Start eating now. The best way to beat the recession is to become obese. A few extra muffins and Maltesers won't be enough. You need to be seriously, clinically overweight: that's at least three Subway sandwiches, a couple of Mars Bars and a few Venti full-fat hazelnut lattes for breakfast.

Upgrade from being merely chubby to Rubenesque and the Government will help out. Break the scales and take up two bus seats and ministers will subsidise your fare. Consume four pizzas a day and they will pay for your gym membership; force-feed your children Haribos and ministers may cough up for their after-school carrot sticks.

Small businesses and the unemployed are receiving little sympathy in this new era of austerity, but the Government is going to spend £30 million to bribe the obese in nine cities to lose weight by handing out supermarket and gym vouchers. All they have to do is prove they are trying to take a few steps towards exercise and they will receive cash to spend on healthy food, exercise classes, equipment and public transport.

Smokers were forced on to the streets, drinkers have been taxed into submission, but the obese, the Government's latest target, are to be treated more sympathetically, because, unlike smokers and drinkers, it is obviously not their fault that they overindulge.

But as Jamie Oliver told the Select Committee on Health Inequalities last year: “Obesity isn't about money or time, it's about knowledge.” And willpower. If it was just a question of cash, the overweight would have curtailed their eating a long time ago. Cutting out that second Big Mac four times a week would save nearly £800 a year; switching from four cans of Coke a day to tap water would save another £1,000. A bowl of porridge for breakfast costs less than a few packets of Wotsits and takes three minutes to cook.

And what happens if you do lose weight under this scheme? Your subsidy card will be taken away. Not a brilliant incentive to stay thin. Obesity can't just be addressed by handing out a few free tracksuits to the overweight as a prize for walking home from the bus stop. The money would be better spent subsidising school meals, creating more cycle lanes and buying back playing fields. Instead of subsidising supermarkets to provide fruit and vegetables, the NHS should be pressurising them to stop pushing junk food on their customers.

The Government calls it a “war on obesity” and says the fat are a greater danger to society than climate change. But if this is war, a better solution than reward cards would be ration cards.

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