WHERE in the world apart from the obvious would you find Ludlow Castle?

One of the places was Delhi in India where in the early part of the 19th century the building was constructed for Samuel Ludlow, a surgeon with the East India Company.

It is a decent pub quiz question and one that has a particular pertinence now – 70 years on from the granting of Indian independence.

Many years would pass before Great Britain divested itself of all of its colonies but it was effectively in August 1947 that Britain became an island nation off the coast of Europe rather than an Imperial power.

Unfortunately, despite the passage of nearly three quarters of a century, there remain too many people who have not come to terms with this and continue to fantasise about a return to a past that is long gone.

India had been the jewel in the imperial crown but the irony is that having clung on for too long when the end came Britain could not wait to get out and a scuttle to leave left consequences which continue to reverberate.

The decision to partition India by creating West and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) resulted in the most hideous bloodshed.

It continues to provide an ongoing enmity between India and Pakistan made worse by the fact that both of these nations have nuclear weapons.

While the idea was to leave Pakistan as a homeland for Muslims and India for Hindus it is a fact that India continues to be home to the third biggest population of Muslims in the world.

While terrible poverty remains along with social problems and serious issues including around the treatment of women, India has made a decent fist of things and is now the biggest democracy and one of the biggest economies in the world.

Pakistan has been less of a success and there is no doubt that the way that the British left India was not its finest hour.

It belongs to the catalogue of things that happened because politicians of all persuasions continually fail to think through the consequences of their actions.

This litany of mistakes includes: the Suez crisis that did huge damage to the global reputation of the UK, the deregulation of the financial services sector that sowed the seed for the financial crash, the fetish for home ownership that is such a factor in the housing crisis, the intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan and more recently the fostering of the Arab spring and intervention in Syria. The most recent addition to this list being the European Referendum.

Of course, hindsight is the finest of things and some of the decisions that went so horribly wrong were made with the best of intentions.

Like so many of the decisions that have been made over the years by our political leaders, Ludlow Castle in Delhi did not have a happy ending.

It was demolished in the 1960s and a secondary school built on the site.