Nigel Biggar minds his language

The word, said his editor, was widely acknowledged to be a racial slur. Nonsense, says Biggar, as “there’s nothing necessarily or intrinsically slurry about it. It’s the verbal equivalent of ‘Frenchman’, ‘Dutchman’ and ‘Irishman’. Indeed, in the sentence to which my editor took exception, ‘Chinamen’ appears nine words after ‘Englishmen’.”

“These are the kinds of people trying to busybody us into abandoning the word ‘slave’ for ‘enslaved person’, on the entirely spurious ground that the former necessarily dehumanises, implying that someone is a slave by nature,” he moans. 

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“That this is nonsense we can easily see by observing that, in English, if we want to refer to the idea that someone is a natural slave, we have to qualify ‘slave’ by putting the word ‘natural’ in front of it. No, ‘slave’ is not intrinsically racist.”

Indeed, Biggar even defends the use of the n-word on the basis that, er, the characters in the films of noted moral lodestar Quentin Tarantino use it.

“According to Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 film Pulp Fiction, and the excellent 2002 TV series The Wire, African-Americans often use the n-word to refer to each other – but in an ironic, not a racist, manner,” he notes. 

“So, I think it plausible that a white person could use it in jest when speaking to a very close black friend, without racist contempt being either expressed or perceived. Tarantino thought so, too.

“I don’t say all this because I’m keen to revive use of the word. Trust me, I’m not. I say it only because people are being unfairly penalised through a combination of malice, thoughtlessness and fear.” So that’s alright, then!

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Might there be a reason some may think that Biggar’s defence of the use of such language may be problematic, though? Such as the fact that his views help provide the intellectual ballast for Restore Britain’s plans for the mass deportations of up to two million people currently living in the UK?

In their policy document Mass Deportations: Legitimacy, Legality, and Logistics, Restore leader Rupert Lowe and ‘academic’ Harrison Pitt (who is neither a university lecturer or professor) set out their plans to fly 1.8 to two million people back to their countries of origin while bringing in sweeping immigration reforms to make it all but impossible for people to come here in the future.

Biggar is among those thanked in the acknowledgements “whether for trusty friendship or helpful conversations” along with such intellectual luminaries as Lucy White, a commentator who has argued that the House of Commons deputy speaker, Nusrat Ghani, should not be allowed in the house because she was born in Pakistan, and Dan Wootton, the hard right commentator considered a bit much for GB News.

The document more than once rather unpleasantly refers to foreign citizens in the UK as “home invaders” – but, presumably, in an ironic, not a racist, manner.