Newham Council is at it again. We’ve hit the national headlines for all the wrong reasons. Here the liberal-left agenda rules, bulldozing all before it – including vulnerable children – and creating bad publicity.

Mr and Mrs “A” clearly have been superb parents to a number of fostered and adopted children. A review panel described them as “strong, caring, sensitive, supportive and resourceful”.

They have adopted and raised a particular boy for five years, and when they heard his two-year-old half-sister (known as “K”) was in need of a home because of her disturbed mother’s drug abuse, they tried to bring the siblings together by applying to adopt “K” too.

Thank God there are such caring and compassionate people.

But of course, they reckoned without Newham Council. Mr “A” told social workers that he had once smacked the boy and he abruptly ran into Newham’s ideological buffers: the couple were immediately disqualified from adopting “K”.

No matter that it is within the law for parents to use ‘reasonable chastisement’ including smacking; that Ed Balls MP, Secretary of State for Children, has said that a ban on smacking “would be the wrong thing to do for the children”; and that Beverley Hughes MP, Minister of State for Young People, has said recently that it shouldn’t be a crime for a mum to smack her naughty child. Newham Council knows better.

Mr and Mrs “A” applied to the High Court for a judicial review of the case, at the end of which Mr Justice Bennett roundly laid into the Council. Finding in favour of the couple, he said the Council’s decision was “bizarre”, “unreasonable” and made “in dangerous territory”.

But Newham Council has its own unique brand of arrogance so the judge’s findings were rejected. “Having carefully considered all the court papers… we have decided that the couple should not be approved as adopters for the London Borough of Newham,” said a town hall statement.

So there you have it. Newham Council disagrees with parental smacking so stuff the children. Ideology comes before common sense and town hall arrogance precludes “K” from joining her brother in a caring supportive home.

I stand with Mr “A”.  As a parent I have very occasionally used smacking for chastisement purposes and may do so again. I believe a sharp smack on the back of the leg by a committed parent as the fore-warned consequence of a child’s destructive behaviour can be extraordinarily effective.

And now, having publicly made my stand alongside Mr “A”, I suppose I can expect the dreaded dead-of-night knock on my door by social workers and apparatchiks representing the Peoples Politically Correct Republic of Newham…