SLAVERY, REPARATIONS, AND IMAGINARY GUILT – SAVILIAN NIGEL BIGGAR. CHAIRED BY SAVILIAN DR RUSSELL WILCOX

 

The Caribbean Community of fifteen island states has presented a bill to No. 10 Downing Street for £18trn in reparation for Britain’s involvement in historic slavery. The African Union has recently announced that it is drawing up its own, continental-size claim. The Irish billionaire, Denis O’Brien, is funding a campaign in favour of reparations in Westminster. Lenny Henry has just published a book promoting them. And the Church of England has already committed itself to pay out an initial £100m to black businesses as penance for its own supposed profiting from slave-trading. Does this make good sense? And if not, why not? Nigel Biggar explains.

Nigel Biggar is Lord Biggar of Castle Douglas, Regius Professor Emeritus of Moral Theology at the University of Oxford, and Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence at Pusey House, Oxford. He holds a B.A. in Modern History from the University of Oxford and a Ph.D. in Christian Theology & Ethics from the University of Chicago. And he is a priest in the Church of England.

Described as “one of the leading living Western ethicists” (by John Gray, formerly Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics, New Statesman, 25 November 2020), Professor Biggar was appointed Commander of the British Empire “for services to higher education” in the 2021 Queen’s Birthday Honours list and named one of Prospect magazine’s Top Thinkers of 2024. In January 2025 he entered the House of Lords as a Conservative peer.

Among his most recent books are Reparations: Slavery and the Tyranny of Imaginary Guilt (Swift, 2025); Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning (William Collins, 2023, 2024), What’s Wrong with Rights? (Oxford, 2020), Between Kin and Cosmopolis: An Ethic of the Nation (2014), and In Defence of War (Oxford, 2013).

In the press, he has written on the Israel-Hamas conflict in the Spectator (London), colonialism in the National Post (Toronto), freedom of speech in the Times (London), the ‘Culture Wars’ and illegal migration in the Daily Telegraph (London), the Iraq War in the Financial Times (London) and the Straits Times (Singapore), the possibility of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission for Northern Ireland in the Irish Times (Dublin), and why Australia should remain a monarchical republic in The Australian (Sydney).

He has lectured at the Royal College of Defence Studies, London; the UK Defence Academy, Shrivenham; the Führungsakademie der Bundeswehr, Hamburg; the US Military Academy, West Point; the US Naval Academy, Annapolis; and the National Defense University, Washington, DC.

His hobbies include walking over battlefields. In 1973 he drove a Morris Traveller from Scotland to Afghanistan; and in 2015 and 2017 he trekked across the mountains of central Crete in the footsteps of Patrick Leigh-Fermor and his comrades, when they abducted General Kreipe in April-May 1944. He enjoys playing an anarchical card-game.

Dr Russell Wilcox has been a barrister in independent practice since 2014. He studied Modern History at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and has postgraduate degrees from London University. He has previously published in the areas of legal theory and comparative law.