The family next door are heavy drinkers. You can’t help noticing that the mother who delivers her children to school in the morning has gin on her breath. The father seems to sway around a bit at the bus stop. Must be hard on the kids, say the neighbours.

But would you report them to social services? Even to suggest that the children be removed for their own safety? That is precisely what has happened to a family in Dundee. Except that their crime is eating too much. Social workers have deemed that the family of eight (parents and six children) have put on so much weight that the two youngest must be taken into care for their own safety.

This is weight-watching raised to a whole new dimension: the State as diet dictator; the council calorie czars; invasion of the burger barons. Do we really think that our eating habits should be a matter for government intervention?

Let us step back a bit. The council says tersely that it cannot comment on the case, but obesity may not be the only reason for removing a child, hinting that the problems go deeper. But all the neighbours, and the family solicitor, claim that this are a close-knit family that does its best in a difficult and deprived area.

It’s just that they are on the stout side. Well, very stout. A year ago the 12-year-old reached 16st. The two pre-school children, who have been removed, were apparently going the same way.

Can that possibly justify what must surely be the action of last resort — the break-up of a family? What about the citizens’ freedom, which must surely extend even unto the right to eat themselves to death? Exactly what waist size triggers a council swoop? Are we really to introduce a national burger-count, with neighbours snooping as they monitor the chip intake of the people next door? The authorities are entitled to advise, implore, even legislate to improve healthy eating, but surely they must draw the line at the kind of intervention that damages the very individuals they are seeking to protect.

We have grown wearily accustomed to the idea that some families are ill equipped to run their own lives, and that the role of officialdom is to tell them how to do it. When it comes to abused and vulnerable children that is probably right. But there is a wealth of difference between saving a life and dictating conformity. The more the idea gains ground that families are incapable of taking their own decisions, whether about diet or discipline, the more they will surrender responsibility for doing it themselves.

And that is to undermine the very unit that everyone agrees must be the solid foundation of our society.

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