Leading article: Our kingdom is about to change forever

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.