The children are off to the Carnegie Weight Loss Camp to slim down as part of a new scheme to tackle obesity. The organisers at Rotherham PCT believe that the intensive £3,000-a-head programme will kick-start healthy lifestyles, and encourage good long-term eating habits. Let's hope that it does.

But what must be going through the children's minds? Seduced by television programmes which offer quick-fix ways to learn anything from how to eat less junk to how to dance the tango, they must be pinning their hopes on this summer holiday stint to sort out the weight that they have been accumulating all their lives.

What happens though, if the experiment fails, and in six months' time, they are right back where they started from, stuffing their faces and hating themselves? Those children will feel doubly demoralised then, when even fat camp can't conquer their eating disorders.

This is what concerns me about quick-fix Britain. It gets people's hopes up, promises so much, but it can be unbearably cruel. It encourages youngsters, especially, to believe that miraculous results can be achieved without continuous hard graft. I've known students who have refused to sign up for degree courses because they involve "too much writing".

So many of them want an easy way to fame and fortune, and popular television positively encourages this. I can't bear to watch any of those "instant makeover", or "find-me-a-star" shows. I want to shake the lazy women who have let themselves go for want of a hairbrush and a bit of lipstick. I always think that, even before their new blonde streaks have grown out, 99 per cent of the participants will be back to going to bed in their make-up and shoving on scruffy tracksuit bottoms. And I can't stand witnessing the dejection of all those would-be Marias or Nancys, abused by the judges and booted off back to their ordinary lives, their cherished dreams crushed in front of millions of viewers.

Kevin Spacey, Trevor Nunn and the actors' union Equity have also criticised the practice of picking unknown stars via television talent shows. But, as Nunn says, that's entertainment. We can all choose whether we want to watch, or not.

What we can't choose are the quick-fix back-of-an-envelope policies and knee-jerk political decisions which shape our lives. Whatever it said in the Labour Party's manifesto for the last General Election, I'm pretty sure it didn't mention anything about knife-crime offenders being forced to visit their victims in hospital.

Who ever thought that one up as a quick-fix response to a spate of particularly horrific stabbings must have been mortified when Home Secretary Jacqui Smith denied it all within hours of its announcement. What then was the point of that particular "solution"?

All it did was underline the confused political approach to a serious issue such as a Trafalgar Day to encourage us all to feel British, and marching petty criminals to cash-points to pay on-the-spot fines.

We can probably all live without a Trafalgar Day; the way the economy is going, most of us couldn't afford the time off work anyway. But we can't live without sensible fiscal policies. Take the Government's snap decision to bail out Northern Rock with taxpayers' money. All this achieved was to keep the building society afloat, and as far as I can tell, nothing whatsoever to help alleviate the doom and gloom of the housing market. It didn't make it any easier for anyone to get a mortgage. In fact, it probably set off a chain of events which has made it worse.

Now we hear that the Chancellor is considering changing the rules on government borrowing to pay for the increase in personal tax allowances. These fiscal rules were laid down in 1997 by Gordon Brown as proof of his prudence at running the economy. But now, thanks to the housing market collapse, slow High Street trading and a drop in company profits, the Government is predicted to face a massive shortfall in tax revenue.

It is obvious that something must be done, and I wouldn't want Alistair Darling's job for all the world. But surely, this might be one quick-fix too far, and given the straitened household budgets of millions of families, a particularly suicidal one.

The message it sends out – that it is okay for the Government to break the borrowing rules, but woe betide ordinary families if they so much as miss a mortgage payment – is not a tactful, or a vote-winning one. And the problem is, once one fiscal rule is broken, who knows where it might end. Will we all end up as victims of quick-fix Britain?