Episode 16 The Big Questions

Today on The Big Questions: Should we be proud of the British Empire?

Today we are at the Oasis Academy Media City UK in Salford to debate

Should we be proud of the British Empire?

Welcome, everybody, to The Big Questions.

Well, the British Empire once covered 13 million square

miles and held sway over 458 million people.

It was the largest empire in history.

The extent of its territories across all the continents coloured

the maps pink and created an empire on which the sun truly never set.

But across the 20th century, its power waned.

Most of its nearest neighbour, Ireland, fought and won the right

The imperial jewel in the crown, India and Pakistan, gained

Britain's new impotence was evident over Suez in 1956.

And then country after country in Africa, the Caribbean

All that is left is the British Commonwealth plus a few windswept

Looking back now, was the British Empire something

to swell our chests with pride or something

We have gathered together entrepreneurs, historians,

faith leaders, commentators and activists from

across the Commonwealth to debate that question.

And you can join in on Twitter or online by logging onto:

Follow the link to the online discussion.

Plus there will be lots of encouragement and contributions

from our very lively and intelligent Salford audience.

Should we be proud of the British Empire?

Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India, for it was he, who said

the empire was a supreme force for good in the world.

He says it was the greatest institution the world has ever seen.

He says the message is hewn in rock, our work is righteous

Of course it didn't endure and the question

I think we have to say this is like the curate's

We also need to clarify there are two definite models here.

Going back to the Greeks and the Romans, and the

Greeks, their concept of imperialism was the colony.

Your little island is not big enough.

So you move and you settle and you become independent.

The other model of course, and this is the one that really

I suspect is what upsets us, is the other model like Rome,

where you become extremely predatory.

You attack people and you take their women.

You gradually expand and you end up exploiting a weaker nation.

And we are a mixture of both, precisely.

We have places like Canada and Australia and indeed America,

you could say, where in a sense the local population was not

Look at the genocide of the Tasmanian people.

What we did to the aboriginals and Maoris.

Do they not outweigh any good that may have come?

The Bengal famine of 1769 to 73 under the aegis of the East India

10 million people died because of wilful incompetence.

Atrocities in Kenya relatively recently.

I think by today's standards we cannot.

But nevertheless what we have to do when we look at it,

particularly as a historian, we have to set it in

If we are talking about British India we have to say

what was there before the British came?

What was in the world before the British were there

Really it is there that we can pick out what to me are straws

because my family was very deeply involved in British India.

My father was one of the last of the civil service to rule over

I saw it in action and I saw in a sense the best of it.

Here I saw one man, and my memories are very strong,

sitting on the verandah, as it were, dispensing justice.

Imparting justice on a model that seemed to work very well.

But as I say, that is a good aspect but of course

There are and we shall explore both sides of the imperial

What Charles says there is interesting.

Perhaps we are rather value-led when we look at the past

and value-led history is bad history.

There were atrocities, appalling things.

Well, the good things were also there.

Like Charles, I agree it is hard to draw any line.

We are organised in the form of debate today so we are encouraged

No, listen, you can agree with each other.

We are looking for genuine enlightenment.

In terms of the good things, I think the infrastructure

that was left behind by the British in India, which was built

for reasons of exploitation and extraction of resources.

One of the by-products, I think, is the infrastructure that was left

behind by the empire, which you could say gave

India an added benefit in 1947, which propelled us

But I see that as a by-product of empire.

It isn't as if it was put in place for the good of the people.

The railways for instance, which are very often cited as one

of the best things that the British left behind, they were there

If you look at the way the railways were planned in the 19th century,

they were directly connecting the ports to the hinterlands.

They were not connecting cities and towns and not connecting people

to pilgrimage centres where people would have loved to go.

But they were built in a strategic way, functioning

When you look back as a British Indian,

It was a hugely unequal power structure.

A sovereign state went in to invade another sovereign state by virtue

of its military might, by virtue of its economic power,

Historians have, and some of my colleagues will know,

historians have called this the absent-minded empire.

People went in knowing what they wanted.

It was very well structured, very well organised,

otherwise how could a handful of people from millions

of miles away construct such an effective system

which was the British Empire in India?

I am proud of the British Empire and I think if you just look at it

In 1897, I think, the year Queen Victoria celebrated her Jubilee,

Britain controls about 25% of the world.

What a remarkable achievement for these little islands.

The fact is that were this an audience of Italians

celebrating the Roman Empire or an audience of Spanish,

Is there anything you are ashamed of?

But you just said, Nicky, if you are going to have revisionist

At the time, in the moment, the British Empire achieved

And it leaves legacies which bring lots of good.

And that needs to be said loud and clear.

The revisionist argument, trying to apply our standards

of 2016 to things that happened hundreds of years ago,

People were horrified at the time about many of these crimes.

To give an example, Ireland, half its population either died

or fled because of the potato famine in the 19th century.

There is a brilliant book by a guy called Mike Davis called

It looked at how when tens of millions of Indians were starving

to death in the mid-19th century, the British were exporting grain

These are crimes of historical proportions and what I am

frustrated by in this debate, is that we have so much

to be proud of in our history that we don't talk about.

Like the people who fought for our rights and freedoms.

The people who fought for the right to vote, for the welfare

state, against racism, against homophobia, for trade union

That is a history we should be proud of, not a history of subjugating

Going into other people's countries, taking their resources,

subjugating them, very often dehumanising them and very

No empire to the best of my knowledge has been ever perfect.

There are plenty like the Soviet empire for example that have

provided nothing but the genocide of millions of people.

I think as empires go the British Empire was generally

I think to characterise it in the way that you say,

Owen, for example ignoring the fact that were it not for the Royal Navy,

I tell you what, I will save you, Charles Allen.

Anindita, I spotted a couple of times you wanted to come back in.

You are talking about value systems and I think that is absolutely

essential sitting in judgment on empire today.

Like you said, what was going on then in the late 19th century,

in Africa, with the massacres and everything, these

are contemporary concerns of those times.

This is where we need to make a distinction

between the Roman Empire and the British Empire.

Post-Enlightenment, given this is the post-humanist period,

we are talking of an age of liberalism, of humanism,

how could empire be justified even by those contemporary standards?

So this is not a 21st century inflection of our values

But by contemporary standards this is post-humanism.

Charles, you can, and there is a lady right behind you.

The values and truth remain true, whether it is the 18th

One human should not exploit another human, full stop.

Whether it happened in the 18th century or the 19th

Charles, isn't empire the default position of history?

We are all the legacy of some empire.

We had the Roman Empire, Venetian Empire, the Arab Empire.

The slave trade in the Islamic Empire and on it goes.

Should we be beating ourselves up about this?

If you look at history, it is essentially the exploitation

So really you have the question of what empire it is.

If I can just look at the 18th century, which is when the British

come onto the map in India, we have three empires essentially.

We have Aurangzeb, the last of the Mughal emperors.

Now he tries to rule India with one standard law which actually happens

He brings in a whole series of rules which essentially discriminate

Now the other model we have are the Sikhs.

The Sikhs under Ranjit Singh are trying again but essentially

They are expanding and there again you have another model

which essentially draws on an even earlier system which

Sikhs will disagree with me, I suspect,

What I am saying is that when the Brits come in,

the Brits have the idea that the law applies to all equally.

This is a new model in the Indian context.

And there are advantages in that, which are there to this day.

The Indian penal code is developed by McCauley in the 1830s and it

I mentioned the caste system and you were agreeing with me

as I posited the fact that it was exploited

When you look back at the British Empire,

I grew up in India until I was 11 and I can tell you, just coming back

to that point, the fact is that now a lot of the voices that

When we look back now, it is from a more balanced viewpoint.

We can look back and hear the voices of those that were actually

exploited and know that it wasn't so good.

What we are seeing now is that propaganda of

The powerful back then were so powerful.

Before every movie they would have these cheering natives

It was all designed to make people here feel good that this

That viewpoint has endured even though it wasn't real.

Even though the people didn't want to be exploited.

Many, many Indians fought against the British to get them out

of India but that viewpoint was kept quiet and the point that was sold

to the British public here was that this was an empire

that is designed as a force for good.

What I find worst about this is that viewpoint now, looking back 100

years later and hearing about the exploitation

and the murders, and we can still sit there thinking there must

In reality the people never wanted to be exploited.

There might be something good about being shot in the back.

You might say, well, some good came out of that.

We can look at straws here and there and say,

we had a benign rule or we made some railways, but in reality

Dr Kartar Lalvani, come back in on this.

It was during the British rule when all the castes,

cultures and races were brought together for the first time

For the first time under British rule.

All the untouchables, everybody worked hand in hand

The railway, again hundreds of thousands.

The telegraph, hundreds of thousands worked together, no problem.

It was the first time India, because India was a conglomerate

the British empire in India was a civilising mission.

The Sikh empire was far more civilised.

Hold on, I will let you come back in a second.

You should know better than anybody else, he is Sikh.

I don't know what he is saying, but let me tell you.

It was the first time, the burning of the widows.

For 1,000 years, nobody bothered to do anything about it.

Not just it's British but the British

They took a great risk by involving themselves, when nobody

This is my point, that to look at it in black and white is wrong.

You have to have a more nuanced view.

A lot of things. wants to speak to me!

Mr Singh should appreciate that more.

I think what we are seeing here is somebody, a mindset

People have been programmed to believe that people

are coming here to exploit you for your own good.

They look past the exploitation and think, they gave us a few things.

Let me go back to the points about Sati and female infanticide.

The empire that the British, that the Sikhs built, for a Sikh

it was totally against the law, something made by the gurus

in the 17th century to have Sati or female infanticide.

Issues like this make me think that we had a very high culture

and then we were told, your culture is terrible.

The Sikh empire never had capital punishment.

We had an empire that was so big and yet nobody...

How many Sikh wives had to commit Sati?

Ranjit Singh was not the epitome of Sikh religion.

He was called to account by the Sikh kingdom.

He was the King of the Sikh empire but he was not seen

He was punished by the Sikh authorities themselves.

He was called to be whipped by the Sikh empire in Amritsar.

Andrea, I'm coming, but clarify what you're saying.

If you go to Lahore, you will see the imprints

of all the wives of Ranjit Singh who when he died had had to be

You were defending Sikhism as being anti-...

Sikhism versus Ranjit Singh are two different things.

We are into a very rich seam with this debate,

We seem to be examining the tree rather than looking at the forest.

We've got odd incidents of injustice here, a hospital

The whole empire I take to be the forest.

I think we put it into context, during the 18th and 19th

century there are several revolutions in Europe.

An intellectual, a scientific, and an industrial.

They give Europe what I might call - Western Europe certainly -

At the same time there is in Europe an enlightened movement to say

we should share these things with other people.

If you like, when the first - a banal example perhaps -

cinema opens in India in 1896, this is a simple example

The fact that we're a lot of cads, scoundrels and rascals running

But there are also men of virtue,

I think we should look in that general position of the empire

I think a force for good, but there were some villains

There's a phrase, that the sun never set on the British empire

because the Almighty could never trust what the British would get up

It was certainly a playground for many.

Femi, you've been responsible for the campaign to get rid

We had a bit of talk about the instrumentalisation

of the caste system in India under British colonial rule.

The British Raj was the model for a lot of what happened later in the

process of colonisation. The British Raj was a model

for the use of the House of Fulani in northern Nigeria

and indirect rule there. The British Raj was the model

for a lot of what happened later You mentioned there

are legacies of empire. I would say that the Darfur conflict

and the recent civil war in Sudan is a legacy of the fact that you've

split the Arab north and the black African south into two segments

and developed the north And the British are entirely

responsible for that. I would say the British

are largely responsible. There was conflict in Sudan

before the British came. I thought the northern parts

of the Sudan were preying on the south in that the Sudanese

slave trade which General Gordon helped destroy relied on the north,

the Islamic north, taking people from the tribal regions of the south

and selling them into Egypt. You have animist and Christian,

black African there is the south. You have in the middle, Muslim black

Africans, and in the north Arab Muslims. It was a Muslim animist

conflict mainly before the imposition of Christianity in the

south and the kind of... But people make their

own decisions to rape This is the same argument that

there's so much crime in black America is due to the fact

that there are primordial tensions. It is not, it's socioeconomic

and structural inequality. So the Janjaweed militia,

you are saying, it is not our fault? If you look at most conflict

in Africa at the moment and you look at most ethnic conflict,

a lot of it is due to poverty. A lot of Boko Haram comes from our

schools which are impoverished where hundreds of kids

have to go out and beg. I've been to Kaduna and seen

it for myself. So the rape of resources

and the drawing of the straight David Vance, do you want to come

back here for a bit? It did take the British empire

to stop the burning That was a clear, demonstrable

advance of civilisation Had it not been for

Britain it wouldn't I'm sorry it has taken

so long to come to you. Talk about this

civilising mission. We have to understand that even

in the 19th century the British had to justify what they were doing,

because it was known So the emphasis on things

like the abolition of Sati, and I'm not going to defend

the burning of widows for a second. I have problems with the idea

of voluntary Sati. But that's not why what we

were there for. A by-product of us our being there

doesn't justify the Was it a case then there there

were good people there, noble-minded people there,

and humans are complex creatures, who saw this and thought,

this is wrong, and in very good faith sought to

and succeeded in abolishing it. I absolutely would give

those people credit. Of course, in any place in any time

there are be the people and bad people, and people working

with good intentions, what they believed were good

intentions at the time, and those willing to undertake

nefarious acts to personally profit Of course there's good

and bad. I don't think we can take a few

examples of civilising missions. Sati affected maybe 500

widows a year. There are thousands of pages

of papers on them. None at all on the hundreds

of thousands of people It is far more to be

appreciated that the authority Companies were solely

responsible to directors. They did what the Kings of India did

not dare to do before. And they did it, it is

a very great achievement. An early manifestation

of globalisation. I think what you're seeing

here are the best of British values. You can't say that Britain

has no good values. I served in the British

Army for four years. I do think the current Britain

we are living in now does have The reality is some terrible

things were done. The good things they did,

I don't know where to start from. The railway, I have a 13

chapter book of doing good. Judicially, what was

the judiciary before? Civic society, it's judicial system.

The judiciary in India was made by the British. The Empress of India,

Queen Victoria, she never went there did she? OK, listen everyone. Femi

mentioned the religions in Sudan - animist and Muslim... It brings me

on to talking about religion, the missionary he missionary position,

if you like - I wish I hadn't said that! Spreading the word, spreading

the good word of the Lord. That wasn't a good thing was it? You were

destroying people's cultures. Cultures. I am not saying you were,

Rose. I agree with that entirely. Yes, I

am a Christian, but I want to recognise that along with

Christianity people brought their own culture. Of course people had

their own religions where they were and the audacity of the British

Empire to think we know what is right and yours is no longer

important all of value! But there was health and education. The

longest serving establishment in terms of health and education, it

was brought through the Christian medium there. Another curates egg.

Well, you may call it that. The reality

Well, you may call it that. The hand on heart, cannot say I am proud

of the British Empire. I am not looking at it through rose tinted

believe some awful things were done. You mention about the British

demolishing slavery. They didn't. You mention about the British

was the people who were being enslaved who were making slavery

unworkable. I am afraid that what that does is it simply contradicts

the fact that the British Navy was the instrument to ensure that the

slave trade was eventually removed. It is a matter of historical fact.

How can you deny history? Let's go to the audience. Arms have sprung

up. Good morning. The Navy took Africans to the Caribbean to work,

just like slaves, which was a bad thing. They also took many back to

Africa, again to endure poverty and trouble. In fact it wasn't a good

thing that the Navy did, not at all. So you think that had the Royal Navy

not sought to stop the slave trade, it would have magically stopped

anyway? No, they encouraged it in a sense by using the same Africans to

do what the planters wanted. The Jamaican rebellion was some years

after that. Because of the disappointment that Emancipation had

not made a difference to their lives. That was brutally put down.

1865, was it? This gentleman wants to promote the image of a utopian

British Empire and talking about a Soviet dystopia. The Caribbean was a

dystopia for the Caribbean people and the Africans transported there.

You talk about the Navy stopping slavery but I will tell you who

stopped slavery. The Africans in the Caribbean rebelled violently. At the

same time, granted, there were a lot of people in the UK fighting for

abolition as well. From the late 1500 up until 1833 there was forced

migration of 20 million people plus all their descendants. Forced

dehumanisation, rape, removal and eradication of culture. For you to

say that the Navy stopped it is historically disingenuous. On the

Navy point, when we were fighting the French in the 19th century, it

was just an excuse to attack French ships. We have abolished slavery,

OK. How can we attack the French? Granted it was the Europeans

transporting slaves across and cancelled their slave trades later.

It was an excuse to attack French ships because they can't attack them

during peacetime but since we don't like slavery any more we can attack

them. The excuse was to attack the French because they are carrying the

flag. Don't say the Navy was a great humanisation force when it was the

same Navy that enforced the policy of forced migration of people for

350 years prior. Do you want to come and sit in the front row? Can I put

that in context? Go on. We have to put this in context and understand

that abolishing was going on, and 40% of the contemporary state budget

was given to former slave owners as compensation. 40% of the

contemporary state budget. That amount of money was at stake and it

was given to the slave owners. Why did they need to be pacified and

paid compensation for exploiting people's lives? Celebrating the end

of the slave trade is like going on a killing spree and saying now I

don't like killing. You don't pat that person on the back. I would

like to bring up the curious point about cinemas. It is possible to

have cultural exchange and share culture and ideas without covering

much of the world and inflicting famines. I think Lawrence said it

was a trivial example, to be fair. The final point, this argument that

somehow, again, we are applying 21st century standards to the past. In

1950s there was an uprising in Kenya against British rule and the British

Empire responded brutally, thousands of people. I am just making this

point. People spoke up against it. Do you know who one of them what?

That well-known lefty Enoch Powell, who condemned British brutality in

Kenya. My point is this. There were people who stood up against this

brutality and it is a disservice and a smear on those people at the time

who fought for the freedom of people to say that they did not do so and

were just applying the standards of the day. The broader point here

which some don't seem to take into account is this. Nobody is arguing

that the British Empire is a utopian model of empire. There never has

been a utopian model of empire. Let me finish my point. There has never

been a utopian model of empire. The very fact that the British Empire

did contribute in the mid 18th-century towards the stopping of

the slave trade shows that it was a more enlightened empire than many

other ones that existed. But you are not here to whinge about them. I

think the Arab empire was far more brutal. I want to make one point.

The Sikhs suffered from both the British Empire and the Arab empire.

The thing about the Arab empire, they knew they were the enemies and

they fought them. With the British it was more nuanced. The Arabs never

tried to twist the secret agent to suit them. With the British it was

very much of taking a religion which is very independent and loving, and

trying to convert that into something they can use for their own

benefit. They convinced the people to join the British Army, use them

for their own good and then attack other people. They were far more

insidious and dangerous. Let's talk about decolonisation. There are

things I want to talk about again, like Christianisation. Some people

argue that has left never get to -- negative legacies. Things like

homophobia. But talking about decolonisation, sitting down and the

straight lines drawn on a map in Africa, and no understanding of

tribal or ethnic complexities in that continent. I suppose empires

have historically been short on foresight, but we made some terrible

mistakes, didn't we? Well, I am not sure. No, let's think of it. How

many African states are fighting boundary walls at the moment? Quite

if you actually. -- quite a few actually. Let's forget about the

boundaries. That is irrelevant. The British government asked for the

assistance of the subjects of empire to fight the Second World War. This

generated a powerful sense of reciprocity. A large number of

Indians and Africans knew what Hitler and Mussolini had in store.

It was very nasty and they knew that. So they fought. And then at

the end of the war in 1945, tens of thousands of them, in the French and

the British Empire, came home and they asked the question: We have

risked our lives in a fight which we have been told, and rightly so, I

believe, was a morally good cause. What do we have in return? We have

been fighting this war for freedom. President Roosevelt, the Atlantic

charter. What share are we going to get of the spoils of this war, and I

think that is the first thing in the background to decolonisation.

Thousands and thousands of Africans, and educated elite, ex-soldiers,

were asking the question: This freedom we fought for, when is it

coming to us? The British government has turned round and said, well, I

think we have got to consider decolonisation. In 45, the Labour

government came to power promising it to India and Pakistan. With no

money, so we liked it. It was a manifesto. Labour said, we will give

independence to India, Salam and Burma. This was in the Labour

manifesto and it came about in 1947. They go further and say it will be

extended to Africa. Nobody could quite work out what the timetable

would be. The 1990s was given. And then something else happened in

1945. We have the beginning of a Cold War. Yes. In which newly

independent countries find that the Soviet Union and the United States

are competing for them. They are coming along and saying join us,

vote for us in the United Nations, we will help you. In 1954, an

African ruler of an independent country, Colonel NASA, once weapons.

-- General Nasser. Chris Chester I will give you weapons and tanks to

fight Israel and also resist encroachment by Britain. Then you

have Africa decolonisation at the same time as the Soviet union and

the United States are looking for world power and confronting each

other. So we are relevant? Britain does become irrelevant. There are

well sourced arguments that the secular regime of General Nasser,

the reaction to it, has led to many of the seeds of Islamism and the

seeds we have that. One thing leads to another. Can I ask you because

you have been coming back in, if we talk about 1947, India's freedom, if

you drew a line on the map and you had done it better, what would you

have done? Over to you. I have been put on the spot, haven't I? Better

than Mountbatten. I would certainly have taken more than two weeks! It

is an interesting question. It is. If I can slightly evade the

question? It has happened before! So many things have been bandied about

in this debate that I want to get back to. The idea that Britain gave

India independence in 1947, that is a myth. We need to get over that.

All the civilising that we had been doing for this period, we did all

this great good to the people, and this was the time that we felt that

India was right to be handed over, given its freedom, and we left. It

didn't work like that. Britain was in a terrible mess in the post-war

situation. It might have been in the Labour manifesto for obvious reasons

but it was also a question of this becoming a very expensive colony to

maintain and it just could not have happened. The Congress showed itself

as downright noncooperative during the Second World War and this was

the last straw, the time and they were absolutely sure that normal

co-operative talks could go on between themselves and Britain. From

the point of view of the Indian freedom struggle, it had reached its

point. This had to be sold. It was a internal pressure as well. It wasn't

just the war and aspirations for liberation that had been suddenly

sparked to life in people. This is a freedom struggle that goes back to

1885. It isn't suddenly the Second World War that has created these

aspirations. Hell I quickly finished? That is one method that we

should get over, that myth. The idea that the nation was a gift of

Britain to India does not hold true. It wasn't education, it was on the

railways, it was the civilisation that did this, it was the presence

of Britain in India. It was the anti-colonial nature of the struggle

that brought India together. The British contributed to the Indian

nation but only by being there and being what they were, which was an

oppressive colonial regime. Let's talk about legacy as well, not just

decolonisation. In Africa we paved the way to apartheid, didn't we?

Many of the problems in Africa today are down to how we behaved, what we

did. Should we hang our heads in shame?

I don't think the problems today in Africa can be laid at the door of an

empire long since gone, Nicky. People have to accept responsibility

for themselves in their own independent countries. But people

are still suffering because of the slave trade aren't they? Which is

being carried out by other rising empires such as for example some of

the Islamic empires we see cropping up. No, we cannot be carrying the

consistent guilty over everything that isn't perfect in every part of

the world. We weren't a perfect empire, I'm not saying we were. Did

we make mistakes? Yes we did, but Zambia, whenever it was part of the

British empire, and we ruled and governed it, the average Zambian had

an income of one seventh of what we had here. All these years later,

what do they have? One 27th of the income here. Whose fault is that?

Whose fault is that? We've gone. Who is responsible? Femi? The first

point on Owen and what he said about the Mau Mau insurrection. How is

bringing are civilisation to a culture systemic internment camps of

1.5 people, anal rape of men with snakes, scorpions and knives? You

have women, pregnant women shot. You have kids, when the British went to

Australia... Are there atrocities in all empires? There are atrocities in

the French empire, the Belgian empire. Human beings can be ghastly

creatures. ALL TALK AT ONCE

I think there is an awful tendency to simplify. The fact is that we do

not study this period. Many countries that have been newly

liberated from 1947 onwards, and use that word, it is a liberation, they

do not study anything other than the freedom movement. India is a classic

example. If you ask people about what happened in the 19th century,

people will not know the freedom movement has become... We need

national myths, and I can understand why every country, whether it is

Kenya or another, needs to portray the freedom struggle in the most

positive terms, but there are nuances that get missed. How many

other tribes got involved? How much was it about land guarding by one

tribe? Who were the victims? Other Africans. Very few Europeans

actually got killed by that tribe, so this is not black and white

history. My worry is that we are getting black and white history when

there are so many nuances involved. Nuances are the great delights of

history, aren't they? Let's talk about history. You can come in

without me even asking you a question. I would not like us to go

away feeling guilty about the atrocities of the British Empire.

What I want us to do is to acknowledge that there were these

major, major issues. They are still impacting on us today. For example,

by virtue for example of paying the slave owners, and giving nothing to

those who were the victims of it, it has left people in that victim mode.

By virtue of taking away people's culture, killing who they are, that

still exists today. That is why the racism that exists in our present

time exist because we still think you are white, you are black, you

are not good enough. This is part of the legacy. We see this happening

all over the world from one set of human beings to another. The Chinese

empire, the rape of resources in Africa from the Chinese empire at

the moment. The American empire, the Chinese, there will always be

empires and the human being does terrible things. But do you think

the British Empire has a uniquely pernicious legacy because of the

slave trade? It is there. We cannot deny it. It is still there. Why is

it that our children today do not learn about cultural things? Why is

it only what is Eurocentric or British? Can we take on a collective

guilt, people watching today? Guilt is useless. Are we responsible in

the way we spread Christianity for homophobia? I was listening to a

documentary about homophobia in Jamaica. You gave us the Bible, the

truth, we believed it, and suddenly you tell us not to believe it. I

agree that it's wrong and I would never condone that. Are we

responsible for spreading those never condone that. Are we

reaping the legacy of it today. Do you think the spreading of

Christianity was wrong? It is not so much about the spreading of

Christianity. It is what we packaged it in. There are strong arguments

that we are responsible for the spreading of homophobia and those

attitudes, but there have been generation after generation of

changes to penal codes, so can they still put the blame at our door?

I think we are very much still under the umbrella, as it were, of that

painful time in history. Still very close in the great span of time.

Audience. You've had your hand up for so long. There's been a lot of

nonsense talked this morning. You should come every week! The saddest

thing I've seen this morning is the true British way, where two Sikhs

have argued the most. You talked about the mogul empire preceding the

British empire, sati is not an Islamic principle. But as a young

British Pakistani Muslim, what we are talking about now angers me the

most. Muslims are always told, you don't integrate, you are not

involved. Black people are told you are not good enough, you are not

smart enough, you are crimes. You are criminals. Criminals. When you

have people like this on the front row who will always see black,

brown, Asian people as being below them, we subjugated you, we owned

you at one stage, you can't get above your level, how dare you get

anywhere? They keep you at that level. What is your name? Mohammed.

One of the arguments is that one of the positive effects of empire is

multiculturalism. It is not working. One of the do we do next? You talked

about India and Pakistan being the jewel in the crown. Literally.

You've still got the jewel in the crown. My crown? Whose brown. The

British. But you're British, it is in your crown. No, it needs to be

returned to the people it was stolen from. Charles, a lot of yous going

on here. It should go back to the tribal people in Golconda. Return

it. It shouldn't go to Lahore, because it has gone through hundreds

of rulers and conquerors over the centuries. The idea that these

simple tokens, that is not enough. Let me go back to that gentleman

there. Good morning to you. Good morning. A quick point. I just need

a minute. I have heard some of the most preposterous comments today

made by many panellists. Which one most of all? Mainly from this side.

We started as an India with a nation. Nationhood ationhood was

given by Britain - thank you. You. And there was infrastructure that

was laid. Whether it was Indian penal code, the Indian Post Office

or Indian Indian penal code, the Indian Post Office or Indian

railways, the Indian Army - these were all central to the development

of the empire. The infrastructure was necessary, so it was for their

own needs, as one of our panellists put. We had that point earlier. We

haven't got a lot of time, so come to your point quickly. What I'm

coming to is the social engineering that we talked about earlier was not

given by the British. It was by all the social engineers, people like

Gandhi and others. They are this ones that did that. We have also

talked, not talked about famines in India. We have talked about famines.

That point you made about racism is critical. Obviously to justify

empire, people who were being colonised were being dehumanised.

They had to be seen as inferior, as you wouldn't allow that behaviour

against people you would see as like yourself that. Legacy scars our

society today. I do think the people are watching this and saying you are

castigating Britain, an anti-Britain it has fest. In our curriculum in

schools across the country, we are not seeing the history of all

backgrounds and faiths who fought for our rights and freedoms. Are you

proud of Churchill? I'm proud of the British war effort against the

Nazis. It is argued he had racially supremacist attitudes. Of course

people who ran the British empire were full of racism. Having a statue

of someone who called, he said Indians were ghastly people with a

ghastly religion, the famine was their own fault because they bred

like rabbits. Ultimately would you like the statue... I'm not going to

make a comment on that, or I will be dragged through the Daily Mail. You

said Chinese rape of African resources as if. Shell, a

British-Dutch company, was not paying the Nigerian Government...

I'm proud that we are now a diverse society and we can build on it and

go forward. What is the positive legacy? What can people look at and

remember? Is there anything about the empire that still binds us

together? I think the Commonwealth for me is a good thing. I am glad

that you gave us cricket I am talking with my Caribbean hat on.

That I gave you cricket? Yes, and look at how terrific we are. But I'm

glad that right here in Britain we can be truly, we are not fully there

yet, we need work at being a better diverse and multiethnic,

multicultural society, celebrating each other. There are three enduring

legacies we can be proud of. We spread liberal capitalism around the

world to the annoyance of some. We shared a form of government which in

many ways still continues. And last but by no means least, 450 million

people speak English in some regards. What a wonderful labcy.

Labcy. There is lots to be proud of. We heard lots of grievances going on

but there is lots to be proud of. They only need to speak English

today precisely because we did colonise half of the world. And you

should be proud of that. APPLAUSE. It is called an

achievement. It is not an achievement.

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