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06 January 2025. Nigel for Prospect. Demands by Caribbean nations for compensation ignore historical reality and the achievements of British abolitionism. White British involvement in Atlantic slave-trading and slavery for over a century-and-a-half up to the early 1800s amounted to “the Black Holocaust, the British genocide”, according to Sir Hilary Beckles, historian, vice-chancellor of the…
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17 December 2024. Nigel for The Australian. Throughout the English-speaking world elites are falling over them- selves to believe the very worst of their own countries. Let’s consider Canada. In May 2021 an Indian band in Kamloops, British Columbia claimed ground- penetrating radar had discovered “soil disturbances” that evidenced unmarked graves containing the remains of…
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20 December 2024. Nigel for The Telegraph. Nigel Biggar has been ennobled by the Conservative Party leader “It’s time you came off the fence, Nigel.” So counselled conservative philosopher Sir Roger Scruton, turning half-around as he walked away from my Oxford front-door one sunny afternoon in 2016. He’d come to look at Christ Church’s wine-list…
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25 November 2024. Nigel for The Spectator. Legal reasoning is only as good as the ethical concepts it uses. That’s why the International Criminal Court’s decision to issue arrest warrants for Israel’s Prime Minister and former defence minister is basically flawed. The ICC claims reasonable grounds for believing Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant guilty of…
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26 October 2024. By Nigel Biggar for The Australian. Republicans object to Australia’s hereditary monarchy, partly because it’s foreign and partly because it’s a medieval absurdity stranded in a modern, democratic age. If that were so—and if I were Australian—I’d object, too. But it’s not true. While Australia has long been an independent state, and…
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19 October 2024. By Nigel Biggar for The Australian. The version below was originally given on 14 October 2024 as an address to St Mary-le-Bow Church, London, on the occasion of the birth of Admiral Arthur Phillip. I Did Admiral Arthur Phillip spearhead the invasion of Aboriginal Australia? While an annual commemoration of his birth…
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19 August 2024. An essay History has always been contested. The indubitable facts may provide firm common ground, but how to make sense of them, which ones to foreground and which to marginalize, how to distribute the weight of significance among them, and above all how to evaluate them morally will always be a matter…
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11 August 2024. Nigel for Quillette. The flawed moral reasoning of the ICC’s panel of legal experts would have approved the arrests of Churchill and Eisenhower. When, in June, the International Criminal Court’s prosecutor sought arrest warrants for Israel’s prime minister and defence minister over their conduct in Gaza, the Conservative government objected that the…
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6 August 2024. By Nigel for the Daily Express. None of the reasons for returning to Athens the sculptures known as the ‘Elgin Marbles’ adds up. The historical reason – theft – is untrue. The sculptures originally adorned the Parthenon, which was used by the Ottomans as a military base for centuries. In 1687 a…