PRESSURE is mounting on the Government to introduce a ban on smacking after a surge in support from MPs for laws that would give children the same legal protection from assault as adults.

A record 170 MPs say that they are in favour of such a reform, representing a dramatic increase in parliamentary support. In 2004 an early day motion in the House of Commons calling for an end to legalised violence against children was signed by 83 MPs.

Now a new motion, sponsored by the Labour MP Greg Pope, has more than doubled this, attracting support from all parties, including 113 Labour members. At the same time there is growing international pressure for a smacking ban in Britain from the bodies responsible for monitoring compliance with binding United Nations and Council of Europe human rights agreements. Campaigners for a ban are backed by a report published today by the Children are Unbeatable Alliance, a coalition of 400 charities and organisations supporting children, which states: “Children should be the first, not the last, members of human societies to be effectively protected from assault.”

The Government has long resisted attempts to introduce a smacking ban, arguing that it would be unpopular and unworkable, but pressure has been growing since 1998, when the European Court of Human Rights declared that the ancient British law that permits the reasonable chastisement of children was unlawful. The ruling has been endorsed by two parliamentary committees and the monitoring committee of the UN Rights of the Child Convention.

A poignant sign of how attitudes towards smacking have changed in recent years comes from Tony Blair. He admitted smacking his three older children when they were small, but said that he has not smacked his six-year-old son, Leo.

The Children’s Commissioners said in January that the Government could no longer ignore the issue. “Children have the same right as adults to respect for their human dignity and physical integrity and to equal protection under the law, in the home and everywhere else,” they said. “There is no room for compromise.”

Sir William Utting, spokesman for the Children are Unbeatable Alliance, said yesterday that the UN had made it clear that all countries, including Britain, must act to meet human rights standards under the Convention on the Rights of the Child. “Ifs, buts and maybes are not good enough. Equal protection is an obligation, not an option,” he said.

MPs and peers are growing increasingly concerned that there should be an opportunity for a vote on equal protection for children in the early years of this Parliament. Labour backbenchers continue to plead with ministers to allow them to vote freely according to conscience. In the 2004 vote Labour whipped against an equal protection proposal.

Last night Lord Kinnock, the former Labour leader, called for the introduction of a smacking ban before the 21st century gets much older. The Tory peer Lord St John of Fawsley said that the case for equal protection for children was now unanswerable.

Annette Brooke, Liberal Democrat spokeswoman on children and the family, said: “There can be no justification for the smallest and most fragile of our citizens having less protection from assault than the rest of us take for granted.”

Kevin Barron, the Labour chairman of the Health Select Committee, said: “Hitting children, even if we dress it up with cosy euphemisms like smacking, hurts emotionally and physically.”

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