Pete

The recent mistreatment of the by the Home Office has been catching some much-needed headlines of late. But it's not as if Britain had been a paradise for residents of its former colonies until now.

It irks me a bit when people phrase things in terms of "the British did this" or "the Mexicans did that". An adjective like 'British' or 'Mexican' denotes millions of people - millions who aren't going to do the same thing in a given situation.

History counts - born today in 1783 - as one of its great winners. That's a fair point. Bolívar - 'South America's ' - did win countless battles in his long wars of liberation against the Spanish Crown in South America.

Back in June 1988, 72,000 people crammed into the old Wembley Stadium. They were treated to a music masterclass. Some of the eighties' best were performing: Simple Minds, Whitney Houston, Stevie Wonder, Sting.

It was a warm Egyptian summer when in 1975, a 39-year-old Palestinian writer, , strolled up to the Cairo HQ of the Afro-Asian Writers' Association. The assassination of Ghassan Kanafani This was a proud moment for the Palestinian.

- who brought the NHS into existence 70 years ago today - had a disappointing life. I don't mean this in a personal sense.

Left-wingers sometimes ask, resentfully, 'Why is there no socialism in the USA?' The point isn't 100% true, but you can't deny that socialism has had a far less successful past century in the United States than it has everywhere else in the world.

On this day in 1976, the schools of Soweto were empty. It wasn't a weekend or a bank holiday. The black students of the township in southern Johannesburg were on .

Hammersmith in West London was a bit of a melting pot for artsy types around the turn of the twentieth century. The revolutionary English socialist,, made his home there.

– 'The Greatest' – died today in 2016. He suffered septic shock while hospitalised in Scottsdale, Arizona. But he could have died 49 years earlier somewhere in Vietnam.