Fat-shaming may be tough but we need it
Widdecombe
ON THURSDAY last week I tuned into BBC Two to watch Living With The Brainy Bunch, a programme which set out to prove what most of us already knew: that the attitude of parents towards education is crucial in determining performance at school. However, what caught my attention about the demotivated, unfocused, bored female student was that she was hugely fat. The poor girl looked as if she cared as little about herself as she did about Pythagoras’s theorem.
It seems that almost every day we read about the impact of the obesity crisis on the NHS (that was something else Bevan could not have foreseen), of the increasing prevalence of lifestyle-related diabetes and earlier this month our worried Government introduced a sugar tax.
When I wrote on this page in the summer of 2016 that, having endured a four-hour flight with the people either side of me flowing into my space, I thought the very obese should pay for two seats, I was pilloried by various commentators for “fat-shaming”.
Well, sorry, but now I have come to the view that the very fat should be ashamed if their condition adversely affects themselves or others and just as we have shamed smokers and drink-drivers so we need to shame the seriously obese. That is more effective than any tax.
FIRST, let me stress what I am not talking about. I do not and never have signed up to the neurotic counsels of perfection which see parents receive letters because visibly fit children have failed some precise BMI measurement. I am not talking about the slightly plump or even the plain fat.
I am talking about only the dangerously fat taking some responsibility for themselves. If they need more than one seat they should pay for two and if that embarrasses them, tough. Parents who can see their children are severely overweight should be called in and told to do
WHY ARE THOSE CLAIMING TO BE ‘PRO-CHOICE’ ACTUALLY THE COMPLETE OPPOSITE?
IT ALWAYS surprises me that those who proclaim themselves “pro-choice” in the abortion debate actually support only one choice: that to abort an unborn child.
One does not need to be a pro-lifer to believe that, bearing in mind the report of the independent Care Quality Commission about the ethos and practices of the Marie something about it and that their efforts will be monitored and if they don’t like it, then tough again.
I myself became badly overweight in middle age so nobody can say I am condescending from on high but I was never so fat that I encroached Stopes Clinics. Those who offer an alternative have for years been available outside abortion clinics but now Ealing Council have forbidden them to be so.
Everybody can understand that women do not want to be harassed at a stressful time but the law already forbids that. What most of these vigils do is simply make visible on another’s seat space or became demotivated or physically inactive and I never placed a burden on the NHS.
We in the West live in enviable times: we can pile our supermarket trollies high, we have a vast range of an alternative route and many women have, over the years they have been operating, approached them and received help in a situation where they thought there was none.
There used to be a Life house in my old constituency which sheltered pregnant women and then let both them and their children restaurants and food outlets, fridges and freezers, fresh food and packaged. With privilege, however, comes responsibility both to ourselves and to others. Those who fail to exercise it should not expect to be immune from criticism. stay for 18 months after the birth. I was at its 21st celebration which was attended by many of the mothers, their children and in some cases their children’s children. All said the same thing: but for the work of Life the only route would have been to the abortion clinic.
What a good job they didn’t live in Ealing.