Stop blaming parents for fat children, says Sarah Vine. It’s time to target the cynical food firms who ply them with junk and impose a thumping Sugar Tax

‘Every day, twice a day, the local schoolchildren walk past my house. As they push and shove each other along the pavement, they leave behind a blizzard of fast-food detritus: crisp packets, dropped chips, half-eaten bits of fried chicken, fizzy drink cans and sweet wrappers.

This tide of sugar-and-fat-saturated flotsam washes up into my front garden, whereupon I pick it up in a huffy, middle-class way and deposit it pointedly in the rubbish bin by the bus stop.

But it’s not the litter that’s the real problem here. It’s the eating habits of this group of ordinary schoolchildren, for whom breakfast is a KitKat washed down with a can of Coke, their after-school snack a packet of sweets or a carton of chips.’

Read more: Stop blaming parents for fat children, says Sarah Vine. It's time to target the cynical food firms who ply them with junk and impose a thumping Sugar tax