What connects the fears around the government’s EU Withdrawal Bill and John Walker, the retired chemical company worker whose landmark court case has secured the same rights and entitlements for same-sex couples as for heterosexual ones?
The Supreme Court’s verdict that Walker – who paid into his company pension scheme for 30 years but whose spouse would only have received the fruits of payments made after 2005, when civil partnerships were brought in – rested on legal rights enshrined into law not at Westminster, but in Brussels. (Specifically that of “equal treatment” under the law, enshrined in the Charter of Fundamental Rights.)
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