They insisted that the Indian peasants carry on shipping out grain for global markets, and enforced this policy with guns. (Stalin did exactly the same thing in the 1930s, during the famines caused by collectivisation). Far from doing nothing during the famine, the British did a lot – to make it worse. This new Temple was praised by his imperial masters as a fine example. If you study the records, you can see this pattern practised as deliberate policy all over India.Niall Ferguson is marginally less extreme than his defender James. He admits, “In the case of Lord Lytton, Viceroy during the disaster of 1876-8, there is clear evidence of incompetence, negligence and indifference to the fate of the starving.” But even this grudging concession presents the behaviour of the British as essentially a passive crime – the failure to act.The evidence shows something much darker.

But in reality, he was severely reprimanded by London for his “extravagance”. The Economist savaged him for allowing the lazy Indians to think “it is the duty of the Government to keep them alive”.Temple learned his lesson. He slammed into reverse, and began to conduct experiments to see how little food Indians could survive on, noting coldly in his book when “strapping fine fellows” were reduced to “little more than animated skeletons .. utterly unfit for any work”. The official record shows that only 23 people died under this enlightened policy. If James and Ferguson were right, Temple would have been held up as a beacon of the way British chaps do things. There were indeed some decent men among the imperial rulers, whose instinct was to feed the starving Indians. One colonial administrator, Sir Richard Temple, reacted at first by importing massive amounts of rice from Burma.

The population of Russia grew during the Soviet Union, and the population of China exploded under Mao – does James think there was no mass death there either?Keep going back to the record. For example, Lawrence James says the British imperial rulers of India “were humane men and, although hampered by inadequate administrative machinery and limited resources, they made a determined effort to feed the hungry” during the El Nino famines of the 1870s and 1890s.His evidence for this? “Between 1871-1901 India’s population increased by 30 million,” he says This is a classic piece of deficient reasoning. If you check the claims of the defenders of Empire against the historical record, it becomes clear there is a howling gap between them. And the truth is still there, no matter how much sound and fury is vomited at it. If you point out basic facts about the British Empire – that the British deliberately adopted policies that caused as many as 29 million Indians to starve to death in the late 19th century, say – you smack into a wall of incomprehension and rage. The historian Niall Ferguson called me “Hari the horrible” for writing about this in my column last week.

Another neo-imperialist historian, Lawrence James, accuses me in The Sunday Times of being a “twerp” who writes “twaddle” The Daily Mail says I should check my facts.
I have Many times. But there is no precedent for the scale of the current d?ingolade over law and order.

More from Bruce Anderson. We are still a nation locked in denial. Imagine what would happen if Mr Blair now claimed to be running a joined-up government.

Never would laughter be more incredulous, ridicule, more torrential – or more deserved. Previous governments have lost their authority; previous prime ministers have been broken by criticism. And so the venal system carries on.y.alibhai-brown independent.co.uk

More from Yasmin Alibhai-Brown. Not all that long ago, Tony Blair had a favourite phrase: “joined-up government” He used it to contrast himself with John Major. The Major government had been at the mercy of events: his would control them.