The Times has another disturbing story about the woke takeover of publishing. It seems Nigel Biggar’s book about the British Empire was cancelled for not being sufficiently anti-Empire. Biggar made the mistake of giving a nuanced and fair account based on knowledge, research, and expertise, rather than blind adherence to anti-colonialist dogma. Here’s an excerpt:
One of Britain’s biggest publishers has been accused of cancelling a book on colonialism by an eminent Oxford academic that concluded the British Empire was not all bad.
Bloomsbury, which published the Harry Potter series, chose to pay off Professor Nigel Biggar rather than publish his book despite initially describing it as a work of “major importance”.
The Times has seen emails exchanged between Biggar and Bloomsbury, which show how the publisher went from enthusiastic to unwilling to publish in three months.
In 2018 the company approached Biggar, who was then regius professor of moral and pastoral theology at the University of Oxford, to write a book about colonialism following his research into “ethics and empire”. Terms were agreed and Biggar delivered the book, called Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning, at the end of 2020.
The book argues that despite grave mistakes and moments of gross injustice, the British Empire learnt from its errors and was increasingly propelled by humanitarian and liberal ideals, most notably through the abolition and suppression of slavery. It also examines the work of a number of historians who Biggar claims “overstate” the sins of British colonialism, concluding that they are sustained by contempt for the West.
After reading the manuscript, Biggar’s editor at Bloomsbury emailed him to say he was “speechless” with enthusiasm. He wrote: “Your research is exhaustive. Your argument is conveyed with care and precision. This is such an important book. I am now going to spread the good news around Bloomsbury about this exciting new project.”
However, three months later Biggar received an email from Sarah Broadway, the head of special interest publishing at the company, which said “conditions are not currently favourable to publication” and that she wanted to delay.
Biggar asked her to clarify what she meant but she offered only one sentence of explanation: “We consider that public feeling on the subject does not currently support the publication of the book and will reassess that next year.”
Biggar replied again, pointing out public feeling is “diverse” and asked again for clarification. He wrote: “Therefore, could you clarify for me, please: which public feeling concerns you; in what sense it is ‘unfavourable’ to publication; and what would need to change to make it ‘favourable’ again?”
Broadway wrote back, saying that Bloomsbury had “grappled with giving defined criteria” but found this “difficult to define objectively”. She said: “We have concluded that this subjectivity could lead to your book being in a limbo lasting more than a year or it might not but we don’t wish to put you in that position of uncertainty.” She explained this meant that Bloomsbury would like to release Biggar from his contract.
A publisher who struggles to express things in words, and relies on their subjective perception of the whims of ‘public feeling’. What could possibly go wrong? Biggar, on the other hand, had no trouble naming the problem:
Biggar, who was told by a source at Bloomsbury that senior executives chose not to publish because junior staff disliked his work, replied: “It is quite clear… the public feeling that concerns you is that of — for want of a more scientific term — the ‘woke’ Left.”
He added: “Rather than publish cogent arguments and important truths that would attract the aggression of these illiberals, you chose to align yourselves with them by de-platforming me. In so doing, you have made your own contribution to the expansion of authoritarianism and the shrinking of moral and political diversity.”
Very well put. But then, that’s what one would expect of a serious writer whose work deserves to be published by what used to be our most respected publishers. Luckily, the book is now being published by the apparently more sensible people at William Collins.
Worth reading in full.
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Good article. In summary, if you let morons formulate policy which they are then allowed to enact, don’t be surprised at the almighty cluster**** that inevitably ensues.
Excellent article. Progress reflects human resolve and ingenuity prevailing over risks to life and limb.
Health, wellbeing and life expectancy correlate with sanitation, running water, mains electricity, supplies of gas and nuclear power, the Haber-Bosch process and overall economic prosperity. Likewise the clean environment green zealots bang on about ad nauseam.
The Politburo doesn’t get the basics of how hundreds of years of social, technical and industrial progress lifted the developed world out of the squalor and tyranny of feudalism. Reliable, affordable and unbounded energy supply was, and still is, fundamental to progress.
The Student Union Government is instead fixated on the ramblings of those ne’er do wells, Marx and Engels, that may have had some 19th century relevance, but are now ancient doctrine gone rancid and sour.
Predicated on climate claptrap and energy folly, a Great Leap Backwards beckons. Witness Western European economic mass insanity.
The Kommissars Must Fall.
All true, but…
“The Politburo doesn’t get the basics of how hundreds of years of social, technical and industrial progress lifted the developed world out of the squalor…”
The lions share of human advances took place in just the last 200 years. Please see Buckminster Fullers chronology of the Industrial Revolution below using the Periodic Table as a key reference. Notice also the number of inventions. The abolition of slavery was in 1830 around the same time as the Factory Act 1832. Notice also the change in transportation across the top. My Father was born 12 years after the Wright Brothers first flight and before he retired Humans had been to the Moon.
Agreed, progress really took off in the last two hundred years. With a bit of imagination. I can just about relate to the world of 1854 (year of one of my great grandmothers’ birth), but not to the world of a century earlier than that. Great Grandma’s life likely began in the era of wells and middens, and ended in 1937 in a house with mains electricity.
I’d argue, however, that the seeds of the 1830s onwards were set by the advances in scientific thinking of Boyle, Hooke, Newton et al, that began around the 1660s. Foundational era of the empirical scientific method. Let there be Light, let there be Enlightenment.
True. We should also include Magna Carta, the Lollards, the English Bible, the Reformation and I think the pivotal English Civil War. The change from an Autocratic monarchy as well as the affects on working practices caused by the plague took the brakes off. Cromwell had already started the agricultural revolution with the draining of the Fens. When King Charles II was restored to the thrown he tried to restore the authority of the Monarch and get us back into Europe, or rather the Roman Catholic Church, and failed on both counts. He tried to shut down the coffee houses in London where all could meet, talk and trade without regard to status, or even gender and he failed on that too. Monarchy and to a large extent the aristocracy became irrelevant. The first commercial steam engine was in 1710, a mere 50 years after the Restoration, and 17 BEFORE the last women was burned as a witch. All nations up to this point were powered by men, horses, and sail. The steam engine was a multiplier and it is significant that engine power is still measured in horses.
“The Kommissars Must Fall” oh they will just a matter of when and how much devastation they cause in the meantime.
Purely using common sense it would seem the lower end of the variables more likely when it comes to deaths caused
The amount of land effected and its effects on humans living on it afterwards is almost impossible to calculate
I would say nuclear is nowhere near as dangerous as is proposed by the green blob and I would certainly prefer it to acres of wind turbines and solar panels
Nuclear waste, which is partly recyclable, is another conversation that needs being opened up to public debate instead of being instantly used as a big stick by the blob
We really do need grown ups in power at the moment, like never before!
Unfortunately the grownups are sadly lacking or swiftly put to the sword – metaphorically speaking.
The world needs energy. We always hear of the risks of using certain fuels but NEVER about the risks of NOT USING THEM—–Without coal gas oil or Nuclear we are back in the middle ages and going to work on a horse, dying young of preventable disease and of injuries caused by back breaking labour. —–There are forces to day trying to control energy use, and infact almost everything else human beings do as well. —-GREEN = RED.
Presumably judging by your last comment you have read James Delingpole’s Watermelons (or perhaps you ARE James Delingpole
).
There has been no shortage of anti-nuclear output about the Chernobyl disaster, but it appears that the design of the particular type of reactor had a built in risk, and they fell foul of it during it’s operation, or maintenance thereof. Not all of the stations in the ex-USSR are the same.
Historically, the old USSR was quite keen on the use of electric traction on it’s railways. Back in 1996, I travelled from Beijing via Mongolia then into Russia and all the way as far as London by train, and once we were on the Siberian route after the Mongolia/Russia border, it was all overhead electric (via Moscow, Warsaw, Berlin, Köln, Brussels). You can travel all the way from the Pacific across the continent that way. You can’t do that across the pond!
That sounds fantastic – a trip of a lifetime!
Central planning is lethal.
45 million people died as a result of Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward – perhaps the greatest number of deaths attributable to the folly of a single man (or small group of people.) To be clear, those were unintended, accidental deaths.
For comparison, 36 million died in WWII and 13 million in WWI.
Allowing a few people to exert immense power and influence over many others is just really dangerous and should not be allowed. It almost always goes wrong at some point. That is the single most compelling argument for small government, in my opinion.
Central Planning is fab, or so i heard on the BBC the other day. People don’t want EVs, so sales are only 21K monthly as opposed to the 28K mandate. Manufacturers can’t manufacture them profitably, and have thrown over £4bn trying to shift the ones they can’t sell.
So, said the man on the news, if the motor manufacturers can’t make them affordable, “the government will have to step up to the plate.” Meaning, of course, that because the public can’t afford them, they’ll have to pay for them anyway through taxation.
So if we are to lead the way to saving the planet, central planning is the sine qua non.
In passing, I heard a story via a friend of someone trying to buy a normal white diesel van for his business (still going). The dealer couldn’t let him have one until he had managed to sell a quota of Electric vans – so over a year he was able to ‘release/sell’ only 3 ‘normal’ vans as EVs don’t sell very well. How on earth have we managed to achieve this?
Everyone seems very keen on Latin today.
It’s yer actual classical education innit? Courtesy of J. Caesar you get to learn how to make accurate measurements with a water-clock without a Lithium battery in sight. Noli illegitimi carborundum.
On the upside he’s also the greatest drug reformer in history. Prior to his coming to power there were millions of opium addicts in China. By executing dealers AND those caught using it there were very few opium users left by the time he died.
Yesterday’s Reform Press Conference on the subject of “renewable energy” and the Net Zero scam is worth watching.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxTrWTWBoM4
Thanks. I will try to work my way through it, though so far disappointed that they are using the term “renewable” without qualification as I think it’s misleading. But perhaps they cover that later.
In the surrounding forests around Chernobyl there are no 2 headed wolves or five legged dear or deformed trees, or any deformed life. This also means It is also not a desolate wasteland devoid of life.
Not far above Las Vegas is Area 51, and a couple of valleys to the West is one of the United State’s nuclear test ground. I’ve attached below a Google Earth screen grab of this area. Each crater is from a nuclear test. It is possible for people to visit.
Didn’t Clarkson visit Chernobyl on one of his Top Gear tours? They all seemed to have survived.
Absolutely first class. So much information packed in to this article. It’s like a Roman banquet.
Thank you.
We owe the “linear, no threshold” model to Hermann Muller, who knew it was false as he collected his Nobel Prize from research by his own team members. It has somehow become an axiom in many sciences, even though in fact it has never been demonstrated scientifically because it is, indeed, false.
It’s not only irrational fear of radioactivity that has been fostered by this (in that case, directly by Muller’s advice to the US government). Muller used it first to make the case that, since heavy radiation causes genetic mutations (hence the Incredible Hulk!), Darwinian evolution would easily work by stray radiation causing tiny, selectable, mutations.
That forms the basic assumption of modern evolutionary theory, but is as untrue as the death estimates from nuclear accidents.
But consider also PM2.5 particles in diesel and other air pollution – ALL the supposed deaths are based on linear no threshold.
On the other side, how do you think proponents of fossil fuels in developing countries estimate the deaths caused by cooking over open fires? Do they count respiratory illnesses or bodies? No, more estimates of toxicity based on linear no threshold.
Likewise when the EU and other regulators ban fertilizers or other chemicals… same reasoning.
I remain convinced that one of the central aims of Nut Zero is depopulation.
‘there is no such thing as a safe dose of radiation’.
The curse of safetyism writ large for the purposes of control.
According to Wikipedia:
Oh dear, even living isn’t ‘safe’.
Maybe that’s why the eugenicists want to kill us all.
Excellent article – the only point I would take (minor) issue with is “And that’s before we’ve even considered the further consequences of rising energy prices, such as unemployment, living in a cold home, reduced levels of public services and so on.” Doesn’t the previously quoted £238 per year income/month of life expectancy ratio already explain/account for that?
“Greens get very worried about the risk of nuclear accidents. But have they considered that the economic devastation of Net Zero will cause far more deaths than were ever suffered by Ukraine after Chernobyl, asks Ben Pile.”
And I ask Ben Pile have you considered economic devastation and many deaths is exactly what Greens want?
Ben Pile is a constant voice of reason. I do hope that his lucid, referenced pieces resonate far more widely than merely in the (inevitable) echo chamber of this forum.
A good read, thank you.
Excellent article and a very useful statistic to counter the “you can’t put a value on granny’s life” covid claptrap from the so called conservatives. Arguably you confuse annual and capital spending but it’s a great point nevertheless!
The photo in this article says it all. This part of the world is dead.
I’m all for nuclear, but the article really cannot make its claims without looking at the history of nuclear accidents in Britain (and their coverups), particularly the Windscale event.
I keep writing to the RSPB about the carnage being brought to bird life in name of Green energy and all i get back are “party line” replies, and now they are saying that solar farms will actually enhance birdlife..! So why not glass over the whole country and see how that goes!. Please can folks here write to the RSPB in hope that its not just me saying this to them, as they probably regard me as some sort of annoying crank.