> Britain owes a debt to its colonies. The colonies owe nothing to it, except contempt.

There's pretty clearly a distinction between different individual colonies on this one. Something like the Falkland Islands which had no indigenous population is very very different from Jamaica which was a plantation colony full of slaves, which is yet again very different something like Aden (now part of Yemen) which had about 600 people living there at the time it was annexed and which has had a very very difficult post-independence story.