Nursery World - MSPs speak up to defend smacking

The Scottish Executive's abandoned proposal to ban the physical punishment of under-threes came under fire in a heated debate in the Scottish Parliament last week. Justice Minister Jim Wallace opened the debate on the Criminal Justice (Scotland) Bill by telling MSPs that the Executive had reluctantly dropped the proposal following the opposition of the Parliament's Justice 2 Committee (News, 19 September). He said, 'We are disappointed that the committee cannot agree that there is an age below which parents should not hit children. We have always said that we would listen to all the arguments and we note what the committee said about the evidence that it took in that area.'

Justice Minister Jim Wallace opened the debate on the Criminal Justice (Scotland) Bill by telling MSPs that the Executive had reluctantly dropped the proposal following the opposition of the Parliament's Justice 2 Committee (News, 19 September). He said, 'We are disappointed that the committee cannot agree that there is an age below which parents should not hit children. We have always said that we would listen to all the arguments and we note what the committee said about the evidence that it took in that area.'

The proposal was roundly condemned by Conservative MSPs, with David McLetchie, MSP for the Lothians, describing it as 'politically-correct nonsense that would have banned parents from smacking their children and turned loving parents into criminals'. Mrs Lyndsay McIntosh, MSP for Central Scotland, said 'parents had a fundamental right to administer mild physical chastisement to an errant offspring', while Bill Aitken, MSP for Glagow, said the law as it stood was sufficiently robust to deal with abuse.

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