Just days after showing that Eton's history department is probably not as good as you might think it is by saying that Britain was "the junior partner" to the US in 1940, despite the fact that the US hadn't even entered the war in 1940 and Britain was saving the world by taking on the Germans on its own, British Prime Minister David Cameron then visits India and says that Britain must show "humility" to that nation.
Not only is Cameron entirely wrong in saying that but, if anything, it should be India showing Britain humility. After all, look what Britain has given to, and done for, India.
Not only did the British introduce the railways, democracy, English common law and the English language (the greatest asset for any country in today’s globalised marketplace) to India, that country would not even exist as a unified state today were it not for British rule. It was the British who outlawed slavery and infanticide in India, and the horrible practice of women being burned on their dead husbands' funeral pyres.
Apart from curry, it's very difficult to think of anything worthwile that India has given Britain.
And the British Empire may have had cruel and racist rulers, but compared to other empires such as the Roman, the Persian, the Dutch, the Spanish and the French, Britain’s empire stands out as a beacon of tolerance, decency and the rule of law.
So instead of Cameron going to India and meekly stating that Britain should show India some "humility" he should have gone there and told the Indians how proud he is of Britain's legacy in India and listed some of the gifts that Great Britain, the greatest civilisation this planet has ever known, gave to India.
It should be India showing Britain humility. And not just India - countries such as the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand would not exist were it not for the British Empire.
Stop saying sorry for our history: For too long our leaders have been crippled by a post-imperial cringe
By Dominic Sandbrook
31st July 2010
Daily Mail
Next year marks the hundredth anniversary of one of the most extraordinary events in our history, the Delhi Durbar of 1911.
In the Indian capital’s vast Coronation Park, more than half a million people watched as every prince, nobleman and senior official in the subcontinent paid their respects to their new King-Emperor.
At that moment, resplendent in his coronation robes and wearing the diamond-studded, 34-ounce Imperial Crown of India, George V could never have imagined that one day a British prime minister would be talking of his ‘humility’ — not his pride — in Britain’s relationship with India.
Days of glory: The Viceroy of India, Lord Linlithgow, at the Golden Jubilee celebrations of the Maharaja
The King expected his chief ministers to stand up for their country, not to apologise for it.
Yet when David Cameron travelled from Istanbul to India this week, he came perilously close to resembling the Uriah Heep of international diplomacy, forever telling his hosts how very humble he was.
Surrounded by the relics of the greatest empire-builders in history, from the Romans and Byzantines to the Ottomans and the Mughals, he seemed oddly ill at ease, as though embarrassed by the thought that Britain once eclipsed them all.
But coming so soon after his description of our country as a mere ‘junior partner’ to the Americans — as well as his apparent ignorance that in 1940 we fought alone while they sat on their hands — you wonder whether Mr Cameron’s exaggerated humility is part of a deeper and disturbing pattern.
He did, after all, once call himself the ‘heir to Blair’ — a prime minister who never seemed happier than when grovelling in apology for Britain’s magnificent history.
What a contrast it is with another Conservative prime minister, who once remarked that he had ‘not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British empire’.
King George V was also the Emperor of India
The date was 1942, the speaker — it should hardly need saying — was the great Winston Churchill.
‘I am proud,’ Churchill said, ‘to be a member of that vast Commonwealth and society of nations and communities gathered in and around the ancient British monarchy, without which the good cause might well have perished from the face of the earth.
‘Here we are, and here we stand, a veritable rock of salvation in this drifting world.’
Those words still have the power to evoke tears of pride. Yet it is no easier to imagine Mr Cameron saying them than it is to imagine him telling Brussels to clean up its corruption or telling the United States Senate where to stick its demagogic criticisms of BP.
Humble: David Cameron with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in New Delhi
The truth is that in our political and media class, apologising for our history has become an almost instinctive reflex.
Ever since the Sixties, politicians have found it easier to run down our country, and to criticise the largest and most prosperous empire the world has ever known, than to stand up for Britain. By and large, of course, historical apologies are meaningless.
Somehow it says it all that Tony Blair found it so easy to apologise for the Irish potato famine, an event that took place in the 1840s, but has never quite got round to apologising for sending British troops to war on an entirely false pretext.
But while there is nothing wrong with showing a little humility, apologising for our history is the last thing a prime minister should be doing — especially a Conservative one.
Yes, our past leaders made their fair share of mistakes. And yes, like every nation on the planet, we have more than a few unsightly skeletons rattling around our cupboard.
But Mr Cameron’s visit to India, of all places, should have reminded him that we have no cause for self-abasement.
When Left-wing intellectuals indulge their penchant for self-flagellation, they blind themselves to the realities of past and present.
Modern-day India, after all, is a success story built on sturdy Anglo-Saxon foundations. Now the world’s second-fastest-growing economy, it would probably not even exist as a unified state were it not for the legacy of British rule.
It was the British, let us not forget, who outlawed Indian slavery, infanticide and the horrendous practice of suttee, whereby widows were burned to death on their husband’s funeral pyre.
It was the British, too, who introduced to India the rule of the common law, parliamentary democracy and, perhaps above all, the English language — the greatest asset for any country in today’s globalised marketplace.
Of course, British rule had blunders, cruelties and prejudices. And yet, by comparison with the other great empires, from the Romans and the Persians to the French, the Dutch and the Spanish, Britain’s empire stands out as a beacon of tolerance, decency and the rule of law.
Defiant: Former Prime Minister Winston Churchill was proud of Britain's history
There is no episode in British history, for example, that looks anything like the appalling exploitation of the Belgian Congo, in which ten million Africans died to satisfy King Leopold II’s lust for rubber profits.
Nor did Britain countenance anything like the dreadful tortures committed in French Algeria — a genuinely shameful episode which the French still refuse to confront. It is no accident that in India, a mere 40,000 British officials governed a vast country of more than 200 million people.
The Raj survived not at the point of a bayonet, but thanks to the enthusiastic co-operation of thousands of ordinary Indians, who relished the order that their colonial partners had brought to a subcontinent torn apart by religious and ethnic conflict.
And it is no accident, either, that uniquely among the great world empires, British rule carried within it the seeds of its own dissolution. For quite apart from the roads and railways, the bridges and ports and institutions of law and order, Britain bequeathed a much more precious legacy to its colonies: the idea of liberty.
We often forget, for instance, that Gandhi was the beneficiary of British tolerance and a British education, studying law at University College London and training for the Bar in the imperial capital.
From Ghana to Malaysia, from Jamaica to Sri Lanka, the ideas that fuelled the independence movements were born and nurtured by the tradition of British liberty, going back to Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights.
And while the critics are so quick to remind us how much Bristol and Liverpool profited from the slave trade, they are suspiciously slow to rejoice in the fact that more than any other people on earth, it was the British who brought that age-old exploitation of human beings to an end.
It was, after all, British Quakers who were the first to argue for slavery’s abolition in the 1780s. It was a great British politician, the Tory MP William Wilberforce, who secured the passage of the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833. And it was the Royal Navy, proudly flying our country’s banner, that led the way in suppressing the trade, capturing more than 500 slave ships by 1866.
All of this, incidentally, unfolded while the Americans were not only slaughtering the Indian tribes on their Western frontier, but shipping millions of slaves to work on their cotton plantations — facts that our supposed ‘senior partners’ choose to forget when they are lecturing the world about their allegedly historic commitments to freedom and equality.
On top of all that, there has never been a case in history of an empire dissolving so swiftly, smoothly and — yes — peacefully as the British Empire did in the Fifties and Sixties.
True, there was bloodshed in Kenya, Cyprus, Malaya and elsewhere, with British forces often pitted against Communist insurgents; and as in any war, there were some dark moments.
It speaks volumes about the British imperial enterprise that there was no real equivalent of the U.S. slaughter in Vietnam, the atrocities in French Algeria, the murderous anarchy of the Belgian Congo or the protracted guerrilla fighting in Portuguese Angola and Mozambique.
But it was no accident that when Union Jacks were lowered in Asia and Africa, there was a feeling of friendship and goodwill.
The tragedy, though, is that instead of taking pride in their achievements, British politicians of the day recoiled from the simple patriotism that burned within their predecessors.
Instead of walking tall in the world, they seemed crippled by a pernicious post-imperial cringe.
In this context, David Cameron’s remark about being Washington’s ‘junior partner’ is depressingly characteristic of this cringe.
For since 1945, too many British statesmen have been content to trot meekly behind the incumbent of the Oval Office or to kowtow to the faceless bureaucrats of the European Union.
Of course, there have been honourable exceptions: Ernest Bevin, the pugnacious foreign secretary who insisted that instead of relying on an American nuclear deterrent, Britain had to have its own bomb ‘with a bloody Union Jack on top of it; or Margaret Thatcher, who stood up for the freedom of the Falkland Islands and made sure that Ronald Reagan treated her as an equal, not a poodle.
Yet at a time when children are no longer taught to love their national story, when the majority of schoolchildren think Churchill is a dog from an insurance advert and when just one in ten students can name a single Victorian prime minister, somehow it is no surprise that our latest prime minister is so quick to slip on the familiar collar and leash.
The great irony — tragedy, even — of all this is that Britain is still a country to be hugely proud of. Yes, our nation’s finances are in a dreadful mess and, yes, we still struggle not only with poverty and ignorance, but with frighteningly high levels of unemployment, crime and family breakdown.
Yet Mr Cameron should have gone to India not in sackcloth and ashes, but glowing with pride that the country we have inherited from our ancestors is a sanctuary of decency and dynamism in an unstable and unhappy world.
For all our financial woes, after all, we remain the world’s sixth-biggest economy and one of its greatest trading nations. Although we tell ourselves that we no longer make anything, we are in fact the world’s tenth-biggest exporter.
Our mongrel language has become the planet’s lingua franca; our scientists and engineers, such as Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, have a worldclass reputation.
Our national sport has become the world’s favourite game; even our popular culture, from James Bond to J.K. Rowling, delights billions from Boston to Beijing.
We have no need to apologise for giving the world Shakespeare and Dickens, Newton and Darwin. Nor should we apologise for giving the world the idea of liberty, the rule of law, the benefits of order, the wonders of science, the joys of free speech and free trade.
We have spent too long cringing and fawning. We are nobody’s junior partner. And Mr Cameron could do worse than borrow from the greatest prime minister our country has ever produced.
‘Here we are,’ Churchill said, ‘and here we stand.’ They are words that echo through the decades and they remain just as resonant today as they were 70 years ago — when Britain stood alone and saved the world.
READERS' COMMENTS
Are you seriously kidding me? You tell David Cameron to learn some history and yet know none of it yourself? The British Empire RUINED India's economy while ruling. Just google the 'Drain of Wealth'. Just once. Infact, It was the other way around. You GAINED money from ruling India, and when the profits began to fall, you left the country.
I agree that David Cameron should have dealt with America more severly, but this is ridiculous.
- Souradeep, India
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The respondent Souradeep is obviously upset but let me inform him that I lived for the first 11 years of my life with rationing and in a house with no electricity and that was in the centre of the of the 2nd biggest city of the empire. Just so that he knows not everyone had it good in the UK while we helped to develop the rest of the world with the white slave labour from our own country.
- gwilliam, Glasgow, Scotland, UK
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The writer has spent no time with people who have suffered under the British empire; or he has and he has chosen to ignore their experiences. Just one instance: job advertisements in Northern Ireland saying that Irish Catholics need not apply. If that was going on in a place so geographically close to Britain, what was going on in other places where there was British rule ?
The writer obviously didn't have to live in a place where he was treated like a third-class citizen by the British.
- Eamon McCrisken, an Irishman in Madrid,Spain,
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The Republic of Ireland is governed by the British method - democracy. There are no tribal areas left, no chieftains who rule by the sword. If you want to bring up all that was done badly in your native country, fine. This article was not dealing in detail but in general.
Sure, you wanted your independence, but waited until Great Britain was up to it's neck in the trench warfare of WW1 to attack - the Irish Rising of 1916. When finally given independence in 1922, what happened? Civil war. You could not agree, nor ague politically so fought it out with the bullet, not the word.
- Feddup, UK
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For all those reconstructed historians who cringe at the memory of Britain's Empire, should realise but for falling under the benign influence of the British, these countries would have become the colonial slaves of Belgium, France, Spain, Portugal, and latterly Germany and even Italy and the USA.
As Churchill remarked about democracy as a form of government, we have to accept that being under British rule was the worst form of colonialism, apart from all the rest.
- Zorro, UK,
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Great article. My family left Great Britain in the 1830s for what is now Canada., Our British roots have made Canada into the stable, prosperous democracy that it is today. I am proud to be a part of Her Majesty's Commonwealth. However, there seems to be no end to our government apologizing to this group and that group for past injustices. I am not denying that there have been injustices, but these apologies just go on and on ad nauseum. Also, in regards to the statement 'in 1940 Britain stood alone' - may I point out that, until the Soviet Union entered WWII in June 1941, Canada was Great Britiain's largest ally. We declared war Sept 10, 1939, exactly one week after Great Britain did. We also participated in WWI right from August 1914 to Nov 11, 1918.
- Leslie, Kincardine, Canada
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With apologies to Monty Python, and our new [post Thatcher]establishment, the 'socio-liberal elite' -
'What did the British Empire ever do for us?' - the world might say
Not much really, apart from:-
Workable and relatively 'fair' Democracy by polling
The foundation of a uniform Judiciary and Legal System
The basis of national and local Governance Structures
Public Institutions - eg Libraries
Pubs
Industrial Steam Engines
Countless offspins and inventions encompasing the Industrial Revolution
'Mass manufacturing' and production of 'added value products' on 'foreign' soil
Mass marketing and trade expansion ACROSS countries of Empire and beyond
Building Railways
Constructing effective Road Infrastructure
Telegraphic communications - ie the first INTERNATIONAL NETWORKING.
Telephone networks - the first trans continental IMMEDIATE COMMUNICATION
The first national and global, expeditious postal service
Daily, weekly and monthly newspapers and periodicals
Broadcasting
- dave, cumbria
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I am American-family here since 1635.
That being said: From a world view-not just western -Britain is the beacon to our human rights, science development, exploration and, save for a few Italians, art, literature and philosophy. History of Britain touches the world.
In the development of "Humanity", Britain is the constant flame. Re colonial aftermath's, other European powers left Africa/India/Asia taking everything down to the window shades with them. Britain, thanks to Lord Montbatten, left India as a complete nation with an infrastructure stronger than most post WW2 European nations-rail system, civil management and a common language and ideal.
Battle of Britain: idiot Yanks say, "We saved your ass". BS. Your RAF pilots-with 6 week life expectancy-scrambled for every battle and, saved the world.
I could go on and on and on but teach British history, bad and good-but the good far out balances the bad. And I would rather have the SAS than US Navy Seals set to save my ass!
- Laurie, NJ, USA
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I can't pretend to be a historian. but I have travelled and have learnt. India to this day owes most of its modern infrastructure and bureaucratic rule to Britain. Without the expertise wtth which Britain at first ruled and later from Lord Mountbatten helped maintain the contriols that today control and run this vast country and community, India might still be ten thousand villages and run by bribery and corruption, which our politicians of today could help them with.
The poor of the country are still desperately in need of our charity, as the modern world of India passes the old India by, in its haste to become as greedy as the Western world of politics and business people we are cursed with today. Thus making the take over of our former industrial leadership of the world a simple matter of almost give away proportions due to Greed.
Luckily both China and India have also caught the greed aspect and so in probably not too many years, when the greedy have met their makers the worl
- mick blair, thailand
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As someone who marched at Churchill's funeral; I say it needs to become the fashion to be PROUD of our history and shout it from the rooftops. I object most strongly to politicians apologising for Britain's contribution to the world.
The British approach will be needed again to save the world from itself.
I thought Eton gave an education; WW2 was 1939 to 1945 Mr Cameron
Only 1941 to 1945 if you were American and the beneficiary of lend lease.
Britain saved the world and India from slavery.
- John Heppell, Aldershot
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People are soon to for get what was built by the British people.
All over the world.
If it was not for the British people and the Commonwealth peoples,
I believe, WE all would be under the Jack boot of Hitlers heirs.
We only have to look over the Channel to see a New Empire being built on illegal foundations.
I ask, Is this not what Hitler wanted.
Now most papers support the New Socialist state which is part of the Mew World Order that they talk about.
Most of them Seem to support the bashing of the British people and what id has done for the good of the world.
We only have to look at what happened to those country's that ? gained the supposed freedoms from the British Yolk.
Most are now basket states. with NO freehold Freedoms to ? question and to think freely as free people.
- Albert Hopkins Shirley, Melbourne Australia
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I am ancient enough to have worked in the Empire in the days when it was ending. I am exceeding proud 'I served my term'. And thats the difference. The anti history / empire brigade, such as Cameron, never contributed to OUR country's greatness, at the most they theorised on the biased articles they read and now endeavour to turn theory into historical fact. It is history that when the Phillipines, the colony of USA stolen from Spain, tried for independence they were shot down by the Unted States Army, just like the Red Indians. We have certainly done no worse.
- Michael White, Brugge, Flanders
dailymail.co.uk
Not only is Cameron entirely wrong in saying that but, if anything, it should be India showing Britain humility. After all, look what Britain has given to, and done for, India.
Not only did the British introduce the railways, democracy, English common law and the English language (the greatest asset for any country in today’s globalised marketplace) to India, that country would not even exist as a unified state today were it not for British rule. It was the British who outlawed slavery and infanticide in India, and the horrible practice of women being burned on their dead husbands' funeral pyres.
Apart from curry, it's very difficult to think of anything worthwile that India has given Britain.
And the British Empire may have had cruel and racist rulers, but compared to other empires such as the Roman, the Persian, the Dutch, the Spanish and the French, Britain’s empire stands out as a beacon of tolerance, decency and the rule of law.
So instead of Cameron going to India and meekly stating that Britain should show India some "humility" he should have gone there and told the Indians how proud he is of Britain's legacy in India and listed some of the gifts that Great Britain, the greatest civilisation this planet has ever known, gave to India.
It should be India showing Britain humility. And not just India - countries such as the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand would not exist were it not for the British Empire.
Stop saying sorry for our history: For too long our leaders have been crippled by a post-imperial cringe
By Dominic Sandbrook
31st July 2010
Daily Mail
Next year marks the hundredth anniversary of one of the most extraordinary events in our history, the Delhi Durbar of 1911.
In the Indian capital’s vast Coronation Park, more than half a million people watched as every prince, nobleman and senior official in the subcontinent paid their respects to their new King-Emperor.
At that moment, resplendent in his coronation robes and wearing the diamond-studded, 34-ounce Imperial Crown of India, George V could never have imagined that one day a British prime minister would be talking of his ‘humility’ — not his pride — in Britain’s relationship with India.
Days of glory: The Viceroy of India, Lord Linlithgow, at the Golden Jubilee celebrations of the Maharaja
The King expected his chief ministers to stand up for their country, not to apologise for it.
Yet when David Cameron travelled from Istanbul to India this week, he came perilously close to resembling the Uriah Heep of international diplomacy, forever telling his hosts how very humble he was.
Surrounded by the relics of the greatest empire-builders in history, from the Romans and Byzantines to the Ottomans and the Mughals, he seemed oddly ill at ease, as though embarrassed by the thought that Britain once eclipsed them all.
But coming so soon after his description of our country as a mere ‘junior partner’ to the Americans — as well as his apparent ignorance that in 1940 we fought alone while they sat on their hands — you wonder whether Mr Cameron’s exaggerated humility is part of a deeper and disturbing pattern.
He did, after all, once call himself the ‘heir to Blair’ — a prime minister who never seemed happier than when grovelling in apology for Britain’s magnificent history.
What a contrast it is with another Conservative prime minister, who once remarked that he had ‘not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British empire’.
King George V was also the Emperor of India
The date was 1942, the speaker — it should hardly need saying — was the great Winston Churchill.
‘I am proud,’ Churchill said, ‘to be a member of that vast Commonwealth and society of nations and communities gathered in and around the ancient British monarchy, without which the good cause might well have perished from the face of the earth.
‘Here we are, and here we stand, a veritable rock of salvation in this drifting world.’
Those words still have the power to evoke tears of pride. Yet it is no easier to imagine Mr Cameron saying them than it is to imagine him telling Brussels to clean up its corruption or telling the United States Senate where to stick its demagogic criticisms of BP.
Humble: David Cameron with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in New Delhi
The truth is that in our political and media class, apologising for our history has become an almost instinctive reflex.
Ever since the Sixties, politicians have found it easier to run down our country, and to criticise the largest and most prosperous empire the world has ever known, than to stand up for Britain. By and large, of course, historical apologies are meaningless.
Somehow it says it all that Tony Blair found it so easy to apologise for the Irish potato famine, an event that took place in the 1840s, but has never quite got round to apologising for sending British troops to war on an entirely false pretext.
But while there is nothing wrong with showing a little humility, apologising for our history is the last thing a prime minister should be doing — especially a Conservative one.
Yes, our past leaders made their fair share of mistakes. And yes, like every nation on the planet, we have more than a few unsightly skeletons rattling around our cupboard.
But Mr Cameron’s visit to India, of all places, should have reminded him that we have no cause for self-abasement.
When Left-wing intellectuals indulge their penchant for self-flagellation, they blind themselves to the realities of past and present.
Modern-day India, after all, is a success story built on sturdy Anglo-Saxon foundations. Now the world’s second-fastest-growing economy, it would probably not even exist as a unified state were it not for the legacy of British rule.
It was the British, let us not forget, who outlawed Indian slavery, infanticide and the horrendous practice of suttee, whereby widows were burned to death on their husband’s funeral pyre.
It was the British, too, who introduced to India the rule of the common law, parliamentary democracy and, perhaps above all, the English language — the greatest asset for any country in today’s globalised marketplace.
Of course, British rule had blunders, cruelties and prejudices. And yet, by comparison with the other great empires, from the Romans and the Persians to the French, the Dutch and the Spanish, Britain’s empire stands out as a beacon of tolerance, decency and the rule of law.
Defiant: Former Prime Minister Winston Churchill was proud of Britain's history
There is no episode in British history, for example, that looks anything like the appalling exploitation of the Belgian Congo, in which ten million Africans died to satisfy King Leopold II’s lust for rubber profits.
Nor did Britain countenance anything like the dreadful tortures committed in French Algeria — a genuinely shameful episode which the French still refuse to confront. It is no accident that in India, a mere 40,000 British officials governed a vast country of more than 200 million people.
The Raj survived not at the point of a bayonet, but thanks to the enthusiastic co-operation of thousands of ordinary Indians, who relished the order that their colonial partners had brought to a subcontinent torn apart by religious and ethnic conflict.
And it is no accident, either, that uniquely among the great world empires, British rule carried within it the seeds of its own dissolution. For quite apart from the roads and railways, the bridges and ports and institutions of law and order, Britain bequeathed a much more precious legacy to its colonies: the idea of liberty.
We often forget, for instance, that Gandhi was the beneficiary of British tolerance and a British education, studying law at University College London and training for the Bar in the imperial capital.
From Ghana to Malaysia, from Jamaica to Sri Lanka, the ideas that fuelled the independence movements were born and nurtured by the tradition of British liberty, going back to Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights.
And while the critics are so quick to remind us how much Bristol and Liverpool profited from the slave trade, they are suspiciously slow to rejoice in the fact that more than any other people on earth, it was the British who brought that age-old exploitation of human beings to an end.
It was, after all, British Quakers who were the first to argue for slavery’s abolition in the 1780s. It was a great British politician, the Tory MP William Wilberforce, who secured the passage of the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833. And it was the Royal Navy, proudly flying our country’s banner, that led the way in suppressing the trade, capturing more than 500 slave ships by 1866.
All of this, incidentally, unfolded while the Americans were not only slaughtering the Indian tribes on their Western frontier, but shipping millions of slaves to work on their cotton plantations — facts that our supposed ‘senior partners’ choose to forget when they are lecturing the world about their allegedly historic commitments to freedom and equality.
On top of all that, there has never been a case in history of an empire dissolving so swiftly, smoothly and — yes — peacefully as the British Empire did in the Fifties and Sixties.
True, there was bloodshed in Kenya, Cyprus, Malaya and elsewhere, with British forces often pitted against Communist insurgents; and as in any war, there were some dark moments.
It speaks volumes about the British imperial enterprise that there was no real equivalent of the U.S. slaughter in Vietnam, the atrocities in French Algeria, the murderous anarchy of the Belgian Congo or the protracted guerrilla fighting in Portuguese Angola and Mozambique.
But it was no accident that when Union Jacks were lowered in Asia and Africa, there was a feeling of friendship and goodwill.
The tragedy, though, is that instead of taking pride in their achievements, British politicians of the day recoiled from the simple patriotism that burned within their predecessors.
Instead of walking tall in the world, they seemed crippled by a pernicious post-imperial cringe.
In this context, David Cameron’s remark about being Washington’s ‘junior partner’ is depressingly characteristic of this cringe.
For since 1945, too many British statesmen have been content to trot meekly behind the incumbent of the Oval Office or to kowtow to the faceless bureaucrats of the European Union.
Of course, there have been honourable exceptions: Ernest Bevin, the pugnacious foreign secretary who insisted that instead of relying on an American nuclear deterrent, Britain had to have its own bomb ‘with a bloody Union Jack on top of it; or Margaret Thatcher, who stood up for the freedom of the Falkland Islands and made sure that Ronald Reagan treated her as an equal, not a poodle.
Yet at a time when children are no longer taught to love their national story, when the majority of schoolchildren think Churchill is a dog from an insurance advert and when just one in ten students can name a single Victorian prime minister, somehow it is no surprise that our latest prime minister is so quick to slip on the familiar collar and leash.
The great irony — tragedy, even — of all this is that Britain is still a country to be hugely proud of. Yes, our nation’s finances are in a dreadful mess and, yes, we still struggle not only with poverty and ignorance, but with frighteningly high levels of unemployment, crime and family breakdown.
Yet Mr Cameron should have gone to India not in sackcloth and ashes, but glowing with pride that the country we have inherited from our ancestors is a sanctuary of decency and dynamism in an unstable and unhappy world.
For all our financial woes, after all, we remain the world’s sixth-biggest economy and one of its greatest trading nations. Although we tell ourselves that we no longer make anything, we are in fact the world’s tenth-biggest exporter.
Our mongrel language has become the planet’s lingua franca; our scientists and engineers, such as Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, have a worldclass reputation.
Our national sport has become the world’s favourite game; even our popular culture, from James Bond to J.K. Rowling, delights billions from Boston to Beijing.
We have no need to apologise for giving the world Shakespeare and Dickens, Newton and Darwin. Nor should we apologise for giving the world the idea of liberty, the rule of law, the benefits of order, the wonders of science, the joys of free speech and free trade.
We have spent too long cringing and fawning. We are nobody’s junior partner. And Mr Cameron could do worse than borrow from the greatest prime minister our country has ever produced.
‘Here we are,’ Churchill said, ‘and here we stand.’ They are words that echo through the decades and they remain just as resonant today as they were 70 years ago — when Britain stood alone and saved the world.
READERS' COMMENTS
Are you seriously kidding me? You tell David Cameron to learn some history and yet know none of it yourself? The British Empire RUINED India's economy while ruling. Just google the 'Drain of Wealth'. Just once. Infact, It was the other way around. You GAINED money from ruling India, and when the profits began to fall, you left the country.
I agree that David Cameron should have dealt with America more severly, but this is ridiculous.
- Souradeep, India
**********************************************
The respondent Souradeep is obviously upset but let me inform him that I lived for the first 11 years of my life with rationing and in a house with no electricity and that was in the centre of the of the 2nd biggest city of the empire. Just so that he knows not everyone had it good in the UK while we helped to develop the rest of the world with the white slave labour from our own country.
- gwilliam, Glasgow, Scotland, UK
******************************************
The writer has spent no time with people who have suffered under the British empire; or he has and he has chosen to ignore their experiences. Just one instance: job advertisements in Northern Ireland saying that Irish Catholics need not apply. If that was going on in a place so geographically close to Britain, what was going on in other places where there was British rule ?
The writer obviously didn't have to live in a place where he was treated like a third-class citizen by the British.
- Eamon McCrisken, an Irishman in Madrid,Spain,
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The Republic of Ireland is governed by the British method - democracy. There are no tribal areas left, no chieftains who rule by the sword. If you want to bring up all that was done badly in your native country, fine. This article was not dealing in detail but in general.
Sure, you wanted your independence, but waited until Great Britain was up to it's neck in the trench warfare of WW1 to attack - the Irish Rising of 1916. When finally given independence in 1922, what happened? Civil war. You could not agree, nor ague politically so fought it out with the bullet, not the word.
- Feddup, UK
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For all those reconstructed historians who cringe at the memory of Britain's Empire, should realise but for falling under the benign influence of the British, these countries would have become the colonial slaves of Belgium, France, Spain, Portugal, and latterly Germany and even Italy and the USA.
As Churchill remarked about democracy as a form of government, we have to accept that being under British rule was the worst form of colonialism, apart from all the rest.
- Zorro, UK,
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Great article. My family left Great Britain in the 1830s for what is now Canada., Our British roots have made Canada into the stable, prosperous democracy that it is today. I am proud to be a part of Her Majesty's Commonwealth. However, there seems to be no end to our government apologizing to this group and that group for past injustices. I am not denying that there have been injustices, but these apologies just go on and on ad nauseum. Also, in regards to the statement 'in 1940 Britain stood alone' - may I point out that, until the Soviet Union entered WWII in June 1941, Canada was Great Britiain's largest ally. We declared war Sept 10, 1939, exactly one week after Great Britain did. We also participated in WWI right from August 1914 to Nov 11, 1918.
- Leslie, Kincardine, Canada
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With apologies to Monty Python, and our new [post Thatcher]establishment, the 'socio-liberal elite' -
'What did the British Empire ever do for us?' - the world might say
Not much really, apart from:-
Workable and relatively 'fair' Democracy by polling
The foundation of a uniform Judiciary and Legal System
The basis of national and local Governance Structures
Public Institutions - eg Libraries
Pubs
Industrial Steam Engines
Countless offspins and inventions encompasing the Industrial Revolution
'Mass manufacturing' and production of 'added value products' on 'foreign' soil
Mass marketing and trade expansion ACROSS countries of Empire and beyond
Building Railways
Constructing effective Road Infrastructure
Telegraphic communications - ie the first INTERNATIONAL NETWORKING.
Telephone networks - the first trans continental IMMEDIATE COMMUNICATION
The first national and global, expeditious postal service
Daily, weekly and monthly newspapers and periodicals
Broadcasting
- dave, cumbria
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I am American-family here since 1635.
That being said: From a world view-not just western -Britain is the beacon to our human rights, science development, exploration and, save for a few Italians, art, literature and philosophy. History of Britain touches the world.
In the development of "Humanity", Britain is the constant flame. Re colonial aftermath's, other European powers left Africa/India/Asia taking everything down to the window shades with them. Britain, thanks to Lord Montbatten, left India as a complete nation with an infrastructure stronger than most post WW2 European nations-rail system, civil management and a common language and ideal.
Battle of Britain: idiot Yanks say, "We saved your ass". BS. Your RAF pilots-with 6 week life expectancy-scrambled for every battle and, saved the world.
I could go on and on and on but teach British history, bad and good-but the good far out balances the bad. And I would rather have the SAS than US Navy Seals set to save my ass!
- Laurie, NJ, USA
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I can't pretend to be a historian. but I have travelled and have learnt. India to this day owes most of its modern infrastructure and bureaucratic rule to Britain. Without the expertise wtth which Britain at first ruled and later from Lord Mountbatten helped maintain the contriols that today control and run this vast country and community, India might still be ten thousand villages and run by bribery and corruption, which our politicians of today could help them with.
The poor of the country are still desperately in need of our charity, as the modern world of India passes the old India by, in its haste to become as greedy as the Western world of politics and business people we are cursed with today. Thus making the take over of our former industrial leadership of the world a simple matter of almost give away proportions due to Greed.
Luckily both China and India have also caught the greed aspect and so in probably not too many years, when the greedy have met their makers the worl
- mick blair, thailand
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As someone who marched at Churchill's funeral; I say it needs to become the fashion to be PROUD of our history and shout it from the rooftops. I object most strongly to politicians apologising for Britain's contribution to the world.
The British approach will be needed again to save the world from itself.
I thought Eton gave an education; WW2 was 1939 to 1945 Mr Cameron
Only 1941 to 1945 if you were American and the beneficiary of lend lease.
Britain saved the world and India from slavery.
- John Heppell, Aldershot
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People are soon to for get what was built by the British people.
All over the world.
If it was not for the British people and the Commonwealth peoples,
I believe, WE all would be under the Jack boot of Hitlers heirs.
We only have to look over the Channel to see a New Empire being built on illegal foundations.
I ask, Is this not what Hitler wanted.
Now most papers support the New Socialist state which is part of the Mew World Order that they talk about.
Most of them Seem to support the bashing of the British people and what id has done for the good of the world.
We only have to look at what happened to those country's that ? gained the supposed freedoms from the British Yolk.
Most are now basket states. with NO freehold Freedoms to ? question and to think freely as free people.
- Albert Hopkins Shirley, Melbourne Australia
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I am ancient enough to have worked in the Empire in the days when it was ending. I am exceeding proud 'I served my term'. And thats the difference. The anti history / empire brigade, such as Cameron, never contributed to OUR country's greatness, at the most they theorised on the biased articles they read and now endeavour to turn theory into historical fact. It is history that when the Phillipines, the colony of USA stolen from Spain, tried for independence they were shot down by the Unted States Army, just like the Red Indians. We have certainly done no worse.
- Michael White, Brugge, Flanders
dailymail.co.uk
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