Article 12 of the Convention incidentally enshrines the right to marry for men and

(Article 12 of the Convention, incidentally, enshrines the “right to marry” for “men and women of marriageable age”: presumably its drafters meant marriage of a man to a woman, but grammatically – and morally – the right should apply to same-sex marriages too.)At long last, gay men will soon be treated the same as heterosexuals and lesbians when it comes to the age of consent for sex. But both gay men and lesbians continue to be lawfully excluded from the armed forces, and need wider legal protection from discrimination.Almost unnoticed, the possibility of such protection has been opened up. You may not have noticed, as you toasted the arrival of summer on Saturday, that 1 May was the day the Amsterdam Treaty came into force. Originally conceived as a way of keeping up the momentum of European integration after Maastricht, the treaty ended up as a minor tidying-up exercise when it was finally signed two years ago. But it also contained a number of potentially significant enabling clauses, one of which allows the EU to legislate a fuller anti-discrimination law, including discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation and age.It is now up to Jack Straw, the Home Secretary, to make full use of the political space which he and the Prime Minister have succeeded in carving out for the values of “common decency”, as Tony Blair called them in an article yesterday.

Mr Blair was quite right to link the fight for minority rights in this country with the fight for the rights of the Kosovar Albanians in Yugoslavia. The deranged hatred of the nail-bomber, aimed at one minority after another, has focused attention on one of the gaps in modern liberal law.. BRITAIN WILL not be the same again after the elections on Thursday. In most parts of the country outside London, people will be electing councillors. William Hague’s future as leader of the Opposition may hang on these low turnouts, but little else will, except in a few places such as Sheffield where power may change hands. But in Scotland and Wales new national assemblies will be elected that will become living, breathing polities in their own right. Even in Wales, where the Cardiff assembly has been derided as a talking- shop and a wholly owned subsidiary of Labour’s London HQ, there are already signs that a new national politics will quickly take off in unexpected and autonomous directions.

On the issue of tuition fees for university students, for example, it turns out that the Welsh Assembly will be able to reverse the policy made in SW1.
All the more so in Scotland, which is bound to feel, on Friday – in a way most English people can only guess at – a nation again. It is even having a full-scale election campaign of the kind that nation states have, all about taxes and public spending. The paradox is that the Scottish campaign could have been designed as a laboratory test of the thesis that modern electorates will not vote for higher taxes to pay for “better services”. And it looks as though the result will prove that, even in the Sweden of the UK, the voters will tell the tax-raising Scottish National Party that they will take Flash Gordon’s 1p tax bribe, thank you very much.We have our doubts as to whether the half-way house of devolution will be able to contain the new Scottish politics in the medium to long run. Whatever happens, though, the adventure that begins on the day after the elections in Scotland and Wales will be more in the hands of the peoples of those nations than before, and that is a great and welcome change.. IT’S A sunny Saturday morning in the main shopping street of Saltcoats on the north Ayrshire coast. The local MP, the Trade Minister Brian Wilson, is politely but energetically defending the Government’s introduction of pounds 1,000 per year student tuition fees to a middle-aged man in a Kilmarnock FC sweatshirt and his wife, parents of two children at university and one preparing to go.

He explains that the money raised by the fees is needed to prevent the quality of higher education from being fatally diluted by the sheer weight of student numbers. The loan repayment system would ensure that they did not have to be repaid until the student was earning enough to afford it. And was there anything inherently progressive in poorer taxpayers paying out good money to keep at university children of parents who could easily afford to contribute? The couple leave on amicable terms, at least recognising that there is an alternative point of view.
This is politics in its purest form, on the stump in the final week of the Scottish Parliament elections Tuition fees are an important issue. They reflect a policy that is entirely within the constitutional competence of the new Scottish Parliament.

But there is nothing explicitly Scottish about the complaints of Mr Wilson’s two constituents. The same conversation could just as easily take place, and no doubt will, in England during the next general election, where the same policy applies.The view that there is something outlandishly different about many of the issues that concern English and Scottish voters is not that easy to stand up in Saltcoats this morning. Not to mention, to judge by some of the amiable grumbling about council tax levels, the quaint notion that the Scots are somehow in love with the idea of paying tax in a way that the English aren’t. Indeed, there is every sign that the biggest boost to Labour fortunes here, overwhelming every other factor, was Gordon Brown’s – UK-wide – Budget last March.It’s true, of course, that this is a constituency where nationalism struggles to make itself heard, compared to some other parts of Scotland The local council is overwhelmingly dominated by Labour. The Conservatives, not the SNP, came second in the last general election.