Without a moment’s hesitation, I corrected them. I told them that I was intent upon returning to my own country, for good or for ill. My friends were mildly stunned. I like Americans — so much that I married one. But I know where I belong: here in Britain.

Quite why I feel this way is not easy to explain. Lots of people who were born here and who live here don’t feel that way — or at least, they don’t appear to. And yet it has determined the direction of the whole of my life. In the words of W. H. Auden, I accept the fate I am. I accept it as a vocation to be true to my deeply felt attachment — and now to confess it.

I say ‘confess’, because throughout my life I have been acutely aware that in the educated, middle-class social circles of my own generation, patriotism has been regarded — and is still regarded — as embarrassing. I am aware that, if old and dear friends in Oxford and in London, politically centrist with a leaning to the Left, read this, there will be a sharp intake of breath and a sucking of teeth — a mental stepping back, as if they’d just encountered something diseased.

I have been aware of the un-coolness of patriotism among members of my own class and generation for all of my life, which is why I have suppressed it. I have always felt it, but rarely expressed it — because I assumed that ‘everyone else’ must know better. However, older age, I have found, confers two benefits: first, one finally knows what one thinks; and second, one cares less for what other people think. So, I now say what I have always felt. I confess the truth: I am a British patriot.

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Accordingly, I have become critical of my self-styled ‘progressive’ friends. Not critical, necessarily, of their attachment to Europe, but critical of their habitual silence over the signal blessings that life in this country has conferred on them — and critical, most of all, of their habitual tendency to denigrate it, unnecessarily and irrationally.

Hilary Mantel, the famous author of Wolf Hall, is not a friend of mine, but she does represent lots of people I know. Last September she told the Italian newspaper, La Repubblica, that she’s planning on moving to Ireland, so that she can become European again. Why? Because, she says, Britain is “an artificial and precarious construct” and has shown its “ugly face” in “abusing exhausted refugees even as they scramble to the shore”.

Now, Dame Hilary was born in Derbyshire, blessed with a university education at the LSE and Sheffield, enabled to become a best-selling and prize-winning novelist, and then awarded public recognition in the form, first of a CBE, and then of a DBE. Such a person, I suggest, owes Britain considerable gratitude, and if she is moved to think ill of her country, it should only be under great pressure and with great reluctance. But Dame Hilary’s alienation is partly incoherent, partly untrue. It’s not reluctant; it’s wilful.

She says that Britain is an artificial construct. Of course, it is. Every state is man-made and artificial. No state ever dropped out of heaven. Britain in its current form as the United Kingdom did not exist before 1707. The United States did not exist before 1783, nor Italy before 1871, nor Ireland before 1922. Since states are artificial, not natural, they come and go: Czechoslovakia was founded in 1918 and in 1993 it ceased to exist.

Perhaps, however, by calling Britain artificial, Mantel means that it’s an unnatural yoking together of different peoples — English, Welsh, Scottish, and Irish. But if that’s what she thinks of the UK, what on earth does she think of the EU? The artificiality of a state, or its multinational character, is no reason for leaving it.

What then about the ugly, racist face of contemporary Britain? Well, there’s no denying that racism exists here — as it does in Europe. But according to the 2018 report of the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, racial discrimination occurs less in Britain than in any other EU member state, including Ireland. (Just for the record, I voted Remain in 2016, not out of blind faith in the EU, but out of Burkean caution. Now, however, I want Brexit to succeed with my whole heart.)

So something perverse, something dishonest, is going on here. One reason, I take it, why my ‘progressive’ friends would suck their teeth if they heard my patriotic confession, is that they find it very difficult to distinguish patriotism from nationalism, and nationalism from fascism. So let me make quite clear what kind of patriot I am. I am a Christian patriot.

What does that mean? In part, it means that I recognise that my country, like every other, is indeed an artificial construct. It is man-made. It is not divine and eternal. My country is not God. In that respect, my Christian patriotism is quite distinct from the kind of Romantic nationalism that so scarred the twentieth century, most infamously in Germany. In this kind of nationalism, the nation is a substitute for God and it’s by investing oneself wholly in the life of the nation that the individual achieves a kind of immortality.

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Such an idolatrous nationalism conflates the nation with divinity. Christian patriotism cannot do that. Therefore, the Christian patriot recognises that his loyalty to his country cannot be blind and it has to be critical, holding it to account before the law of God.

My Christian ideal of patriotism was incarnated, as it happens, in the life of a German. His name was Helmuth James von Moltke. A lawyer, he was the great-grand-nephew of Bismarck’s famously victorious general. Although an aristocrat, he became a Christian socialist and an opponent of the Nazi Party. In the mid-Thirties, he came to England to qualify for the English bar in case he should decide to flee here with his family. In the end, however, he chose to return to his country, to suffer alongside his people, and to do what he could to mitigate the evils of the Nazi regime and prepare for a better future.

And yet he did not support the July 1944 plot to kill Hitler. The reason was that he foresaw that the plot, were it to succeed, would have given Germany a conservative regime that, while not Nazi, was not different enough. He believed that, in order to be redeemed, Germany had to suffer an unequivocal, catastrophic defeat, before being reconstructed from the bottom up. Imagine how painful it must have been for a patriot to want that for his country. Christian patriotism is not Romantic nationalism. The Christian patriot must be willing to play prophet to his country, criticising it because he loves it and wants to save its soul.

So, I am a Christian patriot. But I’m also a British patriot. I have always been a British patriot because I am an Anglo-Scot, born in Scotland to a Scottish father and an English mother, and educated on both sides of the border. I do not answer to ‘English’ or ‘Scottish’, for, being both, I am British.

During the run-up to the referendum on Scottish independence in 2014 I lost several nights’ sleep worrying about the possible break-up of the United Kingdom. As a Christian, I had to admit that it was possible that the UK should break up. It could be that its time had come to and end and that, like Czechoslovakia, it should disintegrate into its constituent parts. At the time, I found it difficult to explain why I was viscerally opposed to this conclusion, and what would be lost if the UK were to disintegrate.

However, in the months following the independence referendum, I discovered at least two things about what the UK is good for. First, the UK is good for multi-national trust and solidarity. Germans identify themselves very closely indeed with the European Union. Yet German taxpayers are adamantly opposed to fiscal transfers, whereby their resources are used to subsidise the French, no matter the Greeks. In contrast, the English, and especially Londoners, hardly bat an eyelid at the redistribution of ’their’ taxes to Scotland or Northern Ireland, or indeed other parts of England and Wales.

During the referendum campaign Alex Salmond was glibly misleading on a number of things. One of them was the supposed ease of the process of dis-uniting. In addition to the Queen, the BBC, and the pound, Salmond genially assured us that the ‘social union’ would persist.

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But since English and Scottish interests would be opposed, it’s a practical certainty that negotiations would be fractious. It’s highly probable that the separating Scots would not get all that they wanted, and that, in turn, the English would recover a resentment of the Scots not seen since the 18^th century.

The truth is that we here in the UK have achieved a level of multi-national trust and solidarity of which the EU can still only dream. It’s a precious achievement, which we should not take for granted nor surrender lightly. That’s one thing the UK is good for.

A second thing is the security and promotion of humane and liberal values. There is a strong strain in contemporary Scottish nationalism, as there is in Corbynite socialism, which believes in the equation, “Britain equals Empire equals Evil”. By ‘Empire’ here is meant, not only the imperial past, but the present aspiration to play a global role in bolstering the liberal international order.

According to some nationalists, therefore, for Scotland to separate from England, and so to disintegrate the United Kingdom, would be an act of national repentance and self-purification. It would redeem the English as well as the Scots.

This view is documented in John Lloyd’s excellent book, Should Auld Acquaintance be Forgot, in which he quotes from Robert Musil 1930s novel, A Man without Qualities, which was set during the decline of the Austrian Empire around 1900. Of that empire, Musil wrote “However well founded an order may be, it always rests in part on a voluntary faith in it, a faith that, in fact, always marks the spot where the new growth begins, as in a plant; once this unaccountable and uninsurable faith is used up, the collapse soon follows; epochs and empires crumble no differently from business concerns when they lose their credit”.

I agree with Musil that faith in what we might call a globally responsible Britain is uninsurable: there’s no guarantee that it won’t be lost. But I disagree that it is unaccountable. I think a good account can still be given.

Maybe in the Nineties we thought that History had ended, that the West had won, and that NATO had lost its reason for living. But with an aggressively nationalist Russia rattling its nuclear sabre on the borders of Europe, and with a ruthlessly authoritarian China building military bases in the South China Sea, it seems that humane and liberal values still need defending. So, who will defend them? The United States, we hope. But after that, who? Arguably, the UK, more or less alongside France.

Britain may no longer rule the waves single-handed, but we can still help to rule them. The fact that we’re no longer Number One in the world doesn’t mean that we’re nothing. If the UK were to disintegrate, one of the West’s three serious military powers would be hamstrung.

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So, I think that the United Kingdom is good both for multinational solidarity and for a liberal world order. My British faith still has credit in the bank. That’s why I am a British patriot.

But it is not just Scottish nationalists who disagree. Another major way of corroding faith in global Britain is to denigrate its historical record, the most recent part of which involves empire. This is why the decolonisers focus so relentlessly on slavery, presenting it as Britain’s dirty secret.

There are two main objections to this story. First, as I’ve indicated, there is hard social scientific evidence that contemporary Britain is actually one of the least racist countries in Europe. More recently, this year saw the publication of the so-called ‘Sewell report’ of the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, which concluded that Britain is not systemically racist. The second problem with the decolonisers’ equation of the British Empire with slavery and the ugly racism behind it is that fact that the Empire was the first major power in the history of the world to abolish the slave-trade and slavery in the name of a Christian conviction of the fundamental equality of all human races under God.

John Wesley, Anglican priest and founder of Methodism, prefaced his Thoughts upon Slavery (1774) with a quotation of the tenth verse of the fourth chapter of the Book of Genesis: “And the Lord said—What hast thou done? The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground”. The context is Cain’s murder of his brother Abel and the implication is clear: African and Englishman, slave and master, are brothers, common children of the same God. This was the racially egalitarian view that triumphed in 1807 when the British parliament voted to abolish the trade in slaves throughout the Empire, and again in 1833, when it voted to abolish the institution of slavery altogether.

What is more, from 1807 and throughout the second half of its existence until the Sixties, the Empire was committed to suppressing the trade and the institution across the world — from Brazil, across Africa, to India and Malaysia. In the 1820s and 30s, the Slave Trade Department was the largest unit in the Foreign Office.

At one point in mid-century, the Royal Navy was deploying over 13% of its total manpower in suppressing the trade in slaves between west Africa and the Americas. According to the economic historian, David Eltis, the British spent almost as much suppressing the Atlantic trade in the 47 years from 1816-62 as they earned in profits over the same length of time leading up to 1807. And according to the American scholars of international relations, Chaim Kaufmann and Robert Pape, Britain’s effort to suppress the Atlantic trade in 1807-67 was “the most expensive example [of costly international moral action] recorded in modern history”.

So, no, there is no causal connection that runs through the British Empire from colonial slavery in the past to systemic racism today. Britain today is not systemically racist. And between the slave trade and slavery of the 18^th century and the present lie 150 years of imperial penance in the form of costly abolitionist endeavour to liberate slaves around the globe. The vicious racism of slavers and planters was not essential to the British Empire, and whatever residual racism exists in Britain today is not its fruit.

Despite the heated nature of these debates, some, on both the Right and the Left, think that the ‘Culture Wars’ are a fuss about nothing. I could not disagree more strongly. What’s at stake in the ‘decolonising’ front of the ‘Culture Wars’ is nothing less than faith in Britain.

Keeping that faith is important for the welfare of human beings, not only on these islands, but all over the world. That is why I’m a British patriot.

A version of this article was delivered at a meeting of the National Club in September 2021.  

Two recent reports, however, have strongly challenged the first two axioms, and thereby dislodged the third. March saw the publication of the Sewell report on race and ethnic disparities, which presented hard social scientific data calling into doubt the assumption that unequal outcomes for non-white racial groups are always, or even usually, attributable to racism. It also bluntly contradicted the claim that contemporary Britain is structurally racist. Predictably, its conclusions were greeted with howls of protest, with several commentators simply unable to digest the idea that a racial inequality might not have racism as its cause.

The second report, which appeared last month, verbally endorsed the axiom that British colonialism was essentially racist, while substantively undermining it. This was composed by the Special Committee to Review Historical Inequalities in Commemoration, which had been set up by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. It revealed that up to 54,000 Indians and Africans who died in the service of the British Empire during the First World War had been commemorated “unequally”, and at least a further 116,000 had not been commemorated either by name or at all.

The report itself attributed the unequal treatment ultimately to “imperial ideology”, that is, “the entrenched prejudices, preconceptions and pervasive racism of contemporary imperial attitudes”. The fateful phrase “pervasive racism” was then picked up and broadcast by the press from the Guardian to the Times, and by television stations such as the BBC and Al Jazeera. Asked to comment, historian David Olusoga provocatively summarised what the report had discovered as “apartheid in death”. Casual onlookers could readily be forgiven for walking away confirmed in their conviction that British colonialism was essentially racist, and that the sooner the British “decolonise” themselves, the better.

Yet closer inspection reveals a very different story. The report makes clear that the Imperial War Graves Commission (as it was known then) was committed to the principle of the equal treatment of all the Empire’s fallen troops in the commemoration of their sacrifice, whatever the colour of their skin. Writing in 1926, the Commission’s founder, Fabian Ware, was unequivocal in stating that “all the soldiers of the Empire should be treated alike”. The report also makes clear that this principle was consistently realised in Europe, something which can easily be confirmed by a visit to the Menin Gate, where the names of Indians with no known grave join those of fallen British comrades cascading down the walls; or to the cemetery at Noyelles-sur-Mer, where the burials of members of the Chinese Labour Corps are marked by individual headstones, just like those of British soldiers elsewhere.

Outside Europe, however, this egalitarian policy was sometimes compromised. Many Indian and African casualties were commemorated, not with individually marked graves, but collectively with their names inscribed on memorials or, if missing, in memorial registers. Other, mainly East African and Egyptian personnel, received no commemoration by name and perhaps none at all. This deviation from the norm in Europe, the Commission’s report tells us, was due to “problems largely born out of distance, communication, local conditions, and on-going instability”.

Practical obstacles, however, were not always the reason for unequal treatment. There was also the view that, since most of the African dead came from peoples that were not accustomed to burying the deceased and so would not appreciate marked graves, they should be commemorated on collective memorials. Thus, F. G. Guggisberg, Governor of what is now Ghana said in May 1923 that “the average native of the Gold Coast would not understand or appreciate a headstone”.

The report’s comment on this and similar perceptions is stern: “Sweeping judgements such as these, which chose to ignore the intricacies of faith, culture, and customs in Africa outside Christian and Islamic traditions, played a significant role in shaping the IWGC policies that led to unequal treatment”. Worse, they were not just innocently sweeping, for their failure to do justice to cultural particularities was rooted in an “overarching imperial ideology” that was based on ideals of progress and civilisation that generated hierarchies of race and religion. Here, then, is where “pervasive racism” is supposed to appear.

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Yet, it is notable that the report does not actually say that the views of the officials were empirically mistaken. That was wise, since it seems that the authors had not read any authority on the funerary customs of Africans — no such work appears in the report’s Select Bibliography. In fact, the ethnography of the period indicated that African peoples did often eschew burying their dead in marked graves. As reported in Volume IV of the 1911 edition of James Hastings’ classic Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, “the Masai, whose reason for not burying ordinary persons is said to be that the bodies would poison the soil, bury [only] their medicine-men and rich men”, while “some African tribes, as the Latuka and the Wadjagga, leave the slain warrior unburied”. Another group, “the Barotse … bury in secret, from which we may probably infer that the object is to leave no clue as to the burial place lest it be violated by wizards”.

Whereas the Commission’s report is quick to attribute the colonial officials’ view of African burial customs to imperial disdain for “primitive” peoples, in fact it might well have been born of close attention to them in the form of ethnographic research and direct experience. In their African colonies the British were so thin on the ground that their rule was only sustainable by persuading native peoples to cooperate. But in order to be persuasive, the British had to make themselves well-informed. For sure, African custom varied a lot over a vast continent, but if the quoted colonial officials were in fact mistaken about the burial customs of their war-dead, the report has not shown it.

However, allegedly ignorant claims by colonial officials about African burial customs are not the only evidence of the “pervasive racism” that the report claims to have exposed. Lying beneath them are the theoretical “hierarchies of race and religion that underpinned empire”. It is clear that the officials did regard the cultures of many African peoples as “primitive”. But I doubt they deserve blame for that, since — whether in terms of science, technology or medicine — African cultures were, compared to European ones, obviously underdeveloped in the 1920s. Moreover, when it came to deciding to commemorate the wartime sacrifice of native Africans collectively rather than with individual headstones, the reason was often respect for native custom, rather than disdain for it.

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Further still, it is most remarkable that discrimination was usually religious rather than racial. Thus, the IWGC regarded non-white members of the West India Regiment, the British West Indies Regiment, and South African units as Europeans, because they were presumed to be Christian (or Muslim) monotheists, according them individually named commemoration wherever possible.

Divergence from the norm in Europe because of serious practical difficulties or out of deference to native religious custom was not racist at all. What would have been racist is the differential commemoration of African or Indian dead because they were regarded as less worthy than their British or European counterparts simply on account of their ethnicity or race. Did that occur? The report does not present much unequivocal evidence of this, but it does present some. So, for example, at the Beira Christian cemetery in Portuguese East Africa, the graves of eighteen named native African soldiers were intentionally left unmarked — since the deceased were to be commemorated on the nameless Dar es Salaam African Memorial — while the graves of white South Africans and Europeans now remain.

In sum, then, what the Commission’s report actually shows is this. Operating out of the metropolitan heart of the British Empire, the IWGC was committed to the racially egalitarian policy of commemorating all the fallen soldiers of the Empire alike. This it did consistently in Europe, marking the known graves of individuals while naming those with no known grave on collective memorials, regardless of their race. Outside of Europe this policy was sometimes adjusted out of practical necessity or respect for native religious custom, with good moral justification. In certain cases, it seems to have been unjustifiably compromised by racist preference for Europeans. That was lamentable, but it does not add up to evidence of pervasive — far less, systematic — “apartheid in death”.

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Parts of the report confirms this conclusion. To assert the success of the policy of equal commemoration in Europe, it tells us, “is not to say that it was only there that the IWGC realised this goal or where it worked to make it a reality”. As for those occasions when it was set aside, it comments that “[i]n many ways it is understandable that IWGC operations during and following the First World War were not perfect”.

However, the report never quite manages to bring into clear focus the truth that not all inequalities are unjust — and that it pays no less respect to African or Indian fallen who would have received a headstone in northern France, to deny it to them in Africa or the Middle East, not because of their skin colour, but because of the dangerous remoteness of where they fell and were originally buried or out of deference to what was believed to be native custom. Because of its unresolved confusion on this ethical point, the report insinuates guilt where it should not, as when it writes that the IWGC was “complicit” in decisions that compromised its principles and treated the dead unequally.

When, to this ethical confusion is added the axiom of post-colonialist theory that the British Empire was informed by a single “imperial ideology”, which involved thinking of race and religion in terms of a fixed hierarchy of (white) superiority and (non-white) inferiority, the judgement is reached that the IWGC’s inequalities of commemoration were ultimately attributable to “pervasive racism”. Except that, as we have seen, that is not what the data says. So, this judgement does not follow from the evidence; it precedes it, and in doing so it brings with it its own, 21st-century, prejudice.

The reasons for his downfall have little to do with the truth about the past. The real Rhodes undoubtedly had a morally mixed record. But he was not South Africa’s Hitler, as the Rhodes Must Fall campaign has claimed. Far from being racist, he showed consistent sympathy for individual black Africans throughout his life. Nor did he attempt genocide against the Ndebele during their 1896 uprising — as activists have sometimes claimed — which might be suggested by the fact that the Ndebele tended his grave for decades. And he had nothing whatsoever to do with General Kitchener’s ‘concentration camps’ during the Boer War of 1899-1902, which themselves had nothing morally in common with Auschwitz.

Moreover, Rhodes did support a franchise in the Cape Colony that gave black Africans the vote on the same terms as whites. He gave financial backing to a newspaper, Izwi Labuntu, that was the voice-piece of one of several black African political associations that were the forerunners of the ANC. And he established his famous scholarship scheme, which was explicitly colour-blind and whose first black beneficiary was selected within five years of his death.

But none of this matters to the student activists baying for his downfall, or even to the professional academics who support them. Since I published my view of Rhodes, substantiated by evidence and argument, in the March 2016 issue of Standpoint, no one has offered any critical response at all.

Notwithstanding that, when the Rhodes Must Fall campaign revived four years later in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests, the same old false allegations revived with it, utterly unchastened. Thus, according to the Guardian newspaper, an Oxford doctoral student (and former editor of the Oxford University Commonwealth Law Journal) was still slandering Rhodes as a “genocidaire” just last month.

What matters is not fidelity to the truth, but the exploitation of political advantage. The statue of Rhodes has been demonised into a totem of the colonialist mentality that allegedly feeds the ‘white supremacism’ infecting our institutions. Among these are the universities, where racial prejudice is said to manifest itself in the unequal representation of Black and Minority Ethnic (BAME) people among students and professors, and in the ‘Eurocentric’ bias of what is taught. Pulling Rhodes down is merely the first psychological blow in the war to ‘decolonise’ the curriculum.

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‘Decolonisation’ would involve admitting more BAME students, appointing more BAME professors, and increasing the quotient of BAME authors on reading lists. It would also involve correcting the national amnesia over the evils of colonialism, by promoting teaching about the history of British slavery, the historic root of the racism that reigns among us today.

Little of this makes sense, either empirically or historically. Empirically, the claim that the admission of students is racially biased doesn’t survive contact with reality. On the latest figures, the BAME population of people aged 19-26 in England and Wales is 18.3%, but the non-white undergraduate student intake in UK universities is 26.2%, and even at stereotypically elitist and hide-bound Oxford it is 22.1 per cent.

Moreover, 9.7% of BAME academic staff are professors, only 1.4 percentage points lower than their white peers. Within BAME groups, the professorial proportion of black staff is just under five per cent, but for their Chinese colleagues it is over 16% — much higher than for whites. These figures simply do not support the claim of structural racial bias in British universities.

As for curricula and reading lists, of course it’s important to grow a graduate citizenry that is aware of the riches of non-European cultures and of how the history of Britain is intertwined with the history of the globe. But that’s long been happening, and if suitable university applicants want to devote the entirety of their student careers to African, South Asian or Chinese studies, no one is stopping them.

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But does racial justice truly require proportionate representation of non-whites on all reading lists, regardless of the subject? Must teachers really make the skin colour and ethnic provenance of authors a criterion for recommending them to students? For sure, if I were teaching a topic in African history, Indian economics or Chinese literature, it would be odd — and maybe even suspect — if the list of authors I assigned my students was exclusively populated by ethnic Anglo-Saxons.

But if I’m teaching Cicero, or late medieval Italian literature, or the ethics of war, or molecular biology, or linear algebra, do I really have to spend my time ferreting out BAME authors who have written on these things? And must I assign them, regardless of whether I think that what they say is worth listening to, and, since all reading lists are finite, necessarily displacing others who have better things to say? Besides, what would ‘proportionate’ representation mean here? Proportionate in relation to what? The non-white portion of the UK population, or of the world, or of authors on the relevant topic? The more one thinks about it, the less thinking it bears.

What is more, a ‘Eurocentric’ bias in British education is surely justified. Britain is not Anywhere. It is located in north-west Europe, has a particular history, and has developed particular institutions and traditions. It’s vitally important, therefore, that school education, and even undergraduate studies, should focus on helping budding citizens understand the cultural and political environment for which they are about to become directly responsible — including the contemporary fact of ethnic diversity and its history.

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But whether they also need to have their noses rubbed in the facts of slavery, I doubt. It’s difficult to believe that many Britons know nothing about it or that many approve of it. But if they are going to learn more about the story of British involvement, they need to hear the whole story, not just the politically useful part. In addition to the appalling 200 years of transporting slaves to the West Indies and the American colonies, they need to hear about the dogged, 50-year campaign to abolish the trade and the institution within the British Empire two centuries ago.

And they also need to hear that British ‘colonialism’ then spent over a century in deploying the Royal Navy to stop slave-ships crossing the Atlantic and Indian oceans, and in suppressing the Arab slave-trade across Africa. Maybe they’d even learn that the Empire supported action against Arab slavers in Nyasaland in the 1880s through the British South Africa Company. And guess who ran the BSAC? Cecil Rhodes.

At the beginning of the new year, the young Thought Police who guard our own egalitarian Cultural Revolution targeted their latest victim. John Finnis is an eminent legal philosopher, whose trademark is precise, relentlessly logical reasoning, and who is best known for pioneering a novel and sophisticated theory of natural law. He is also a conservative Roman Catholic, whose moral arguments tend to support the official teaching of his church. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that he holds unfashionably critical views about homosexual practice.

In the second week of January, two postgraduate students of law at Oxford University, Alex Benn and Daniel Taylor, launched a petition to have Finnis banned from teaching. Their case against him is his long record of “extremely discriminatory views against many groups of disadvantaged people”. He is known, they say, for being “particularly homophobic and transphobic”, and his “hateful statements” include the assertion that “being gay is ‘evil’”. By allowing Finnis to teach, they claim, Oxford University permits the promotion of hatred towards LGBTQ+ students.

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Shortly after the petition’s launch, Messrs Benn and Taylor asserted in a Guardian article that, through his stated views, Finnis “dehumanises” disadvantaged groups and implies that LGBTQ+ individuals are “morally bad or inferior”. A few days later, the Guardian itself weighed in with an editorial that declared that “by reason of his religious commitments, [Finnis’s] language, and indeed his beliefs, are profoundly homophobic… [His] repugnant views … violate our moral sensibilities.” While it conceded, not very generously, that “freedom of religion implies the freedom to be wrong, and to argue in absurd and morally disgusting ways”, it nevertheless called upon Oxford’s law faculty to “reconsider his invitations to its seminars” (sic). By 22 January, Benn and Taylor’s petition had attracted 626 signatures.

Let me make clear, before I go any further, that I disagree with John Finnis about the immorality of gay sex. I am more appreciative than the Guardian of the deeper reasons for his position, not being content to dismiss it, incuriously, as “weird” and “absurd”. Many – perhaps most – societies throughout history have taken against homosexual practice, as have luminaries such as Plato and Kant. To dismiss all these as ‘homophobic’ is not only intellectually lazy, but, worse, it doesn’t explain very much.

If one takes the trouble to scrutinise the ancient Hebrew or Christian traditions, for example, it becomes clear that the driving concern is the survival of human society through the generation of children. In times and places where human societies are vulnerable to sudden destruction by famine, disease, and war – that is, in every part of the globe throughout most of human history – a strong emphasis on the vital social duty of reproduction isn’t hard to understand. And so long as there is reason to fear that homosexual practice, once allowed, might become so popular as to predominate, a strong social bias against it is really not absurd.

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Now, however, in our Western societies, which have enjoyed the privileges of peace, food security, modern medicine, and the development of artificial reproduction for several generations, and which have discovered that tolerating gay sex doesn’t in fact result in a societal pandemic, the arguments against homosexual practice just don’t stack up.

So I don’t agree with Finnis. But nor do I agree with Benn, Taylor, and the Guardian that he should be banned from the classroom. To start with, there is an obvious and entirely innocent sense in which Finnis’s view of homosexual practice is discriminatory: he thinks it immoral. He thinks it “evil”, just as Benn and Taylor and the Guardian think his view is morally “repugnant”. By definition, a judgement discriminates, and a moral judgement discriminates between right and wrong. Unless we’re going to banish the public expression of moral judgements, we have to recognise that at least one kind of discrimination is perfectly legitimate.

What the law rightly forbids, is the unequal treatment of people – that is, discrimination against them – on the ground of such things as race, religion, gender, and sexual orientation. This is because those features are morally indifferent: the mere fact of being, say, ethnically African, Muslim, female, or homosexually oriented does not make anybody guilty of moral wrong-doing. Insofar as ‘being gay’ means simply ‘being a homosexually oriented person’, someone as characteristically precise as Finnis would never have called that ‘evil’. One cannot usually be held responsible for the orientation of one’s sexual desire; one can only be held responsible for the practical expression one chooses to give it. Therefore, to say that engaging in homosexual acts is morally wrong is not to say that being a gay person is evil.

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I imagine that Finnis’s critics would protest that sexual expression is essential to gay identity, and, since gay identity is essential to the humanity of gay people, any criticism of gay practice is dehumanising. But this isn’t true. Sexual expression is a choice, for which the chooser is responsible; and all responsible choices are susceptible of moral assessment and criticism. Powerful though sexual desire is, and painful though it may be to control it, it doesn’t have to find expression in sexual relations. Some people choose to be celibate; others, lacking alternatives, must be.

Identity is also a choice. We all inherit identities, but we’re not fated to adhere to them: I was born British, but, married to an American, I could have chosen to identify myself with the US. I deliberately opted not to. What’s more, we usually inherit or have the opportunity to adopt several identities, and it’s not determined which ones we’ll choose to make a song and dance about. Identities are not fates; they involve choices, for which we are morally accountable.

So to criticise homosexual practice, or the choice to identify oneself with it, is not to assault the very humanity of homosexually oriented people, claiming that they should be treated like animals or worse. By the same token, nor is it to express hatred against practising homosexuals. There is a common and insidious tendency on the part of our Revolutionary Guards to dismiss any criticism of their assumptions as ‘phobic’ – as Zionists too often rubbish criticisms of the Israeli government as ‘anti-Semitic’.

Last August, after I’d published an article in the Times entitled Obsession with gender identity goes too far, in which I expressed doubts about the current ideology of transgenderism, I was immediately labelled ‘transphobic’. However, as I had explained, in order to fear or hate something, I’d first have to have some idea of what it is I’m fearing or hating; and my problem with claims to transgender identity is that I find myself unable to understand their content. After all, what does it mean to be a ‘man’ or a ‘woman’, now that feminists have rightly taught us to jettison sexist stereotypes? Before I am able to be phobic, I first need to get past being baffled.

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So bafflement explains my delinquency far better than phobia. In Finnis’s case, charity obliges that, before we attribute his (faulty) reasoning to irrational hatred, we first consider kinder and equally plausible alternatives. One obvious candidate is his absolute faith in the veracity of the moral teaching of the Roman Catholic Church – which shouldn’t be so very strange to ardent True Believers in Revolutionary Dogma. A sense of irony, self-awareness, and charity, however, don’t feature prominently in the conduct of the young thought-police, who are far too busy venting aggressive, illiberal self-righteousness.

Disturbingly, this illiberality is not confined to students. In December 2017 I became the target of three online denunciations, one by students, but two others by several hundred academics worldwide. My crime? That I had argued in an article in the Times that Britons have reasons for pride, as well as shame, in the British Empire; and that I’d launched a collaborative research project, “Ethics and Empire”, which is designed to assess moral critiques of empire from ancient China to the modern period.

My consistent experience of these professional academics is that they do not trouble themselves to understand what they are criticising, nor to pay attention to any replies that they receive. Last autumn, a Kings College London organiser of one of the denunciations, speaking at a London think-tank, cavalierly attributed to me a stupid view that I have never held and made plain that he hadn’t bothered to read any of the responses that I’d published almost 12 months previously.

This was nothing compared with the abuse earlier sprayed out by the Cambridge academic, who tweeted that I was ‘racist’, a ‘white supremacist’, the ‘Rev Bigot’, and anything that came out of my mouth was ‘vomit’. When I complained about her behaviour to the heads of her college and faculty – not least, that if she treated me in that fashion, how on earth would she treat dissident students? – they responded that her conduct was legal and that therefore they would do nothing about it. Shortly afterwards two other academics published an article positively condoning her abuse in the Times Higher Education Supplement.

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The problem is not primarily intellectual; it’s moral. It seems that many professional academics have not been taught to develop the basic virtues of emotional self-restraint, justice, charity, and humility. They feel no need to hold in check their feelings of irritation, indignation, hatred – and fear. They recognise no obligation to be scrupulously fair to their opponents. They don’t understand that the most cogent critique is one that charitably construes the opposing case in the strongest possible terms, and only then sets about dismantling it.

And most of all, they seem to lack any sense that they might be mistaken, or that they might have something to learn. In my theological moments, I have wondered whether we are now witnessing the fruits of a post-Christian culture that remembers everything about social justice, but nothing at all about the universal spread of human sin. If that’s so, then we’re going to have to get used to a whole lot more unhearing, unintelligent, unforgiving, ugly self-righteousness.

So there’s the deeper problem. What can be done about it? The first, basic step is to call it out and expose it. Beyond that, university leaders should be pressed to start taking some responsibility for it. They will take some persuading, however, because for generations now, they have complacently behaved as if moral formation and the maintenance of civil norms are either unnecessary (because everyone knows, don’t they, what decent behaviour is?) or someone else’s responsibility (surely, parents or schools?).

Now, however, the chickens of neglect are coming home to roost. Some professional academics are spitting out vile abuse at politically incorrect colleagues, while others condone it. Other academics and postgraduates are organising online denunciations designed to shut down heretical projects or ban heretical colleagues from the classroom.

Meanwhile, applicants, students, and untenured junior scholars are watching and observe the passivity of college and faculty heads and the prevailing silence of their classroom colleagues. So, mindful of their careers, they resolve to censor themselves or at least keep their mouths prudently shut. The result is that, notwithstanding Vice-Chancellors’ reassuring affirmations of freedom of speech from on high, a climate of illiberality and mistrust is quietly spreading down below.