NO wonder girls aged just 11 years have what’s been described in a troubling new survey as an “unhealthy obsession” with their weight.

I’m not surprised. If you were regularly made the target of vicious, targeted and sustained attacks, you’d feel pressurised too.

Over the past five or six years, fat children have been hounded, demonised and picked on by the authorities in this country.

Barely a week has gone by without some fat-bottomed government spokesperson, civil servant, “health official”, campaign group or po-faced commentator laying into allegedly lardy kids.

It’s like they’re responsible – or going to be responsible – for the end of life on earth as we know it.

As a group, fat children are accused of being ill, unhealthy and a drain on the NHS. They’re going to get diabetes and cancer and die before their parents. They’ve even been cited as a cause of climate change – apparently global warming is caused by growing the carbs for them to eat.

According to the government’s irritating Change4Life website: “Nine out of 10 of our kids risk growing up with dangerous levels of fat in their bodies. This can cause life-threatening diseases like cancer, type 2 diabetes and heart disease. Change4Life is a nationwide movement that’s there to help you and your family eat better, move more and live longer.”

The BBC’s Newsround toes the politically-correct line stating: “Britain is one of the fattest nations in Europe and the number of children that are heavily overweight has doubled in the last 10 years.”

It quotes an unnamed psychologist who says: “Children who are teased about their weight suffer from anxiety and stress and in extreme cases can be driven to suicide.”

You don’t say.

I’ve long been suspicious of the “fat kids will eat the world” theory. Based upon the fact that I rarely see any fat kids but also because surveys like the one which emerged this week, conducted by Great Ormond Street Hospital and a leading university, state that one in five 5- to 11-year-old girls is trying to lose weight and one in three has already dieted, tell a different story.

If this survey is true, the Change4Life stuff can’t be. Someone’s got it wrong and my money is on the Obesity Gestapo.

I could better understand this obsession if the government and its hench people were slim and healthy-looking themselves. But they’re not. Having seen quite a few of them close up over the years, I can assure you that skinny they are not.

John Prescott is Jabba the Hutt’s body double, Gordon Brown has spare tyres, Tony Blair had a fat wife and Harriet Harman and Jacqui Smith could both do with joining WeightWatchers.

If this government really cared about child obesity, as opposed to simply meddling in people’s lives, they would ban junk food advertising, open sports centres for free and prosecute local authorities who sell off sports fields. When they do that I’ll take their message seriously.