Those who forget the past,” warned George Santayana, “are condemned to repeat it.” And Britain should need no lessons on how to reconcile its history; you only have to walk past the Houses of Parliament to realise that. There stands the statue of Oliver Cromwell, the man who beheaded a king and established a republic. Every year, the Cromwell Society assembles at the statue to celebrate his birthday, yet his body isn’t even there.

After the restoration, Cromwell’s body was dug up from his tomb at Westminster Abbey, his head stuck on top of Westminster Hall, and his body, after being hung at Marble Arch, was dumped in a pit somewhere beneath Hyde Park Corner. His bones lie under the road there to this day. Yet now, whenever the monarch addresses parliament, he passes this statue with no questions asked, showing how a country with no appetite for the return of the republic can still honour the founder of a republic.

In stark contrast, the country is struggling to reconcile its imperial history. This failure is all the more remarkable, as in the nearly 60 years that I have lived in Britain, I have seen it reinvent itself into a much more welcoming country.

I could not have imagined this when I arrived from India in January 1969, nine months after Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech, where he called for a policy of repatriation of “coloured” immigrants to be