Why are poor people fat and rich people thin?

FOLLOWING ON from last week, and it’s like a game of terminal Top Trumps. First we had a 14-stone eight year old, then a 15-stone nine year old, both finally steamrollered in the porker parade by a 25-stone, size 32, 15-year-old called Natalie Cox.

(That’s a lot of figures in one paragraph for anyone who was educated after 1972, but bear with me.)

Natalie’s mother – herself weighing in at 16 stone, obviously – says that her daughter’s addiction to food is so severe that she once resorted to eating the leftover scraps of a family meal from the dog’s dinner bowl. “She just can’t stop eating. She loves food. The first thing she’ll do when she gets in from school is go straight to the cupboard for a load of biscuits then onto the fridge to see what she can get her hands on.”

Perhaps it hasn’t occurred to her that if she stopped buying bulk supplies of Bourbons or container loads of junk food for the fridge, her porcine offspring would have no choice but to gnaw on a turnip for amusement.

But wait. What’s this coming over the hill? Is it a monster? Well, yes. It’s the latest entrant in the National Clottery, a 42-stone mother-of-four who’s claiming that she’s been “left to die” because the NHS won’t pay to treat obese people.

Sharon Mevsimler, 37, has so much strain on her heart and lungs that she claims that she is permanently connected to an oxygen tank. (Well she can’t be permanently connected, can she? She somehow manages to prise the mask away long enough to shove down the occasional pie.)

Of course, it’s not Sharon’s fault – it’s down to her local health trust for refusing to cough up the £5,000 a week required to treat her in a private clinic. Put that in the context of the £2.50 a day needed to treat sufferers of Old Timers’ Disease and you can see their point.

One thing strikes me about this literal landslide of obesity. The “victims” are all from poor families. Now I don’t mean 1950s poor; all cardboard shoes and rickets. I mean 2007 poor; plasma screens, DVDs, PX2s, STDs and mobile phones, but without the necessary cash to smoke Silk Cut instead of Tesco Value gaspers.

But surely it’s the poor people who should be thin, and the rich people who should be fat? Look back through history and it’s always been famine for the riff-raff and feast for the wealthy. So when did the balance tip? And why?

I blame vegetarians. And cyclists, and Guardian readers, and bandwagon-jumping politicians, and the middle-class yummy mummies who willingly pay a fiver for a bunch of rapidly-wilting organic broccoli from the trendy farm shop before driving it home in their unnecessary 4x4s. These are the people who have priced the underclass out of the basic, seasonable vegetable market.

(It’s the same with bread. When I were a lad, only poor people baked their own bread. Now it’s strictly the province of the ciabattering classes, with their £100-a-pop machines, their strong Canadian flour and their expensive imported yeast. The rest of us muddle along with a Warburton’s sliced white, although even that is now approaching a quid a loaf.)

Our chavs, povs and scrotes are now reduced to foraging for food in the frozen wastes of Iceland. Or Lidl, or Aldi, or anywhere that Findus Crispy Pancakes and oven chips can be found on a two-for-one offer.

Mind you, I suppose that it’s not all bad news. If we accept that fat people are generally more jolly, then Sharon must be an absolute riot at parties.

NOW I know that some of you think that I’m going soft, but some of the anomalies of our legal system have caused me much concern in the past week.

On one hand we have the Attorney General legging it up and down The Strand, credibility flapping out of the back of his trousers as he desperately tries to gag the BBC, The Guardian and the Daily Mail amongst others to stop them discussing new evidence in the Cash for Honours scandal – a duty that undoubtedly suits the government.

On the other hand we have comparatively Draconian prison sentences handed down to those who have offended the Establishment in other ways – and for whom punitive new laws have been especially introduced.

Now I have no truck with animal rights protesters. I think that they are cowardly, small-minded, selfish scum who would soon change their tune were they to need a cancer-fighting drug that had been developed in laboratories that used animals. I despise their tactics of bullying small companies and digging up the remains of people’s grandmothers.

But this week saw three animal rights activists jailed for between 15 months and four years for taking part in a campaign of “intimidation” which seemed to mainly consist of shouting insults at passing scientists. No arson, no nail bombs, no digging up your Gran; just a bit of shouting.

These sentences are recommended under the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005. The investigation and subsequent prosecution was conducted by the CPS and the Police National Domestic Extremism Team. I don’t know about you, but at a time when paedophiles are getting off with a smacked wrist (or even getting off on a smacked wrist), I find this a little bit frightening.