Mark Andrews on Saturday: Why we have an obesity crisis

“Want some chips?” said the father, feeding the infant from a McDonald’s carton in the way one might hand bread to a tethered horse.

The child looked barely old enough to be on solid food.

A few years ago an even younger baby was wailing its head off in Argos. Father pulled the child’s bottle from a bag, filled it with Vimto, and stuck it in the baby's mouth.It did quieten down for a while.

And there, in a nutshell, is why we have an obesity crisis. Governments can hector us all they like with punitive taxes and nanny-state limits on restaurant portions.

But, as night follows day, there will always be fat kids when there are deadbeat parents.

YES, I know the 1990s are all the rage at the moment, but there are limits. The Spice Girls revival, fair enough. I can even live with various members of Take That popping up from time to time. But is there anybody on earth who wants to hear a bit more from Sir John Major and Tony Blair?

Like a pair of ageing rockers enjoying one last hurrah, the gruesome twosome have been working the television studios demanding another Brexit referendum. Or 'People’s Vote' as they patronisingly call it.

Which is strange, because neither of them were that keen on the idea when they called the shots.

While we are constantly fed the myth that Ted Heath took us into the EU in 1973, in truth it was Major with the Maastricht Treaty of 1993. Before that we had a trade body called the EEC, which really wasn't that big a deal.

Now the Danes were given a referendum at the time, and voted against joining the new EU. So, of course, they were told not to be so silly and try again. And make sure they got it right this time.

Major, on the other hand, decided we didn't need to bother our pretty little heads with this stuff, and signed us up anyway.

Then, in 2004, Blair offered to surrender our crucial policy vetoes without a referendum, by signing up to a new EU constitution. Inconveniently, the French and Dutch were given a referendum, and voted against. So the constitution was renamed the Lisbon Treaty and passed anyway.

I don't suppose it has ever occurred to either Mr Blair or Sir John that had they given us a vote in the first place, we probably wouldn't be enduring the turmoil we are today.

WHEN two drug dealers appeared before him in court, Judge David Hale adopted an interesting approach to sentencing.

After reading a string of text messages Luke Rance and Brandon Kerrison had sent to punters, the judge decided to let them go. Their spelling and punctuation was first rate, you see, and it would be a terrible shame to see them locked up with all those illiterate drug dealers

It is an innovative idea, sentencing criminals according to their command of grammar, but I do think Judge Hale has got it the wrong way round. Instead of letting off villains for getting their syntax spot-on, why not impose stiffer sentences on those who don't?

In fact, why wait for them to actually commit a crime? Imagine if judges could just bang up anybody who uses text-speak, street slang, stupid acronyms, or replacing the letter 's' with a 'z' for no obvious reason.

Literacy standards would improve overnight.