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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Historical case I: The Peace of Vereeniging, 1902

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

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

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

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

Historical case II: The Yalta Agreement, 1945

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Compromise, evil, and regret

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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BREXIT TEN YEARS ON (Part II)

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

I

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

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

II

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

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

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

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

I

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

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

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

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

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

Let me explain.

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Reference CAS-8297457-C1L2F8

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

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

1. David Olusoga is an ‘established’ historian;

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

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

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

To these assertions, I answer that:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

30 March 2026

ONE PAGE SUMMARY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Professor the Lord Biggar, CBE

House of Lords SW1A 0PW

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

30 March 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Professor the Lord Biggar, CBE

House of Lords SW1A 0PW

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

Reference CAS-8297457-C1L2F8 

8.5.2026.

Dear Lord Biggar,

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to contact the ECU:

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

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

Kind regards,

BBC Complaints Team

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

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

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

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

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

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

So far, so much good sense.

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

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

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

II

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

By why?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nothing at all.

III

So, what was driving them?

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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.

First among those virtues should be temperance. In this context, that does not mean abjuring alcohol. Rather, more generally, it means the restraint of emotions or, more exactly, passions. Strictly speaking, a ‘passion’ is an emotion that is out of our control and has us at its beck and call. Sexual passion is its epitome. The word derives from the Latin verb, patior, which means ‘to suffer’ or, specifically, ‘to be subjected to’.

We live in a culture that vaunts passion and strong emo­tion as signs of authenticity and vitality. But emotions can lie. They do not lie about their own felt strength, of course. But they are based on perceptions, and perceptions can be untrue, embodying a lie about what is perceived. Nazis, for example, were subject to very strong, ‘authentic’ passions about Jews. But those passions lied.

Moreover, emotions that are out of our control – passions – blind and deafen us to things we ought to see and truths we ought to hear. Among those truths are the duties we owe other people. Passions can make it impossible for us to perform them.

So, if we are going to be able to see straight and listen care­fully, and if we are going to be able to treat other people as they deserve, we need to cultivate temperance. And if we are going to foster temperate graduate citizens, voters, businessmen, lawyers, soldiers, journalists and politicians, then university professors are going to have to start modelling it.

Temperance or self-control is the necessary condition of a second virtue: respect. The duty of the virtue of respect is widely recognized and talked about – but not what is required to make it possible. If we cannot control or restrain ourselves – if we are ‘full of passionate intensity’ – we will not be able to stop ourselves trampling over the rights of others. We will not be able to respect what they deserve.

One thing that other people deserve, at least on first encounter, is the presumption that they are acting in good faith. So, when they speak or write, we should assume that they are expressing the truth as they see it. We should not cyni­cally, presumptuously, arrogantly assume that they are simply rationalizing some unjust interest or advantage.

Accordingly, we should begin by attending to what they say, rather than trying to discredit it by assaulting their person – whether by insinuating or smearing or damning by associa­tion. Of course, it may be that the more we attend, the more apparent it becomes that they are not acting in good faith. So be it. But our initial stance should be to give benefit of doubt and exercise the virtue of respect.

If we are going to show respect, we will also need to exercise a third virtue: carefulness. When reporting what someone has said or written, we should take care to be strictly accurate, not omitting inconvenient bits, distorting others, bending the whole into a straw man, the easier to knock down.

It may seem that accuracy in reportage is too elementary and prosaic a skill to merit adult attention. But many adults have never learned it, because their teachers never taught or rewarded the virtue of carefulness. Consequently, we have journalists, politicians and – as we have seen in these pages – decorated university professors who constantly misrepresent some people, thereby misleading many others.

Being careful with a person’s words, so as to hear and report them accurately is, indeed, elementary in the sense of basic. It is a basic form of doing them justice.

Involved in the virtue of carefulness is, fourth, that of patience. Careful listening often takes time. And if what someone is saying is unfamiliar or complex or ambiguous, careful listening will take a lot of time. So, in order to be careful, we will have to be patient. Sometimes, the meaning of what is said will not give itself up quickly and only becomes clear with careful attention, patiently sustained over time.

The word ‘patience’ derives from the same Latin root as ‘pas­sion’, but in this case it means the opposite. Far from being a strong emotion that renders us its helpless playthings, patience is a species of emotional self-control – of temperance - that enables us to suffer frustration and discomfort in waiting. The virtue of patience is the ability to endure.

Sometimes, what others say or write is not only complicated; sometimes, it is uncertain, inconsistent or ambiguous. One possible response is to represent it in its weakest form. But that is mean and unkind, and possibly cowardly. The generous response is to give an ambiguous utterance the strongest pos­sible construction, not the weakest. This brings us to our fifth virtue: charity.

‘Charity’ here does not mean what we usually take it to mean, namely, the voluntary giving of aid. It means, more broadly, a generous form of love.

It is said of Barack Obama that, as an attorney (‘barrister’, for us Brits), he was wont to open his case by scrupulously summarizing the position of his opponent, giving it the best possible construc­tion. Only then did he set about dismantling it.

Such charitable practice is not only kind, but rhetorically optimal. For, generous scrupulousness wins the trust of impartial observers. And it gives precision to the criticism that follows, making it all the more cogent.

Unless we intend to mistake ourselves for gods, we will be aware of our cognitive limits and moral flaws. So, when we first encounter someone else’s speech or writing, we should do so with a sixth virtue, humility.

We should not stand upon our rank, looking down, but face the author as an equal, subjecting ourselves to the common rule of evidence and reason. We may have higher professional status and we may be much celebrated, but we should not take ourselves too seriously. We should acknowledge that authori­ties and professionals sometimes get it wrong – and, if they are arrogant, they almost certainly will. Moreover, temperate, careful, patient, charitable amateurs sometimes get it right. It is not uncommon for truth to speak from an unlikely quarter. Following closely on the heels of humility is, seventh, docil­ity or teachableness. Aware of our cognitive limits and moral flaws, we should be open to the possibility that we have things to learn and that we might be mistaken in what we think we know. We should always be ‘docile’, not in the modern sense of being blindly submissive, but in the original sense of being open to being taught and corrected.

Luke Conway observes that ‘one of the hallmarks of the modern left-wing authoritarian movement is its intellectual apathy… They dislike thoughtful reflection… They shun serious intel­lectual questions.’ Thinking is what the Tavistock Institute failed to do, as the title of Hannah Barnes’s book indicates: Time to Think. It is also what, I believe, the ‘antiracist’ critics of the Sewell report and the ‘progressive’ critics of my book on colonialism failed to do: engage thoughtfully, albeit sceptically, to find out what they might learn.

In contrast, if we exercise the virtues of temperance, care­fulness, respect, patience, humility and docility, we will also exercise an eighth virtue: that of thoughtfulness. We will allow the difference between what we have assumed and what another says to provoke us to reflect, interrogate ourselves, perchance to think and rethink.

Finally, we should exercise the virtue of courage. To be respect­ful, careful, patient, charitable, humble, docile and thoughtful also makes us vulnerable. That is because, in allowing thevoice of another person to ring out clearly and cogently – by not obscuring it with noisy abuse or distorting it into a straw man to be casually dismissed – we may find some of our most cherished convictions challenged, threatened or toppled. And bound up with those convictions may be a career’s worth of reputation, rewards and accumulated social status. It is brave, indeed, to give another person the freedom to speak clearly.

So, there are some of the virtues that university professors ought to teach. There is no neutral position available. If they do not teach these virtues, they will, in effect, teach their oppos­ing vices: intemperance, disrespect, carelessness, impatience, meanness, arrogance, unteachableness, thoughtlessness and cowardice.

How should professors teach the virtues? Certainly, by giving voice to them and rewarding their exercise. Further, in the arts and humanities, by prescribing texts (or films) that illustrate them and provoke reflection and discussion about them. But, most of all, by modelling them in their own conduct. The best way to teach virtue is to be virtuous.

Ultimately, vice-chancellors, university managers and professors have a moral choice to make. Either they promote the virtues that make graduate citizens capable of being intellectually scrupu­lous and of behaving liberally, or they do not.

For sure, there is no universal consensus on what should count as a virtue and what should count as a vice. If we go with Confucius, we will view deference to political authority as a virtue, but not resistance to it. If we go with the ancient Hebrew prophets, we will view care for the weak and the poor as a virtue, but not if we go with Nietzsche or Ayn Rand. If we go with Jesus, we will view humility, compassion and forgive­ness as virtues, but not if we go with Aristotle. As we saw in the case of the controversy in Cambridge in 2020, some people think that ‘respect’ should be promoted, while others do not, preferring ‘tolerance’. And I think myself that compassion and kindness are only virtues in certain circumstances. In others – where, for example, military commanders have to put their own troops in harm’s way, or surgeons have to perform ampu­tations without anaesthetics, or university managers have to make colleagues redundant, or professors have to award marks that cause students to fail – a certain thick-skinned quality, or what we might call ‘callousedness’, is a virtue.

It would have served human welfare better, for example, if staff at the Tavistock’s GIDS clinic had, instead of avoiding their own emotional discomfort, steeled themselves to risk upset­ting children by questioning their gender identification, rather than nodding them through to irreversible bodily changes that some have now come to regret.

So, we will not all agree about the choice of virtues or the meaning of them. There will always be room for a plurality of interpretations and further debate. Consensus is usually tense in this sense, not entirely settled and relaxed. That said, we should not exaggerate our moral differences. I cannot think of any former academic colleague who would actually rec­ommend intemperance, disrespect, carelessness, arrogance, thoughtlessness or cowardice.

Regardless, universities cannot afford not to discuss the matter and reach whatever provisional consensus they can. For that to happen, however, its members need to wake up – become ‘woke’, we might say – to the importance of what is at stake: namely, whether or not we are to have a society run by people who are so devoted to the welfare of individuals and the common good that they care to find out the truth – about gender, race, colonial history, etc. – and who care sufficiently to find out the truth that they are willing to humble themselves so as to listen, perhaps learn, and even change course.

In 1919, on the eve of civil war in Ireland, W.B. Yeats wrote in his poem, The Second Coming, that famous line, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity”. If we are to avoid a New Dark Age of repression and naked power-struggle, university leaders, managers and professors need to recover liberal conviction and assert it, throwing off the intensely passionate, illiberal tyrants currently riding on the back of their acquiescence.

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.