The police would be formally discouraged from taking action against adults who tackle misbehaving youngsters under a Conservative government, Dominic Grieve, the Shadow Home Secretary, reveals today.

Fear of legal action, not violence, holds most people back from confronting antisocial behaviour, Mr Grieve said in an interview with The Times.

He said that the recent arrest of a father for smacking his seven-year-old son highlighted the need to reassert adults’ rights to remonstrate with misbehaving children.

“The key issue is that if you turn up at an incident where children have been misbehaving and adults have intervened [and] the child says, ‘That man slapped me’, and there is no visible mark on him, do you say, ‘This is a very serious matter and I’m taking you down to the police station’, or do you say this is something that, historically, people have the discretion to do?

“If someone appears with a black eye or a bruise, or has been beaten with something, that’s a completely different thing from someone making an assertion that that adult touched me in the course of telling me not to misbehave,” he added.

Mr Grieve also criticised ministers for failing to challenge Muslim groups when they gave platforms to extremists and holocaust deniers.

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