[Seumas Milne is a Guardian columnist and associate editor.]

The reporters who heard David Cameron tell Pakistani students this week that Britain was responsible for "many of the world's problems ... in the first place" seemed to think he was joking. But it's a measure of how far Britain is from facing up to its own imperial legacy that his remarks were greeted with bewildered outrage among his supporters at home.

The prime minister should not "run down his own country", declared the Daily Telegraph, the authentic voice of Tory England, warmly endorsing instead the insistence of his Labour predecessor, Gordon Brown, that "the days of Britain having to apologise for its colonial history are over". In reality, no such apology has ever been made.

Cameron was responding to a question about the Kashmir conflict – a product of Britain's partition of India in 1947 – and was clearly anxious to avoid antagonising either Indian...