Fatties in the firing line

THE FRIDAY THING

The jack-booted march of the health police is coming to a chippy near you.

If you thought, following the triumphant wiping out of the British boozer and its fifth column attack on the puffers and chuffers of the smoking brigade, the army of we-know-what’s-best-for-your health stormtroopers would retire to a cottage in the country where they could drink and smoke in comfort, raising a glass to their successes in the misery-causing stakes, you would be wrong.

Far from being satisfied with their pleasure-quashing antics, the health police have found a new and fast-growing target — the army of wheezing, puffing and gasping fatties who fill our streets and take up two seats on the buses.

The busybody Academy of Medical Royal Colleges wants to wage war on a shopping list of nibbles and treats that the vast majority of folk actually want to eat and drink for no other reason than that they like them.

Prof Terence Stephenson, vice-president of the academy, says that “urgent action, similar to that undertaken to reduce smoking over the past two decades is necessary”.

Coca-Cola and McDonald’s are at the heart of the medics’ obsession, not only because they serve fizzy sugar-filled pop and calorie and salt-laden burgers but because they are both major sponsors of the upcoming Olympic Games.

The prof maintains that people will be influenced to eat more of the companies’ products with the brands appearing so regularly on Olympic TV coverage.

This war on waistlines doesn’t stop there. There are legitimate concerns about the effects, especially on young people, of the ready availability of junk food, chocolates, fizzy drinks and crisps etc from vending machines. But should we legislate for this?

The concern, of course, is the cost of medical treatment all these fat and getting fatter folk will need in future years, not ameliorated by the fact that many of them may die young and thus not be too long a burden on the NHS and will probably not live long enough to draw pensions.

But there does need to be an education-based wake-up call on obesity and healthy eating before the huge growth in the number of fatties knocks the earth of its axis and tips us all into space. Where we will, ironically, be weightless.



Ann Widdecombe has mercifully put away her dancing wellies and taken up a new role in life.

Her mission is to stop young women from getting absolutely ratted (my word, not hers) on Friday nights, staggering scantily-clad along pavements in 6in heels, and falling off kerbs to hail taxis in which they are sick.

In other words just your average night out in just about every town in the North-West on any weekend.

Widders doesn’t hold with this 40p per unit for alcohol because the majority of young women she has observed getting up to all sorts of Friday night naughties can afford to pay for their pleasures.

What Widders wants is to bring back the concept of shame. She would like the police to pursue anyone who is drunk in A&E or incapable on the streets, arrest them, take them to court and release their pictures and names to the press. In other words she wants public drunkenness to be as socially unacceptable as drink-driving and smoking. There are two chances here; fat chance and no chance.



FINAL WORD: If there is ever a league table of criminal nutters, the name of Anders Behring Breivik will surely be at or near its summit.

Breivik, who has a scary, vacant look about him, killed eight people with a bomb he planted in Oslo’s government district and then shot dead 69 young people attending a political youth camp.

At his trial Breivik admitted planting the bomb and murdering 69 others, mostly teenagers, but will not plead guilty because, he says, he killed 78 innocent, unarmed people in self-defence against multiculturalism.

Was he a lone, mad extremist or is he, as he claims, a member of an international band of mad extremists that has members in London?

It is a terrifying thought to take with us into the weekend.