THE BBC2 documentary Britain’s Forgotten Slave Owners, largely based on UCL’s research into the slave-owner compensation claims of the 1830s, made the point (revealed by the Sunday Herald in December 2010) that “proportionately Scotland had more slave owners than everywhere else”.

As well as highlighting the likes of John Gladstone, the Leith-born merchant and slave-owner who was given the equivalent of £80 million for the inconvenience of having his 2,500 Guyana slaves set free, it drew a parallel with the 21st-century Scottish bank bailouts, another case in which pragmatism dictated the guilty went unpunished. In the 19th-century case it was also because the alternative – continuation of the system – was even worse.

Agenda does not go along with the programme’s assertion that modern racism owes much to the propaganda campaigns of the slave-owning interests, or that the compensation system spawned the bureaucratic state. But like everything provoked by the UCL project they are fundamental challenges to the way we see modern Britain, Scotland very much included.

AN interesting addendum to the FM’s speech about women’s rights in China: Scots businessman Tommy Cook of Calnex, visiting that country, told us of his “unique experience in 33 years of attending technology client meetings” that all five of the customer’s team were women.

“In China and India they do a far better job at encouraging girls to follow a career of technology ... there clearly is a higher ratio of women to men than there is in the West. Equal opportunities are not the reason, it’s schools’ careers guidance.”