As well as wrapping himself in the Union Jack and cutting back on the winter fuel allowance and benefits for disabled people in order to spend more on the armed forces, Starmer has further embellished his patriotic and imperialist credentials by  declaring that the British Empire  was “ a force for good in the world”.

Is he really so abysmally ignorant of history?

Was slavery a good thing? It was certainly good for the slave-owners, who became extremely rich by exploiting the unpaid labour of millions of enslaved men, women and children, mainly from the continent of Africa.

This is the origin of the richly furnished stately homes that adorn our countryside.

Is this lunatic claim his government’s pre-emptive attempt to stave off claims for reparations for the countries that suffered under the British yoke?

In 1943, when Britain still governed India, a famine in Bengal resulted in 4 million deaths. Britain would not divert food to Bengal at the expense of the war effort. Was that a good thing?

Was it good for the Kenyan farmers who were expelled from the most fertile territory in order to make way for British settlers, leading to an uprising in which 10,000 native Kenyans were killed between 1950 and 1960?

In colonising Africa, Britain and other European nations destroyed  sovereign states and cultures which had lasted for hundreds of years. The bloody legacy of that disruption is there for all to see.

When Britain eventually conceded Indian independence in 1947, against the wish of Mahatma Ghandhi, the independence leader, the country was partitioned along religious lines, which cost 3 million lives at the time and leaves a toxic legacy to this day. Has that been a good thing?

Britain was not the only colonising plunderer in Africa, Asia and the Pacific in the late 19^th and early 20^th century, but it did rule the biggest empire” on which the sun never sets”.

When I was in primary school in the 1940s, we annually celebrated Empire Day. We turned up in our Brownies and Cubs uniforms, marched around the playground and heard about the poor little black children in Africa. Thus, all in one go, we were taught to be proud of the Empire, racially superior and patronising. A whole generation of children were imbued with incipient racism, which we saw burst forth in the ugly race riots of the 1950s and 1960s in London and the Midlands. Good for the world, Sir Keir?

In 1954, A.K. Chesterton and other left-overs from Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts, formed the League of Empire Loyalists.It is no more. Would Keir Starmer like to see it revived?

The empire was built on violence, theft and humiliation.

Starmer’s historical revisionism cannot erase that dark chapter of British history.