Last month, after years of rumours and thinly veiled threats from Tory reactionaries, Secretary of State Brandon Lewis finally announced plans to introduce legislation that would ban all future legacy prosecutions arising from the Troubles. Going forward, a statute of limitations would be set on incidents that occurred before 1998, applicable to both veterans and ex-paramilitaries.

Just days after this announcement, news emerged from Essex that local Tory councillors in Southend had launched a censorship crusade, successfully shutting down a park installation commissioned to spotlight Britain’s largely undiscussed notoriety as a ‘colonial nuclear state’. Titled An English Garden, Australian artist Gabriella Hirst’s restrained, unobtrusive work in Gunners Park featured small benches and a neat row of flowerbeds planted with Atom Bomb roses – a near-extinct species of garden rose deriving its nickname from the Cold War. Affixed to one bench was a plaque that explained how, in a site nearby, Britain’s first atomic bomb—tested by way of detonation on Indigenous land in Australia—was assembled.

Unrelated though these flashpoints seem, they are far from isolated events. In keeping with that time-honoured tradition of the British ruling class, who perpetually mourn their reduced standing in the world after the death of Pax Britannica, these incidents should be seen as interconnected bids to distort the image of a colonial past and the reality of Britain’s neo-imperial present. In admitting to Troubles-era crimes—arbitrary detention, rendition, torture, collaboration with loyalists, extra-judicial murders of their ‘subjects’—the British ruling class open themselves up to culpability for a whole host of barbarities committed under the aegis of the British Empire – let alone the imperialism it has wrought on the world or been complicit in this century.

The amnesty itself marked a grim denouement, following at least two election cycles’ worth of ratcheting authoritarian rhetoric from the reliably militarist quarters of the British state and the introduction of comparable statutes for war crimes committed in Afghanistan and Iraq. It also arrived just two weeks after the authorities’ abandonment of the prosecution of the only British soldier charged over the Bloody Sunday massacre in 1972. The English Garden incident, too, follows a long-term pattern of right-wing attempts to stamp out criticism of Britain’s imperial past, symbolised by the pending introduction of a potential ten-year prison sentence for those found guilty of damaging statues. Neither are examples of spontaneous culture war battles or standalone miscarriages of justice. They are the concerted efforts of an intergenerational ruling class to conceal historical crimes—an effort which, in the context of the British Empire, has often taken a literal form.

This ideological drive to airbrush history cannot be disconnected from present-day hopes of quelling discontent and disciplining the masses at home. The process, as Rosa Gilbert wrote in Tribune last year, grants the state ‘moral and political legitimacy, facilitating continued imperial endeavours abroad’; it also limits our ability to understand the colonial relations of oppression, dispossession, and alienation as baked-in features of a vicious capitalist system. This year’s granting of amnesty to the state-sanctioned slaughter of innocent civilians in a dirty war should, in fact, come as no surprise, simply because it is naive to imagine a scenario in which a deeply entrenched right-wing political class and its security state apparatus would willingly take the blame for policies they cannot be precluded from pursuing again.

The task for the Left is to draw links (and attend to the differences) between the manifold brutalities inflicted by those colonised across borders, as well as those fighting neo-colonial structures today. In our contemporary order of capitalism, epitomised by the hyper-exploitation of workers in the Global South, we should take seriously the need for cross-national solidarity in the struggle against imperialism.

That means expressing solidarity with the anti-colonial struggle being waged by Palestinians, supporting the Latin American political projects striving for disentanglement from US domination, demanding an end to the blockade on Cuba, and so on; in Ireland, it necessitates a call for the removal of partition through a grassroots unity movement. And any of these things is impossible without a commitment to a political education that fosters historical consciousness.

We must seek to do this work ourselves, unreliant on the whims of corporate media, a largely unradical intellectual class, and rudderless social democratic parties. ‘The rulers at any time,’ Walter Benjamin reminded us, ‘are the heirs of all those who have been victorious throughout history.’ There will never be a top-down reckoning of colonialism in our lifetimes; with or without state power, our job is to wrench back popular control of incomplete narratives by connecting the stories of the oppressed loudly and often. Only by contesting the ruling bloc’s official histories will we be able to change our own futures.