Lord Biggar: The Left use ‘fascist' to silence people they don't like

Telegraph

04-04-2025

The Left is using the term 'fascist' to label anyone it wants to silence, according to an academic 'cancelled' for his views on colonialism.
Lord Biggar told an audience at the Oxford Literary Festival that the word had been co-opted to shut down freedom of speech.
The Oxford University emeritus professor made headlines in 2018 when fellow historians opposed his project exploring the ethics of the British Empire, after he suggested that Britain should take pride in some aspects of its colonial past.
He discussed the backlash in a debate at the festival on whether fascism was on the rise.
'In my experience of the word, it is used to label something or someone so that, from now on, we don't have to listen to them. 'Biggar's a fascist therefore don't listen to him.' It's not a word that is used to illuminate, it's used to shut the ears. The same would go, often-times, for 'racist' or 'white supremacist' or whatever it is.
'It's not helpful. It doesn't advance our understanding at all,' said Lord Biggar, who is chairman of the Free Speech Union and sits as a Conservative peer in the House of Lords.
'Some people think I am a fascist. Why would they think that? Well, because I wrote a book about British colonialism that reckons the British Empire chalked up some signal achievements as well as presiding over some things we should lament. I also don't think empire is necessarily an illegitimate form of rule; most people lived under empires.
'And, what's more, I do think it is not racist to say that sometimes one culture is superior to another in certain respects, so a culture that has figured out how to build ocean-going ships is superior in terms of maritime technology to one that has only developed canoes to go around coastal waters.
'As long as it's not discriminatory, it is perfectly fair to say that at a certain time this culture is more advanced than another in a certain respect. So it may be for those reasons that some people for the last eight years have regarded me as being a fascist or a white supremacist.'
Lord Biggar also said it was important that 'we should not think of fascism as a monopoly of the Right'.
He said: 'In my own limited experience of the culture wars, as I have experienced aggression and abuse online it has come from the cultural Left. Of course people online are much nastier and more disinhibited than they are in real life, I get that, but I have been struck by the lack of scruple from some people on the Left.'
'Fascist' label applied to Trump supporters
He was joined in the debate by Prof Justin Schlosberg, professor of media and communications at the University of Westminster and a fellow at Harvard.
Discussing the US, Prof Schlosberg said there was a 'knee-jerk labelling' of Donald Trump and his supporters.
'A lot of Trump's support base, like in this country, encompasses at the margins people who I really would consider fascists or at least sympathetic to certain fascist ideas, but in its mainstream are actually just people with conservative values.
'But what the liberal establishment does is, it seeks to label all of this mass – 70 million voters in America, 20 million here – as far-Right and attendant words like 'fascist',' he said.
In a separate talk at the festival, Alexander McCall Smith, the bestselling author, poked fun at the absurdities of trigger warnings and 'the extent to which universities are pandering to an exaggerated sense of vulnerability on the part of students'.
The author, whose prolific output includes the No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency novels, said: 'Students say they have a right not to feel uncomfortable. That, to my mind, is really the opposite of what education really is.
'Education requires that you be open to ideas that you disagree with and may make you feel uncomfortable. You can't say you have a right to not be exposed to them. This is not in the spirit of enquiry.'