Straw blames colonial past for the world's ills

Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, said yesterday that many of the world's problems could be blamed on Britain's colonial past.

In an interview with the New Statesman, Mr Straw said: "A lot of the problems that we are having to deal with now – I have to deal with now – are a consequence of our colonial past."

He questions the idea of "liberal imperialism", a term used by Robin Cooper, the Prime Minister's former foreign policy adviser to characterise recent military interventions in Kosovo and Sierra Leone.

"I didn't agree with that stuff. I'm not a liberal imperialist.... There's a lot wrong with imperialism." The Foreign Secretary illustrated his point by cataloguing instances in which today's problems can be traced back to British rule. "India-Pakistan – we made some quite serious mistakes," he said. "We were complacent with what happened in Kashmir, the boundaries weren't published until two days after independence. The consequences are still there.

"Afghanistan – where we played less than a glorious role over a century and a half." In the Middle East, he said, "the odd lines of Iraq's borders were drawn by Brits." The British involvement in the birth of the Arab-Israeli dispute was ""not entirely an honourable one.

* Tony Blair's foreign policy adviser, Sir David Manning, is to be Britain's next ambassador to the United States. Sir David, 52, will succeed Sir Christopher Meyer, the new chairman of the Press Complaints Commission.