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22 April 2024. By Nigel Biggar for The Daily Sceptic. In her speech at the London conference of TheCityUK last Thursday, Kemi Badenoch denied that Britain’s economic prosperity is mainly attributable to colonial exploitation. She made this historical claim because of its present political significance. If post-colonial governments really believe in the narrative of simple victimhood at…
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17 April 2024. By Nigel Biggar for The Critic. There’s definitely no debate about whether she is transphobic or not…. She’s putting out so much hate”. So asserted Katie Neeves, biological male turned transgender female and founder of Cool to be Trans, on the BBC’s World at One last Tuesday, responding to a long string of…
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27 March 2024. By Nigel Biggar. The issue of how the moral principles stemming from the example and teaching of Jesus of Nazareth should be applied to political life has always been uncertain and controversial. This largely because, as the son of a village carpenter in 1st century Palestine, Jesus had no responsibility of any…
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24 March 2024. The approach is imaginative: to present a snapshot of the British Empire a century ago, five years after its victory in the First World War, when its territory was most extensive and at what must have seemed its zenith. The result is a display of the Empire in all its ad hoc variety, from…
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3 March 2024. By Nigel Biggar for The Telegraph. Opponents of the Jewish state smear it as a colonial project. This is a false narrative and fake history. The “decolonisation” story is a moral melodrama, performed in stark divisions: black versus white, oppressed versus oppressor, good versus evil. That’s the comic- book source of its…
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10 February 2024. Campaigners to legalise assisted suicide invoke the principle of arbitrary autonomy. This threatens to give us a libertarian society at the expense of a humane one. “There should be a booth on every corner where you could get a martini and a medal.” No doubt the novelist Martin Amis was exaggerating for…
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18 January 2024. By Nigel Biggar for The Spectator. Israel’s fight against Hamas is not genocide. Last week Lord Cameron, the Foreign Secretary, expressed his concern that Israel ‘may have breached international law’ in its three-month bombardment of Gaza. Two days later, at the International Court of Justice, South Africa’s lawyers presented their case accusing…
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31 Oct 2023. Nigel Biggar for The Times. Sir, to be fully proportionate, Israel’s response to Hamas’s deliberately indiscriminate slaughter of October 7 needs more than the prospect of military success and a reconstructed Gaza (“Is this a just war? Let’s apply some tests”, Philip Collins, Oct 30). It needs to belong to a political…
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25 October 2023. By Nigel Biggar for the Scottish Episcopal Institute Journal. I have a dog in the political fight over Scottish independence. Proud to have been born in Kirkcudbrightshire, the son of a Scottish father and an English mother, educated on both sides of the border, and now living in England, I would not…