Given John Vassallo’s credentials as a former Ambassador of Malta to the EU, one might have expected him to have a greater understanding of British history and the Copenhagen Criteria for membership of the EU than he demonstrated in his article ‘Brexit and the end of colonialism’ (The Sunday Times of Malta, October 28). 

In 1603 the English Parliament, in the absence of a suitable heir to the English throne, petitioned James VI of Scotland to also become King of England, resulting in the Union of the Crowns. Hard to interpret that as an act of colonisation by England – if anything, it could be interpreted as the opposite.

As Scotland is currently an indivisible part of the UK, any possible future formation of an independent Scotland would create a new country and thus would require that new country to apply for EU membership.

Scotland’s economy currently has a deficit equivalent to 7.9 per cent of its GDP, a figure more than two-and-a-half times that required as a pre-requisite for entry to the euro. Hard to conceive how the European Commission could countenance taking on a new Member State with such a deficit when it is already struggling to control the high deficit budgets of member countries Greece and Italy.

With the ratio of Scotland’s trading with the rest of the UK at four times that with the EU, Scotland’s future lies, as it has always been, as part of its own Union, that of the Crowns.

And I would like to know which survey or poll suggests to Mr Vassallo that “the majority of Irish voters in Northern Ireland would rather leave the UK and join Ireland”. While Northern Ireland voters overwhelmingly voted to stay in the EU, to date there has always been a majority voting to remain part of the UK and hence, the intractable border problem with the Republic of Ireland.