Thin on Evidence

Mere experts have been carping and cavilling over our lissom, slender Head Boy's proposed war on fatties. The Government intends to deprive people of social security payments if they have obesity or addiction problems and refuse to be coerced into surgery or brainwashing. However, the president of the British Psychological Society and the chief executive of the charity Addaction both apparently believe that there is some sort of medical ethic that transcends the only two human drives which are widely recognised at Westminster, namely the profit motive and the lynch-mob instinct. Their doubts are no doubt fully justified, but of course they miss the point. One does not make war on fatties in order to help fatties; one makes war on fatties in order to provide a nice, big, rounded, soft target at which the tabloids can aim the rabble.