For some reason I find myself in disagreement with our august leader writer (that's him, two screens along) over plans to prevent car owners from moving into a new housing development in York.

City of York Council wants motorists to be banned from applying for tenancy of houses scheduled to be built off Lawrence Street, and aims to take car ownership into account when deciding who can live in the properties.

Tuesday's leader column described this proposal as "a ham-fisted attempt at social engineering", and it is true that the council might have seen this one coming.

Yet to hear Tory leader John Galvin speak on this matter, it would be easy to believe that the Labour-controlled council he opposes had suggested these houses would only be available to people who were prepared to have a bicycle surgically inserted in a tender place.

"I believe," said Mr Galvin, with thunderous indignation (well, it looked that way on the page), "this is acting against the 1998 human rights act, which the Labour Government has signed up to..."

I have a car and very convenient it is too, but I don't consider ownership of my ageing Swedish motor to be a human right. Usually human rights indicate more pressing matters, such as staying alive, not being tortured, free speech, those sort of distractions. The freedom to own a Ford Mondeo that can be washed on Sundays seems a little less pressing.

Mr Galvin believes "everybody has a right to own a car and a right not to be discriminated against for owning one". Yet he seems to have missed the point. For what is wrong with a few houses being built for people who do not own a car? Diehard drivers can always go and find somewhere else to live. And this is a small development. Who knows? In the future perhaps whole estates will be built for those who don't drive, or are prepared to live without a car.

I wouldn't choose to live in such a place, but others might. And their reward would be a home that was not hemmed in by cars. For we are ringed by metal these days, with cars camped outside our front doors like tin sentries.

All of which confirms the car as the perfect modern contradiction: useful, desirable, potentially lethal and possibly containing the seeds of our fume-filled doom. I can't offer a solution to this, or much else probably, but I can't see the harm in a few car-less houses.

SMACKING is out - unless you do it on the bottom. Such is the newest proposal from the Government. There is perhaps a problem here. For in suggesting that it will be illegal for parents to smack their children anywhere apart from on the bottom, the Government appears to endorsing the bottom-bashers of this world.

Now I accept that Tony Blair isn't exactly saying "make my day - smack that baby's bottom", though the implicit endorsement of the palm on bum manoeuvre amounts to something dangerously similar.

The trouble is that in trying to be both modernising (corporal punishment out) and traditional (a smack is just a smack), the Government has tied itself into a typically elaborate knot.

Eighteen months ago, the Government recognised it would have to change the law on the right to beat one's children, following a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights. Yet Paul Boateng, then the health minister, said: "This Government believes in parental discipline. Smacking has a place within that..."

Well, this parent believes in discipline, in an oh-please-don't-do-that sort of way. I can't say I've never smacked, for that would be a shameful lie. But I smacked very rarely, never recently and hated myself every single wretched time. For I can't help but worry that hitting children is a strange way of teaching them anything.

20/01//00

If you have any comments you would like to make, contact Julian Cole directly at julian.cole@ycp.co.uk

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.