Update: The Today programme just repeated the gross error of fact that causing ‘reddening of the skin’ is illegal. In fact, the CPS prosecution guideline explicitly states that what’s illegal is ‘an injury…other than reddening of the skin’.

Just a jaw-dropping lack of research going on here.

What the Children Act 2004 actually did was to outlaw punishment that causes Actual Bodily Harm: serious injury that is “more than transient or trifling”; examples include grazes, cuts, bruises and black eyes.

To be clear, a restoration of the previous law would mean adults could mete out injuries like this to children with impunity.

Lammy – “we should return to the law as it existed for 150 years before it was changed in 2004″
http://www.mumsnet.com/Talk/mumsnet_live_events/a1389861-Live-webchat-with-David-Lammy-MP-on-UK-riots-Tuesday-24th-1pm-2pm

Not sure what’s more disgusting. The call to revert to the previous law, or the idea (pushed by Lammy and his apologists) that concern about parents causing Actual Bodily Harm to their children is some sort of middle-class indulgence.

At this rate, Labour won’t have a single one of its natural supporters left by 2015.

What child-smacking ban? Why Mail was wrong on the law

They’re just quoting David Lammy. Nowhere in that article does the Mail take a view – indeed they finish it by citing two terrible child abuse cases in Lammy’s constituency.

“He also makes a point that deserves attention: if many parents believe smacking is automatically illegal, and do not know how else to discipline their children, we have effectively rendered parenting impossible” – this is tantamount to saying smacking and effective discipline are virtually synonyms – if Lammy really is saying such things then somebody needs to have a quiet word in his ear.

“Update: The Today programme just repeated the gross error ”

And went unchallenged on it by our very own Mr Hundal who was defending Lammey whilst revealing his common bond with Anthony Worrell Thompson

It strikes me that if there is no smacking ban, then what Lammy’s constituents were complaining about not being able to do in order to discipline their children changes dramatically.

Ellie makes a good point in the OP that there seems to be widespread misunderstanding of the law on this.

But the state seems to want to have it both ways.

On the one hand it charges the parent with the responsibility of bringing up the child to have some kind of moral code (and to punish the parent if the child truants or breaks the law).

On the other, it withdraws the authority from the parent to carry this out as required.

These days many parents find themselves threatened with a call to Childline if they so much as raise their voice!!!! When the child has no reason to fear any form of punishment the balance of power within the family changes dramatically, as it has in schools.

[7] “These days many parents find themselves threatened with a call to Childline if they so much as raise their voice!!!!” – if in doubt blame the kids, eh? (terrifying hapless parents with malicious calls to big bruv).

Now back to the reality – this is not the first time a prominent labour politico who happens to be black has put his foot in it over smacking kids.

Paul Boateng was keen to smooth the waters over the smacking issue even though in England one study found “35% of children in a sample of ordinary two parent families had received “severe” physical punishment, defined as the intention or potential to cause injury or psychological damage, use of implements, repeated use, or use over a long period of time. Parents’ views are coloured by their own experiences as children. A study of 11?600 adults showed that 74% of those who had been punched, kicked, or choked by their parents and almost half of those who had been injured more than once did not consider they had been abused”.
http://adc.bmj.com/content/83/3/196.short

@ pagar

“These days many parents find themselves threatened with a call to Childline if they so much as raise their voice”

Well, it’s a good thing that Childline exists, and the parents aren’t going to get in trouble for raising their voice. So I’m not sure what your point is, unless you have some idea of how to prevent people calling Childline with non-actionable complaints.

You know the Doomsday clock which measures, in minutes close to midnight, doom through atomic/nuclear weapons, climate technologies and biological disasters? We could do with one that measures just how much Labour is shifting to the right.

Lammy is an idiot and, similarly, this appeal to supposedly popular right-wing policies is idiocy. What is with so many politicians and their race to the (pre-Victorian reforms) bottom and the obsession with ‘capturing’ the votes of the centre right?

“These days many parents find themselves threatened with a call to Childline if they so much as raise their voice”

There are essentially two issues here; (1) Parents having a lack of confidence to bring up their children, (2) Parents being ignorant about what the law says, possibly believing the ‘PC gone mad’ type tabloid stories, and as a result being timid.

The second issue is one that could be corrected by a more responsible media and active government efforts to correct the myths. The first issue is a more general one about the support given to parents in bringing up their children. The political tendency to which you belong has spent the past decade acting hysterically against government funded schemes to promote good parenting, and would eliminate schemes such as sure start, regarding it as the ‘nanny state’. It has also been responsible for the spreading of many of the PC gone mad stories and spent ages prior to leveson denying there was a problem with the tabloid media in the UK. Libertarianism = non solutions to non-problems.

@ Planeshift

The political tendency to which you belong has spent the past decade acting hysterically against government funded schemes to promote good parenting, and would eliminate schemes such as sure start, regarding it as the ‘nanny state’.

I make no apology for that.

I think we can all agree that they have been a complete waste of money, can’t we?

The Childline conversation seems to have moved to the previous thread….

“I think we can all agree that they have been a complete waste of money, can’t we?”

Actually no. The Welsh version of sure start (flying start) has recieved excellent evaluation and praise for its work, to such an extent even the Welsh Conservatives support it and think it has been value for money. Whilst I’m not going to pretend to be familiar with the literature on how it has operated elsewhere, I would be suprised if there weren’t several examples of it working well in England as well alongside others of it not working.

There is a difference you see between supporting the principle of something ‘the state should fund support for parents who need help in raising their kids’ and having concerns about how it has been implemented, and thus wanting to improve a scheme, versus the baby bathwater approach libertarians often take.

“These days many parents find themselves threatened with a call to Childline if they so much as raise their voice!!!!”

evidence please, Pagar. Otherwise folk might just dismiss it as yet more propaganda. (Love the multiple exclamation marks, by the way).

Oh, and might I ask if you have kids yourself, and if so, how have you (thus far) prevented them from rioting/looting/stabbing old ladies for fun/etc…?

Cheers.

Lammy himself said that he wanted to reverse the law away from the 2004 changes that made it an offence to strike your child hard enough to bruise, cut, etc. This isn’t anything to do with the Mail, and everything to do with a Labour MP engaging (shock horror) in blatant populism (and shilling his book, nothing like profiting off of tragedy and misfortune) with local voters to support the rolling back of the rights of children in this country.

Why is it that out of this affair so many Labour supporters have felt the need to try and pervert reality and make out as if it is the media who have made the link between a non existant smacking ban (which does exist, actually) and Lammy through any other means than simply *quoting what he said*.

For some reason, quite a lot of people seem to think smacking is illegal. I thought it might just be stupidity, but maybe this is a lie the tabloids have been spreading?

Anyway, the riots were caused by capitalism. Anyone on the left who won’t say that is just scared.

I blogged pretty much the same thing myself – I promise I didn’t see this until afterwards (I wonder if the auto-links have included it – I’ll go check).

Here’s the link to mine -http://wp.me/pycui-Go – I’ll pop a link to this site as well in my blog

@ 17 Chris

“Anyway, the riots were caused by capitalism. Anyone on the left who won’t say that is just scared.”

Scared of what, exactly?

@15 Hi Lee – can you expand on how a smacking ban exists, when you have yourself accepted that only injuries at the level of cuts, grazes etc. are banned? Perhaps we have a very different idea of what a smack is.

As for defending Lammy, in fact I favour a complete ban and so disagree with his views as stated, but he does not in fact misrepresent the law as I can see it in the article; the writer alone does that by claiming that causing reddening of the skin is illegal, which it isn’t.

“These days many parents find themselves threatened with a call to Childline if they so much as raise their voice”

Haha, my Girlfriends six year old threatned to call the police after I said he wasn’t getting a debtime story for being cheeky on Sunday night.

Made me chuckle

Headline: “Why Mail was wrong on the law”

The article seems rather generous on this point, apparently making the somewhat unbelievable assumption that what Mail journalists (and their fellow travellers) lack is an understanding of the law.

Sorry, they want their readers to believe leftists have banned smacking, because that makes them angry and hostile to the left. Meanwhile, in other news, Guardianistas have been conniving with Muslims to ban Christmas.

I’m afraid in their world, the truth is for naive losers.