But, while the relatives of the Madrid dead won’t appreciate it, thanks are due also to al-Qa’ida. Maybe one day they too will be jolted out of barbarism back into the human fold.The writer is a journalist and author based in Spain. Anyone who, in an honest spirit of enquiry, has watched the British eat and drink will have been appalled at the sight. A large part of the population has become simultaneously gluttonous and undiscriminating: or rather it chooses terrible things to consume and terrible ways of consuming them And, increasingly, it has the physique to prove it. And, increasingly, it has the physique to prove it.
How far should the Government be responsible for the health consequences of its own population’s lack of taste and self-control? How far should it attempt to rein in those companies that profit from encouraging the idle and foolish to consume junk food and alcopops? Should the state be nanny or indifferent bystander?There is no simple principle of political philosophy that will answer the question, that makes the Government responsible either for everything or responsible for nothing.

Almost no one, for example, would deny that the Government had the right, indeed the obligation, to limit the sale of alcohol; no one believes that alcohol should be sold everywhere, to anyone of whatever age, at any time.We expect the Government to protect us from adulteration and outright poisoning. In the 19th century, for example, arsenic regularly found its way into chocolates, beer and other commodities. But the harm done by the couch potato’s diet is less clear-cut: I am often startled by the blooming health and gargantuan size of those who have been brought up on a diet of junk. Nevertheless, the evidence seems to be that the sugary, fatty, salty products of the prepared food industry are bad for the health, at least long-term.The question boils down, at least partly, to one of efficacy rather than one of fundamental philosophical principle. Will the Government’s envisaged advertising bans make much difference? Personally, I rather doubt it, but I cannot work myself up into a lather of indignation against them on the grounds that they threaten our fundamental liberties. Moreover, I might be wrong, and the Government might be right: the proof of the pudding, to coin a phrase, will be in the eating.We should not overlook far deeper and more revealing aspects of the national diet, however.

And everyone in the household eats not as a social activity, but almost furtively. Most people prefer not to think about these, because they reveal a society in a state of profound decomposition Britain is the most littered country in Europe. Why is this? If you examine the national litter, as I do wherever I walk, you discover that it is composed mainly of the wrappings of junk and fast food. In such a case you would have to ponder this proposition: if killing 190 people is bad terrorism, is killing 10 good terrorism? If the answer is no, our terrorist has a problem. The microwave is the cooker, the saucepan, the casserole dish, the entire batterie de cuisine in fact. They have been taught, and have learnt, to eat when and where they feel like it: and, as the monstrous regiment of nibblers shows, they feel like it now and always.Households in which there are no dining tables are also households in which not much in the way of cooking fresh ingredients goes on. The British eat on the street to a degree almost unknown anywhere else.But why should this be? A sociologist told me that half of British households no longer have a dining table, and this certainly accords with my experience of my adolescent and young adult patients, many of whom have never in their lives known what it is to eat a meal at a table with someone else.

And since Batasuna’s primary purpose in life is, like everybody else’s, survival, and since in order to survive they need to have some measure of public support, they and their terrorist wing have been obliged to submit their methods to a dramatic reappraisal.The other factor in all this is the collaboration between Spanish and French police. Logic dictates that he abandons terrorism altogether.Now, it could be that such thoughts have not entered the heads of any Eta member or Batasuna official, such thoughts had to have penetrated the minds of a good sector of Basque society in general, and Basque supporters of separatism in particular. Sobered, like some of those IRA men emerging after 11 September (and indeed the Real IRA’s bombing of Omagh) after their decades-long killing spree, they may even have pondered the thought that murdering children whom you do not know, and have never done you any harm, is the summit of criminal imbecility.The enormity of what happened on 11 March and 11 September might also have provoked a bout of what the intellectual left (to which the Eta-Batasuna crowd like to think they belong) call “self-criticism” Which means submitting your actions to dialectical analysis. In fact, Otegi said as much, declaring that what happened in Madrid was categorically not the sort of thing Eta would do.At which point, and having subjected yourself via the news media to the hideous images and harrowing personal tales that the massacre of the Madrid innocents occasioned, your Eta cadre – as well as Otegi and many of the thousands of others who thought that terrorism was cool – may have paused for some quiet reflection.

Let us try to penetrate the mental processes of an Eta terrorist living clandestinely in a nice country house in south-west France or – not so clandestinely – in a Basque mountain village, idolised by the local youth.On 11 March you hear the news of the slaughter on the Madrid trains and you hear also that practically all of Spain, not excluding a fair number of your Basque compatriots, believe your people did it. You’d feel, probably, a certain horror at what happened, in common with most other members of the species to which – notwithstanding your calling – you belong. You’d also feel indignation at being associated with such a thing. The al-Qa’ida bombs that killed 189 people on commuter trains bound for Madrid on 11 March, had a similar impact on the Basque separatists.It is a risk to try to enter the mind of a person who is prepared to kill innocents in pursuit of a political end, in particular an end as banal as the one Eta has been pursuing. (It is one thing resorting to terrorism when Franco is in power; another when you have your own massively autonomous government, your own language taught in schools, and prosperity unlike anything your people have ever known.) But let us try.