It's easy to act like colonialism is an ancient, regrettable relic of our past, but it isn't.

Zimbabwe only became independent in 1980. While the civil rights movement was starting to gain momentum in America, we still owned what are entire countries today. This was only 35 years ago.

We like to think in this country that we backed down from colonialism with grace and dignity, but the reality of it is that we clung tooth and nail to empire; we were forced, often after violent and bloody wars against nationalist campaigns, to give it up.

At first we offered the Commonwealth residents citizenship to our country, on the understanding that people probably wouldn't actually come, because we only expected white Commonwealth countries to use it. When people started to arrive from post-independence nations in the Carribean and elsewhere in search of a better life with the rights that we offered them, a better life from the countries that we actively exploited for every resource we could, having spent 150 years actively trying to destroy their cultures, identities and societies, we said "no thank you" and took away that right.

And for the past 70 years, we've heard the same anti-immigration rhetoric. "It hurts employment". "It hurts our identity". "There's not enough homes". Generation after generation, we're told the same thing, that society can't bare any more immigrants. It has always been proven false.

So no, you personally, nor I doubt any of your lineage, were actively engaged in the slave trade. Congratulations. But don't even for a second try and pretend that the wealth of this country wasn't built on the backs of the rest of the world, the majority of which is still recovering from the damage we inflicted. This is not "historical guilt". This is the guilt of a state who actively exploited the rest of the world for its own gain. As recently as 1980.

The fact that a post trying to downplay our role in the slave trade, that plays in to the long, long proven false lie that Africa was poor and backwards and in need of the gracious white man to come and save them, that plays the same old anti-immigration cards that we've heard for decades is highly voted as this is case in fucking point as to why this article is important.