To be fair, Scotland did try and be a colonial power - but was incredibly incompetent at it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darien_scheme

It's kind of interesting that the area is to this day pretty rough, devoid of big settlements and the single reason you can't drive the length of the Americas - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dari%C3%A9n_Gap

Though to be clear I agree that it was incompetence that scuppered the scheme, reading little snippets on the scheme itself the colonists were woefully ill equipped for the task of creating a settlement.

My favourite bit is that the organisation set up to handle the English "bail out" money eventually became RBS which, a few hundred years later ended up requiring yet another epic bailout from the UK government.

I had no idea about that, what an interesting fact :D

I got that from the book "Shredded: Inside RBS: The Bank that Broke Britain" by Ian Fraser.

Another interesting fact: for a short while before it imploded, RBS was actually the largest bank in the world by assets!

The Spanish and Turkish have nothing to do with refugees crossing the channel, though. Why these people do that is because of the previous presence of the British Empire in their corner of the world, otherwise they'd have stopped on the way; there are several countries they have to cross that are not really any worse than the UK for people in their situation.

The Spanish have their own share of problems at their border with Morocco and along their mediterranean coast.

What has the former British empire got to do with choice of destination? Do you mean English speaking?

I though the reason they aim for the UK is the impression of a good quality of life.

For Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the Middle East in general, yes, the language and some kind of cultural knowledge. The same reason why a lot of Vietnamese, Laotian, or Lebanese refugees went to France some decades ago. They need to know about the quality of life, which happens mostly if there is some kind of cultural contact.

Quality of life in the UK is good, don't get me wrong, but not orders of magnitude better than what they could find on the continent.

The reason they desire to come to the UK is that is where the bombs are not being dropped by UK's forces and their allies.

Unless I've been unusually inattentive, I think I'm right in saying the UK isn't currently dropping bombs on France.

Its fascinating that your sly xenophobia has been applied in an argument posited in a thread specifically about Oxford Street, a very English institution, in an attempt to deflect from the very real crimes against humanity for which the English people, as recipients of war treasure, are indeed responsible.

Whataboutism is the last resort of cowards. The fact is, the UK (euphemistically referred to as the "English" by most of the rest of the non-Anglo world) has the blood of millions of innocent victims on its hands TODAY. Not just generationally, but in the context of the current zeitgeist, the "English" are recipients of a great deal of war treasure in the form of direct arms sales to extremist, totalitarian-authoritarian fascist entities across the globe. TODAY.

It is why there are 34 million refugees from our wars out there, today, desperate to escape the bombings that have been carried out on average every twenty minutes, for the last twenty years...

Those bomb sales are war treasure to more than just the denizens of Oxford Street.

did the UK sold bombs (and other armaments) to the regimes of Somalia, Syria, Iraq, Libya... responsible for some of the refugee crisis you're talking about?

Yes. In fact, they did. And they also dropped bombs on those states, causing immense suffering for the civilians that became refugees.