Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:59 pm on 12 February 2019.
Well, I thank you for your clarity on the issue. Now, the results of the official consultation on the smacking ban showed that opinion was fairly split on this. Half of the respondees felt that legislation would protect children’s rights, but half felt that it would not. It seems that, at best, the smacking ban is a law that will split the Welsh electorate down the middle. Now, this is the Assembly’s own consultation. All of the opinion polls conducted before this have shown a strong view against the smacking ban. I wonder if your Welsh Labour Government has thought enough about how the smacking ban is going to be policed. How will it be enforced? Will we have children informing against their own parents? And, if we do, who will be able to verify whether the claims are true or not? We could be heading into some kind of imitation of Stalin’s Russia of the 1930s, when perfectly law-abiding parents got sent to prison camps because their children were encouraged to whisper allegations against them to their schoolteachers. Is this the kind of scenario you want to occur here in Wales?