Reason:

Under the amended offence it will be possible for a parent to be convicted of: smacking a child; not providing it with regular meals; leaving a crying baby alone on the petrol forecourt while visiting the station checkout; even ignoring teenage angst. Indeed, the wayward and emotionally fragile teenager, not to mention the teenager who dislikes his parents’ style of parenting, should have little difficulty making a case for his parents to be prosecuted. Defenders of the new law may guffaw at these examples, and claim that such prosecutions could never happen, but they are wrong.

The article goes onto site the example of a father who was charged for leaving his two year old daughter in the car for a few minutes. While headline cases like this provoke the usual complaints about literal nanny statism, the danger here isn't the absurdity of the laws but their lack of objectivity.

One of the vital safeguards of a free society is well written laws that prohibit activities that can be clearly defined and litigated. That Mr X murdered Mrs Y is an objective action that can be proven, or not proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Evidence in criminal cases can always be questions but at least we are the world of actions and things. Someone is dead, someone is the murdered and there is a chain of evidence that points one way or the other. The process is hardly infallible but by dealing with facts it allows a defendant somewhere to stand and fight.

A legal regime based on emotions, an individual's perception of hate or angst, is no legal regime at all. You cannot have a legal system worthy of the name where fleeting sensations are the substitute for objective actions. Even in cases where no actions are taken, as with death threats, the victim can argue that given the circumstances the threat was real and the fear was legitimate. It was night, the threat came from a stranger and the victim had no real means of defense. The perceptions of a reasonable person but perceptions within an empirically established context.

Laws that drop any context, that rest purely on personal emotions, allow to the accuser and prosecutor near total power. That's not a bug, that's a feature. The goal of these new laws is not to protect children from violent or abusive parents, it's to establish a legal regime where anything a parent might do or not do could be constituted as abuse. The parent is, in effect, now under the arbitrary jurisdiction of the state. The parent has no recourse to fact or logic. Given the ease with which children, including teenagers, can be manipulated by a skillful prosecutor or social worker the state is now, for practical purposes, the true guardian of the child.

The paternalistic instinct dies hard. The whole edifice of the welfare state is based on a paternalistic approach to managing social issues. Much of the health, housing and poverty issues that face the modern West could be more efficiently and humanely handled through direct financial assistance. Even if you accept the need for state involvement, which I don't, modern social policy would likely work far better with cash payments given after meeting a few clearly established criteria. There is, however, in this approach no bureaucratic middleman.

Without the bureaucratic middleman there are fewer jobs for the marginally employable, fewer dues payments to the public sector unions, and above all no one with the power to rule over other people's lives. Government is about force and power. That force can be directed to the peaceful or the violent. Since there are always more peaceful than violent individuals in any society there is a tendency for the state to go beyond its legitimate functions. The classical liberal state was once derided as the "night watchman" state. The planner, the prodder and bully has little purview in such a political arrangement. That's rather the point.

The simplest way to increase work for the power luster, hampered as he is by the still lingering notions of classical liberal government in the modern world, is to smash the law. Instead of a society with few criminals where his power would be correspondingly limited, have a society in which anyone at anytime might be a criminal. The power of the state official goes from limited to unlimited at the few strokes of a pen.

As Ayn Rand observed: Don't question an absurdity, ask only what it accomplishes.