Was Piers Morgan right?

I love England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland but I'm English. At the risk of repeating myself (again) I wish our history could be discussed in a mature, reflective manner. I wish public buildings and statues weren't re-named or torn down but amended, to include today's view of the benefactor whose politics/slave trading are unacceptable today.
Berlin is one city I've visited that marks and records its own history without hiding from the truth.

Like you paddyann, I too love my country, in my case England!
We weren't the only country to have colonies! Most of Europe did, the Dutch East Indies among others comes to mind, but other countries don't seem to have our guilt complex, they also don't have our Commonwealth, born out of former colonies, which should tell us something!!

Trisher ? though I avoid most TV political debate progammes for that reason!,

PECS I think expecting a 'mature response' from Piers Morgan is asking too much. I know some people believe in miracles but even they wouldn't expect that.

Iam I often find it hard to see anyone as totally bad or to hate anybody. There are one or two people I can think of that I know about who make me feel a level of hate.
My mum, who suffered because of the attitude of snobs and racists found kindness and support from people she least expected it from. She taught us, her children, to always judge by your experience of a person, not their reputation, wealth or lack of, education or lack of etc! A good lesson that I tried to pass on to DDs.

I wish the UK was better at acknowledging its own history, rather than this simplistic view that either the Empire was something we should not question, or the empire was an evil perpetrated by our disgusting imperialistic country.

Churchill was a fascinating personality, admired and disliked in equal measure for much of his life. Acknowledging his contribution to the war effort in WW2 doesn't mean we ignore the devastation at Gallipoli. Churchill seems to have been as distraught about what happened there as anyone would be and it informed his approach in WW2.
Well said PECS, surely we can discuss someone as relevant and interesting as Churchill without falling into polarising the debate and being unable to consider positives and negatives.

Idolising, or idealising, people and places & being unable or unwilling to consider criticisms and falling into defending the indefensible is not a very mature response in any debate.

So, basically, you have to bow down to every establishment icon and tradition - the royal family, Winston Churchill, military displays, etc, etc, etc unless you want to be accused of loathing your country.

Surely there are many more things a person can respect and appreciate about living in this country than just the usual unoriginal - and, in my opinion, often undeserved - choices.

I watched this today and the question was a fair one.

The professor was asked the question in the context of his point of view the British are ALL racist and as a man of means and education why did he not move if that was his feeling.

His reply was ' Where to.' He said something like we had ruined the world .

It was one of those interviews where the accuser of racism somehow made themselves seem rather racist in their view.

He was asked which politician did he respect and Mendella was raised as a point in question and he was asked is Mandela a terrorist or hero , again that was the gist of the question and he said 'He was a Sell Out '.

His favoured politician after complaining Churchill killed millions of people was to name a female Marxist.

I think you need to watch the whole interview to make an assessment not to jump to conclusions by ' possibly' taking things out of context.

M0nica nobody is saying WC was not the right leader in that moment in history but , like you an me, he was a flawed human being!
Acknowledging faults and mistakes is important. Not doing so and only seeing things in black & white is why people end up so polarised! Good and bad everywhere.. nobody is totally good or evil!

maybe he loathes the UK ,many do but love the country they live in ,in my case Scotland .Ask the 100 000 Independence supporters who marched through Edinburgh last weekend.You'll find they mostly feel the same .

You've lost me there.

Because he earns more here than any other country that will have him. There are plenty of others who do the same they loathe the UK but will take the money and all the other advantages like freedom of speech, which they don't always have in their home country.

Cometh the hour, cometh the man, I guess. Churchill was an extremely complex character, with many weaknesses alongside his undoubted strengths. He was a supporter of eugenics too, at one time. My dad was a Durham miner and loathed him. But yes, he was what was needed as a great wartime leader and our lives would have been very different without him.

Back to oldbatty's question that Piers Morgan put to the professor "Why do you live in a country that you loathe?" ..... why does he?

We shouldn’t forget the 46,000 Allied Troups who died in
The Battle of Gallipoli

I don't think anybody has done that trisher, but it is true, that warts and all, without Winston the war would have been lost, and however angry or disappointed anyone feels there is simply no denying that.
I wonder how people is 60/70 years time will view us?!!. It is very difficult to judge the standards and people of long ago with standards and people that prevail in present time!

I certainly won't cast the first stone. He was a man of his time .

Oh really what should we do then. Not acknowledge that he had some faults? Give him a halo?

OK lets accept, Churchill should have been strangled at birth.

Hitler would probably then have succeeded in invading Britain, or at least making us a client state. Anyone contributing Jewish.

I'm not so sure he is the most famous person of the 20th century.

He was Dundee's Liberal MP until he lost to the local Neddy Scrymgeour, a devout prohibitionist.

That's absolutely true, but not unusual for upperclass children of that era. Winston had an adored Nanny called Mrs Everest whom he and his younger brother Jack called Womany. This lady virtually took the place of their mother and wrote to him regularly at school even persuading Lady Randolph Churchill to remove Winston from his first prep school because he was severely beaten and, understandably, desperately homesick. Lord Randolph died of syphilis after hideous illness almost seeming to take it out on Winston by continually belittling and relentlessly criticising him. Not an easy childhood for all the privilege.

I would be surprised if Churchill was not a racist by modern standards they were not very politically correct in those days.
As a journalist in the Boer war I'm sure he was not fair and accurate in his reporting, but then that hasn't changed much today. His Galapoli campaign in WW1 was a disaster, Britannia might have ruled the waves but it did not rule the beaches.
The interwar years he was in the wilderness, lobbying for rearmament but nobody wanted to know until 1938. Not until he was elected PM in WW2 was he well suited to the role, without his leadership Britain would probably have lost the war. Winning the Battle of Britain in particular enabled the allies to Bomb Germany to a point where it could not replace losses.
A racist most likely but compared with Hitler he was Mother Theresa and rightly the most famous person of the 20th century

Churchill was probably racist. He certainly opposed women's suffrage believing at one time "women are well represented by their fathers, husbands, and brothers". He was also Home Secretary when women demonstrated outside Parliament in 1910 after the failure of an act which would have given them the vote. The women were physically and sexually assaulted by the police and anti-suffrage men. Churchill refused to apologise for the police actions. The day became known as Black Friday.