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Shona Main deplores the growing support for hard line policies on youth crime in Scotland.

We are a year away from an election in Scotland and already the parties are saddled up and trying to push each other off their horses. On the very day the Liberal Democrat deputy first minister and justice minister, Jim Wallace, was dodging the bullets of the Scottish parliament's justice committee over the executive's plans to ban the smacking of under-threes, he was usurped back at the ranch.

As in Westminster, increasing public pressure is pushing the Scottish executive to consider new, radical and fast ways to deal with youth crime. In an attempt to wrest political control of the crucial law and order agenda, the first minister announced that Labour's Cathy Jamieson, the education minister, would head up a new Scottish executive assault on youth crime.

The Liberal Democrats are understandably miffed about their minister being pushed to one side. But more worrying for them - and for those who work with children and young people - is that if the minister is edged out, with him will go many of the more reasoned approaches to some of Scotland's most complex problems, and in will come the more hard line policies that seem to push for a quick fix.

This policy shift comes at a time when the parliament is considering the Criminal Justice Bill. It will forever be known as the smacking bill or, as one MSP quipped, "the bill that lets them get away with it for another two years". They fear more "one-boy crime waves" and infuriated Labour backbenchers are turning on Wallace for having too soft an approach towards what they regard as the scourge of their communities.

Oddly, Wallace is also under fire for the "harshness" and "futility" of his plans to ban the use of physical chastisement for children under three. Although the ban has been applauded by children's charities and services alike and panned by the Church of Scotland, much of the parliamentary unease concerns whether the proposal is actually workable.

MSPs who once championed this policy are now peevish about proceeding with this ban if it is going to be so difficult to enforce and, perhaps more significantly, portrayed by the media as pointless. But Wallace has stuck his spurs in. "If we can build a culture in which resorting to hitting is not a reflex, but something that parents must stop and think about and then perhaps choose to use alternative strategies, in the longer term that must be for the benefit not only of children but of the wider community."

There is nothing wrong with a piece of legislation that aspires to change behaviour even if it cannot always affect it. It would be a tragedy for the Scottish parliament and executive if ideals were the first thing offloaded when the political stakes are high.

Shona Main is the parliamentary officer for the Association of Directors of Social Work.