Just a little obvious
A number of people have turned telling the English how awful we are into a nice little earner,
 
Fact: hardly anyone alive today is responsible for Britain’s colonial past.  If he or she is, she/he is probably in a care home.
 
Fact: few of those alive at the time can be held responsible for it because there was not universal suffrage and we the people en masse had no control over what the bloated capitalists did overseas  – little enough over what they did to us, never mind anyone else, so we fought for that control.
 
We actually did not vote for running around the world going bang-bang. 
 
Universal male suffrage was finally established in 1918, together with votes for women over 30. 
 
Universal suffrage for everyone over 21 was established in 1928
 
Prior to that the 1832 Third Reform Bill extended suffrage to 60% of the male population; no women.  Thus the majority of the population had no vote throughout the C19th. 
 
And for that matter:
The years immediately before the First World War (WWI) were the most active period for the suffragists campaigning for the vote for women. But throughout WWI only about half of men aged 21 and over had the vote. Most of the men killed or maimed in that war did not have the vote.
 
It’s probably useful to chart the rise of the Labour movement, mass education, working-class voices being heard  and not least mass media against the decline of colonialism. It may even be useful to chart it against entry of women into the universities and women more confident they would be heard. 
 
What actual facts were known by anyone in Scarborough or Taunton is probably unquantifiable.  There would have been anecdote from those who’d gone to sea or been in the Army.  No internet, no TV, no radio until the 1920s.  Certainly newspapers but there is no reason to accuse the ‘Tory press’ of objectivity in this area.  The first edition of the Morning Star (formerly The Daily Worker) appeared on 1 January 1930.  The Daily Mirror was founded in 1903 but originally pitched to the middle-class and not at all left-wing: it supported Moseley and the BUF. 
 
People had other things on their minds, like finding bread to give their kids. 
 
Much today rests on two ridiculous propositions.  1) that the English en masse were all living lives of luxury and ease on the back of the colonies.  2) that England has no internal history and consequently everyone was obsessed by empire.  Scarce had Catholic versus Protestant, the main preoccupation from about 1534 (establishment of the Church of England) to 1780 settled down, civil war, execution of the king (1649), restoration (1660), Glorious Revolution (1688), the Jacobite risings of 1715 and 1745 (Bonnie Prince Charlie and all that), nothing to distract anyone from the activities of the East India Company, as well as finding bread for their kids, just in time for a war with France that lasted until 1815, the Corn Laws increasing the price of bread, the anti-Corn-Law League, the Chartists, the birth of Marxism, the Factory Acts, all against a backdrop of the industrial revolution and migration from the land into towns and cities. 
 
The Factory Acts were a series of UK labour law Acts passed by the Parliament of the United Kingdom to regulate the conditions of industrial employment.
The early Acts concentrated on regulating the hours of work and moral welfare of young children employed in cotton mills but were effectively unenforced until the Act of 1833 established a professional Factory Inspectorate. The regulation of working hours was then extended to women by an Act of 1844. The Factories Act 1847 (known as the Ten Hour Act), together with Acts in 1850 and 1853 remedying defects in the 1847 Act, met a long-standing (and by 1847 well-organised) demand by the millworkers for a ten-hour day. The Factory Acts also sought to ameliorate the conditions under which mill-children worked with requirements on ventilation, sanitation, and guarding of machinery.
Children in the Cotton Industry

Children in the Cotton Mills
by Peter Ward
(Please visit the Peter's web site: [email protected])
A third of all cotton mill workers were children because their labour was so cheap.
In the days when the textile industry was cottage based, women did the spinning, children carded and wound the yarn while the man of the house did the weaving.
In Victorian times, children were expected to work for a living, with most children starting their first full time job at around the age of seven.
Wages were very low and children needed to work so that their families would not starve.
Mill owners saw children as cheap labour and sometimes mills employed more children than adults.
The hours at work were long and conditions hard.
The only future available to them was to spend their lives working in the mills.
Children were given the dirtiest and most boring jobs in the mills.
Many worked as piecers, tying yarn threads together when they broke.
The job of scavenging (picking up pieces of loose cotton from underneath textile machinery) was given to children because they were smaller and more nimble than adults.
Many children were badly injured and some were killed.
The spinning sheds were usually too hot; the weaving sheds too cold.
Mill workers suffered from chest complaints, headaches, and stomach ailments.
If children were late they were fined.
If children made a mistake or fell asleep on the job they were beaten.
Children's wages were very low, sometimes just a few pence for working sixty hours a week!
Working in textile mills was completely different from working at home in the textile industry.
In the textile mills, there were rules and regulations.
http://www.weasteheritagetrail.co.uk/Resources/Children-in-the-cotton-industry/index.htm
Introduction of the ten-hour day proved to have none of the dire consequences predicted by its opponents, and its apparent success effectively ended theoretical objections to the principle of factory legislation; from the 1860s onwards more industries were brought within the Factory Act.
What schooling and political awareness of the wider world were these kids supposed to have?
The history of education in England is documented from Saxon settlement of England, and the setting up of the first cathedral schools in 597 and 604.
Education in England remained closely linked to religious institutions until the nineteenth century, although charity schools and "free grammar schools", which were open to children of any religious beliefs, became more common in the early modern period. Nineteenth century reforms expanded education provision and introduced widespread state-funded schools. By the 1880s education was compulsory for children aged 5 to 10,
 
Note that ‘until’.  Probably their ancestors were better educated in country parishes by the church.
In the early C20th we had a major war, the decimation of the population of young men, the General Strike, the  Great Depression, the rise of orcs in Europe. 

During the Great Depression, unemployment in parts of 1930s Britain was at crisis levels, with many living in abject poverty The 1930s were a period of global economic turmoil. Caused by the Wall Street Crash of 1939, the Great Depression had plunged much of Britain into abject poverty. Slum living and homelessness became common, with malnutrition and its associated illnesses rife in certain parts of the country, particularly in the industrial north and Scotland, where a sudden lack of demand for products meant sweeping unemployment. 
In a country not yet recovered from the economic and social impact of the First World War, unemployment never had the chance to return to pre-war levels before Depression struck. In his role as Chancellor of the Exchequer, Winston Churchill – ill-advisedly – restored the Pound Sterling to the gold standard at its pre-war exchange rate, making British exports more expensive and further harming the chances of economic revival in certain sectors.
 
All of this spelled mass unemployment. The Great Depression that began in New York had a devastating effect on the British employment market. Within a year, unemployment had jumped from 1 million to over 2 million. The Welfare State was, at this stage, in its infancy. Until August 1931, unemployment benefits were dependent on the recipient’s contributions to the scheme, so many working class people who found themselves out of work may never have been paid well enough to contribute, meaning they received nothing. Even if the claimant had contributed enough to receive payments, they would last a maximum of 15 weeks. As a consequence, working class areas of Britain – particularly the industrial north and mining communities – were plunged deeply into poverty. 
This scant protection for the unemployed was what made the recession of the 1930s so much worse for Britons than the recession of the 2000s. With no government assistance, avoiding complete destitution was in many cases impossible, and with unemployment on the rise in the first half of the 1930s, Hunger Marches – perhaps the most famous of which being the Jarrow March of 1936 - resurfaced as a means of the unemployed expressing their desperation.
 
The middle of the decade showed signs of recovery – unemployment rates were down from their peak of 22% during the Depression, and the economy was steadily growing again – however these signs of prosperity were not evenly spread. While a housing boom created by low interest rates in the South East was providing jobs and security, areas of Wales, the north of England and other centres of industry were crippled, with parts of the north east reaching unemployment rates of 70%. Conditions like scurvy and rickets became common in children living on a subsistence diet.
 
Yup, if you were part of the 70% unemployed in the North, I’m sure Empire was uppermost in your mind.  Except possibly a) as somewhere to get the fuck out to b) to screw the capitalist cunts responsible for all of it Durham children in a Durham pit.  Sometimes I think some of these guys are issued with a handbook: How to Piss off the English Working-Class.  Well, of course, no-one would have treated white children the way we were treated.  Oh really? 

On no account ever mention the Arab slave-trade.
From the 7th century until around the 1960s, the Arab slave trade continued in one form or another. Historical accounts and references to slave-owning nobility in Arabia, Yemen and elsewhere are frequent into the early 1920s.[48]
In 641 during the Baqt, a treaty between the Nubian Christian state of Makuria and the new Muslim rulers of Egypt, the Nubians agreed to give Arab traders more privileges of trade in addition to a share in their slave trading.[49]

It seems reasonable that more Africans were enslaved by Arabs than by Europeans because the Arabs were at it so very much longer and that Africa was well raped before Europeans got there - and after.

Slavery is wrong, right?  Whoever’s doing it. 
 
Slavery was comparatively recently outlawed in Oman (1970),[76] Qatar (1952), Saudi Arabia, and Yemen (both in 1962).[77]
 
Much longer. 
 
Fact 4, The political unification of England took place in 927.  England was a going concern centuries before empire, we are not embodied by the colonial experience
 
Fact 5, the campaign to guilt trip the English and make us ashamed of existing and eager to please you  is just a little obvious

England has therefore existed for 1095 years.

Oh, and I suppose some fucked-up religious pervert who thinks people kneel invented 'taking the knee'.  Kneeling is what slaves do.  Nothing is more ludicrously inappropriate. 

Oh, and nor of course did we vote for the influx of psychopathic freaks epitomized by Sacranie and his rabble and most lately by goons objecting to a movie.  Oh well, if they object, naturally it must cease to exist.  Bwahaha.  We weren't actually asked about that.  As of course we weren't asked if we wanted constant lectures about who and what we are by people chiefly defined by their breathtaking ignorance.