Rod Liddle: If we don’t stigmatise fat people, there’ll be lots more of them

Trying to get good, healthy, nutritious food down the ungrateful throats of the lower orders, especially northerners, has become a serious national problem. At the moment these awful people eat nothing but fat coated in breadcrumbs and deep-fried in engine oil, and so as a consequence they are gargantuan, slobbering masses of compacted lard, so vast that there would be room, if they so wished, for Hogarth to do their tattoos. Have you ever wandered about in the centre of Sheffield or Rotherham? It’s like being transported to a film set where Quentin Tarantino is shooting a version of Gulliver’s Travels with belching and farting, shellsuit-clad Brobdingnagians waddling and wheezing in and out of fast-food shops, gripping hold of deep-fried oblongs of saturated fat with their black-pudding fingers.

Poverty, we are told, is the major cause of this epidemic of obesity, but I’m not sure I buy it. I heard one chap from a leftish think-tank explain that northerners eat this cheap fattening filth because it is very quick to heat up in the oven, and they cannot afford to have the oven on for longer than 20 minutes because of the prices charged by those bastards who run the energy companies.