Don’t infer from these remarks that I am a regular nigger-hater, for I am not. But however good they may be, they must, as a people, be ruled by a hand of iron in a velvet glove. In the present instance they have been rash enough to pull off the glove for themselves and were now beginning to find out what the hand was made of.’ On 7 March 1951 the pro-British prime minister General Ali Razmara was assassinated to great popular delight. Confronted with a militant nationalist movement and fearful for his throne, the Shah reluctantly bowed to popular pressure and on April 29 appointed Mussadiq as prime minister. On 1 May 1951 Mussadiq signed a bill nationalising the oil industry.

Unwritten constitutions, on the other hand, are more amenable to evolution over the longer term in response to cultural change; the UK constitution is sometimes described as a ‘living constitution’ because it evolves and adapts to reflect changing social attitudes. However, unwritten constitutions are less accessible, transparent, and intelligible. They can also leave the separation of powers between the respective offices of government ambiguous and uncertain and, therefore, a potential source of conflict between those offices to the weakening of government as a whole. Ireland: Potato blight first appeared in Ireland in 1843 when it destroyed between 30 and 40 per cent of Ireland’s potato crop. The potato was the staple food of the poor and the blight caused great hardship. The following year the blight ruined almost the whole crop and great hardship became terrible famine. This was Western Europe’s worst modern peacetime catastrophe, with a million people dying of starvation, disease and exposure, and another million fleeing their homes as refugees. What about the use of torture? As French points out, there were “no manuals detailing how these techniques should be employed. They were taught at the Intelligence Corps training centre by word of mouth.” He quotes one former soldier remembering his 1949 Intelligence Corps training: “The tortures that were described to us had the advantage of leaving none of the visible traces that might be noticed …beating the prisoner after his body had been wrapped in a wet blanket, filling his body with water, and holding him against a hot stove.” 10 Of course, recognizing the realities of British counterinsurgency does not necessarily lead to anti-imperialist conclusions; it can lead to the “realist” conclusion that if that is how an empire has to be ruled then so be it. But this is not something that most people are prepared to countenance, which is why so much effort is put into hiding the evidence and denying the truth.

Popular anger finally burst onto the streets of Alexandria on 11 June. The assault was provoked by resentment at the privileged position of the Europeans and their racist arrogance, and by fury at the continued intimidatory presence of the Anglo-French war ships. Brexit too is a bourach. The northern English looking at their potholed roads and smashed high streets, or good trains that go south to London and shite trains that run East-West are rightly angry and nostalgic for a 60s, 70s and 80s when it wasn’t like this. Jamaica: ‘British participation in the Atlantic slave trade is arguably the worst crime in British history. Estimates of the numbers shipped to the Americas by all the slave-trading countries range from a low of 10 million people up to as many as 15 million. Whatever the figure for those shipped, some 2 million is a conservative estimate for those who died while making the voyage whether from illness, violence, starvation, suicide or whatever.

The Mau Mau revolt: The revolt was largely the work of the Kikuyu tribe for whom the white settlemen had been a complete disaster. They were penned in by the settlers. By 1948 one and a quarter million Kikuyu were restricted to landholding in 2000 square miles of tribal reserve, while the 30,000 white settlers held 12,000 square miles, including most of the best farmland. Between the declaration of the emergency and November 1954, 756 rebels were hanged. By the end of 1954 the number was over 900 and by the end of the emergency it had reached 1090. A mobile gallows was specially built so prisoners could be hanged in their home districts to provide an example. At one point they were being hanged at a rate of 50 a month.When presented with details of the crisis in Bengal, Churchill commented on ‘Indians breeding like rabbits.’ Churchill’s attitude was quite explicitly racist. He told Amery, ‘I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.’ Amery, on one occasion said, ‘I didn’t see much difference between his outlook and Hitler’s.’ And it was not just to Amery that Churchill made his feelings clear. He told his private secretary that ‘the Hindus were a foul race . . . and he wished Bert Harris could send some of his surplus bombers to destroy them.’ The CIA, needless to say, is welcome in Britain, where it maintains a substantial secret establishment completely outside any parliamentary scrutiny. The new Labour government effectively condones the CIA used of torture, including incredibly enough, the torture of British prisoners held at the Guantanamo concentration camp. ISIS is the progeny of those in Washington, London and Paris who, in conspiring to destroy Iraq, Syria and Libya, committed an epic crime against humanity. Like Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, ISIS are the mutations of a western state terror dispensed by a venal imperial elite undeterred by the consequences of actions taken at great remove in distance and culture. Their culpability is unmentionable in "our" societies, making accomplices of those who suppress this critical truth.

The American political system, however reluctantly and belatedly, called Nixon to account. The British political system has signally failed with regard to Blair. The invasion of Iraq began on March 2003. Its catastrophic consequences for the Middle East have been well documented. Searing with hot irons . . . dipping in wells and rivers till the victim half suffocated . . . squeezing testicles . . . putting peppers and red chillies in the eyes or introducing them into the private parts of men and women . . . prevention of sleep . . . nipping the flesh with pincers . . . suspension from the branches of a tree . . . imprisonment in a room used for storing lime . . . ” This everyday abuse and violence continued until the end of the British Raj. So much has changed since this book was first published. The total collapse of the old left-wing nostrums of the state running the commanding heights of the economy, a transformation of the mechanisms that make nationalism within states. Newsinger thus detaches the economics of imperialism from its politics. He compounds this by belittling the independent interests of British imperialism post 1945. True, he refers at times to the global character of ‘British interests’ (p181, p221) or to ‘British capitalism’s global interests’ (p228). But he never concedes that such ‘interests’ reveal the predatory, parasitic character of an imperialist power or that Britain has remained the second major imperialist power throughout this time. Far from it: in his introduction Newsinger says he wants ‘to explore the process of British subordination to American imperialism that has taken place since the Second World War’ (p11), saying that after Suez, ‘both Conservative and Labour governments have aspired to a subordinate role in the American Empire. This remains the situation today and it will continue when Blair has gone. In opposing our own government, we are participants in the global fight against American imperialism’ (ibid).to American imperialism is a betrayal of the British people in the interests of big business...In the economic sphere, Britain has been turned into a satellite of America’ (p7). Tony Benn holds a similar position, writing in 2004 that ‘if there is a role for Britain that would make sense it would be as an independent nation’, whilst cautioning that ‘if we began moving in this direction...the response in the White House...could be explosive as they face the world without Britain as its colony’. (Socialist Campaign Group News, June 2004) This, from the President of the Stop the War Coalition, draws out the reactionary logic of Newsinger’s argument very clearly. The nostrum that the British people were sovereign in 2016, and the Northern Irish too in 1973, 1975 and 1998; where the Scots and Welsh magically in retrospect weren’t in 1979, 1997 and 2011 or 2014 is bandied about in Westminster as if it matters. There was hardly a war crime that the United States did not commit in Vietnam (the torture and killing of prisoners, the massacre of civilians, indiscriminate shelling and bombing, chemical warfare, even medical experiments on prisoners), but the Labour government continued to champion America’s cause.