Fear of paedophilia makes you fat

Rod Liddle says that the government’s White Paper on public health won’t help the fatties, but if we could overcome our fear of ‘kiddie-fiddlers’, children might be able to reduce their weight on the playing field

Everybody you know is on a diet because everybody you know is fat. Sometimes they’re just a bit porky, a roll of subcutaneous blubber the colour and consistency of a McDonald’s vanilla milkshake around the midriff, or at the top of the legs. Quite often, though, they’re quiveringly leviathan and — rather like our universe — in a state of perpetual, hectic expansion; the folds of enveloping flesh growing almost before your eyes. And here’s the point: these people are fat not because they’re stupid or feckless and can’t take care of themselves, or are merely gannets, suffused with greed, or weak-willed — but because they are victims. Their fatness, you see, has been imposed upon them unfairly by other people, by society; they did not want to be fat, they wanted to be thin and healthy.