I made an innocuous comment about the Chinese making a land grab for the Spratly Island (which by anyone's definition aren't in Chinese territorial water) today and got told that China can do pretty much whatever it wanted to locally because they're really powerful now.

Now I know that I can be a "Little Britain" type who's irrationally proud of our imperial past. I know that I get irritated by people who say that we should be embarrassed by what we did (being honest I tend to think of the Monty Python sketch "What have the Romans ever done for us?" when they do), but not even I would go so fair as to claim what my colleague claimed.

I know we pretty much strip mined some places, but with the exception of China (let's face it us Brits and Frogs were the biggest drug dealers in the world -the population of China actually WENT DOWN because we got them so off their face), we gave back too.