Nigel Biggar and Marie Kawthar Daouda

Theologian Lord Nigel Biggar and Moroccan-French academic Dr Marie Kawthar Daouda challenge the ongoing debate around the legacy of colonialism and discuss making amends for historic wrongs, paying reparations, immigration and questions of race and responsibility.

Biggar is a former professor of moral theology at the University of Oxford and author of the bestselling Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning. In Reparations: The Tyranny of Imaginary Guilt, Biggar argues against the notion that Western countries should pay reparations to former colonies for the damage they caused, particularly through slavery. He looks at why the claim is being made now, whether it makes sense and how historic wrongs can be made right. He sets the issue in its historical context and mounts an ethical argument against reparations.

Daouda is a lecturer in French at the University of Oxford, who writes regularly for The Critic and The Daily Telegraph on education, heritage and immigration. In Not your Victim: How our Obsession with Race Entraps and Divides Us, she argues that the narrative that western colonies were uniquely evil and their legacy underpins systemic racism, injustice and oppression today is dangerously wrong. Daouda says a closer look at French and British history belies a simplistic world view that all the evil in the world is the result of white western colonisers. She argues that it valorises victimhood above individual or collective agency and denies ethnic minorities any sense of responsibility.