Sometimes in this column I have talked about how Northern Ireland’s Unionist politicians appear to be trapped in a mindset that’s out of touch with the everyday reality of life around them.

They’re trapped in a Colonial past that’s doing nobody any favours. But maybe they’re not alone in this.

Although modern Britain’s way more socially liberal than anything the DUP, for example, might be comfortable with, it’s also cut from the same cloth when it comes to Empire.

Maybe the Emperor’s new clothes, sadly ...

In a recent Guardian article, the renowned author and historian David Olusoga claimed that the United Kingdom is the one country that’s still trapped in the British Empire.

He argues that Britain is like the last person at a party who hasn’t noticed that everyone else has left the room.

He says it needs to “have its independence day from its own history”.

Greenwich, where I live in London, is a prime example of this. It’s a fantastic place to live, work, socialise or go on holiday.

It’s characterised by its diversity of people, locations and cultural experiences.

More than a quarter of the population are of black African or Caribbean heritage, and another sizeable and fast-rising segment is of Asian extraction.

When you add in other historical waves of immigration from places such as Ireland, this is a part of London that reflects the modern city as well as anywhere.

Yet at the same time, there’s an elephant in the room – a great tusked beast out of place in the modern world.

Greenwich is also obsessed with its attachment to military, monarchy and Empire.

Sometimes, the left hand doesn’t know what the right’s doing, as said in Fermanagh.

On the one hand, it’s all anti-slavery and pro-Black Lives Matter, and the next it is glorifying Empire so proudly it might as well be holding a whip in the cotton fields.

A couple of years ago, a student at the University of Greenwich, where I began my academic career a lot longer ago, wrote a paper about this.

She looked at how white British people seem completely blind to the contradictions that surround them when it comes to Empire.

It’s as if deep down, they’re deeply proud of all that colonisation stuff.

Across the board, I don’t think they are, but in places like Greenwich they feel an obligation to act as if they are, because they’re told that’s the right thing to do.

But at the same time, it’s as if they’ve never asked themselves any questions about the dark parts of history.

I remember going canvassing once with a Labour councillor in Greenwich and she was saying how terrible it must be for the North Koreans to know nothing of the outside world, believing everything that their government and their media tells them.

I asked her how she knew all this about North Korea, since I seriously doubted that she’d ever been there.

I claim some knowledge from looking at it through a telescope on the South Korean border.

Anyway, her answer was that she’d heard it in the media. Briefly, there was a lightbulb moment there, and then we went back to canvassing.

But the point isn’t to say that people are stupid because they don’t know these things. They just haven’t been taught about them, and the British narrative around Empire is very basic.

Everything is reduced to a tale of the Blitz spirit and daft nostalgia.

One great example that I have seen and sometimes commented on is the existence of Facebook groups dedicated to remembering the armaments factories of Woolwich in centuries past.

On such groups it is not uncommon to get quotes that sound like the following.

“Every Christmas me old nan used to tell us stories of her days in the factories when she’d fill the bullets with gunpowder. Oh, she took such pride in it, thinking the bullets what she filled was being sent out to the troops all around the world.”

It’s like a primary school history at times – a ‘British History for Dummies’, where every act of colonisation and attack has been remodelled as an act of defence.

The Indians were the pirates, for example, when British ships went to raid their shores.

The Irish were peasants; the blacks gallantly rescued by those who challenged the evils of slavery.

At no point is there any reflection on the death and destruction that such bullets and weapons were used for, no thought of colonial massacres, and so on.

There’s not even any of the self-deprecating humour that’s found in TV shows such as ‘Blackadder’.

And even though Greenwich might seem far from Northern Ireland, there’s a lot that both places can learn from one another.

If we can find a way to remember history without glorifying all the dark aspects of it, then we can shape a more hopeful narrative for the future – one that reflects more of a diversity of people and perspectives.

It’s not about forgetting history. It’s about retelling and reimagining it in a different way.

My own great-grandfather fought in the Boer War. There’s a statue to such soldiers in every town and village throughout Britain.

When such monuments are used for sombre remembrance of the horrors of war, they serve an important purpose.

You could say the same about Republican monuments such as the one dedicated to Sean South in the Brookeborough area.

Cans of paint can’t whitewash the existence of histories that people don’t like to hear about.

In the same way, tearing down statues is an empty gesture unless you change the underlying values that they represent.

In places like Greenwich, these monuments still represent the idea that to be British you have to be supportive of the military, the Monarchy and the glories of the Empire.

If you don’t support these three things, you’re just a tourist in someone else’s value system.

Until that mindset changes, Britain will never move forward. It will indeed be the last colony, shackled by the chains of itself, sucking on the dying cigarette butt of Empire.

Surely a place that has offered the world so much of terms of science, literature, the arts and engineering shouldn’t be so stuck in the groove of something so negative?

There was nothing good about Empire and subjugation. It’s time to move on, not necessarily to tear down statues, but to at least be honest about what they represent.

Until that happens, some parts of England will always be trapped in the past.

Paul Breen is @paulbreenauthor on X.