An investigation claims to have uncovered a Left-wing cabal in British academia, after 58 academics condemned colleague Nigel Biggar for suggesting Britons should feel temper their guilt about the British Empire with a little pride.
Biggar, Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at Christ Church, Oxford, as well as an Anglican priest and an adviser to the Vatican, had penned an article titled ‘Don’t feel guilty about our colonial history’ for The Times, in which he suggested the British should “recognise that the history of the British Empire was morally mixed, just like that of any nation-state, [so] pride can temper shame.”
Recalling achievements such as the Royal Navy’s long battle to suppress the global slave trade, Professor Biggar noted that, historically, “indigenous peoples sometimes chose to move into territories governed by colonial regimes, rather than away from them,” citing the “millions of Chinese [who] took refuge in British Hong Kong during the early years of Communist rule in Beijing, and especially the anarchy of the Cultural Revolution” as an example.
The professor’s call for readers to “moderate” their sense of “post-imperial guilt” infuriating the Left-liberals on social media, however, with comments denouncing him as a “bigot”, a “racist”, and even a “Nazi” pouring in.
Fellow academics also got in on the act, with some 58 of them putting their names to an open letter declaring their “firm rejection” of his alleged “agenda”, accusing him of peddling “very bad history” and swearing to boycott his research project.
However, an investigation by Guy Adams for the Daily Mail claims that Professor Biggar’s detractors are almost all “card-carrying members” of the political Left.
Adams claims that the “vast proportion are fully paid-up Labour activists and supporters of Jeremy Corbyn.
“Indeed, of the 25 who have publicly expressed political views in recent times, 20 have endorsed or campaigned for the Labour Party and two are Labour members.”
He also noted that thirteen are anti-Brexit campaigners — with one wailing that the vote to Leave the European Union had “called forth a storm of racism and xenophobia” — and another five are anti-Israel campaigners.
Adams said he found “no evidence” that any of the 58 had ever expressed support for the at least nominally conservative Tory Party which currently governs in Britain. One of them, Worcester College’s Tunstall, disparaged the party as “disgusting, xenophobic, [and] repellent” on social media.
Concluding that “a nakedly political agenda has at least partly motivated this attack on [Professor Biggar’s] intellectual freedom,” Adams said the situation provided a “profoundly distressing insight into the culture of one of our great academic institutions”, and suggested a personal vendetta inspired by Biggar’s opposition to tearing down statues of the famous imperialist Cecil Rhodes.
A survey conducted earlier in 2017 found that the number of Right-leaning and conservative academics in British universities has been steadily eroded since the 1960s, to the point where some eight in ten now lean to the Left.