The theologian and moral philosopher who has become a prominent conservative voice in the free speech debate says he was a reluctant conscript in the culture wars

The right to free speech is a hot topic. The public debate surrounding it has thrown up some unlikely figures of controversy. None more so than Nigel Biggar. The Emeritus Regius Professor of Moral Theology at Oxford, an Anglican priest and a recent addition to the Conservative benches in the House of Lords, is the first to label himself as “a mild-mannered academic”. Yet his work at Oxford on the “Ethics and Empire” project he co-founded led to him being propelled from relative obscurity to online opprobrium when students and fellow academics loudly demanded he be cancelled, claiming that he was an apologist for the crimes of the British Empire. It was a charge he rebutted steadfastly in his bestselling (“70,000 copies, unknown for an academic”) Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning. He has returned to the fray with a new, short but potentially explosive volume on the same contested ground – Reparations: Slavery and the Tyranny of Imaginary Guilt.

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