no real choice “if the alternative option, the freedom to draw on high-quality end-of-life care, is not available”. That’s why in its 2012 report the Demos Commission, chaired by Lord Falconer himself, stipulated as an “essential” precondition of legalisation, the universal provision of “the best end of life care available”.

So, when Jonathan claims that the proliferation of amendments and the slow passage of the bill through the House of Lords is due to the bad faith politicking of “a very small but prominent group of peers”, he’s wrong. During the Lord’s Second Reading, an extraordinary 160 members – from all sides of the House and of all faiths and none – signed up to speak, two-thirds of them voicing doubts. Amendments have since been laid by over 50 peers, not just the six that Jonathan fingered.

The Leadbeater bill is one of the most socially consequential legislative proposals to come before any parliament. As a private members bill not in the Government’s Election manifesto, peers aren’t bound to pass it. And they are duty-bound not to pass it, if they deem it unsafe. As Professor Mark Elliott, former Legal Adviser to the Lords Constitutional Committee, has written: “Any argument that it would be undemocratic or otherwise constitutionally suspect for the Lords to do anything other than rubber-stamping the Bill would be wide of the mark.”

• 81% expect the Church to support local parishes rather than use financial resources on reparations,

• 64% believe it is “not the role of the Church Commissioners, using funds in their care, to atone for previous injustice such as slavery”, and

• 61% would switch their giving to alternative charities, if the Church proceeds with its policy.

The background story is this. In November 2022 the Church Commissioners for England, a charity which administers a fund to support the Church of England, made a commitment to make reparation for its involvement in transatlantic slavery, via ‘Project Spire’, to the tune of £100 million. This commitment was made in response to historical research that appeared to show that the Queen Anne’s Bounty, an 18th century forerunner of the Commissioners’ endowment devoted to supplementing the income of poorer clergy, had “links” with African chattel enslavement, mainly through investments in the South Sea Company.

Without any further or wider deliberation, the Commissioners set up an ‘Oversight Group’ to work out how reparation should be made. When the group presented its 41 recommendations, the Commissioners—who included both the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, and the present Archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell— endorsed them fully.

Then the trouble began. After examining the historical evidence, the emeritus professor of international banking at Southampton University and author of a book on the South Sea Company, Richard Dale, concluded that the Commissioners had misinterpreted it. Their statement that “a significant portion of the Bounty’s income during the 18th century was derived from sources that may be linked to transatlantic slavery, principally interest and dividends on South Sea Company annuities”, he judged “misleading on several fronts”. As he explained,

• “First, no investor in the South Sea Company benefited financially from the slave trade, since it was consistently loss-making.

• Second, the Church Bounty did not even stand to benefit from the trade, because it declined to buy shares in the Company.

• Third, the investments that it did make, in South Sea annuities, represented, at one remove, claims on the Government which had no connection with the trade in slaves”.

Next, when I, a former holder of the Anglican world’s premier professorship in Christian ethics at Oxford University, went hunting for the Commissioners’ ethical justification of Project Spire, I discovered there was none. The thorny ethical questions about what present generations are obliged to do about the not-uncommon sins of some of their ancestors two centuries ago had not even been raised, no matter answered.

The Commissioners and the Oversight Group had evidently functioned as echo-chambers, their members all assuming the same answers. Yet surely any body of trustees is duty-bound to test its assumptions before embarking on a venture. As the Charity Commission itself prescribes, “constructive debate and challenge are signs of healthy governance” and trustees should “critically and objectively review proposals and challenge assumptions in making decisions…. Trustees who simply defer to the opinions and decisions of others aren’t fulfilling their duties”.

The objective observer may wonder on what possible legal basis a charity that exists to support the work of the Church of England, especially its parishes, could engage in something so political, contentious, divisive, and ill considered. A Freedom of Information request of the Charity Commission has revealed that, by May 2024, the Church Commissioners, had realised that they didn’t have the necessary legal power to proceed with Project Spire and would have to make an unprecedented application to the Charity Commission for special authority. Furthermore, this couldn’t be done without first making a successful application to set up a new charity for the purpose. These controversial intentions were not explicitly admitted until May 2025.

This vexed project exemplifies the detachment of the Church’s elite from its people, as the poll shows. Since its launch, it has been subjected to sustained, authoritative criticism: historical, ethical, and procedural. That there is such weighty dispute should be enough to demonstrate that the decision made three years ago, on the basis of incomplete evidence and understanding, was a mistake and to persuade the Church Commissioners to think again. If they don’t, it is to be hoped that the Charity Commission will keep the Church Commissioners’ powers as they are. The Church of England’s travails are bad enough already. The prospect of alienated Anglicans feeling compelled to seek judicial review is not a happy one.

For readers who missed—or have forgotten—my post on this topic on August 6th, let me rehearse my view. Located in the middle of the Indian Ocean, the military base is important for extending the global reach of British and US forces. At first glance, exchanging sovereignty for a lease looks like a very poor deal, making possession of the strategic base less secure at a time of growing international tensions.

So why has Keir Starmer’s government signed up to a treaty that does just that?

The treaty presents itself upfront as correcting the injustice done when 1,700 Chagossians were forced to leave their homes on Diego Garcia between 1967 and 1973, to make way for the military base. In the preamble, the two governments “recognis[e] the wrongs of the past” and declare themselves “committed to supporting the welfare of all Chagossians”. Yet the process that produced the treaty does not bear this out. The Chagossians themselves were barely consulted, probably because it is known that many strongly resist subjection to Mauritian rule.

Moreover, the treaty binds the Mauritian government to do little for them. Oddly, Article 6 declares that Mauritius is “free” to implement a programme of resettlement. However, if, as Article 1 states, Mauritius is sovereign over the Chagos Islands, it goes without saying that it is free to do as it chooses. It does not need stating. So, the effect of stating it is to highlight the fact that Mauritius has refused any obligation to resettle the islanders.

Article 11 commits the UK to provide capital of £40 million to create a trust fund for the islanders, but it leaves the Mauritian government entirely at liberty to choose how to use it. Yet, when it received £650,000 (equivalent to £7.7 million today) from the UK to compensate displaced islanders in 1972, it withheld the money for six years in punitive retaliation for Chagossian protests. And, again, nine years after it was given £40 million in 2016, to improve Chagossian welfare, it has only disbursed £1.3 million under restrictive conditions.

The treaty’s main concern lies elsewhere. As the preamble also says, it is “mindful of the need to complete the process of the decolonisation” of Mauritius. In saying this, the UK government is implicitly accepting the Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice in 2019 that the detachment of the Chagos Islands from Mauritius in November 1965, before the latter was granted independence in 1968, was unlawful. This is because it was incompatible with resolution 1514 (XV) of the United Nations’ General Assembly in December1960, which declared that “any attempt aimed at the partial or total disruption of the national unity and the territorial integrity of a country is incompatible with the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations”. Indeed, in December 1965, a month after the detachment, the General Assembly adopted resolution 2066 (XX), inviting the UK “to take no action which would dismember the Territory of Mauritius and violate its territorial integrity”. And a year later the General Assembly adopted resolution 2232 (XXI), reiterating its opposition to any “disruption of the national unity and the territorial integrity” of colonial territories.

None of these resolutions makes good sense. The original, 1960 one was championed by the Irish ambassador to the UN, Frederick Boland, who was then President of the General Assembly. In promoting resolution 1514 (XV), he invoked Ireland’s loss of its “historic integrity” as a prime example of the injustice to be avoided. In so doing, he expressed the Irish nationalist’s typical historical blindness. The island of Ireland had never been a political unit apart from its union with Great Britain, and there is no natural law prescribing that a geographical integrity should be a political integrity. On the contrary, there can be very good reasons for dividing it. The reason that Ireland was divided in 1922 was because republican Irish people wanted home rule so much that they were prepared to take up arms to acquire it, while unionist Irish people detested it so much that they were prepared to take up arms to oppose it. Ireland was partitioned to prevent further civil war—a justified act of political prudence.

The 1965 and 1966 resolutions are no more sensible. The first talks luridly of ‘dismemberment’ as if the separation of parts of a colony must be the tearing apart of a natural organism, and of ‘violation’ as if some natural, moral law were being assaulted. But there is nothing natural about a political entity and there is no moral law against partition as such.

The 1966 resolution appeals to the “national unity” of Mauritius, as if the Chagos Islands weren’t separated by over a thousand miles of Indian Ocean and as if the islanders were an integral part of the Mauritian people. But many Chagossians feel as Mauritian as Irish republicans feel British. The only connection between Mauritius and the Chagos Islands is an accident of colonial, administrative convenience. Talk of some ‘national unity’ that was ruptured in 1965 is a romantic fiction. Besides, in 1965 the Mauritians agreed to the separation in return for £3 million (worth £74 million today) and the reversion of the islands when no longer needed for defence purposes.

Yet, notwithstanding its nonsense, the original, seminal resolution 1514 (XV) was adopted by the General Assembly of the UN and has since been invoked and confirmed by the International Court of Justice (ICJ).

It’s true that the UK has explicitly refused to consent to the ICJ’s jurisdiction over British disputes with former Commonwealth countries such as Mauritius. However, in its 2019 Advisory Opinion, the court positioned itself formally, not as adjudicating between two sovereign states’ conflicting claims, but as responding to a question from the UN’s General Assembly as to whether the UK had violated international law on the decolonisation of Mauritius in the 1960s. Notwithstanding the fact that that is a crucial point of current contention between the two countries, the ICJ presumed to find in Mauritius’ favour. It is because the UK Government fears that a subsequent international tribunal—such as the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea—will use the ICJ’s Advisory Opinion to make a binding judgement against it, that it prefers to concede sovereignty over the Chagos Islands and negotiate an expensive lease now.

But there is more to the Government’s motivation than fear. In his October 2024 Bingham Lecture, the Prime Minister’s Attorney General, Lord Hermer, declared that Britain must champion respect for international law, so as to dispel the view in the ‘Global South’ that the international rules-based order and human rights are “imperialist constructs”. In other words, by surrendering its claim to sovereignty over the Chagos Islands, Britain will ‘decolonise’ itself and thereby win diplomatic capital. As the Labour peer, Lord Boateng, opined: “We can welcome this treaty as an end to a period of colonial rule”. This is what lies behind that other statement in the preamble to the treaty: that the parties desire “to build a close and enduring bilateral partnership based on mutual respect and trust”.

Yet the international law to which Lord Hermer would have the UK submit comprises the imprudent nonsense of UNGA’s resolutions 1514 (XV), 2066 (XX), and 2232 (XXI) and the Advisory Opinion of a court that, arguably, has exceeded its authority. It may be law, but it is bad law that serves to bring the international order into disrepute and damage its authority. So, for the sake of restoring confidence in international law, the UK should stand its ground, arguing the strong, rational case for its sovereignty over the Chagos Islands, exposing the romantic imprudence of the General Assembly’s resolutions, and reminding the international community that neither the ICJ nor ITLOS have jurisdiction. And if ITLOS were unwise enough to issue a binding judgment against the UK on the basis of the ICJ’s Advisory Opinion, the UK should, with respect, refuse to comply.

No doubt that would cost us diplomatic good will in ‘progressive’ quarters entranced by an idealised view of international law. But we have no good will to lose with ideologically hostile states such as China, Russia, and Iran. And the rest of so-called ‘Global South’ is not a politically uniform bloc. It embraces nations ranging from India to Nigeria and Peru, which have divergent—sometimes strongly opposing—interests and views. They would not all react with equal disapproval to principled non-compliance. Some might even be impressed by a self-confident Britain’s refusal to yield to cynical lawfare, in bold defence of the law’s integrity.

For all those reasons, then, I do not think that the treaty between the UK and Mauritius to transfer sovereignty over the Chagos Islands makes good sense—legally, morally, or in terms of Britain’s national interest—and I would like to see its ratification fail.

That is why, although I got home late on Monday night, I did so nonetheless with a moderate spring in my step. For in the course of the afternoon and evening, the Conservative Opposition—with the aid of my vote—had inflicted a series of significant defeats on the Government.

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Now, I see that my intuition was on the button. Recently reading John Keay’s 1991 history of the East India Company, The Honourable Company, I learned that the three great port cities all owe their existence to it. Before the British arrived, Bombay comprised a set of seven separate islands, Madras was a fishing village, and Calcutta a cluster of three villages. According to Tirthankar Roy, the Bengali-born professor of economic history at the London School of Economics, by providing security, political stability, and impartial justice, the EIC attracted Indian artisans, merchants, and financiers from the interior, and so enabled the islands and villages to transform themselves into major ports and hubs of international trade.

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Never mind that the bronzes were icons of African-led enslavement, forged out of brass objects used as currency in the intra-African slave-trade. Never mind that Benin practised not only slavery, but human sacrifice. Never mind that the military expedition was launched in response to the slaughter of an unarmed embassy and resulted in the abolition of slavery. And never mind that the bronzes weren’t looted but taken according to the laws of war, to defray the expedition’s costs and fund pensions for war widows. Never mind the historical truth, they were surrendered in a heedless mania of atonement for imaginary sins.

And yet, since their celebrated return, not a single bronze has gone on display in Benin city’s purpose-built, Museum of West African Art, partly funded by the British Museum. This is because Nigerians cannot agree to whom the bronzes belong—whether the federal government, the Edo state, or the descendant of Benin’s ruler in 1897. As MOWAA’s director Phillip Ihenacho has commented, “In the west, there was a race about who was going to be the first institution to restitute… there wasn’t enough of a focus on to whom they would be restituted”.

Recently, the British Museum’s director, Nicholas Cullinan, has developed a more thoughtful, less craven way of responding to ‘decolonising’ pressure. Instead of surrendering objects allegedly stolen from India by the British, he’s dispatching 80 items from ancient civilisations contemporaneous with that of the Indus Valley on loan to Bombay, enabling a museum there to show how India was a cradle of civilisation. As Cullinan puts it, “You don’t have to embarrass your own country to do something with another country”.

That won’t stop Cullinan’s Hindu nationalist partners from making ‘decolonising’ capital out of the loan. The director of the Bombay museum, Sabyasachi Mukherjee, has already claimed it will help to “correct colonial misinterpretation” of India’s past. “Through this exhibition, there is decolonisation, an attempt is made to decolonise the narrative. We suffered for many years and colonisation penetrated into our education, our culture”.

Never mind that it was Britons like Sir William Jones and Warren Hastings who rescued classical Sanskritic civilisation from oblivion in the late 1700s, undermining the Eurocentric assumption of the primacy of Greece and Rome. Never mind that, according to Nirad Chaudhuri, they “rendered a service to Indian and Asiatic nationalism which no native could ever have given. At one stroke it put the Indian nationalist on a par with his English ruler”, giving him the material out of which to build “the historical myth” of a Hindu civilisation superior to Europe’s. And never mind that, on the other hand, it was the Hindu social reformer, Raja Ram Mohan Roy, who lobbied the British in the 1820s against funding a college to support traditional Sanskrit learning—”the best calculated to keep this country in darkness”—and in favour of educating “the natives of India in mathematics, natural philosophy, chemistry, anatomy, and other useful sciences, which the nations of Europe have carried to a degree of perfection that has raised them above the inhabitants of other parts of the world”. If his Indian counterparts choose to abuse the historical truth in the service of nationalist ideology, Nicholas Cullinan can hardly be blamed for it.

What’s more, his “new model” of cultural diplomacy is faithful to the British Museum’s mission to be universal rather than national. In countries with insecure or troubled identities—such as Singapore and Hungary—museums are devoted to telling and reinforcing the nation’s story. In contrast, since its foundation in 1753 the British Museum has used global networks created by imperial expansion to collect objects, with a view to comparing human cultures the world over, noting not only their creative diversity, but also what they share in common. In the face of strident nationalisms built on racially divisive lies about the past, it is vitally important that the British Museum stays true to its human calling and resists groundless calls to disperse its universal collection.