Scratch an Englishman and you get an imperialist

When I die (not soon enough, I know, for some of you) I think the gravestone should say: "She never understood the imperial pulse of this country." For I don't and now have to accept that I never will. This week, as almost every week, some event happens to reveal this obstinate legacy of imperialism, and I look at my country and wonder if it has really changed in the way I like to think, or if it ever can.

When I die (not soon enough, I know, for some of you) I think the gravestone should say: "She never understood the imperial pulse of this country." For I don't and now have to accept that I never will. This week, as almost every week, some event happens to reveal this obstinate legacy of imperialism, and I look at my country and wonder if it has really changed in the way I like to think, or if it ever can.

Tim Collins, head of the Royal Irish Regiment was, until now, a hero of the illegal US/UK sacking of Iraq. Strangely, what I first noticed about him was how American he appeared. He looks a little like George Bush, wears those hard, American shades, and made a stirring speech to the troops about needing to behave with care in Iraq so the people of that blighted country would not turn against their colonisers. It turns out that the injunction allegedly might not have applied to him, as he has now been accused, by an American officer, of threatening Iraqis and of "war crimes" which include pistol-whipping a local headmaster. It allegedly happened in Rumaila, southern Iraq.

Collins has denied any war crime and my, my, have the jingoists risen to defend their man, even if it means kicking the shins of our only and Bestest friend in the world, the US, which we were told we had to stop criticising because that was criminally "un-American". Page after page in flag-waving papers went on the rampage, almost appearing to claim (now) that American soldiers are all bastards and the country knows no rules of engagement.

I was on Channel 5 news on Friday with the irrepressible Colonel Bob Stewart (remember him in Bosnia and afterwards when his private life was sprayed across the pages? He has something of the Steve Norris about him - rather a lot of ladies find him delectable). He came out in defence of Collins. He thinks the accused fellow is a "dreamboat" and like him, a true-grit Brit, unlike by implication, one presumes, the weasels who have decided to investigate what happened in Rumaila. Stewart's old British nationalism burns brightly, a halo around his butch, don't-mess-with-me persona.

The wolves are turning on each other over this, which is a tinge satisfying to watch. But I still find the sentiments of "our" side absurd and depressing. Up and up goes the ululation: How dare they criticise our man Collins, a British colonel; what do these Yanks understand about honour, propriety, excellence? Anyway, they have been utter barbarians on the killing fields, shooting their own allies, journalists, women and children on buses, anyone who annoyed or scared them. As we all know.

Now I too think that the Americans need to be launching their own, open investigations into the things that were done in Iraq and elsewhere. They need to answer questions about the journalists, translators and others killed in suspicious circumstances and the humiliation they often inflict on civilians. I accept too that there are soldiers in developing countries who commit horrendous crimes against the population. But no, my Britishness isn't the old-fashioned sort where I have to proclaim with absolute confidence that our boys can never do any wrong.

Stories about how some of "our" soldiers have behaved in Bosnia, in Cyprus and elsewhere should cause us concern. Allegations are coming out of Kenya where Masai women with mixed race children claim British soldiers raped several of them over 20 years. The last reported case was only five years ago. The Army did nothing. Believing things shouldn't happen is vital to the moral life of any nation; insisting things can't possibly be happening is dishonourable and it permits this nation to make up different rules for itself.

Stick your finger deep enough into the national psyche and out from the ancient soil they come wriggling - memories, desires, ambitions, pretences and judgements which have descended from those glory days when to be British was to have global might and an invincible moral superiority. Both were thought to be divinely bestowed. This terrific self-belief sustained the indomitable British civilisers who went forth to the colonies through the doubts, the obvious injustices, and the sheer un-Christianity of the grand project that was the previously unmatched great British Empire. And when you read the fashionable modern revisionist historians - Niall Ferguson, for example - you realise how this spirit is alive and still kicking arse.

The new unassailable colonial power is marching across nations, even more fattened with hubris and its own lying myths. But this is doing little to diminish the false pride of the old imperialists. The remains of their historic self-belief remain strong in the blood of old Britain, France and Spain. Still they carry on, these mighty nations of the past, their might waving menacingly around, like - as Salman Rushdie once described it - a phantom limb.

On Broadcasting House on BBC Radio 4 yesterday you heard the arrogance of two of these nations in ghastly Benidorm. Many local councillors there are now British even though most resident Britons will not speak Spanish (except for a couple of sentences, one of them being "Can I have a beer, please?"), most will not admit Spaniards into their ghettos except as servants and labourers, and most will not see that they are upsetting the nationals - who have their own ugly prejudices, of course. The Spaniards want them to integrate (remind you of Burnley?) not because they are good Europeans but because they have no desire to turn Spain into London "where there are no English people". On this the British migrants agree; they are there to escape the "Pakistanis" and immigrants who don't mix and jump to the front of every queue.

The old colonial spirit is afloat in Nepal too this week as the world marks the 50th anniversary of the climb to the top of Everest by Sir Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tensing Norgay. The first really serious, really screaming row (so the glassware rattled) I had with my English husband was over this crowning achievement. (Dear readers, you have no idea how many times my lovely husband has to answer charges about the Empire even though, as far as we can ascertain, none of the Browns of Brighton played any part in keeping us natives down.) All my life I have been incensed that so much credit went to Hillary (Tensing Norgay was not knighted but the expedition leader John Hunt, who did not reach the summit, was) and how unfair that was. This week Pemba Dorjie, a sherpa, climbed to the top in a day, and a 15-year-old girl, Ming Kipa, also made it to the summit. How many others have there been?

African wildlife trackers, or the fixers and translators for our media get no credit either. No, it is the Westerners we are meant to admire, the zoologists, the climbers, the named and photographed explorers and journalists, not the people who take them there, often carrying their luggage for them too.

It all reminds me of a poem by Ben Okri:

The Souls of nations do not change;
They merely stretch their hidden range
Just as rivers do not sleep
The spirit of empire runs deep
History moves, the surface quivers, but the
Gods are steadfast in the depth of rivers.

y.alibhai-brown@independent.co.uk

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