Page 16 Daily Mail, Thursday, March 5, 2020
c oM Me n t
Hounded postmasters
still striving for justice
THE cruel hounding of hundreds of
postmasters falsely accused of stealing
from their branch accounts was the most
grotesque miscarriage of justice.
Honest men and women were thrown out
of their jobs, bankrupted, imprisoned and
in at least one case, driven to suicide.
And all because of disastrous faults in the
Post Office’s computer system. In reality,
there had been no thefts.
The Post Office finally settled a High
Court case with a £58 million payout to 550
wronged former postmasters, plus a
staggering £32 million in legal fees.
But that is far from the end of this appalling
saga. Detailed questions must be answered
about when Post Office chiefs first realised
the terrible mistake they had made.
Was there a deliberate cover-up? Did they
plough on with these cases knowing that
their flawed computer was to blame, not
the postmasters? If so, was this a case of
conspiracy to pervert the course of justice?
Boris Johnson has rightly promised a full
inquiry and the Commons Business Select
Committee announced yesterday that it
will summon top executives from the Post
Office and Fujitsu, who supplied and
maintained the computer system, to
account for their actions. The Mail sincerely
hopes they will get to the truth.
In the meantime however, more than 50
postmasters who still have criminal
convictions on their record are bidding to
have them expunged by the Court of
Appeal. Justice dictates that their plea
simply must succeed.
Nothing will ever make up for all they
have suffered. But at least this is a chance
to give them back their good name.
Shaming of a charity
THE Charity Commission’s words were, as
always, carefully measured. But restrained
language couldn’t disguise their devastating
verdict on Save the Children’s mishandling
of sexual harassment claims against two of
its top executives.
The charity ‘let down complainants, staff
and the wider public’. Its attempts to
resolve the complaints were so poor that
they ‘amounted to mismanagement’.
And there were ‘serious weaknesses in
workplace culture’. By Charity Commission
standards, this was an excoriation.
The executives concerned, former CEO
Justin Forsyth and policy director Brendan
Cox (husband of murdered MP Jo Cox),
have since left. But one man – Kevin
Watkins – has been at the centre of events
throughout this fiasco, first as a trustee of
the charity and more recently replacing Mr
Forsyth as chief executive.
How can this once proud charity ever
hope to regain its credibility while he
remains at the helm?
Don’t give in to panic
KEEPING your head when all about you
are losing theirs has long been regarded as
a great British virtue.
With the coronavirus outbreak on the
march however, some of us seem to have
abandoned this legendary stoicism.
The surge in panic buying of disinfectant
products, toilet rolls, pharmaceuticals and
non-perishable food staples has become so
intense that major retailers are considering
rationing some household essentials.
We should all settle down and listen to
chief medical officer Professor Chris Whitty,
who has been a model of calm assurance.
Yes, this is serious, he says. Yes, we must
take reasonable precautions such as washing
hands. And if an outbreak is confirmed,
isolation measures must be taken.
But the NHS is equipped to cope and Prof
Whitty advises that no one needs to change
their normal day-to-day behaviour.
Over-reaction achieves nothing and only
exacerbates our difficulties.
For now at least, we have nothing to panic
about but panic itself.
Sorry, we
shouldn’t be
afraid to use
the F-word
Academics now claim
calling people fat is
akin to racism or
sexism. Nonsense,
says Mail doctor
MAX PEMBERTON,
hard truths may be
the only way to tackle
a grow ing crisis
W
HEN did the
w o r d ‘ f a t ’
s t o p b e i n g
a description
of someone’s
body and start to become
their identity?
Being fat is now a choice that
should be celebrated — a
characteristic that deserves
respect from others.
To suggest otherwise — that,
for example, being overweight
is a fundamentally unhealthy
state and might be something
that an individual tries to
address for their own benefit
— is considered ‘shaming’.
A n d n o w d o c t o r s a n d
healthcare workers are being
warned against calling patients
fat in case it offends them!
In fact, a group of academics
at King’s College London —
and 100 organisations that
support them — have gone one
step further. In a statement
worthily entitled ‘Pledge to
Eradicate Weight Stigma’, they
outline how calling people fat
is akin to racism and sexism.Escalating
Have we all gone stark raving
mad? Discriminating against
people because of the colour of
their skin or because of their
gender is very different to
stating a fact about someone’s
physical state which is putting
them at risk.
And I worry this hyperbole
and, quite frankly, nonsense
from hand-wringing liberals
falling over themselves not to
upset people at every turn,
helps nobody, least of all those
battling with their weight.
Last year, a Freedom of
Information request showed
the NHS receives hundreds of
complaints every year from
patients who object to having
health professionals suggest
they lose weight. This ‘pledge’
will only encourage more com-
plaints at a time when the con-
sequences of obesity cost nearly
half the entire NHS budget.
It’s not old people or dementia
or cancer that will cripple the
NHS, it’s fat people. Being over-
weight is linked to a host of con-
ditions, from cancer and heart
disease to strokes, joint and
breathing problems, and diabe-
tes, to name but a handful.
Managing type 2 diabetes
alone costs us £10 billion a year,
and the situation is escalating
out of control.
Of course, being fat or obese
is not something one should be
mocked or bullied over. Butequally, nor is it something
that should be ignored.
A n d i t ’ s c e r t a i n l y n o t
something that we should
p r e t e n d i s n’ t l i n k e d t o a
shortened life expectancy.
To me, as a doctor, it seems
bizarre that I’m now being
urged to turn a blind eye to the
waistlines of my patients.
Because this is not an issue
that we need to debate, nor is
it a matter of opinion. It’s a sim-
ple fact: being fat can kill you.
I’m sure this is upsetting for
some overweight patients to
hear, but it doesn’t make it any
less true. I view it as my duty
as a healthcare professional to
warn them of it.
So how did we get to this
point? Like so many trends, it
started in America — a country
which is decades ahead of us in
the obesity epidemic.
There, people with weight
issues have adopted the lan-
guage of persecuted or margin-
alised minorities, such gay or
black people, to justify their
size and shape and deflect
criticism. Now they are ‘proud’
of their fatness and ‘celebrate’
in what has become a ludicrous
cult of ‘body positivity’.
But what is there to celebrate
if you are so fat you can only
wear tent-like clothes, can’t fit
into airline or theatre seats,
and you need a reinforced bedand reinforced ambulances
to ferry you to hospital for
treatment for the myriad
health issues you suffer?
Where’s the pride in being
unable to walk without a
stick or having to sit on a
mobility scooter?
All this ‘ body positivity’
m o v e m e n t i s d o i n g i s
facilitating a delusion. It stops
people from attempting to
make the lifestyle changes that
will save their lives.
Our attitudes towards weight
are a major factor in the scale
of the problem we face, as illus-
trated by a fascinating survey
by the Department of Health,
which compared data collected
in 1967 with that from 2010.Sedentary
Although the Sixties diet was
high in fat and there was far
less access to gyms, people
were considerably slimmer
than they are now, a fact attrib-
uted to greater daily activity.
For example, fewer people
had cars, and there was more
manual work compared with
our relatively sedentary lives.
But the 1967 survey also
found that nine out of ten
people had attempted to lose
w e i g h t i n t h e p a s t y e a r
compared with 57 per cent of
adults questioned in 2010. Evenmore telling is the finding that,
in the Sixties, of those who
thought they were fat only
7 per cent failed to do anything
about it. That figure compares
with nearly 50 per cent now.
To be blunt: people just
aren’t bothering to lose weight
any more.
In part, this may be because
so many more people are now
overweight, it is becoming
viewed as ‘normal’. But I think
increasingly people just refuse
t o t a k e r e s p o n s i b i l i t y f o r
their behaviour.Insidious
Instead of acknowledging
that they are fat because they
stuff their faces on a regular
basis, they prefer to blame the
Government, the food manu-
facturers, their genes etc.
And if someone is confronted
with the reality of being fat or
obese, they fall back on the
insidious language of identity
politics and claim they are
being victimised or picked on.
Some activists argue that
being overweight is not a
choice. Sorry, but it is. There
may be complex reasons why
someone is obese — poverty
and poor education are factors
— but this doesn’t absolve
people of responsibility, of
choosing to eat more food than
their body needs.
There is undoubtedly a group
of obese people who have deep-
rooted underlying psychologi-
cal problems — they may use
food as an emotional crutch —
and I meet many of them in my
outpatient clinics. They need
help and it pains me that we
are so lacking in adequate
services for them.
But I also know that the
majority of overweight people
simply don’t care. When their
joints crumble because of their
bulk, or they need surgery to
clear out their blocked arteries,
or they develop diabetes, they
know the NHS — that is us tax-
payers — will pick up the tab.
It is incumbent on all of us to
change this attitude — to make
being overweight socially unac-
ceptable, just as smoking is
because of the risk it poses to
health, and to the rest of us.
We could sort out all the
NHS’s funding problems in the
bat of an eyelid if only people
would take responsibility and
lose pounds by eating less and
moving more. What is at stake
is the future of the NHS.
And as a doctor I will continue
to make patients aware of that
fact, whether or not it hurts
their feelings.