Bum rap pinned on parents

Acts of brutality are carried out in the name of ‘reasonable chastisement’ but, says Rachel Johnson, banning smacking will only encourage children to believe that they have a right to behave as they please

Well, this promises to be a fair old punch-up. In the anti corner, we have some 350 parenting and counselling organisations, 180 MPs and peers, the Methodist and Catholic Churches, the European Court of Human Rights, the UN Human Rights Committee, the Lib Dems, 71 per cent of the general public (according to our old friend Mori Z. Poll), Penelope Leach, a roster of the great and the good from David Aaronovitch to Benjamin Zephaniah, and the late Dr Spock.

In the pro corner, we have Evangelical Christians, all those who believe in the inerrancy of the Bible, King Solomon, the Labour government, the Scottish Executive, and the late Dr Spock.

So how come Dr Spock appears twice? And what’s Labour doing with that crowd? Well, we’ll come to Labour later, but during the course of Spock’s career as the world’s paediatrician, he changed his mind about smacking, and became an anti. But as he’s dead, he is not here to lend his support in person to the hugely powerful campaign that is gathering steam in Westminster to remove from parents the right to ‘reasonably chastise’ their own offspring, a removal that will necessarily criminalise millions of loving, responsible parents who slap a naughty child on the back of the legs, as well as this country’s legion of vicious, violent, Millwall-supporting low-lifes who duff up their own kids for laffs.

I’m not exaggerating. If you read the literature put out by the Children Are Unbeatable! alliance, the lead agency of the anti-smacking lobby group, you would think that this country was a nation of child-beaters, and be ashamed to be British.