Have you heard of Jameela Jamil? No, me neither, though I’m told she’s worryingly influential. This British-born ‘actress, comedian, activist and presenter’ who used to work for Channel 4 and BBC Radio 1, told the ‘Yestergays’ podcast that Britain is currently ‘living in a race war’, that in some unspecified way ‘Brexit paved the way for American chaos’, and that ‘British people are truly the most evil in history’. For good measure, she believes that we owe the Indian subcontinent massive reparations.
We may dismiss Ms Jamil’s wild claims but we should pay attention to her biography
According to Ms Jamil, the bill for our occupation and exploitation of India is apparently $43 trillion. She seems to have picked up this figure from an Indian Marxist economist called Utsa Patnaik, though Professor Patnaik’s calculations are modest indeed when set beside those made by that charity to which you used to donate, Oxfam. It calculates your bill to India at $64.82 trillion. It’s the .82 that always gets me: how do they do the sum so precisely? Similarly, the Brattle Group, on behalf of Caribbean nations, assesses our reparations bill for slavery, colonialism and attendant ills at £18.6 trillion.
Jameela Jamil: "British people are truly the most evil people in history. They are Thanos. Britain is Thanos. They owe 43 trillion to India." https://t.co/6vG3Y9ZWBj pic.twitter.com/J6m4ds4jUK
— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) July 21, 2026
We could dispute the figures. We could direct them to the work of Tirthankar Roy, Professor of Indian economic history at the London School of Economics, who doubts that Britain made a profit from India and disputes the idea that our presence over more than two centuries stymied Indian economic development. We could point to our legacies, turning a land which once had over 600 separate political jurisdictions into two states in 1947, India and Pakistan, and offering India, at least, a model of mass democracy which has endured, more or less, to the present day.
One of the other guests on the podcast chimed in to complain about Indian artefacts held in British museums, and we could easily point to the more than 100 museums founded by the British across India, from the late 18th century onwards, to house the treasures unearthed by British archaeologists that would otherwise have been left to rot.
Though the great monument to Sir William Jones in the chapel of University College, Oxford, where he studied and taught, has been dishonoured by his college, we could point to his role as the founder of Indology, the study of Indian culture, history, law and languages. Once every year, Jones’s tomb in Calcutta is the scene of celebrations, speeches and the laying of garlands by Indian admirers who remember the greatest scholar to have studied Indian civilisations. Without the British there would have been no modern India and Pakistan, nor the organised knowledge of the sub-continent’s long and rich history.
We may dismiss Ms Jamil’s wild claims but we should pay attention to her biography. She speaks with a cut glass English accent, just as one might expect from someone who has lived in ‘Camden, Belsize Park, Swiss Cottage and Hampstead’. She won a scholarship to the private day school, Queen’s College, one of the pioneering girls’ schools in Britain, which dates from the mid-nineteenth century and where fees are a cool £33,000 a year.
She is of mixed Indian and Pakistani heritage, and is therefore one of more than two million Indians and 1.6 million people from Pakistan (at the 2021 census) who have chosen to live among the most evil people in history. Together, these two groups are the largest and second largest ethnic minority communities in the UK. We’re so evil, in fact, that we’ve even had an Indian prime minister.
Though Jamil now lives in America where she’s known for television comedy (what else?), the first 30 or so of her 40 years were spent in Britain where she seems to have enjoyed the best things on offer. Yet still she criticises.
Professor Patnaik, who came up with the reparations figure, is similar. Her doctorate in economics is from Oxford where she was a postgraduate at Somerville College, another pioneering institution in women’s education. Perhaps she had a bad time there? Would this explain why someone lucky enough to have enjoyed an elite education in Britain should be so critical as well?
I know of someone from a family of stateless refugees from Nazism who, in the middle of the second world war, were given refuge by the British and allowed to settle in Bombay where much of this person’s idyllic childhood was subsequently spent. Despite being saved by us, she too is a critic of empire and of the British in India.
What unites these cases may well be ingratitude. But critics like these lack self-awareness. It’s not just a case of learning something about the past and thinking before one speaks. They – we all – need to place ourselves in history and reflect. Can Britain really have been so bad if it has educated, promoted and offered safe haven to women like these?
As a society, our relationship to the past is out of joint. We judge the past and moralise about our ancestors without a thought for our own sins and errors, and for what posterity will make of our mistakes and failings. We usually ascribe this to the influence of pernicious ideologies working on ignorance, but bad ideas flourish when people have no grip on who they are and what they owe to others.
Ms Jamil may not deserve the dignity of an allusion to the classics, but the Greeks knew a thing or two when they enjoined us to first ‘know thyself’, taking self-knowledge to be the foundation of wisdom, maturity and a meaningful life. I’d like to teach everyone some accurate and objective British history: but first, like Ms Jamil, they must know themselves.
Professor Lawrence Goldman is an emeritus fellow of St. Peter’s College, Oxford. He is the executive editor of History Reclaimed.
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