The great imperialism revival (1)

I'm grateful to Lenin's Tomb for highighting this from Saturday's Daily Mail:

"Britain must stop apologising for its colonial past and recognise that it has produced some of the greatest ideas in history, Gordon Brown has declared. The Chancellor called for the "great British values" - freedom, tolerance, civic duty - to be admired as some of our most successful exports.

"He used a visit to one of Britain's former East African colonies and one of the strongholds of the campaign against 'white imperialism' to make an unabashed pitch for a return to patriotism.

Brown is quoted thus:

'We should celebrate much of our past rather than apologise for it.

'And we should talk, and rightly so, about British values that are enduring, because they stand for some of the greatest ideas in history: tolerance, liberty, civic duty, that grew in Britain and influenced the rest of the world.

'Our strong traditions of fair play, of openness, of internationalism, these are great British values.'

Perhaps this should be read alongside a discussion of British policy in Kenya in the 1950s from today's Observer. Highlights include over a thousand people hanged and 160,000 detained in camps.