Like Stalin! Ex-race chief slams critics of Empire row don
ACADEMICS who attacked an Oxford professor over his views on the British Empire have been likened to Joseph Stalin by a former race equality chief.
Trevor Phillips, former chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, said they were wrong to criticise Professor Nigel Biggar simply for voicing his opinion.
He said the academics were trying to suppress free speech by dictating what lines of inquiry professors should pursue, just like the Soviet dictator.
Mr Phillips is the latest public figure to defend Prof Biggar, who was shamed by dozens of colleagues earlier this month over his views on colonialism.
The eminent theology don wrote an article arguing that society should take a more balanced view of the empire rather simply remembering it with shame. In response, 58 Oxford academics signed an open letter saying they ‘rejected’ his views because they gave the impression the university ‘celebrated’ imperialism. They also said his new research project, titled Ethics and Empire, ‘asks the wrong questions, using the wrong terms, and for the wrong purposes’.
Prof Biggar said the letter, which was posted on the internet, was ‘collective online bullying’. And in a letter to the Times yesterday, Mr Phillips said universities were ‘permitting the intimidation of minority voices’ because anyone with a different opinion was shouted down by hard-Left campaigners.
Mr Phillips said he was the author of the ‘no-platform’ initiative at the National Union of Students when he was its presi- dent. In the past, ‘no-platform’ policies – or bans on speakers – existed to protect ethnic minority students from far-Right thugs, he added.
‘We wanted all students to be free to speak their minds in a society that still treated people of colour as unwelcome interlopers.’
Mr Phillips said he was ‘dismayed’ that the policies had become ‘abused’, and that anyone with a differing opinion was shut down.
And the Biggar saga indicated that academics were leading the way in these campaigns, he added.
‘Today’s perversion of the policy means that universities are failing to protect the vulnerable, and permitting the intimidation of minority voices,’ he said. ‘However, students’ misreading of history is entirely understandable if they are instructed by the academics who criticise Nigel Biggar for asking “the wrong questions, using the wrong terms”, an attack line of which Joseph Stalin would have been proud.’
Mr Phillips also said that while he himself had ‘no reason to defend colonialism’, he agreed with Prof Biggar that ‘we should constantly reappraise its consequences’.
He said one was ‘today’s multiethnic Britain’ – and that ‘we are only here because you were there [in the former colonies]’.
History tutor Dr James McDougall, one of the letter’s signatories, said yesterday: ‘Our open letter explicitly affirmed Prof Biggar’s right to hold and to express whatever views he chooses… we also have the right to disagree with them.’
Oxford University has stood by Prof Biggar, saying it ‘supported academic freedom of speech’ – but it also said his critics were entitled to their views.