Shouting Abuse At Fat People Is Not Just Fun. Itâs Socially Useful
ROD LIDDLEWEDNESDAY, 9TH JULY 2008
Rod Liddle is impressed by David Cameronâs speech in Glasgow and the Tory leaderâs 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 Sainsburyâs this week, so fat I couldnât 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 Chakrabartiâs 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 â through all that reconstituted crispy chicken nugget and salt and sugar and saturated gunk?
Before David Cameronâs speech in Glasgow East I would simply have shrugged my shoulders, looking at this hag, and maybe sighed â ah, yes, this is Britain. But now he has told these awful people itâs 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.
Well, OK, I didnât do any of that. But I thought about doing it and that is an improvement, a nod in the right direction. Ever since Cameronâs speech â a politically brave thing to do, because I am told that almost everybody in the constituency resembles that lady in front of me in the checkout queue â there has been a renewed spring in my step. For the first time this effete public-school monkey connected. What he said will have had resonance across the country, I suspect: it is what you hear people saying all the time, almost all people, except politicians. You can tell it was good stuff by the number of harridans from endlessly diffuse pressure groups â most of them paid for through the wallets of you and I, all of them wrong â ensconced in BBC local radio stations whining about how David Cameron is a bully, why we need to show solidarity with fat, stupid people, rather than setting them on fire, and how alcoholism and âobesityâ and drug addiction are illnesses, in much the same way that scarlet fever or sciatica are illnesses. No, theyâre not â and Cameron deserves credit for having said so.