Letter to the Editor by John Derbyshire

As a British citizen, I take exception to Les Payne's ignorant and spiteful remarks about my country's history.  ["The Race Check at Heathrow," Currents, July 12].  Payne refers to Britain's "centuries of looting the ... wealth" of its former colonies.

Payne should take a trip to Hong Kong, where he would see that the border separating that colony (groaning under the heel of British Imperialism since 1840) from mainland China is marked by a high fence, built to keep desperate Chinese out.  Or visit the border towns of Northern Ireland on a weekend and watch the long columns of cars crossing over from the Republic (independent since 1920) in search of sane prices and sane taxes.  Or talk to some of the Caribbean boat people, who are fleeing not from Jamaica and Trinidad (British until the 1960s), but from Haiti (independent, under black rulers, for 150 years).  It is not in ex-British Kenya that millions of people are starving, but in Ethiopia, which was never effectively colonized.

British colonialism was the greatest and most selfless civilizing force the world has ever seen.  I defy Payne to name any colony that we left poorer, worse educated, less healthy or less populous than we found it.   "Looting," indeed!  And can he explain how, after all those centuries of looting, Britain happens to be one of the poorer countries in Europe-- poorer than Germany, which never had any substantial colonies?  The people of the Third World Payne so enjoys patronizing know the truth.  In at least one case-- Fiji-- the local population begged Britain not to abandon them to independence.

The whole theory that colonialism was exploitative was dreamed up by Vladimir Lenin, desperate to explain why capitalism still throve decades after Marx had predicted its collapse.  That theory, like the rest of Leninism, now has all the intellectual respectability of an Elvis sighting.