Welcome experts
JAcK Kilpatrick’s letter about foreign students of nuclear engineering (22 March) reminded me of a lateral thinking alternative to the trillion dollar invasion of Iraq.
Offer citizenship in Western countries to the few dozen leading nuclear and chemical scientists in Iraq with their immediate families.
This is the sort of limited immigration of people who would be of value to the host nation that Ukip supports, rather than that of unlimited people from the poorest countries in Europe and beyond, which we don’t.
The lack of even so few people would have made it impossible for Iraq to produce weapons of mass destruction, even had it been trying to, without all the death and destruction that actually happened.
The option was rejected, which is one of a number of reasons to think those parties pushing for war (Ukip specifically not being among them) did not actually believe their own scare story about WMDs. NEIl crAIG
Secretary UKIP Glasgow branch MIchAEl Fry (Features, 20 March) writes that “livingstone was revered for his heroism. . . in ending the slave trade in central Africa”.
Neither livingstone nor the missionaries inspired by him succeeded in suppressing the slave trade.
The mission stations provided security in their immediate vicinity, but further afield the slave trade and tribal warfare continued unabated.
The slave trade in what later became Malawi was brought to an end in the 1890s by explorer harry Johnston, who was financed by mining magnate cecil Rhodes.
Elsewhere in central Africa the slavers were subdued and tribal warfare brought to an end by the British South Africa company, itself founded by Rhodes.
Both Rhodes and colonial adminstrator lord lugard were great men. If they do not command respect in the Africa of today, it is in considerable part because Britain made no attempt to defend her own colonial record during the period of decolonisation in the 1960s.
In addition, in Northern Rhodesia, the colonial history of the territory was of almost continu- ous economic development and rising African living standards.
When I was working in the copperbelt in the 1970s, Africans remembered the federation as a time of prosperity and contentment.
rIchArd AA dEvErIA I AM concerned at taste in shoes which the young lady royals have taken to wearing.
last year, we had the Duchess of cambridge wearing high heels when opening the new hockey pitches at her old school and earlier this week we saw her getting her high heel caught in a grill while celebrating St Patrick’s Day.
Then we saw Zara Phillips wielding a hockey stick and wearing big heels while opening the new sports centre at her old school (your report, 22 March).
You would have thought they would have learned from each other. Whatever do the groundsmen think of the potential of holes being made in the playing surfaces?
lENA ANdErSoN Elitism does not come into it. To achieve an uptake of more than 25 per cent of families that are classed as suffering financially is a tremendous achievement.
- Hector the Miner Never deny that education is the answer to individual poverty, but it can’t be a solution for society as a whole. Top students need top universities.
- ReprievedSoul The school system should be ensuring that pupils leave school capable of going to university regardless of their background.
- MI Clive It would be interesting to know the percentage of Scots By being “elitist” their qualifications are accepted worldwide.
- Iain in Spain Any imbalance is not the fault of the universities. This is the fault of the high schools.
- BrotherLouis Universities are educational establishments which recruit on ability and previous educational outcomes. Ability does not start at university. So if fewer people from poorer backgrounds are getting into university in Scotland, it is not the universities which are wrong and to blame but the social engineering and education system.
- Richard Lionhart