Shouting abuse at fat people is not just fun. It’s socially useful

Rod Liddle is impressed by David Cameron’s speech in Glasgow and the Tory leader’s call for greater personal responsibility. Antisocial behaviour needs to be stigmatised, not treated as an illness to be cured

Good for David Cameron. There was a grotesquely fat woman in front of me in the checkout queue at Sainsbury’s this week, so fat I couldn’t see the car park; she looked like 26 Ethiopians, if you put them in a blender, added some bleach and gelatine and then allowed the result to set for 38 years in the fridge. Her trolley was full of prepackaged brown filth, tramp-semen-flavoured nacho chips, pasta shaped into an approximation of Shami Chakrabarti’s face, smothered in sugar and vinegar and tomato sauce and shoved in a tin, and carbonated sugary drinks that would make Jesus belch. Meanwhile, causing a ruckus by the entrance, was her vile lardy brood, a clutch of under ten E.S.N. thromboses waiting to happen, even the youngest of them with a pierced ear. How did they find a sleeper large enough to get through all that earlobe fat, I wondered — through all that reconstituted crispy chicken nugget and salt and sugar and saturated gunk?

Before David Cameron’s speech in Glasgow East I would simply have shrugged my shoulders, looking at this hag, and maybe sighed — ah, yes, this is Britain. But now he has told these awful people it’s all their own fault that they are hideous, poor and stupid I felt thoroughly empowered; liberated almost. So instead of doing nothing I set the fat mother on fire with my Zippo lighter and, on the way out, kicked the smallest fat child hard in the gut. Nearly lost my boot, too; entire leg almost swallowed whole.