Regarding Gary Younge’s article (Millions of the black and brown people who fought for Europe’s freedom didn’t get a VE Day, 8 May), it is refreshing to read about what actually happened at the end of the second world war. But I do resist strongly the framing of the millions of colonised people in the British empire as having “fought for the allies”. They were the allies. These people, including my late father, were subjects of the British empire, just like any soldier from Liverpool or an Auxiliary Territorial Service recruit from Maidenhead. They were trained as the British army and they fought and died, or survived, just like those from Scotland or Wales.
Many British people don’t want to hear that millions of the grandparents and parents of those “foreigners” living here were born and lived under the same rule as any Bristol or Birmingham council estate, but that was the case. The far-right “othering” of people is a result of a deliberate and hateful ideology aimed at seizing power.
