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In The Times 10 February 2020 Letter to the Editor, Nigel Biggar challenged his readers, and Education Secretary Sir Gavin Williamson, ‘to dispel the climate of self-censorship and inner exile’ and to champion moral and political viewpoint diversity in Universities. Editor of The Article Daniel Johnson offered a response to Biggar (read his ‘Universities need more intellectual and political diversity, as…
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Reflecting on a recent trip to Hong Kong, and the protests that spilled into its streets, Nigel Biggar raises questions about the limits of democratic elections to bring political well-being–‘votes,’ after all, ‘can’t be any wiser than the voters’. Yet rule of law and a free press are institutions thought essential for fostering political trust between…
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July 2019 saw the publication of “Biggar vs Little Britain: God, War, Union, Brexit and Empire in Twenty-First Century Conservative Ideology,” by Richard Drayton, Rhodes Professor of Imperial History at King’s College London. In his essay Drayton mounts an attack on what he calls “the Biggar phenomenon”. While Drayton’s essay can be found in Stuart Ward and Astrid Rasch’s…
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Nigel Biggar has offered comment on the decision by Cambridge University to withdraw the invitation for Jordan Peterson to join the Divinity Faculty as a term-limited visiting fellow: Please read Biggar’s 02 April 2019 “Cambridge and the exclusion of Jordan Peterson” contribution to The Article here. Biggar’s “Cambridge has double standards on free speech”, a contribution to the Thunderer at The…
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Nigel Biggar has offered comment on the Cambridge University decision to investigate its historical links to slavery in the 04 May 2019 weekend essay of The Times. Biggar argued, in part, ‘Whatever wrongs happened in the distant past, the fog of history makes it impossible to determine who deserves compensation for the slave trade’. He concluded by encouraging Cambridge to…
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Commenting on the present crisis of herd morality and the policing of public rationalities that constrain content-full discourse and illuminating debate around issues of identity, sexuality, and the like, Nigel Biggar opened his recent contribition to UnHerd, and their ‘Groupthink’ theme, with these words: We need to talk about ‘discrimination’, ‘homophobia’, and ‘identity’. In fact, we need to rethink them.…
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Nigel Biggar recently reflected on the legacy of the Royal Air Force, with particular attention given to Flight Lieutenant Richard Hope Hillary (1919-1943). Hillary was the author of The Last Enemy (1942), an account of his experiences that was republished by Penguin in their 2018 Centenary Collection. The article was published alonside other reflections on the centenary of the First…
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On 26 September 2018 the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung published an article by Paul Ostwald, “Wie günstig! Da kommen plötzlich drei Kriege mehr aus”, which was highly critical of the “Ethics and Empire” project, which Nigel Biggar runs in the McDonald Centre. You can find the article here. Mr Ostwald’s article contained a series of inaccuracies. Professor Biggar therefore wrote a…
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Last year (2017) several scholars denounced the McDonald Centre’s Ethics and Empire project and called for its termination. Recently, referring to such actions, David Sanderson of The Times newspaper quoted Trevor Phillips, former chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, who observed a trend to reduce acceptable scholarship in the Academy to a narrow range of focal themes and…