Tag: Articles
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Christian Realism
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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Imperial Quandary: Nigel reviews ‘One Fine Day: Britain’s Empire on the Brink’ by Matthew Parker
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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Israel’s founding is complex and messy – but it certainly wasn’t imperialist
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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Autonomy’s Suicide
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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The Spoils of War
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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Times letters: Moral legitimacy of military action in Gaza
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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Scottish Separation: A Faith in Search of an Adequate Rationale
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…
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Israel has every right to defend itself against Hamas’s war crimes – but it must find a just peace
15 October 2023. By Nigel Biggar for The Telegraph. An ‘Iron Wall’ will never make the Jewish state safe. The last 100 years shows it will only make some Palestinians nihilistically violent. Hamas’s attack on Israel has given fresh voice to the view that a just political end legitimates the use of any military means…
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What really motivates the ‘new progressives’
5 October 2023. By Nigel Biggar for The Spectator. Kemi Badenoch is right to say that Britain is not a racist country. The data simply does not support the claim that black and ethnic minority (BME) people in the UK are generally disadvantaged because of the racial prejudice of white Britons – that ‘systemic racism’…
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Rushi Sunak’s war on wokery is both morally right and electorally popular
6 August 2023. By Nigel Biggar for The Telegraph. The Government’s combative response to the recent Coutts’ de-banking of Nigel Farage on “progressive” political grounds suggests that Rishi Sunak is committed to the war against wokery. And so he should be, for three good reasons…. The culture war is no ‘concoction’; it’s a real danger…