Actor Sean Penn says UK should not have sent William to Falklands (Malvinas)

Actor winds up Brits again - but now he faces call to hand back his Malibu estate to Mexico

BY TIM EDWARDS 

A DAY after accusing Britain of "ridiculous colonialism" over the Falkland Islands, Sean Penn has struck again, claiming London's decision to send Prince William to the overseas territory to join an RAF search and rescue team is insensitive.

The Hollywood actor was lampooned by the British media yesterday after calling on the UK to negotiate with Argentina over sovereignty of the Falklands during a meeting with President Cristina Kirchner.

Today, after meeting Uruguayan President Jose Mujica, he waded into the row again.

"Yesterday in Buenos Aires, I spoke to the press and did not expect to be immune to their paraphrases and hyperbolic statements," he began. "However, I will make a small clarification regarding Great Britain and the Falklands.

"My oh my, aren't people sensitive to the word colonialism, particularly those who implement colonialism?

"There are many kinds of colonialism... It's unthinkable that the United Kingdom can make a conscious decision to deploy a prince who is part of the military to the Malvinas, knowing the great emotional sensitivity both of mothers and fathers in the United Kingdom and in Argentina who lost sons and daughters in a war in those islands.

"There are many places to deploy the prince. It is not necessary, when the deployment of a prince is generally accompanied by warships, to send them into the seas of such shared blood."

Penn is on a tour of South America, hoping to persuade governments there to offer aid to Haiti, the earthquake-stricken Caribbean island which has named him its 'ambassador at large'. (He has not mentioned the fact that Argentina has given only $8.3m of the $17.8m aid it promised Haiti in the wake of the 2010 earthquake. The UK, on the other hand, promised $39m and has given a total of $40.5m.)

Meanwhile, on the subject of "colonialism", Penn is facing calls to give up his own land. In a tongue-in-cheek article in The Daily Telegraph today, historian Dr Tim Stanley calls for the actor to hand back his Malibu estate to Mexico.

"His continued occupation of Malibu is an unacceptable mockery of national self-determination," writes Stanley. "The Mexicans owned that stretch of real estate well into the early 19th century and it was stolen by the Americans in a naked act of imperialist aggression." ·