"Visits to Glasgow confirmed my grandparents' stories of the sectarian-based hatred that was the backdrop for their growing up. My grandfather's family were staunch Protestants - Glasgow Rangers fans and chapel-goers par excellence. Yet his close friends were Catholic in the main. They were all unusual in the extreme - or so their families told them.

Struggling to come to terms with puberty, adolescence and the opposite sex on Depression-ridden Clydeside, they realised the truth of this. They were unusual, not because they came from different sides of the divide, but because their mutual experience, understanding and respect had allowed them to resist the vilest pressures of sectarian bigotry that were rife then and for a long time after. There must be lessons to learn . . .

"Now, in 1998, seeing the British National Party/National Front push their propaganda through local letter boxes and watching the associated reactions of the people in our school's catchment, I realised again that despite the emergence of New Britain, old conflicts remain. Our society has still not learned the lessons. "We have managed to reduce the level of violence compared to other jurisdictions and other periods in time, but we have not managed to introduce anything like the levels of justice, respect and equality that people wiser than me have been celebrating for years before I even existed."

Tony Morrison, teacher, Birmingham