Tuesday, July 08, 2008

Thou shalt not be morbidly obese

Politicians are too afraid to talk about moral issues today. And so we are facing an epidemic of knife, fork and spoon crime. And the poor. Don't get me started. It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a poor man to enter the kingdom of heaven.

Some people insist that morality is all about how you treat other people, that you should be free to eat and drink what you want. Not the Conservatives - we believe in damning you for your lifestyle choices. And we've never much liked the idea of treating plebs humanely, so we've got to have something to attach to the label "immoral" we so like using.

Public figures should not be afraid to use the concepts of right and wrong wrongly. Without the wrong idea of right and wrong, people might not always blame the victims. They might want the state to do its bit to give opportunities to people trying to lift themselves up. Don't they understand that we just talk about personal responsibility.

No, people shouldn't believe that the state will even try to solve their problems, because it won't. Not if I have anything to do with it. Personal responsibility means that we successful people can be smug about it. And if you are hard-working and remain poor or fat, there must be some reason for that, that we can still be smug about.