I concluded at the time
of the riots that
of all the things the government now needed to do, it was the married family which most urgently needed to be rebuilt: I was and remain as
certain of that as anything I have ever written, and I have been saying it repeatedly for over 20 years: I was saying it, for instance, when I was attacking (in The
Mail and also The Telegraph), as it went through the Commons, the parliamentary bill which became that disastrous
piece of (Tory) legislation called the Children Act 1989, which abolished parental rights (substituting for them the much weaker «parental responsibility»), which encouraged parents not to spend too much time with their children, which even, preposterously, gave children the right to take legal action against theirparents for attempting to discipline them, which made it «unlawful for a parent or carer to smack their child, except where this amounts to «reasonable punishment»;» and which specified that «Whether a «smack» amounts to reasonable punishment will depend on the circumstances
of each case taking into consideration factors like the age
of the child and the nature
of the smack.»