I heard some on the BBC's Life Scientific which caused me concern. The programme profiles and interviews leading scientists. Two of the British women scientists on recently were privately educated. How many women in the UK are privately educated? Statistically, it's surely unlikely that even one privately educated woman would appear on the programme. What worried me was the possibility that opportunities in scientific research were heavily weighted in favour of those whose parents could afford to pay for private school. One of the women I heard went to a school that saw its mission as teaching Home Economics to create good little housewives. And yet it appeared that whatever job this woman wanted to try, doors were opened for her. I think Africa suffers badly due to lack of opportunity for youngsters whose parents are not rich. I worry that maybe perhaps a career in UK science is no longer a question of talent, but of parental income. That's something we can't afford.

When I was a 17 year old office boy at the Glasgow Herald I was sent to the Mitchell Library for about a week to find out what the paper had said about momentous events in history. This was for a book to mark the paper's bi-centenary. I can't remember now much of what I found but I do recall they didn't use the comments on the acquisition of Hong Kong in the early 1840s. Basically, the paper said Britain had been cheated by the Chinese and what was it going to do with this barren island at the mouth of the Canton. What I do remember is how the paper's attitude to the poor and working classes changed after the First World War. Before the war the paper took a paternal and concerned attitude. After the 1918 the working classes were the enemy within. These were days of Red Clydeside. This was the paper read by the handful of men who ran heavy industry in Scotland and who, along with their sons, would cripple attempts from the 1930s onward to diversify the Scottish economy and give workers a wider choice of employers. And then eventually move their shipbuilding operations, etc, to places like Korea. Even before I joined the Herald, Koreans had a higher standard of living than the Scots. The Red Menace of 1918 conjured up by the Herald had been vanquished.

I recently watched an American documentary about the 1944 D-Day Landings. One of the US infantrymen interviewed had an obvious German accent. He was described as being "of German descent". But was he brought up in Germany? Not necessarily. I remember talking to an old Ukrainian guy in Edmonton. He spoke English with a thick Eastern European accent. But it turned out he'd been born and raised in Canada. He had the accent because all the adults in the village he was brought up in spoke English with a thick European accent.

I saw a documentary about the 1994 Mull of Kintyre Chinook Crash, which pretty much wiped out the entire leadership of Britain's anti-terrorism effort in Northern Ireland. I came to Canada in 1997. So I was unaware of the vehemence with which successive government ministers insisted "nothing to see here, move along". The RAF inquiry ruled that two of its top Chinook pilots were guilty of gross negligence. Eventually, it was admitted that there was insufficient evidence to support the finding. So, the public still does not know what really happened. It has come out that there were a lot of concerns about the safety of the American-built Chinook 2 and government ministers were lied to and misled by the Ministry of Defence. The MoD does lie, sometimes stupid lies. Usually it does so due what it interprets as "National Security". Often this simply means not saying anything that might embarrass the Americans.

What do Alberta Premier Danielle Smith and Russian Federation supremo Vladimir Putin have in common? They have both appeared in recent weeks being "interviewed" by American right wing propagandist Tucker Carlson. Smith said she welcomed the chance to tell the world the good news from the Canadian province. Even accepting Carlson's claim to be a journalist, which he is not, Smith does not seem to have been asked by local reporters why she did it twice, once in Calgary and again in Edmonton. In fact it looks like she was pandering to a right wing pressure group, a lot like the old Left Wing Militant Tendency in the UK, which has been taking control of the local branches of her ruling United Conservative Party. These are the kind of people who would vote for Donald Trump if they could. And in fact, I suspect, a lot can as they are dual US-Canadian citizens. Putin just wanted a platform in the west which would not involve being asked any hard questions. Who'd have thunk a hard core right winger like Carlson would be a shill for The Evil Empire? Anyway, when are Smith and Putin going to share a stage? We should be told.