9-29-07, 10:17 am

Two years ago, when Gordon Brown unleashed his campaign to slip into 10 Downing Street, he said that 'the days of Britain having to apologise for its colonial history are over.'

Many puzzled observers scratched their heads, wondering when either the Labour Party or its opponents had ever apologised for the empire on which the sun never set and the blood never dried.

Appropriately enough, Mr Brown chose that bastion of progressive values, the Daily Mail, as the appropriate vehicle to air his views on the supposed lasting benefits of empire.

'We should celebrate much of our past rather than apologise for it,' he declaimed, quoting British ideas of 'tolerance, liberty and civic duty' and strong British traditions of 'fair play, of openness, of internationalism.'

Strangely enough, those at the sharp end of Britain's colonialist expansion saw things rather differently, from Ireland to India, from Ghana to Guyana and from Aden to Australia.

For some reason, the victims of empire seem obsessed with trafficking in human beings, prison ships, slavery, indentured labour, massacres, repression, rape, torture, dictatorship, plunder, exploitation and, above all, racism.

For hundreds of years, various parts of the world - at its height, a quarter of the Earth's land mass - were denied all rights to self-determination while Britain's ruling class enriched itself and spun tales of its unique status as a paragon of virtue and enlightenment.

It is not surprising that the Mail - a paper whose backing for Oswald Mosley's Blackshirts and support for racist immigration legislation complemented its pro-empire views - should welcome Mr Brown's espousal of views that he would once have spurned.

What is more perplexing is why the incoming leader of a party that was set up by Britain's trade unions should choose this course.

Is it that the colonialist-concocted fiction of empire's 'civilising mission' lends itself to current ideas of benevolent or humanitarian interventionism as fig leaves for imperialist invasion and occupation?

The three ideas and three traditions that he recommended are worthy aspirations, but they fly in the face of colonial practice and imperial nostalgia.

Mr Brown has already taken a pot shot at one former colony, Zimbabwe, this week, demanding that it bow the knee, despite opposition throughout southern Africa to his plan for Harare to fall in line with the imperial plan.

His most recent target is Myanmar, where a military junta is denying people their democratic rights and is holding democratic leader Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest.

The democratic rights that Mr Brown now champions were totally absent in the British colony of Burma that was part of his beloved empire until 1948, from which Aung San Suu Kyi's father was forced to flee to China when he led the Burmese people's struggle for self-determination.

They remain absent in such states as, among many others, Egypt, Pakistan, Jordan and Saudi Arabia that the Prime Minister and his commander-in-chief in the White House regard as compadres in the wars against terror and for democracy.

The British government should show some humility, acknowledge its own repressive role - historical and contemporary - and adopt an impartial and consistent attitude to norms of government that are dictated by international law rather than imperial power.

From Morning Star