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It is supposed to be an account of one family's experience of the American war of independence against Britain. It is actually pure fiction, but fiction of an unusually nasty and slanted type. It should play to empty cinemas throughout the kingdom and any theatre fool enough to show it should be punished in the pocket - not just because it insults this country and its people but because it insults the intelligence of anyone who watches it.

I ask what sort of people they think we are because the film portrays the British as sadists, Nazis, atrocity-mongers, child-murderers, snobs, moral cowards and, in our spare time, mincing effeminates and vain dandies. That may be the general opinion held in Southern California but if we were really like this then it would be extremely unwise to unleash such a picture on us. Such a people would respond in ways so horrible that I will not describe them here in case I am accused of inciting such unBritish behaviour, which I certainly am not.

We are generally pretty tolerant of American misreadings of history. My response to the unbelievable piffle U571 - a film in which the US Navy captures a crucial Nazi code machine - is to say that British studios could and should have made a better version of the story. But The Patriot is different. This is not just a matter of British actors being cast as villains in a distant and irrelevant past. Nor is it a matter of the Americans stealing our valour from us. It is part of what seems to be a general smearing of this country's history and nature.

As a passionate but critical British patriot, proud of this country and convinced that it has in general been a force for good in a bad world, you might expect me to say this. But I am not alone. Jonathan Foreman, film critic of the New York Post, has written the following devastating condemnation of The Patriot: "If the Nazis had won the war in Europe, and their propaganda ministry had decided to make a film about the American Revolution, The Patriot is the sort of movie you could expect to see."

Having seen the film on your behalf, I would like to endorse this verdict without reservation. I should point out here that I have lived in the US and love it dearly. It remains the most reliable arsenal of liberty on the earth's surface. I write this more in sorrow than in anger.

I am more than happy to celebrate the Fourth of July, which seems to me to be a festival of profoundly British ideas of liberty and law. I think the American colonists were right in their demand for no taxation without representation and I think George III and Lord North handled them stupidly.

I regret that we employed German mercenaries to fight some of our battles for us. I also think it a strange paradox that we were defeated thanks to the French navy, the fleet of a liberty-hating, intolerant autocracy. I am sure that we did not always fight kindly, and I would be surprised if wicked things were not done on both sides.

But experts on the revolutionary war agree that British regular troops never behaved as they do in this despicable film. In fact, as Jonathan Foreman points out, one key incident in the drama is actually paralleled only by the behaviour of Nazi soldiers in the Second World War.

It was the Waffen SS who massacred civilians by locking them in a church and burning them alive, in the French village of Oradour-sur-Glane. I do not believe British troops have ever done this. Generally, it is the kind of thing that British troops prevent, rather than the sort of thing they do. This fact is particularly striking when you discover that the film's director, Roland Emmerich, was born in Germany in 1955.

This is a thoroughly morally dubious movie. A French soldier is shown sniggering over the possibility of murdering wounded British redcoats. The whole issue of atrocities is muddied because the central character, played by Mel Gibson, has committed them in the past in the bitter frontier wars with the French. He is also shown falling into a near-obscene frenzy of ketchup-soaked brutality, in a skirmish where he avenges a dead son. What are we supposed to think?

One of history's greatest and most important battles about liberty is here portrayed without any discussion of the real issues which divided the two sides and changed the world. Instead, the mainspring of action is Gibson's retaliation to the murder of his young.

It is also ridiculous and inconsistent. The true state of blacks, in the deep South colony of South Carolina, was certainly not as relaxed and happy as it is shown here. And it is odd that Hollywood - which has recently spent so much time slandering the heterosexual married family - here idealises such families to the point of sickly nausea.

Shun this celluloid pack of lies.

Movie's make-believe massacres and war crimes The Patriot is the story of Benjamin Martin, a war veteran-turned-pacifist who takes up arms against the British when redcoats murder one of his sons.

His bitter opponent, a cruel British officer called Colonel William Tavington, believes in defeating the American rebels with brutality. Neither actually existed though Martin is based on a Carolina militia leader called Francis "Swampy Fox" Marion - a slave-owner who is said to have hunted native Americans for sport and raped his slaves. The film shows Martin as a kindly furniture-making widowed father.

Tavington seems to be based on a British officer Banastre "Bloody Ben" Tarleton, accused of massacring American soldiers after the Battle of Waxhaws in 1780. That accusation is disputed by US historians. There is also no evidence that Tarleton broke the rules of war or that he shot a child in cold blood.

Yet Tavington is shown shooting a teenage boy and trying to execute a uniformed messenger as if he were a spy. There is no historical record of British troops behaving in this way. He also massacres the entire population of a village by herding them into a church and burning them alive. There is no evidence this happened in the War of Independence although there was such an incident in the French village of Oradour-sur-Glane in 1944, when 642 civilians died at the hands of German SS troops.

The film's historical adviser, Steven Lubar, an expert in military strategy, pointed out this error to director Roland Emmerich and urged him to leave the scene out. Emmerich insisted the episode was "necessary to the story".