Nigel speaks beautifully; it almost takes one back in time.

"England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality." - G. Orwell

I will not use the term 'lived experience' because the word 'experience' is already descriptive enough and experience can only be gained when alive.

Ultimately, everyone hates a winner. I won't list Britain's achievements, there would never be enough space.

"It's a strange paradox, that the liberals are illiberal in their demand for liberality. They are exclusive in their demand for inclusivity. They are homogenous in their demand for heterogeneity. They are somehow un-diverse in their call for diversity - you can be diverse, but not diverse in your opinions and in your language and in your behaviour. And that's a terrible pity." - Stephen Fry.

Lovely to listen to Douglas, as always. I was just talking about cultural appreciation being called appropriation, incorrectly.

The problem is that the people who SHOULD be listening to this talk (most MPs and most 'academics' who teach on 'Studies' programmes) will not hear it. Professor Biggar is lecturing the 'properly-educated': not those who come with an 'ideology', or 'chip-on-their-shoulder', owing to their "lived-experience".

Insightful and eloquent!

Thank you.

I was there! Absolutely amazing!

Thank goodness for the lucid Douglas Murray.

Very grateful for this lecture. I feel it has expanded my thinking on its topics. And I'm sure there are many wise and important points here. Nevertheless, I struggle to agree with much of it. In Biggar's initial lecture... did I perhaps miss something? He starts talking about what happens when stronger and weaker tribes meet, says either the stronger tribe wipes out and replaces the weaker, or they separate (like, he says, in apartheid South Africa), or they integrate (and that takes mostly the form of the weaker tribe being integrated into the stronger)... This description seems so strange to me. The two tribes, in most cases of colonialism, have not just neutrally 'met' - the stronger tribe has gone well out of its way, travelled right round the world, and seized land and resources from the weaker. Was there not just like the option of... not doing that? We haven't done that with, I dunno, Korea - our relations with Korea have developed without that; couldn't we have not done it with, say, India too? And then Murray at the end - the idea that the abolition of slavery, and attempts to enforce that abolition internationally, amount to reparations... Maybe that atones somewhat for the previous 200 years of slavery, but why think it compensates for all other the colonial theft, destruction, debasement, disruption... Reducing all that to a financial calculation of what the UK lost out on from abandoning slavery and not trading with countries that still practised slavery vs all the harms done - how can he be content with that? Similarly, the claim that foreign donations just factually have been reparations... When Sashi Tharoor talks about the needs for reparations, he says the amounts are so much less important than the attitude, the acceptance of responsibility... Foreign aid, which has not been given in anything like that spirit, and which has so often had an agenda to it or even conditions attached, is a very different thing, it seems to me. And again, what's the basis of this blithe certainty that what's been given is even nearly proportionate to what was taken? I wonder also what they would say in response to the paper The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development by Acemonglu et al.

Agreed. Never replace one ideology with another, but in the first place Britain is, or was not an ideology.

Before you set up an event to be recorded. make sure you have the best sound man you can find; don't take audio for granted.

Interesting. Maybe we can work together. Thank you for sharing. #NigelBiggar #Colonialism #JohnCanoe #Oxford #Enfield #EnfieldTown #GBNews #FreeSpeech #FreedonOfSpeech #ReformUK #British #RoyalNavy #Abolishion #Slavery #SlaveTrade #ReparationsNow #ReparationCorner #ReparationRoad

Very enjoyable, and interesting of course. The other answer to the question of why the decolonisers attack Churchill so readily, or Lincoln, in 'preference' to other, lesser, figures, is that the decolonisers are usually so appallingly ignorant that they don't actually know of any others. To attribute an understanding to these people, no matter how poorly grasped by them, that their sacred project will be most effectively achieved by attacking the most meaningful and therefore most wounding targets, is probably to grant them too much sophistication. In most cases, I'd say that they simply don't know who else to attack. After all, who hasn't seen clips of these idiots being asked, in the heat of their tantrums, who it is they're gunning for, or what they're even doing at the time, and not being able to provide an answer. I'm not saying that D Murray is wrong when he makes his point about attacking what they know to be 'our' most sensitive spot, but I imagine that that knowledge is held only by a minority of the cretinous participants.

Japan doesn't think or act like this. One people, one language, one culture that live longer than any other human being. They respect life, live and eat well. Are kind to each other and work hard. The only country with two atomic bombs on it...they were once a colonial superpower. Why nobody attacks them? Why is nobody demanding they become multicultural?

What is it with these chairs, they spend all the time devoted to questions for the speakers, in making their own speech.!

1:20:51 More to the point, blaming generations now for what generations past did is archaic, backwards, and stupid. You don't blame someones brother for the crime that THEY committed. You don't blame their father, and you certainly don't blame the son for what the father did, either. You are guilty of your own sins and no one elses. The entire arguement should and needs to be shut down then and there. If someone, personally, wnats to voluntarily pay and apologies, then let them, but it should never be sanctioned, endorses, or enforced by the state.

Great Britain is not a colony of itself and therefore decolonizing itself is non sensical. In addition, no one is forbidden to study anything and in any language. In addition, the indigenous British population were never asked whether they wanted to be multi-cultural and it is hugely inflammatory, divisive and demeaning to suggest that British culture is in need 'cultural enrichment' as this implies it is culturally lacking, while there was always an interest in other cultures, perhaps not universally, but sufficiently.

As a member of the FSU, I'm quite concerned that someone with such left-wing views is our Chairman. I have no specific reason to suspect that he would fail to act impartially, but in my experience Leftists tend to view politics as a matter of truth and falsehood rather than a matter of opinion - i.e. that espousing certain positions would be considered tantamount to 'spreading misinformation' and therefore not deserving of defence.

What’s wrong with empires? Discuss

"If those things are true..." Which they're not.

There are no solutions inside the Liberal paradigm. We stayed inside the Liberal framework and gave ground every year from 1945.

Skip ahead to 57.24

This isn't conservatism. It's civic nationalism, aka, slow-motion liberalism.

I agree with most everything debated and said, and the insane idea that reparations are owed are completely inane, however this sentiment of inequality has risen from falling living standards and pay, and the enlightened light-footed folk, once either emancipated or enslaved by this system, have no intention about arguing about that. It is a shame really that if people could provide for their families, and homestead, everyone would be better off.

I can hear an American accent creeping up on Murray. Too much time in New York.

There have been over 180 empires in human history and the industrial and farming revolution as well as market capitalism made that type of governing model (empire) increasingly irrelevant.

By the way, if you haven't seen the Dutch ' beauty and consolation' documentary on Scruton on youtube, you should. It shows how utterly ridiculous and laughably moronic he was. There are scenes of him getting all philosophical while chomping on a fat cigar in his library and blowing smoke up multiple asses, and also of him sitting on horseback at a fox hunt, explaining how ripping an animal to pieces is a healthy way for the forlock-tugging peasanty and their noble overlords to form a connection to the soil. Real Blut und Boden stuff. I can only assume that the parade of tribunes here never actually listened to a word he said but just liked the ideas of him. Btw, his book on Wagner is a joke too.

What a turgid, unoriginal, dreary speech. How long did he need to state the obvious in the most flat-footed way. Bring back Roger!

I found Biggar's offering the successful displacement of Britons in their universities and government as proof of British non-racism quite cringe-worthy in its cringiness.

Douglas Murray? A propaganda specialist?