It’s been a dreadful week to be British. I’m not talking about the dwindling spectacle of The Hundred – a clown show cricket tournament so stupid even the players look embarrassed. Seriously, why don’t we just have one delivery per side and settle a draw with the wicket keepers mud wrestling naked? Nor the revolving door at Number 10, where Andy Burnham has just moved in as PM number seven this decade. No, the true horror of the week is that the decolonisation crowd is back on their soapboxes, demanding we once again drag out, put on trial, and exorcise the ghosts of our imperial past. As we all know, history was a Woodstock festival until a white man in London decided to chart the high seas and ruin it for everyone. There is at least one person who has called out this nonsense – someone previously unknown to me but has now become my spirit animal. Up until about a minute ago, I had never heard the phrase ‘whinger politics’. I’m going to make note of it and use it more in conversations. It was uttered by Winston Peters, the Foreign Minister of New Zealand, in response to the screeching over two new Cook Strait rail ferries.

The Kiwi government suggested naming one ferry after Kupe, the Polynesian navigator, and the other after Captain James Cook, the British explorer who mapped the island’s coastline. A balanced, nuanced and reasonable nod to shared history, you would agree? Would it surprise you if I said no? To the professional activist class, painting Cook’s name on the hull is akin to a war crime. Knowing the predictable neurosis of the grievance mob, the Rt Hon. Peters pre-emptively advised the country’s ‘snivelling wokesters’ to accept that ‘a mature country does not run from its history’. Imagine the sheer horror of trying to cross 50 miles of water on a vessel bearing the name of the man who mapped it. May I suggest swimming across the strait instead, powered entirely by an inflated sense of moral superiority.

Yet this ferry spat is a microcosm of a much broader cultural debate. Across New Zealand – or Aotearoa, as it is increasingly referred to – there is an ongoing campaign to replace historical colonial place names. In recent years Mount Egmont has been renamed Taranaki Maunga, Captain Cook’s own Mount Cook has taken a back seat to Aoraki, and towns like Wanganui have had their spellings politically overhauled. From the Thames River becoming the Waihou to One Tree Hill taking on Maungakiekie, centuries of British history are being erased from official maps. Little by little, the English names that defined the country’s modern era are being changed or replaced in the public square.

The renaming frenzy goes hand-in-hand with the absurd rise of the welcome to country and land acknowledgement ritual. Before every sports game, corporate Zoom call, major infrastructure project or even Comic-Con across Australia, wealthy executives and smug academics now recite pre-scripted acknowledgements to the ‘traditional custodians’ of the land. It’s the modern equivalent of medieval indulgence payments: it allows rich folk an opportunity to chant a ritual and buy moral absolution, ensuring they don’t lose a square inch of their multi-million-dollar estates or inflated executive salaries. It does sod all for anyone. It fixes no real-world problems. It improves no healthcare. Do the indigenous residents of Alice Springs – where violent crime per capita is nearly ten times the national average and life expectancy remains over a decade lower than non-Indigenous Australians – feel safe or better off for it? No. It simply allows the speaker to feel profoundly saintly for thirty seconds before returning to the air-conditioned office in Canberra. Yet as mad as the ferry fallout and Welcome to Country chants are, they are mere raindrops compared to the ocean of stupidity sloshing around the podcast studios of Los Angeles. I give you Jameela Jamil. Appearing on a podcast to humblebrag about her Hollywood career, the London-born actress decided to offer the world a master-class in history. Discussing her role in The Good Place, she explained that she had to make her character intentionally unpleasant because: ‘Americans think British people are so sweet, which is so crazy because British people are truly the most evil people in history. They are Thanos. Britain is Thanos. They owe 43 trillion to India. We colonised the world.’ Brilliant – just what the world needs: a history lecture from the star of She Hulk: Attorney At Law.

She is, of course, parroting the academic myth popularised by Marxist economist Utsa Patnaik, who claims Britain ‘stole’ $45 trillion USD from India. It is a figure so bonkers it roughly equals the combined annual GDP of the United States and China put together. To arrive at it, Patnaik didn’t just add up trade accounts; she applied two centuries of compound interest to 18th-century tax revenues. You can see the hamster wheel turning. In Jamil’s world, centuries of empire are reduced to an image of Dick Dastardly twirling his moustache and making off with bags marked with dollar signs. Long before the East India Company set foot in Bengal, England was already a productive, high-wage nation. During its colonial rule, Britain constructed thousands of miles of railways, built deep-water ports, established irrigation systems, and introduced representative governance. We also helped proscribe reprehensible historical practices like sati (widow burning) and established municipal sanitation as the bedrock of a hygienic civilisation – not to mention the billions in financial assistance and development capital funnelled into the country since. Britain left nearly 80 years ago, and India is now a space-exploring global economic superpower – so if its people are still crapping in the street that’s on you, literally. Like her fellow revisionists, Ms Jamil treats history as a one-way moral ledger in which Britain holds a monopoly on human suffering. She fixates on the past while ignoring the present: there are over 11 million people living in modern slavery in India, including forced child marriage, debt bondage and forced labour. But never mind, she can bravely slam the British Raj from an air-conditioned Los Angeles studio. How stunning, how brave.