``ALL empires die of indigestion,'' said Napoleon. They do. They bite off more than they can chew, swallow territories their colonial systems can't digest, and die. The only empire worth a damn was the Glasgow Empire and it died of televison. That apart, empires stink. The Roman Empire spread not science and plumbing, but slavery and surrender to the rule of Emperors. It also crucified dissidents, including a woodworker from Galilee whose death caused a bit of a stir.

The real cross-fertilisation of ideas came from migrants and traders, going about their business, while colonising Armies plundered and raped. At school we were told the British Empire was different. Its concern was with bringing Christianity and civilisation to the natives. We were urged to give pennies to our teachers who would pass them on to starving black babies in India and Africa.

Through movies, our window on the world, we knew of Sabu, a young lad from India who could drive an elephant like nobody's business. He looked healthier and better-fed in his jungle than we did in ours. He had an elephant, and I didn't have a bike.

What was beyond our comprehension was African poverty. Kids in Govan knew something about the world. The docks were in our midst. My grandfather was a docker. My dad worked in the docks for years. My sister lived up a close in Govan Road. Her windows overlooked the docks. Ships from all over the world came to our doorstep. Those from Africa were full of iron ore, copper, all sort of minerals and valuable raw materials. Africa was an eldorado, it was said, teeming with gold and diamonds. How come kids were starving?

In my teens I learned that Africa had the biggest potential iron-ore reserves in the world, the biggest per capita reserves. The continent was abundant with raw materials and natural wealth. Colonialism built railways, often single-track, that ran to mines and centres where cash crops were stored, then to ports where these treasures were put on ships and taken away.

In Mauritania there was an 18-mile-long mountain of rich high-grade iron-ore deposits. A four-nation consortium of companies from Britain, France, Italy, and West Germany was formed to exploit this resource. They built a railway line to a newly developed port. The ore was relatively easy to quarry. ``It just has to be blasted, tipped down chutes, gobbled in eight-ton gulps by mechanical shovels, tipped into hundred-ton trucks......'' wrote Ritchie Calder in the New Statesman, December 26, 1959. It would then be taken down to the sea where ships awaited to take it to places like Govan.

The manager of the project, M Jean Painsard, told the world: ``When we have finished, there will be no landscape.'' He could have added the railway will crumble in disuse. The port will crumble when the ore runs out. Africa will have been drained of another mineral resource worth billions, and African children will still be starving.

They couldn't tell us this truth, so they told us lies. Rudyard Kipling put it this way: ``Take up the White Man's burden - Send forth the best ye breed - Go, bind your sons to exile To serve your captive's need; To wait in heavy harness On fluttered folk and wild - your new-caught, sullen people, Half devil and half child.''

But truth will out. Britain's rulers never wanted the empire to end. In a joint declaration issued on August 14, 1941, Franklin D Roosevelt and Winston Churchill set out eight principles as guides to the post-war world we were all supposed to be fighting for. These included, ``Respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live.''

Anti-colonialists asked if this applied to Britain's colonies. On September 9, 1941, Prime Minister Churchill issued an official declaration that specifically excluded the British Empire from the terms of the Charter. ``At the Atlantic meeting we had in mind primarily the restoration of the sovereignty, self government and national life of the states of the nations of Europe......''

On February 21, 1946, Ernest Bevin, Labour Foreign Secretary, told the House of Commons: ``I am not prepared to sacrifice the British Empire because I know that if the British Empire fell...... it would mean the standard of life of our constituents would fall considerably.'' All talk of the white man's burden had now been dropped. Naked self-interest was proclaimed.

Bevin was wrong in one aspect. The poor in Britain were not beneficiaries of empire. At its height the children of the poor were dying like flies in cities like Glasgow. Empire distorts the economies of the colonised. It also distorts the economy of the colonisers. In the 1880s Britain was the workshop of the world. Exporting goods to every corner of the globe. The zeal of empire building put an end to that. Profits made in Britain were invested in the colonies in pursuit of fabulous profits made from exploiting the mineral resources of subject lands and the cheap labour of subject peoples.

This starved British manufacturing industries of capital investment which over decades led to widespread obsolescence in our manufacturing industries. Britain was exporting capital at the expense of goods. The outcome, the industrial dereliction we see around us in the central belt of Scotland.

The post-war world called for a decisive break with the past. The empire was finished. A new world and a new role for Britain beckoned. But one way or another those who ruled Britain wanted to cling to the past. Instead of making the best out of no longer being a superpower, they sought global influence through hanging on to the shirt tails of the new superpower, America. The kith and kin of Anglo-Saxon blood ties got laldy. Churchill boasted that through his mother he was half-American. By this time Winston was mostly half-drunk. Britain pleaded for a ``special relationship''.

Our politicians became Atlanticists. In 1945 Britain could have led Europe but preferred to be Uncle Sam's poodle. Today Britain dithers. England clings to imperial illusions. Tory Eurosceptics are reincarnated Empire loyalists. Loyal to an empire that is dead. Both Major or Blair duck and dive trying to say nothing about Europe for fear of falling foul of English chauvinism. Serious matters have to be resolved but there is no debate, only soundbites. At times I wish that Scotland was an independent nation.