What a time it’s been for fatties. First came the glad tidings last week that the world’s fattest man lives in Ipswich. Paul Mason, 48, who weighs 70 stone, needs NHS surgery if he is to survive (also in Ipswich, a woman of 27 stone had to be rescued by firefighters after she fell in a ditch and got stuck). Then some fat people demonstrated outside the office of Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, calling for discrimination against fat people to be made a hate crime, like racism.

Then — cherry on the cake — the last of a family of seven children (three of them already being looked after by social services), including a newborn baby, were removed from an obese Dundee couple and taken into care.

The mother, 40, weighed 23 stone. One of her children, a toddler, weighed four stone, her 13-year-old son weighed 16 stone and an 11-year-old weighed 12 stone. Their father weighed 18 stone. After the Children’s Panel hearing, he said: “They would only listen to the social workers. They were accusing me and my wife of emotional and physical neglect and we deny that. I have lost all my children and I am devastated.” The mother said: “I want my wee girl back. She’s only a day old.”

This is very sad; the idea of tiny babies being removed from their parents is horrific. However, a spokesman for Dundee council’s social services department was at pains to point out that “we have made it clear on a number of occasions that children would not be removed from a family environment just because of a weight issue”. The family’s lawyer, Kathleen Price, said: “The family is not being helped here. They have been systematically bullied and disempowered.”

Not helped? In July it was reported that Dundee council was spending £114,000 on helping the family with their weight issues. At the time the mother said: “They keep making an issue about the kids’ weight. I don’t even own a deep-fat fryer.”

I’m not what you’d call skinny myself. I’ve been much fatter — although never, happily, obese enough to have my children removed from my care. I have every sympathy with people who get overweight: I know exactly how it happens.

I lost a lot of weight a few years ago and wrote a diet book explaining how I’d done it — overeating isn’t simply a question of being so greedy that you’re compelled to stuff your face all day. It’s to do with emotional states, unhappiness, anxiety and thinking about food as a friend and comforter rather than merely as useful fuel. So I can see, perhaps better than people who’ve only ever been thin, that this issue is about more than just incontinent lard-bucketry (although there’s that, too).

However, I am completely appalled by all of these stories. Whatever else may or may not have gone on with the fat family — and social services seem to be indicating that weight is only one component — being so irresponsible that you make your children obese is absolutely reprehensible and deserving of punishment. It’s a form of child abuse. Being fat, or a smoker, or a drug-taker, or a drunk oneself is one thing: we all bear responsibility for what, as adults, we choose to do with ourselves. But it’s not okay to force the nicotine or the drugs or the whisky onto your children — and nor is it okay to feed them so much, or so badly, that they develop weight issues when they’re barely out of nappies. I’d have taken the children away too.

As for the protesters outside the mayor’s office: I was looking at the BBC’s website last week when I came across the story and I tweeted a link to it with a comment about how utterly ludicrous it was. You can’t do anything about your race, age or sexual orientation, but if you’re so incredibly fat that people point at you in the street, there’s always the novel concept of going on a diet. But the protesters, who belong to the Size Acceptance Movement, one of those organisations that claim being morbidly obese is totally fabulous and really healthy, want the UK to be more like San Francisco, where a law bans fattism and where doctors aren’t allowed to suggest that anyone might want to lose weight for health reasons.

One campaigner, Kathryn Szrodecki, said that in the UK fat people were stared at, pointed at and attacked. She said: “I have been discriminated against — I am a YMCA-qualified fitness instructor, but I have gone for jobs and been laughed off the premises.” Another campaigner, Marsha Coupe, said: “I have been punched, I have had beer thrown in my face, I have had people attack me on the train. They say, ‘Move out of the way, fatty!’ ”

Szrodecki added: “This is a very common event — someone being beaten up should be a crime. It is not about who you are or what you have done, it is just about the way you look. You are allowed to shame us just because of the way we look.”

She seems to be completely missing the point that people are beaten up all the time because they can’t help the way they look or the impression they give. A 62-year-old gay man, Ian Baynham, was beaten up by three teenagers in Trafalgar Square a month ago. He suffered brain damage and died on October 13. This story makes me so incandescent that I can barely type. I can find no way at all of seeing how it is even a little bit like someone shouting “get out of the way, fatty” or being greeted with raised eyebrows when you go to a job interview and don’t fit on the chair.

It was interesting on Twitter, because a handful of people popped up berating me for being fattist and making light of the torments fat people go through “every day”. I’m very sorry for them, but I am also incredulous of the idea that our victim culture is so highly evolved that these people seriously believe the only thing that can help them is the law. Personal responsibility? Choice? Nah. Hate crime, innit.

Abusing people is wrong, whether they are gay, straight, black, white, young, old or fat. But there’s only one group in that list that can physically do anything about the way they are. If they don’t feel like it, that’s fine — but enough of the whingeing. You gets your trolley and you makes your choice and then, because you’re a grown-up, you live with the consequences.

india.knight@sunday-times.co.uk

+ So it turns out that Samantha Cameron’s humble M&S dress — the £65 number she wore at the Tory conference with a pair of grey Zara heels, in stark and deliberate contrast to Sarah Brown’s £600 Erdem dress and £350 Jimmy Choos — wasn’t that humble after all.

On Friday The Times reported that the dress, which had sold out, was tracked down for Cameron by Sir Stuart Rose, M&S’s chairman, who asked the designer Alison Mansell to run one up as a favour; it was made by two seamstresses, Svetlana Markeviciene, 41, and Spyroulla Antoniou, 52 (amazing to think that M&S clothes involve patterns and seamstresses: you always assume they spring forth fully formed).

What this means is that the dress was bespoke, not off the peg; commissioned, not snapped up during an ordinary- person trip to the store; and acquired through high-level string-pulling.

Much was made, at the time of conference, of Samantha Cameron’s perfectly judged, finger-on-the-pulse outfit, but the question of who now occupies the moral high ground has become rather nebulous.

Also, talk about unenterprising: I know for a fact that eBay was awash with the M&S dress in a variety of sizes for weeks leading up to conference. Leader’s wife on eBay: now that really would be something.

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