Time for change

Thank goodness Labour MP David Lammy has finally admitted that his party were wrong to reform smacking laws. About time too.

The majority of, what one woman on the ITV News described as the ‘feral vermin,’ that attacked our major cities last year were all under the age of twenty one. The youngest was believed to be just eleven years old. Britain lost its power and its disipline where it had already lost its respect and it only had itself to blame.

Take for example a childs very start to life – nursery school – up and down the country nursery workers are now banned from telling a child that they are ‘naughty,’ because it ‘brands’ them.  Then of course, in 2004 the power to smack your own child was taken out of the hands of parents for fear that the country was failing to provide children with equal protection under the law on common assault.

 Teachers no longer have any power. They cannot touch a child without fear of losing their jobs and the worst part is that children are all too aware of their rights. They know that if any adult breaches the rules of this ‘nanny state,’ that they can kiss goodbye to their livelihood and even their friends and family. Society will simply outcast them in disgust.

Lets face it, coupled with the fact that everyday another tabloid brandishes the news that rapists and paedophiles are getting more and more reduced sentences across their front pages, is it really any wonder that the children on the streets of London, Birmingham and Wolverhampton, thought that they could get away with pretty much anything?  Nobody was going to put them into prison for nicking a CD player, especially not if that murderer down the road only got four years and a telling off?


Nobody’s saying bring back the cane, and I for one believe that there must be some rules in place to stop adults severely hurting their children – just one look at the case of Baby P tells us that we still have monsters in our midst that bend the rules way too far and we CANNOT allow these cases to continue- but we must also give power back to those in control of children. My parents smacked me a handful of times whilst I was growing up and not only did it do nothing to damage my wonderful relationship with them, but it meant that the fear of punishment was always there if I did something wrong, which ultimately stopped me from doing it. My teachers were allowed to shout in our faces, to call us ‘naughty’ and to make examples of us and again, the shame that that brought about was enough to stop us from ‘pushing it too far. ’ We genuinely feared the police, because when I was growing up, prison seemed a scary place (I blame ‘cops with camera’s’ myself but that’s for another time).

Labour were wrong to reform smacking laws and maybe now that they realise so, perhaps we can start to get our Britain back to something that we can all be proud of.