SOMETIMES I am shocked by my own ignorance or, more correctly, lack of knowledge. Then again if you are denied access to information you remain in ignorance through no fault of your own. I was a reasonably diligent student I remember being schooled in history, we learned of the Battle of Hastings and Julius Caesar nobody mentioned English troops and tanks being despatched to Glasgow in 1919 to quell riots involving hungry Glaswegians. Neither did they mention a similar incident in 1725 when 19 Glaswegians died at the hands of English troops. I heard all about Waterloo and Napoleon but nothing about the 1885 Berlin conference where the major European nations arbitrarily carved up amongst themselves the continent of Africa its resources and inhabitants to create its present-day borders.

We were certainly never told about the Zinoviev Letter and the involvement of MI5 and MI6 on behalf of the Establishment in attempting to bring down the Labour government in 1924. I would never have heard about this attempted coup if The Herald had not reported yet another occasion, just as in the case of the paedophile investigative report, where Whitehall has lost, misplaced or possibly destroyed hundreds of files full of information including the Zinoviev case ("Call for inquiry into lost Government files", The Herald, December 27).