Great Uncle Fred? I think Britain is the greatest country in the world. We won two world wars and we ended the slave trade. My Dad does not think Britain is the greatest country in the world. He says we are to blame for lots of bad things and he says that we should never have gone into Iraq, he says it`s a disgrace. I want to feel good about my country because I am patriotic and I think the Queen is brilliant. Should Britain be proud of herself, or ashamed? (Hector, Spring 2008)

I suppose Britain, with such a lot of history to contemplate, might feel both proud and ashamed, depending which bit of her history she was recalling. You would accept, I presume, Hector, that there are some things of which any country, even Britain, might feel ashamed, after some time has passed. Perhaps the question might be more understandable in these terms - should Britain be more proud than ashamed of her history, or vice versa? Well, I don`t think you would ever get agreement among historians on this matter. There is no answer, there are only opinions. Here are some of mine. I do believe that Britain is special, unique and the World could hardly have done without her. Parliamentary democracy, the English language, the common sense of the Scottish Enlightenment, the spirit of tolerance, the television, the telephone, the bicycle, penicillin, tarmac - these are quite important contributions to the life of the western world in the 21st century. However, and there are a lot of howevers, well, you mention the slave trade. I think you are right to say that we led the way in ending the trade but it should also be mentioned that we were probably more guilty than anyone in creating and sustaining the evil. Then there is the British Empire. In acquiring our empire, we were moving in the spirit of the times, acting just as our competitors were acting, though more successfully on the whole. Any shame that we might feel at this - taking over other countries which had not asked to be taken over - must be tempered by the knowledge that what we did was the done thing. Hardly any Briton at the time would have seen anything wrong in our subjugating of people, our imposition of our way of doing things, our arrogant conviction that we were helping inferior races by conquering them. And when it became clear that the whole idea of empire was contrary to common decency (and so much of history and progress and personal relations is to do with working out the nature of common decency), we withdrew, for the most part, calmly and sensibly. The big exception to this is our withdrawal from the Indian Subcontinent which was botched, and rushed, and mishandled and led to the deaths of thousands and thousands of ordinary people. An episode to be ashamed of? Yes. Meanwhile, the Industrial Revolution, which really got going in Britain. A good thing? Well, an inevitable thing. Not something to be proud of, perhaps, but not ashamed either. As for those two World Wars you mention, I believe that the part we played in both was entirely honourable and we should be proud of what we did. Some historians would disagree but it is my genuine and reasonably informed conviction that the wars were not our fault, we did what we could to prevent them, but when they became inevitable we told our people why we had to fight and then we fought as hard as we could for the sake of the whole human race. As I say, there are those with more knowledge than I have who would disagree with that viewpoint. Since then, since 1945 there has only been one year (1968) in which a British soldier was not killed on active service, so there has been a lot of conflict. To consider just two, the Falklands and Iraq, well, the first surely should have been avoided and the second, I don`t know, of that I am ashamed because I still don`t know why we went there. Why did we go there? Wars are of course utterly appalling but it helps if your country knows why it has got involved. About Iraq, no one ever said. If you look into the history of Iraq, by the way, you will discover that one of the biggest causes of strife was the border drawn up by the British after the First World War, a border which completely failed to take into account the different peoples that were confined within it. We are not very good at making borders. The on-going troubles in the Middle East can be largely attributed to British line-drawing. The Partition of India, and Ireland, yes, there is a great deal in history which the British might have done a whole lot better, and for which we still might feel responsible. But - do I think we should feel more proud or more ashamed of our history? Well, I feel more proud than ashamed, just. Only just.

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