Davies

They still call us colonialists. The empires are gone. India left in 1947, the bulk of Africa by the mid-1960s, the final significant British territory in 1997. Almost no one alive today ran a colony or held imperial power. The accusation is nevertheless treated as a permanent moral debt owed by people who never exercised it. While that debt is demanded, large numbers move into the West from the former colonies. The same voices that describe historical European presence as the theft of land and resources treat the present movement in the opposite direction as an entitlement. They complain about stolen wealth while settling in the countries that created it. They speak of stolen land while taking up residence on it. What was once condemned as extraction is now treated as something they are entitled to access through migration, welfare systems and political rights. Course, the standard is applied only one way. The identity standard is equally selective. Someone who has been here five minutes is declared as British as anyone else. Americans whose families have lived on the continent for generations, in a country nearly 250 years old, are told they remain permanent outsiders, settlers rather than natives. Time of residence decides indigeneity only when the conclusion is already fixed. Recent arrivals can claim full ownership of the national identity after a short stay. Multi-generational populations are told their history does not count and that the country was never really theirs. Britain was in India for roughly 190 years. Generations of Britons were born there. They still left. Power was transferred. The country was returned to the original inhabitants. There was no insistence that British-born populations remain as permanent co-owners of the place. There was no demand that Indian institutions be permanently altered to accommodate British demographic preferences. There was no campaign for multiculturalism or diversity in the societies being left behind, and no attempt to reshape those nations so that the departing population could feel at home. The reverse process is now described as progress. The same pattern holds across the former empires. European powers withdrew from territories across Africa, Asia and the Caribbean. In most cases the exit was negotiated or accepted rather than fought to the last. Local majorities took control. The departing populations did not demand permanent demographic footholds or institutional redesigns to suit themselves. Yet the historical fact of having once been present is still treated as an unending crime of invasion and genocide, while the current demographic transformation of the West is insulated from the same standards of consent, continuity or right of exit. They cry about how we ruled and invaded the world, even though we left every country we ever held and gave it back. Yet they do not want to leave. Selective memory is required for the argument to function. Colonial rule is condemned in absolute terms for its duration and its extraction. The fact that it ended, that the territories were handed back, and that the colonisers left is treated as irrelevant. At the same time, large-scale settlement in the West is presented as irreversible. Demands that the new arrivals integrate are framed as hostility. Any suggestion that the scale or speed of change might matter is dismissed as illegitimate. The historical standard of “you must leave and return control” is applied only to the past European empires. The people who push multiculturalism and diversity on the West never sought to impose the same on the places they left. European colonial rule ended. The territories were left. The people who ran them went home. The standards used to condemn that history are not applied to what is happening in the West today. The inconsistency is not subtle. It is the entire position.