ALLOW your imagination to play a little game for a moment: let’s pretend that Boris Johnson has just been arrested in connection with drug smuggling, and Ireland steps forward to say it’s going to impose direct rule on Britain until London gets its act together. Or maybe the European Union takes us over, or perhaps France or America. Or Botswana or Tibet or Nicaragua. Or just about any random nation on Earth.

The bottom line, in this thought experiment, is that a British leader has been caught in alleged criminality and as a result democracy in Britain is suspended.

What would we, the average citizen, do in such a theoretical situation? Meekly obey? Riot in the streets? Launch a guerrilla war against the "occupying power"? Certainly, the notion of another nation ruling us – regardless of how egregious or criminal or offensive our government may be – is an affront to democracy so profound that it would probably merit a physical response of some kind or other, as an act of resistance.

Now, let’s hop on a jet and cross the Atlantic to the Caribbean where Britain is currently threatening to put the British Virgin Islands (BVI) – a British overseas territory – under direct rule after its premier Andrew Fahie was arrested on suspicion of drug running. Evidently, few decent souls will hold much love for the British Virgin Islands given its noisome history as one of the world’s leading tax havens, though perhaps there’s a fondness among a subset of Conservative Party donors. And clearly, any allegation of serious criminality against a serving national leader is horrifying.

Read more: ‘Scotland didn’t have empire done to it, Scotland did empire to other people’.

But what damn business is it of the UK? The notion of a "British overseas territory" should be consigned to the same bin in which serfdom is found, just next to the skip where the refusal to give women the right to vote lies rotting. The BVI could be running a pirate empire, and it should still be none of Britain’s business. It’s up to BVI citizens to fix their problems, not us. If there' are allegations of criminality which require an international response then leave that to the United Nations.

If ever there was proof that Britain still has the hots for Empire, then the BVI is it. Something in the soul of Britain remains hankering after colonies and supremacy, regardless of the fact that we’re a middling power with a dysfunctional government.

The discussion around Britain suspending democracy in a Caribbean nation is quite simply historically offensive. Britain ran slave colonies across the Caribbean. The descendants of those slaves now have to listen to British politicians standing in judgment. Here’s one note from the National Archives of Britain: “It is estimated that Britain transported 3.1 million Africans (of whom 2.7 million arrived) to British colonies in the Caribbean, North and South America and to other countries.” This was between 1640 and 1807.

Britain is widely loathed in the Caribbean. Prince William and his wife Kate faced demands for slavery reparations during their recent visit to Belize, Jamaica and the Bahamas. The trip was intended to strengthen the Commonwealth and woo other countries away from following Barbados, which became a republic at the end of 2021.

However, Jamaica’s Prime Minister told the royals the country was “moving on” and would become a republic. In the Bahamas, a government committee told the royals they should issue “a full and formal apology for their crimes against humanity” – a completely fair point given their predecessors ruled over the slave era. Back home, our tabloids just lied about how the tour was received. "Kate dazzles on Jamaica tour", we were told.

Astonishingly, the royals followed up the disastrous Kate and William trip with a tour by the lesser Prince Edward and his wife Sophie. In Saint Lucia, they were greeted with placards reading "Queen say sorry". In a moment which defined the concept of "tone deaf", Edward was asked by Antigua’s premier to use his “diplomatic influence” to help the case for “reparatory justice” for Caribbean nations colonised by Britain, in response the Prince laughed, said he hadn’t been taking notes during the comments, and so couldn’t respond.

Read more: Decolonisation, Empire and repatriating looted art

Scotland doesn’t get off the hook here. This isn’t simply a British or English problem. Scotland has its own unique problems with empire. There’s a persistent refusal to acknowledge the past within sizeable sections of Scotland’s population. Many hardline unionists see no problem with empire: it was all fine and dandy and weren’t we great for bringing civilisation to the benighted corners of the world. On the flip side, hardline nationalists simply refuse to accept that Scotland had any part in empire. We were the poor colonised victims rather than enthusiastic participants. Some nationalists even refuse to accept that Scotland wanted to be a colonial power in its own right prior to union. We tried to colonise Panama in the infamous Darien scheme and failed abjectly. The fall-out from this event helped move Scotland towards union with England – which in turn turbo-charged British (for which read "English and Scottish") colonisation and empire-building.

Just last week I spoke to one of Scotland's most celebrated Egyptologists Dr Campbell Price, who’s working hard so that his academic discipline acknowledges the sins of the past. He was particularly scathing about Scotland’s phoney myth-making. “There’s a funny attitude,” he told me, “where Scots kind of distance themselves and say, ‘oh well, you know, we were colonised first. The English came in, and we’re the victims’. Based on my work on the history of colonialism in Egypt, Scottish people are more than well-represented. They are disproportionately represented in the cogs of the imperial project with Scottish diplomats, engineers and soldiers … There’s a sense that empire was ‘done to’ Scotland, when in fact Scotland ‘did’ empire to other people … We put this stuff on the English and say it was the English.”

He’s bang on the money. Britain as a whole is twisted by fantasies of empire. Within Scotland, there are far too many of us, both nationalist and unionist, who refuse to look at the past truthfully. Any country which cannot confront the past, has no hope of building a decent future.

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