WHAT'S the link between a Muslim teenager in Luton who took her grievance to the House of Lords and a schoolgirl in York banned from school for wearing a stud? We'll come to that in a minute.

Shabina Begum, 17, claimed her human rights were violated when she was banned from wearing a head-to-toe Islamic dress to school. An appeal court ruled in her favour, only for the law lords to overturn that verdict two months ago.

The forthright teenager had argued that banning her from wearing the jilbab at Denbigh high school in Luton, Bedfordshire, breached her rights to an education and to manifest her religion. She lost two years education before moving to a school which allowed her to wear her preferred religious garb.

One striking aspect of the case was that the school which had so offended Shabina does, in fact, go out of its way to accommodate religious dress, and for two years the teenager had happily worn tunic and trousers, known as the shalwar kameez.

The affair of Shabina Begum stirred up many headlines and also, I suspect, allowed some people to give vent to closet-racist grumbles. Such unkind observations did not enter my liberal-minded head, but then you wouldn't really expect them to.

What did stir a little bit of mental dust was the thought that Shabina Begum, for all her intelligence and moral steadfastness, was only having a teenage moment. All right, it was a very long and principled teenage moment, but I couldn't help feeling she was being awkward for awkwardness sake, and citing her human rights while doing so.

Human rights are very important, more important than most things. Yet nowadays people shout "human rights" about anything and everything, which tends to demean those who are truly in need of theirs.

While Shabina Begum's story was unusual, the complaint made by a teenage pupil at Millthorpe School is more run of the teen mill.

Rachel Ellis was excluded from school because she refused to remove a lip piercing she had done over Easter. She is anxious because she is excited about attending the end-of-term prom, which she fears she may have to miss.

This matter may even have been settled already, because Rachel's mother was due to meet the head teacher today, according to a report yesterday in The Press.

Head teachers are busy people, no doubt, and having to preside over arguments about inappropriate piercings, provocative haircuts and the like cannot be easy.

Perhaps Rachel will have decided to forget her principle and remove the stud. Being middle-aged, I look on such studs with a degree of alarm and wonder why an attractive girl would want to have metal inserted into her face. I also wonder, with a nervous passing sigh, how I will react if my daughter, on the cusp of teenagehood, ever asks if she can have something similar done to her face.

Every time I read one of these stories, which is quite often as they do come round, I usually think: oh, he/she is just having a teenage tantrum over something that is hardly important.

But then, I'm not teenager, so what do I know? The link hinted at in my opening paragraph is that Shabina and Rachel are teenagers and they do know what matters. Or at least they know what matters to them right now, which is almost the same.

o BACK in the grown-up world (allegedly), an unnamed Labour rebel who attended Monday's meeting with Tony Blair was quoted in a national newspaper as saying, "We have been eyeball-to-eyeball, and the prime minister has blinked."

Dear me, these politicians do like to get swept up in macho posturing. Who does this nameless man think he is - Clint Eastwood or something? And can't you just see the "film" titles: A Fistful Of Votes... For A Few Voters More.

I bet the politician with no name felt good as he strode off on Monday night, chewing an imaginary cheroot and aiming an invisible six-shooter at fading sheriff Blair.