The textbook whitewash of our brutish empire is a lie

On holiday in Sri Lanka, a Sinhalese friend lent me a book about Britain's conquest of the island just under two centuries ago. Neither of us knew that Gordon Brown was soon to deliver a speech on Britishness, so my reference point at that stage was George Bush's Iraq.

The similarities between April 2003 and British policy in Sri Lanka in 1815 were uncanny. Determined to remove the King of Kandy, who controlled the mountains of the island's interior and was the last bastion of independence, the British conspired with local nobles to topple the autocratic ruler.

But, instead of withdrawing as the nobles had been led to believe, the British stayed on in Kandy. "You have now deposed the king, and nothing more is required - you may leave us," one of them said in polite desperation.

I was reminded of the graffiti that appeared on the pedestal of Saddam Hussein's statue less than a month after US marines pulled it down in central Baghdad: "All done. Now go home."

The Americans haven't, and nor did the British. The result was a guerrilla insurgency that the British put down with enormous savagery. PE Pieris's book Sinhale and the Patriots 1815-1818 is a work of immense scholarship that includes testimony from the then British governor Sir Robert Brownrigg's official papers as well as the reminiscences of army officers.

If we are to celebrate Britishness as the chancellor wants us to do then the lesser-known aspects of our past ought to be thrown into the mix. If one of the elements of Britishness today is fairness then let us remember that the year 1815 saw not only the triumph of Waterloo but also a vicious campaign of colonial brutality much further afield.

As the Sinhalese insurgency grew, Brownrigg advised London not to tolerate "the disgrace of a great military nation being expelled by a band of semi-barbarians without discipline and but little courage". He recommended that "the people must be driven to peace by starvation and burning". Captain Ajax Anderson promised, "We'll track the savage to his den with famine, sword, and flame," and Colour Sergeant Calladine whiled away his tedious time on sentry duty by composing chauvinistic verses:

But British courage still prevailing,

soon we made our foes to fly

and, their villages assailing,

caused some hundreds for to die.

See their villages a-burning,

and their temples soon laid low,

this the wretches get for joining

with the jungle rebel foe.

The Sri Lankan atrocities were among the earliest in a long line of imperial barbarity. Their perpetrators were at least honest - which makes them marginally less repulsive than those empire builders who claimed "our" standards were higher than the other side's.

I remember once squeezing into a Kabul bookshop that was little more than a cupboard in the wall with barely enough room for its elderly owner and one customer. From the packed shelves he offered me the memoirs of a 19th-century British officer. It had a chapter called The Cruelty of the Afghan.

Claiming "the Afghan imbibes a taste for violence with his mother's milk", the officer described being sent to rescue a small group of troops ambushed by Afghan fighters on a mountain road. As he drew near, he saw the men were dead. The only Afghan in sight was a boy of about seven struggling to behead one of the corpses with a knife. This was meant to be a story about Afghan cruelty, and the officer apparently saw no irony in recounting (I foolishly did not buy the book so my memory of the exact wording may be faulty): "The busy little urchin did not apprehend my approach. I took him on the point of my bayonet and tossed him over the cliff."

It would be nice to think that this kind of barbarity was confined to the phase of imperial acquisition, or that what was politically correct in the 19th-century became unacceptable later. Alas no. The placid years of settlement in Africa and Asia were shot through with racist arrogance and contempt for local cultures, apartheid in practice if not in name. Those Britons abroad who made an effort to learn languages and study religions, and came to admire the traditions and practices of the people they ruled, were always a tiny minority. And when the natives got restless, brutality quickly resurfaced. Two books that came out last year on Britain's suppression of the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya in the 1950s uncovered brutality and mass murder, ordered by the British authorities, on a scale that matched Kandy in 1815.

A year or so ago Gordon Brown said it was time Britain stopped apologising for the empire. If only Britain had started to. Instead we have seen a flood of new books and articles glorifying it, while school texts still take the most benign approach to our imperial record.

The chancellor wants to reclaim the union flag from the right, then oddly cites the American model of the stars and stripes in the front garden. Does he not realise that most American homes that fly it are rightwing ones? He would have done better to cite Sweden, an impeccably centre-left country, where a triangular pennant of blue and yellow flies outside many a suburban social-democratic house.

But flag-flying, whether right or left, is not the main thing. At this stage of history the British public style is too undemonstrative, and cautious about every kind of emotional display, for most people to wear flags anywhere except on their underwear. Brown's call will not be followed.

The real issue is to reclaim British history from the right. Tolerance of others is a value that today's Britain boasts, but it is not the dominant feature of recent centuries. Nor is Britain's new acceptance of multiculturalism the result of a willing or easy choice. It was necessitated by the arrival of tens of thousands of former colonial subjects and the demands of their British-born children for respect and equal rights. Fairness has been forced upon us.