by Ian Paul, Psephizo
Lord Nigel Biggar is Regius Professor Emeritus of Moral Theology at the University of Oxford, and a well-known author on moral and ethical issues. He has just published Reparations: Slavery and the Tyranny of Imaginary Guilt (Swift, 2025), challenging the current narrative within and beyond the Church of England about the need for reparations for slavery. I had the chance to ask him about it.
IP: Why do you think the issues of reparations has become so important in recent years? What has sparked your interest in this issue?
NB: The topic of reparations for slavery is a distillation of the larger topic of ‘colonialism’. I first became interested in that issue during the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence. As an Anglo-Scot, I had a unionist dog in the fight and was viscerally opposed to the disintegration of the United Kingdom, which, according to the then British ambassador to the UN “would have had a devastating impact on the UK’s standing in the world, much greater than withdrawal from the EU ever would”.
Nevertheless, as a Christian, I could not regard the UK as divine. Nations and states come and go. Before 1800 the United Kingdom did not exist. In the 1860s the United States almost ceased to exist. In 1993 Czechoslovakia did cease to exist. It was possible, therefore, that the Scottish nationalists were right and that the UK had come to the end of its justifiable shelf-life. So I felt morally obliged to consider nationalist arguments. And one I came across amounted to this equation: Britain equals Empire equals Evil. Therefore, Scotland needs to repudiate Britain’s bloodstained imperial past and sail off into a bright, new, shiny, sin-free future.
Yet, having read about the history of the British Empire for more than two decades, I knew that the simple equation, Empire equals Evil, is not historically tenable. But that was when I realised that colonial history was being used—and abused—for political purposes that I regarded as destructive. And I thought that someone needed to correct the distorted record—which I have sought to do in my 2023 book, Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning. I did actually broach the issue of British reparations for slavery there, but my latest book, Reparations: Slavery and the Tyranny of Imaginary Guilt is a much fuller treatment of the issue.