A SCOTTISH Tory peer has spoken out in defence of using the N-word.
Nigel Biggar, a priest and theology academic who was given a seat in the House of Lords by Tory leader Kemi Badenoch in 2025, argued in a blogpost that it is “stupidly unjust” for people to be punished for using the N-word if they did not mean it in a racist way.
On Tuesday, The Spectator – the right-wing magazine run by former Tory minister Michael Gove – republished Biggar’s blogpost, but used a version that had been edited to remove his repeated use of the N-word.
Biggar, who as a peer is termed “Lord Biggar of Castle Douglas”, had originally said: “You may, in certain circumstances, utter the word 'n*****' innocently [asterisks added].”
After taking issue with an editor preventing him using the word "Chinamen", he went on: “Frankly, my contextual view of verbal meaning extends even to the ‘n’ word taboo.
“Anticipating the dishonest twisting of what I am about to say, let me state clearly and loudly, so that no one in good faith can doubt it, that I object thoroughly to the racist use of the word ‘n*****’ to disparage people with non-white skins. That is always and everywhere morally wrong.
“Nonetheless, I was appalled years ago, when I read of a woman high up in some British organisation – a nursing one, I think – being sacked just for referring explicitly to the original title of Agatha Christie’s 1939 detective novel, Ten Little N******. And I have read of similar cases more recently. That people should be so punished is stupidly unjust.”
Biggar said that he had learned that the N-word could be used “in an ironic, not a racist, manner” from watching Pulp Fiction and The Wire, adding: “Therefore, I find it plausible that a white person might even use it in jest when speaking to a very close black friend, without racist contempt being either expressed or perceived.”
He further said that while he does not wish to “revive the use of the word” and “myself have had cause to use it on only two occasions”, he is concerned “that people are being unjustly and gravely penalised through a combination of malice, thoughtlessness, and fear”.
“Some who belong to historically ‘victimised’ groups are eager to exploit the power that membership confers,” Biggar went on. “They’re on the lookout for opportunities to wield that power unscrupulously, by working themselves up into a lather of being ‘offended’ and daring others to call them out on it.”
Biggar has previously faced criticism after pivoting away from his background in theology to instead focus on British colonialism, defending it as a project and denying that British Empire had committed genocide.
Biggar was on the advisory board of pro-Union think tank These Islands in 2017, but is now not listed on its website. In the same year, he was slammed for an article in which he argued that Britain needs to feel less guilty about its colonial past.
He wrote: “If we believe what strident anti-colonialists tell us – namely, that our imperial past was one long, unbroken litany of oppression, exploitation and self-deception – then our guilt will make us vulnerable to wilful manipulation, and it will confirm us in the belief that the best way we can serve the world is by leaving it well alone.”
Biggar’s article was in defence of a controversial piece written by American professor Bruce Gilley entitled “The Case for Colonialism”. In response to Biggar’s remarks, 180 Oxford scholars signed a letter condemning his views and dubbing him a “colonial apologist”.
Commenting on Biggar’s 2023 book Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning, colonialism expert and author Professor Alan Lester said that it was more “political contestation rather than scholarly debate”.
Lester said that Biggar’s conclusion that the British Empire had not committed genocide in Tasmania was not supported even by the scholars he cited, writing: “[Australian genocide scholar] Dirk Moses tells me that the claim of Biggar’s that he is in agreement with his work is ‘totally disingenuous’. Moses arranged the publication of Raphael Lemkin’s unpublished essay on genocide in Tasmania precisely to show how the concept applied there.”
Lemkin was the Polish lawyer who coined the term genocide.
Lester concluded that Biggar had used his book to tell a “highly selective story purely in the interests of a contemporary political project”.
In a Guardian review of the Tory peer’s book, writer Kenan Malik said that Biggar’s approach “is wherever possible to find good motives behind every colonial act – he portrays racial segregation, for example, as the product not of racism but of the desire ‘to protect native peoples from harmful encounters with settlers’”.
The Tory Party has been approached for comment.
