Back in the merry old 1960s, a fellow student who hailed from Great Britain and regularly railed against the Vietnam War assured me that, through thick and thin, Americans could always count on Britons as allies.

The other day, Her Britannic Majesty’s Consul-General Paul Lynch, based in Houston, said the same in a Trib editorial board meeting, then at Baylor University.

That’s worth noting, especially considering how relations between Great Britain and the United States have strained in recent months over everything from British troop levels in Afghanistan to allegations of impropriety over the release of the Lockerbie bomber.

Lynch, 46, dismisses allegations that Britain pressured Scotland to release Abdel Basset al-Megrahi, terminally ill with prostate cancer, so that Britain could curry favor with Libyan officials and win oil and trade concessions.

The August decision by a Scottish magistrate was based on law, not politics or trade, Lynch says. He echoes embattled British Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s insistence that the release of the only man convicted of the 1988 Pan Am bombing that killed 270 people was “quasi-judicial.”

As for what some claim is the Brits’ flagging commitment of 9,000 troops to our increasingly uncertain Afghan mission and reports that the British intend no greater numbers, Lynch says the United Kingdom will continue to have a solid presence there for years to come.

“We have a commitment to be there for the long haul,” he told us. “We think the mission is pretty clear. We want them (Afghans) to run their country. We’re trying to help them build their capacity to do so. We think those goals are the right ones and reasonably clear.”

The prime minister, he says, describes the challenge in Afghanistan as a “generational problem.” The current military goal is to better equip British forces.

As for other allies we supposedly have in our Afghan mission, “the United Kingdom, as is the United States, is saying other countries need to be more involved.”

Lynch says the British government is worried by the Obama administration’s new tariff on Chinese tires, calling it a “major error,” especially in a recession.

“We want to keep an eye on anything that smacks of protectionism,” he said, adding that the initial Chinese response — threats to hold up U.S. imports of poultry and auto parts — was “robust but measured.”

As for the climate bill that passed the House of Representatives this summer, Lynch says the British government is encouraged that some leaders in the United States are committed to clean air and alternative energy sources, even if the issue is proving volatile for President Obama.

Then there’s health care. Yes, Americans regularly deride the British public health care system. Lynch chuckles at the attacks and says some critics lie about its effectiveness by being slyly selective in the statistics cited.

“What (American critics of the British health care system) are doing is pointing out one or two things where they are ahead of the international average,” he said.

He also mentions allegations of the Brits rationing health care.

“The idea any kind of health care system doesn’t ration is a misunderstanding,” he said in his understated way. “In the United States, it’s done through the market. In the United Kingdom, it’s done another way.”

So what on earth was Her Britannic Majesty’s Consul-General doing at Baylor? Lynch says the British government has long counted on Americans to look fondly on the U.K., if only because so many of their ancestors hailed from the Old World.

But with greater diversity of Americans these days, that may be changing.

“We need to get out and talk to the next generation of Americans about the U.K. since they don’t necessarily have that link,” he said.

When Americans consider their heritage and ancestry, he says, “they may now be looking south rather than east.”