Brexit has increased the risk to our overseas territories

Though with considerably less bloodshed involved, the final stages of Britain's retreat from colonialism are becoming almost as tricky as the creation of the empire itself. The sun has not quite set on what was once the greatest imperial power since the Romans, at its peak encompassing fully a quarter of the Earth's people, but soon another few islets will no longer be coloured pink, as once they were in the school atlases.

- SEAN O'GRADY

The British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT), an archipelago best known by its largest components, the Chagos Islands (including Diego Garcia), will soon be no more - and, on the whole, it is entirely right that this should be so. Formal sovereignty of these lands will be transferred back to the independent state of Mauritius, and the very important US-UK (mainly US, to be honest) military installations will be retained under a 99-year lease arrangement.

It marks the end of a long-running and irksome legal dispute, and will thus place the islands on a far more sustainable basis in international law. One of the last "African" colonies will be liberated, peacefully, leaving only the Spanish enclaves on the north cost of Morocco as reminders of the imperial age.

Put at its simplest, the United Kingdom has no business exerting "sovereignty" on tiny specks of land in the middle of the Indian Ocean. "Losing" the BIOT is not like handing Yorkshire over to the Danes or Kent to the French, and neither does it carry the same significance as the dissolution of British rule in Ireland, Egypt, India or Palestine; there is no need for an emergency session of parliament. It is a long-overdue tidying up of an anomaly.

Under international law - or at least United Nations conventions the islands should never have been carved out of the territory of Mauritius in 1965, while it was still a crown colony, in return for the full independence granted in 1968. The Chagossian people should never have been summarily evicted from their homes and sent away to Mauritius, Seychelles, and, er, the less tropical environment of Crawley - to make way for the Americans, who didn't want any locals hanging around such sensitive facilities.