LETTERS : How to have a say in Ireland

GEOFFREY Wheatcroft writes that the Act of Union of 1801 was meant "to make `Britons' of the Irish, as the Scots had been made in the previous century". In fact, it was the Scots who set out to make "Britons" of the English, starting in 1603 when James VI of Scotland became James I of England, and proclaimed a "Kingdom of Great Britain". And it was the Scots, not the English, who settled Ulster and created the Northern Ireland problem. Tony Blair's proposal to give Scotland a national parliament, while denying one to England, stands in a long tradition of Scottish attempts to destroy England's identity as a nation.

Alan Fisk

Stowmarket, Suffolk