@mustlovegin
[O]ther nations do not have to act in our best interests. Why should we take their views as gospel? What you seem to be suggesting is that we had better toe the line or else.
Not at all. But the UK is a weak nation no matter how you skin this particular cat, and the only way to increase its influence is to build alliances with like-minded nations, through shared sovereignty or at the very least through shared interests - be that a common enemy or a common goal. If Dunkirk didn't wipe away the last vestiges of belief that Britain could go it alone, then I imagine Suez did.
We're never going to achieve that without understanding our would-be allies' interests or goals. If the UK cannot or will not do that, then toeing the line is the best that we can hope for.
Your and others' similar posts (as I don't mean to put you on the spot) relay a feeling of detachment. Very rarely someone with any deep sense of belonging or loyalty to their land and fellow countrymen would express opinions in this way.
Once again, your interpretation of fact results in your version of truth which is bollocks. I have a Portuguese first name and a Silesian family name, and I speak fluent Cantonese, but if you met me in the street you'd mistake me for being related to Jacob Rees-Mogg long before you'd think I was related to Cristiano Ronaldo. I am foreign, but I am also British. I have nevertheless spent my life since the age of nine justifying my presence in Britain and I'm getting rather sick of it. I am amazed that anybody could interpret my life as displaying detachment when I have spent it consciously putting down roots here.
I refuse to show wilful blindness to the UK's many problems simply out of a sense of loyalty or belonging, because that does not achieve anything. I express dissatisfaction with life in the UK precisely because I have a deep sense of loyalty to it, and with that comes both a desire and a duty to improve it. I have spent much of my life around born-and-bred
Brits who have lived overseas and - with the benefit of that experience - think the same as me. It's nothing to do with detachment, everything to do with the fact that we are not blinkered by blind faith in British or English exceptionalism.
[D]o you not think it's rather tone deaf and disingenuous to suggest that we need to encourage negativity and self-flagellation for the sake of it and start to focus on events that didn't even take place here like apartheid?
You are the only one who has described understanding the facts of history as "negativity" or "self-flagellation." I'll give you an example of why something like apartheid, in a far off land, has consequences for totally disconnected people today, and how understanding it makes people's lives easier, if not necessarily better.
I mentioned previously that my mother was Portuguese, from Mozambique. In the run up to Mozambican independence in 1975 my parents were among the quarter of a million or so who were ordered to leave. Mine went to Macau, many went back to Portugal with nothing but the clothes on their backs, and the rest generally went penniless to South Africa. Those who settled in SA often took up skilled trades - carpentry, plumbing, electrician work - which white South Africans didn't want to do, but for which the training and education wasn't available to blacks. They settled and integrated. Some even set up international businesses like Nando's. But come the end of apartheid all those skilled trade jobs became accessible to black South Africans. All well and good.
The Portuguese in SA found themselves priced out of the jobs they'd been doing for 20 years, and most of them didn't have the skills to go on to the professional classes where, if they did, they were also competing with post-apartheid blacks. Many tens of thousands of Portuguese citizens - and their children, who had been born and raised in South Africa and often spoke English or Afrikaans as a first language - went back to continental Portugal and had to be absorbed there.
Now, if you are a British retiree or holiday home owner in the Algarve, and you never learned a word of Portuguese (i.e. most of them) you'll seek out businesses where people speak English. If you're a British holidaymaker and need to go into a bank you'll ask if anyone speaks English. A huge number of the people you'll encounter are Portuguese retornados from South Africa.
None of this is a problem, really. But every so often, if you hang around them long and often enough, you'll hear one refer to "the Dutch," and it's usually not complementary. Given the number of people from Amsterdam, Eindhoven or Nijmegen who have also settled in the Algarve you'd be forgiven for thinking that these Portuguese-Saffas had an issue with folk from the Netherlands. You'd be wrong. They had simply lived under an apartheid pecking-order which as well as discriminating against people of colour (unlike what they had in Mozambique or Angola) also differentiated between white Portuguese, whites of British origin, and Afrikaaners - the "Dutch" to whom they are actually referring.
Those who don't understand the history behind it jump in feet first at drinks parties in southern Portugal - which had literally nothing to do with apartheid - at their peril.