The equalities minister says she doesn’t care about Britain’s imperial impact. It’s a sign of how deep-rooted the legacy is
In every single country that was ever under British rule, you will find a significant number of people who praise colonialism or claim they would willingly welcome back the British. It’s a sort of meme – half joke, half genuine frustration over political or economic instability.
Sometimes these laments are wistful longings for things that never really happened, such as the trains running on time, or lost status from a period when “people knew their place”. But they are almost always issued by those who have internalised the logic of empire itself – which is that it was, overall, an improving mission, albeit with a small number of unsavoury excesses.