Picking teams is always a traumatic time for the chubby kid; being the last fatty standing. Children are cruel and they may even insist that the obese children are not allowed to play on their team. Such a public rejection by their peers is deeply embarrassing and degrading. Not only will the obese child not play the game on such an occasion, but they would go home with a low self esteem and may comfort eat. Obese children may even comfort eat after a poor performance in one such game at school. Once obese, children need special attention with regard to exercise, not just shoved into the deep pool.

Britain is following America with regard to, among other things, their compensation culture. Places of work are being sued; professionals are being sued and public enterprises such as schools and hospitals are also being sued. If rough and tumble games are played at school, and a child gets hurt, a school could be left in the red after paying out a fortune in compensation. In a growing technological market, education is increasingly important and so educational institutions need to take all the precautions they can to keep open.

As with anything, the buck for obesity is trying to be pushed elsewhere. Now we are hearing the banning of violent games from school playgrounds is to blame! However, boys were the main players of such games whilst girls sat around crayoning and plaiting hair. But girls were no more obese than boys back when obesity was described as an epidemic. So this shows that the banning of British Bulldog in playgrounds was not the cause of obesity and so lifting the ban will not be the solution to obesity.

Merely lifting the ban on violent games such as British Bulldog will make no difference to our obesity epidemic. For a start, it is only helping children; obese parents need to be helped. If a child witnesses their parent slobbing on the sofa constantly when at school they will exhibit the same behaviour, regardless of whether contact games are allowed in the playground.

The energy that would be used by exercising in lunch time may not be enough for binging Britain. If the parents remained uneducated about food, and packing a stodgy pack lunch for their obese child, a game of British Bulldog may not even burn off the calories of the lunch, let alone their breakfast and tea.

Unfortunately there are no quick solutions to obesity, we need a British reformation.