Banned Wagon | 12 October 2002

So, the United Nations weapons inspectors are ready to go in, and this time they are not going to be put off their scent by feeble excuses. They will not be satisfied until every single weapon has been destroyed. Every slipper, every cane, every outstretched bare hand must go: the UN committee on the rights of the child has ruled Mr Blair’s government to be an international pariah because it has failed to ban the smacking of children. ‘We are talking about alternative forms of disciplining children because we are not saying children should not be disciplined,’ the committee chairman, Jacob Doek, told reporters last week. ‘But is it necessary to hit them over the head or kick them in the butt?’

Mr Doek appears not to know that those two particular activities are already banned in British homes, and have been since Victorian times, when the law allowing ‘reasonable chastisement’ was drafted.