The Daily Signal - 'BAD RELIGION': Effort to Cancel This Defender of the British Empire Reveals the Left's 'Repressive' Ideology

Episode Date: May 25, 2025

Nigel Biggar, who faced cancel culture for his efforts to reexamine the narrative demonizing the British empire, opens up about the ideological commitments behind cancel culture. He says the Left's "repressive" desire to silence "anyone who disagrees" is part of a "really, really bad religion," in which people mistake themselves for God. Subscribe to The Tony Kinnett Cast: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-tony-kinnett-cast/id1714879044⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Keep Up With The Daily Signal Sign up for our email newsletters:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.dailysignal.com/email⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠     Subscribe to our other shows:  Problematic Women:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.dailysignal.com/problematic-women⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  Victor Davis Hanson: https://megaphone.link/THEDAILYSIGNAL9809784327   Follow The Daily Signal:  X:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://x.com/intent/user?screen_name=DailySignal Instagram:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.instagram.com/thedailysignal/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  Facebook:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.facebook.com/TheDailySignalNews/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  Truth Social:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://truthsocial.com/@DailySignal⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  YouTube:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.youtube.com/dailysignal?sub_confirmation=1    Thanks for making The Daily Signal Podcast your trusted source for the day’s top news. Subscribe on your favorite podcast platform and never miss an episode. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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We'd love to talk, business. I am myself a religious belief. I'm a Christian, a priest, so I'm not against religious belief, but there is bad religion, and this is religion where you mistake yourself for God, and you think you have all truth on your size, you forget that you're a sinner, you have all the truth, you have all the justice, and anyone who disagrees with you is belongs to the devil, and your job is to shut them up by whatever means without any scruple. and that is really, really bad religion. This is Tyler O'Neill, a senior editor at The Daily Signal.

I'm honored to be joined by Lord Nigel Biggar, who is a professor emeritus at Oxford University and a peer in the House of Lords and an author of a best-selling book about colonialism, A Moral Reckoning. It's a real honor to have you with us. Thanks, Tyler. I'm delighted to be here. So I want to just jump right in. why write a book about colonialism?

You know, you're also an Anglican priest, but like how does, why did the issue of colonialism stand out to you and why is it important to correct the record on British history and the history of the overall colonial project? So, Tyler, although my first love was history, is history, I read a lot of it. I didn't decide to write about climate, journalism just for historical interest, my motivation was political because I observed how a distorted

account of Britain's historical record and Australia's and Canada's, and to some extent Americas, the United States, was being used for damaging political purposes. Even though I sign English, I'm actually Scottish. And in 2014, there was a referendum on whether the Scotland should succeed from the United Kingdom, whether the UK should disintegrate. One of the arguments put forward in favour of secession was that Britain equals empire, equals evil, and so the Scots need to purify themselves and sail off into a nice, new, shiny, sin-free future. But which would, the disintegration of the UK would have been a major blow to one of the secondary pillars of the West. But I've been reading,

British imperial history for 20 years. And I knew that the simplistic cartoonish equation empire equals evil is unsustainable. But that was when I noticed that colonial history was being used in Britain for political purposes that I regarded as destructive. And so I wanted to correct the record. Yeah. So the major narrative is colonialism, evil. You know, you're imposing your values and control over native peoples and this is all bad. And I think we've all been indoctrinated with this narrative for now. Where does that fall apart and why is that politically destructive, as you say? Well, when considering European or British or American colonial endeavor, one needs to put it in context.

One context is that the mass migration of peoples is a universal phenomenon. And throughout history, up until the end of the First World War, Most people lived under empires. Now, we may find that strange, but it's true. So that the fact of European empire and of the mass migration of Europeans to North America, for example, in the 17th and especially, excuse me, the 18th and especially in 19th centuries, in global terms, it's not exceptional. So, let's put it in context. It's not only Europeans who are migrating. So you have the Iroquoian south of the Great Lakes expanding.

northward in the 1640s, overwhelming the Huron, people who then are displaced westward and displaced other North American peoples who have the Comanche. Wait, the North, the Native Americans were taking each other's land? Yes, would you? And let me say that they had a quaint way of assimilating the people they conquered. The women and the children they adopted, the men, they ate. That's one way of, one way of cooperation. Yeah, quite literal in corporation.

Well, it was literal. The Comanche in the 1700s expanded, I think eastwards, overwhelmed the Apache and ran what one historian calls a vast slave economy. So just to be clear, yes, Europeans arrived on the shores in great numbers in the later 1700s, 1800s, and overwhelmed native peoples over time. But that wasn't a unique historical form. That's the first thing to say. Let's get it in context. No, the establishment of European or British Empire was not always simply by conquest. Sometimes it was through negotiation.

Things grew incrementally. I mean, you have the East India Company pitches up on the coast of India in the 1600s to do what? To trade? Why? To make a profit. Well, what's wrong with that? But over time, relations with Indian princes grow. There's civil war between Indians.

the Eastern India Company gets involved. It's on the winning side. It gets given ports and land. And eventually it ends up ruling territory. But no one going out to India in the 1600s plan to rule territory. They wanted to make profit through trade. So we need to get past sort of caricatures of what colonialism actually was. And even though, yes, imperialism and colonialism involves one people dominating other peoples.

the dominance was always qualified because oftentimes the numbers of the number of Britons in India was tiny compared to the population and then Africa too so Britons couldn't simply snap their fingers and make things happen Indians and Africans had to collaborate

and they did for various reasons out of their own self-interest so there's much more negotiation and cooperation than the cartoonish story holds and then sorry there's a long out of answer to your question. No, I don't mind.

Yes, it's true that European empires, British Empire involved bad things, massacres, injustices, seizure of land, racial prejudice. But I challenge you or anyone else to name a 400-year-old state anywhere in the world of which that isn't true. Any state over time is going to preside of a bad stuff. So let's admit that, yes, it's lamentable, but let's also admit that the British Empire left a legacy of considerable humanitarian and liberal achievement,

most signally the abolition of slavery and the suppression of slavery worldwide for a century and a half, and also the British Empire was most violent doing what in the 1940s fighting fascist Nazi Germany. So no, you can't equate empire with evil. I think this message is so important and historically grounded, but you face tremendous opposition when you wanted to write this book. You were telling me that it was delayed for more than a year,

that you faced cancel culture. Would you describe what you faced and the backlash? Yes. Before I got to the book, I began to publish my views, and I was running a project in Oxford called Ethics and Empire. And in December 2017, a Cambridge academic called Pre-invalda-Galpal, who was a reader of post-colonial studies in Cambridge, noticed that. and apparently got rather alarmed and she tweeted her followers in Oxford, Cambridge and London, oh my God, this is serious, S-H-I-T, we need block capitals to shut this down. And that precipitated a week's worth of three online mass denunciations, the third of which was addressed to Oxford University, insisting that they take the project out of my hands.

I was unnerved, my name was in the press for every day for about two or three weeks. The major historian collaborator of my project abandoned ship within four days of the first denunciation being published. I had to postpone the operation of the project for a year so I could re-populate it. So it did cause temporary damage, although in this case my university was supportive and I survived and the project survived it completed its work into 2023. So survived that, but there was an attempt to shut me down. One happy result of that public controversy was that I was approached by publisher,

Bloomsbury Publishing, to write an intelligent person's guide to colonialism, given there are lots of unintelligent versions of it. I agreed. In April 2018, I produced the manuscript at the end of 2020 with about nine hours to spare before the deadline fell on the New Year's Eve. Early 21, my publishing, my commissioning editor wrote to say that he was speechless with admiration for the book's rigor and comprehensiveness. He said it was one of the most important manuscripts to hit his desk in some years, and he predicted sales up up to 20,000 copies. The book went into the copyating process, a cover was produced, but then in March I got a message

from the top of Bloomsbury announcing that they were postponing publication indefinitely because public feeling was unfavourable. I was told that what had happened was that junior staff had protested at having to deal with such offensive materials, my book. I've heard that before. I think the New York Times, other places use that excuse. And I've heard it very recently, too. For some reason, and I don't quite understand it,

the grown-ups in charge of publishing houses and universities and in indeed newspapers, are inclined to cave in to agitation from young, illiberal zealots. Don't ask me why, but they do. Anyway, so I was devastated because I had no other publisher to go to when Bloomsbury handed back my contract in April, 2021. Happily, Harper Collins, their nonfiction wing, William Collins, gave me a contract in August, and the book came out in February 2023. So again, there was a happy ending, but there were two attempts to do. to counsel me. And Bloomsbury must be rather unhappy with their own decision now, I would think,

considering how many copies your book is sold. Yeah, so just to let your viewers and listeners know, as I say, my commissioner editor at Bloomsbury, who was very upset at the cancellation. He predicted up to 20,000 copies would be sold. In fact, it's sold to date over 65,000 copies. And I've been in Australia and New Zealand and in Canada and also in the US to talk about it. So it's been a bestseller in the UK. Yes, I've received word from Bloomsbury indirectly that they do regret the decision, mainly I think, because they were embarrassed in the press about it. Yeah. Well, and I think that's when we talk about these cancellation initiatives, that when you have these cancel culture situations,

oftentimes the people who are trying to cancel something end up being embarrassed in the long run. And we saw, you know, in Britain you've been working with the free speech union, I understand. Yes. Can you expand on that effort? Yes. So because of my early experience of cancellation, I ran a conference in Oxford in May 19, just before COVID, under the title, Academic Freedom Under Threat, What is to be done? And out of that, later in 2019, a group gathered together. And one of our members in early 2020 founded the Free Speech Union in the UK,

which in five years has attracted over 25,000 subscribing members, giving us a considerable annual income plus major donations, such that the FSU UK is now well, resourced enough to apply for a judicial review of the current Labour government's policy on universities. What's more, the FSU in the UK has created or helped to create sister organisations in New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, Switzerland and recently in Canada. And that's made a major difference to the landscape because what the FSU does is to, it receives SOS is from beleaguered members of universities, students or professors, or people in their

workplace or people who have been visited by the police protesting against the infringement of their right to free speech and the FSU will then write stiff letters to these organizations and also in collaboration with the writers fend to press which publishes articles that then embarrass the institutions and public, making the institution publicly accountable and often forcing the institution to back down. Because unless they're made publicly accountable and embarrassed, they will often cave in because they think that suppressing free speech and giving in to angry, an angry minority of

zealots is the path of least resistance in these costs. So what we need to do is to raise the costs of cravingness and make it clear to them that suppressing peace, which is not always the most, the cheapest way to get by. Where do you think this ideological threat, you know, I almost see it as desire for there not to be any dissent from the left's narrative. You know, in the States, I think the worst example is the Southern Poverty Law Center, but I know there are many organizations out there. In Britain, you have Stonewall that seems to have this grasp on power in the way that the human Rights Campaign does here. How do you define this threat that is going after free speech,

but specifically free speech that goes against the left's narrative? Yes, so I've noticed it's not just that we have points of view that disagree with me on colonialism or race or gender or whatever. I mean, that's acceptable in a liberal society. But what I've noticed is it's not sufficient for people to express the fact they disagree with me. They want to shut me down. So there's a repressive element to these progressive ideologies. Now what sense do we make of that? And I puzzled over it.

And I try to explain this right at the end of my book. I think this is a quasi-religious movement. I am myself a religious believer. I'm a Christian, I'm a priest. So I'm not against religious belief, but there is bad religion. And this is religion where you mistake yourself for God and you think you have all truth on your side. You forget that you're a sinner.

You have all the truth. You have all the justice. And anyone disagrees with you is belongs to the devil. And your job is to shut them up by whatever means without any scruple. And that is really, really bad religion. In a sense, it's godless religion because I think one of the advantages of believing in God is that you're lessing client to mistake yourself for one. Yes. So I think there is a, and as a, you know, as a, I'm a moral theologian, so I think moral commitment is really good and important.

Part of me thinks that the attraction of this ideology is it is morally serious, it believes in justice. It thinks it's championing the poor and oppressed and the victimized. It thinks it's doing that. And I approve of that. But the thing is that the champions will not suffer. any criticism of their assumptions. And my view is that, you know, if you really want to help the poor, you will really, really, really be interested in getting your diagnosis of the causes of their

plight. Right. Because if you get the diagnosis wrong, then whatever remedies you propose are going to misfire because you don't understand the nature of the problem. So I would expect people who really care to help the marginalized and the oppressed to pay close attention when some says, well, actually, the sums you're making are incorrect because of this data and these reasons. But I noticed that the progressive crusaders are not interested in listening

to the possibility that might be incorrect. They dismiss what I and others have to say out of hand, which tells me they're not really interested in solving the problem. So what is this really about? And I think this is about self-it, it's really about the crusader. It's the self-perception of the crusader. They're on a kind of high, they love playing the role of being crusader. It's not really about helping the oppressed.

So it's partly religious, it's partly about a kind of moral self-absorption. It's quite narcissistic. And then, of course, people who have invested themselves and their careers and their personi and their social circles in crusade, it would cost an awful lot for them to abandon it. So as a Christian, what do you see, you know, I think in the states we see this to a large degree, I think it happens across the pond too, where Christians are almost viewed as morally suspect from the beginning. Like there's this concern that you want to control people's sex lives, that you want to, you know, and there's this automatic assumption that you're a

knuckle-dracker. You're, you know, associated with the Middle Ages and with barbarism and with stupidity. And I think all of those are very wrong, but, you know, what is the best winsome way for Christians to engage with this sort of false narrative? Well, Tyler, I rejoice in the happy accident that this point in my life, as a public Christian, I find myself fighting the corner for reason and tolerance. Yes. So as a Christian, I do believe certain things to be true, but I also understand myself to be a creature. So my knowledge of the truth is limited.

I'm also a sinner. So yes, it's possible the way I see things is distorted by unjust interests I have. And so I'm open to that charge and I will consider it. But that goes for everybody, by the way, including my critics. We're all capable of having our views distorted by illegitimate interests. So, and I think if you see yourself as a sinner and as a creature, but you believe in God, you believe in a world that is structured. There's a reality there.

There are fundamental moral principles, there's a moral reality there. So we all have a world where we are accountable to reality. We don't get to make it up just as we fancy. But if I'm a creature in a center with limited, possibly distorted understanding, then I need you, I need other people to test me. So together we can approximate the truth more closely, which is why we need to be able to, in good faith, express what we believe to be true and then to question each other.

That's what should happen. So as a Christian, out of my own beliefs, I find myself contending for a liberal culture in the specific sense of, and I know the word liberal can mean all sorts of things. In this case, I mean a culture where we are free to express our in good faith views in order to persuade or to be corrected. And so in terms of answering the stereotypes of critics of Christianity or religion, I just point out, right now, I'm the liberal. Yeah, yeah, I think that's a great. But let me be clear. In this case, I mean liberal. I'm fighting for responsible, free expression of what people believe to be true.

So you have a forthcoming book also about reparations. And I think this is a fantastic topic to discuss because, you know, in the United States and of course in Britain too, there is this sense that our government did abuse people in the past. But of course, there's also the question of how do you do reparations? You know, you can't take our modern society with a lot of. of immigration with a lot of, you know, a long history of civil rights laws that tried to address it. What's your main thrust of the book? Yeah. So the book is called Reparations, the Tyranny of Imaginary Guilt. And it'll be published by Swift Press in September. It's a short book with 13 bite-sized chapters. So, yeah. So the thrust of the book,

is that first of all enslavement is very bad, agree in that. But for reasons, we 21st century, Western people need to understand slavery, slave trading was universal, practiced by non-white peoples before Europeans got involved in it, and practiced even by indigenous peoples, the Comanche ran a vast slave economy in the southwest of the US and the 1700s. The indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest were all slave societies. So we may find that puzzling and disturbing,

but the fact of the matter is slavery was universal. So European and British involvement and American involvement of slavery wasn't unusual. Yes, chattel slavery in particularly sugar plantations was particularly brutal. Oh, yes. People being worked to death. Yeah.

worse than conditions here in the States. Yeah, yeah. But not uniquely so, I'm afraid to say. There were plantations being run by Arabs in Africa in the 1800s. But the point is, yes, slavery is abhorrent. European involvement was not extraordinary. What was extraordinary is that Northwest Europeans, starting with the French, then the Danes, then the British,

and of course also New Englanders and then the US, we were among the first states in the history of the world to abolish slave trading and slavery and then the British used their dominant imperial power from around 1815 until the end of the British Empire in the 1960s to suppress slavery from Brazil to New Zealand. So when we're considering what Britain owes the descendants of slaves in the the West Indies, that needs to be taken into account. Also needs to be taking into account the fact that if Africans hadn't been enslaving other Africans and bringing them to Europeans on the coast of West Africa, then they never would

have been to supply. Africans were deeply involved. And in fact, they had been selling other Africans, first to the Romans, then to the Arabs. So if we're going to have a reckoning about the sins of the past, then the African states need to be included in that. Then finally, yes. So there are people alive today in the West Indies in the U.S. and in Britain whose ancestors were slaves. The descendants of slaves in our countries are not themselves slaves.

Right? What a concept, yeah. Almost like there was an injustice corrected. They're free because our societies got to the place where slavery was abolished. Now, do the descendants of historic slaves still bear the marks of the slavery? Well, they might, but that needs to be demonstrated, not asserted. I mean, my Scottish ancestors were covenanters. We didn't like bishops and we didn't want to suffer the Book of Common Prayer.

So my people went to worship in the hills where they wouldn't be disturbed and they fought battles against a government that wanted to impose a different kind of Christianity on them and they were hunted for government troops. My people lost battles. Do I suffer intergenerational trauma? Am I suffering from their misfortune? All I can say is not obviously, Tyler. So the claim is made that the descendants of slaves in, let's say, the West Indies still suffer the effects of slavery, to which my response is well demonstrated. And by the way, can you explain why the fortunes of peoples in the West Indies, the fortunes are not uniform? So Barbados, Barbadians are flourishing considerably better than.

and Jamaicans, and also actually, according to World Bank data, in terms of literacy, life expectancy, and international income per capita in, excuse me, per capita income in international dollars considerably better than Nigerians. Nigerians are the descendants, some of them, are slave owners. Right. Right. So the descendants of slaves in Barbados are doing better than the descendants of slave owners. So the point is between historic wrongs and the present.

All sorts of other things have happened to diminish and diffuse the effects of abhorrent slavery. So I end up in the position of saying reparations, at least in the British case, don't make a lot of sense. But by all means, Britain is a prosperous country, and we have an historic association with the West Indies. If we're going to give international aid, it should go to the West Indies, not to China. Well, there you go. Or at the very least, you know, we have voluntary associations that are very strong in Britain in the United States. And if there are claims that are important there, you know, we want to help people.

I think, you know, I talk about this all the time in the context of immigration. There's a large appetite for American dollars to go to charities that will help immigrants who are in dire situations. So we don't need the federal governmental ways to be putting money behind that. That's right. That's right. Well, anyway, thank you so much, Lord Bigger. I feel like we could talk for forever.

Is there anything else that you'd like to address, that you think an American audience needs to hear anything about politics in Britain? I mean, we've barely scratched the surface of world events. I guess I'd simply end on a, on a, Positive note, Tyler, to say that I do think our societies at the moment have a problem with the free expression, particularly of conservative views or non-progressive views. Certainly in universities, my view is that the problem comprises the noisy aggression of a zealous, illiberal minority, plus the intimidated, perhaps in different acquiescence of a majority. The ideologues are a minority, actually.

But because the majority are either intimidated or don't care enough, what is in fact the view of a minority dominates. That's the bad news. The good news is if the acquiescent majority can be persuaded of the importance of what's at stake here, to rouse themselves. And if an environment can be created where it's not too costly to risk contradicting the illiberal zealots, the landscape would change instantly.

So I think there's hope we can get this right. But it does mean that what we need are people who can afford to take the risk of saying what they think in criticism of progressive ideology that they take. those risks because I'm sure there are other people around them who will be glad if they do that and they may even rally behind them. Yeah, I think that's a really encouraging message. I see signs of it here in the States with some of these corporations that used to go full bore on every LGBT issue and now are suddenly saying, oh, wait, maybe some of our audience, some of

our customer base doesn't want us to be doing this. And now the Trump administration is coming in. And of course, is it making them more confident or more willing to stand for the truth? Or are they afraid of going against the government? Those are interesting other questions. But it does feel like something is changing in the states. And I hope that more will be changing here and there in Britain. Yeah.

So we are involved in a cultural war. And it's important that in the specific sense, I meant liberal people win because otherwise we don't have a culture where we can challenge false dominant ideologies. But certainly in Britain there have been developments which give me a lot of hope. And yes, on the colonial front where I've been thinking and writing a lot, I'm convinced that the truth is on our side, which the truth doesn't always win politically. I know that, but it's a good start. You always would rather have it than not.

Yeah. Well, thank you so much again, Lord Bigger, for joining us. This again is Tyler O'Neill with The Daily Signal. Subscribe to get the news the legacy media won't tell you and only the Daily Signal can bring to you.