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was asked to do was to be a member of yet another committee, which looked at our current colonies and considered their status and how we should go forward with them. This also included various holdings by trade companies - such as the East India Company - of which there were several. Most of the companies had been dissolved in the UK many years before, which involved some creative use of legislation - especially as they had been founded by Royal Warrant. The really awkward case was the Hudson Bay Company, which not only still existed but had substantial UK assets and what looked like rights to vast tracts of Canada - that was nearly four years before it reached some sort of conclusion, and nearly ten years before it was finally resolved. It had been decided to allow members from the Labour and Liberal parties onto the committee; after all, we were making long term decisions for the future of these places and what we did not need was a quick volte-face by other parties taking office at some point. Luckily, I was not to be on this committee for too long - it was tedious in the extreme.
     
    The main problem with the committee was that the members and the civil servants were children of the era of Imperial Retreat; the legacy of decolonisation lingered over all of us like a shroud. It was assumed by many that each of these colonies would swiftly want to separate itself from the UK and become masters of their own destiny. We did not appreciate the lack of non-British identity in these places, nor did we understand the extremely limited context in which many of them existed. I think it still amazes people that, fifteen years on, we have not yet given independence to a single colony that we chose to retain, nor that there has been anything but the most piffling objection to British rule in a single colony from the former colonials.
     
    Instead we lingered in a sort of miasmic world where we assumed that places would want their own independence as quickly as possible, with perhaps just some simple trade and security guarantees from the UK. Obviously, we appreciated that some places would probably be effectively Crown Dependencies as they were before the Dislocation,  but that was about the limit of it. We certainly did not appreciate that places would look to be fully integrated in the UK. Our first report was very much in the wishful thinking mode, and in the end only a handful of places were evacuated and abandoned. I don’t think we made any incorrect decisions over Bencoolen and the African slave factories - and similarly, although people have disputed it, the state of our claims on the Mosquito Coast and St Lucia were barely tenable. The latter did upset a lot of people in the UK of St Lucian decent, but the facts on the ground were that the island was effectively French; there were just a largish number of people of British descent there. It had a disputed history and our records were not perfect.
     
    Some criticism has been made that part of this “get out quick” idea came from the Labour party; it is certainly true that, even to this day, Labour struggles with the idea of our colonies both old and new. Whilst many people have come to accept that, firstly, we need the resources desperately and, secondly, that many of these people regard themselves as British or feel in need of close association with us, there are those - mainly on the left - who cannot accept that. However, both Labour’s members on the committee were generally in line with the thrust of the debate, and Terry Davis [41] in particular grasped the issues firmly in that we had certain responsibilities. On the other hand, the Liberals had not at this point made British North America their cause - probably because they had not yet met Mr Franklin - and they were initially quite awkward about Native Rights, which later became more Sir Edward Heath’s cause.
     
    During this time, the UK continued to make more and more contact with the nearer European