CYCLING PAST Inner London Crown Court the other day, I was nearly flattened by an angry chav in his pimped-up motor. When I opened his passenger door to remonstrate, he lunged at me screaming that I was “paedo scum”, so I made a hasty escape. A little further on a pedestrian who’d seen the incident flagged me down and said: “Do you know, he damn nearly ran over a woman with a pushchair on a zebra crossing as well? He tried parking in the court’s car park, was told he couldn’t and went ballistic. I expect he’s probably late for his trial.” We gave one another a wearily knowing look and laughed bleakly.

When I stopped to think about the incident afterwards, though, I realised just how appallingly I had behaved. Rather than scorn this poor, benighted creature, I should have tried harder to empathise with his pain and understand the root causes of his difficulties. It’s not his fault for being such a disgusting, selfish, violent underclass specimen, I realised. It’s society’s.

No, don’t worry, I didn’t really think that. But according to a lengthy piece of hand-wringing prose in The Guardian this week I should have done. The article was prompted by Prince William’s apparently disgraceful decision at a Sandhurst end-of-term party to turn up — as the “chav” fancy-dress theme stipulated — dressed in a white baseball cap, wearing two gold chains and “making hand gestures and swaggering from side to side”.

And it’s not just toffy army officers who indulge in this prole bashing. The “chav-bop”, it seems, is an immovable fixture not only at public schools but also at Oxford colleges. Then, of course, there’s the sneering middle-class comedian Jimmy Carr. And what about Matt Lucas and David Walliams, privately educated creators of that horrid caricature of housing-estate young motherhood, Vicky Pollard? What we have here is nothing less than a terrible new conspiracy by the privileged to mock and revile the helpless, vulnerable underclass.

Well, if there is such a conspiracy, count me in. As a member of probably the most discriminated-against subsection in the whole of British society — the white, middle-aged, public-school-and-Oxbridge educated middle-class male — I see no reason why I should be considered fair game and others exempt. Besides, the Vicky Pollards and the Waynes and Waynettas of our world have got it coming to them. If they weren’t quite so repellent, we wouldn’t need to make jokes about them, would we?

The reason Vicky Pollard caught the public imagination is that she embodies with such fearful accuracy several of the great scourges of contemporary Britain: aggressive all-female gangs of embittered, hormonal, drunken teenagers; gym-slip mums who choose to get pregnant as a career option; pasty-faced, lard-gutted slappers who’ll drop their knickers in the blink of an eye; dismal ineducables who may not know much about English or History, but can damn well argue their rights with a devious fluency that would shame a barrister from Matrix Chambers.

Since every one of these menaces has made Britain a demonstrably worse place than it was two or three decades ago, I fail to understand why they deserve sympathy or protection or special pleading. While “chav” is not generally a word I’d use to describe them myself, this is not so much because it’s pejorative as because it’s irredeemably passé. Call them what you will, though, these people do exist and are every bit as ripe and just a target for social satire as were, say, the raddled working-class drunks sent up by Hogarth in Gin Lane.

The function of satire is not only to make us laugh, but also, with luck, to draw our attention to the things that are wrong with the world and help mock them into extinction. There is not, it must be said, a great deal of evidence that Bristolian teenagers called Destiny, Shannon and Bethany have suddenly been shamed by watching Little Britain into marrying their children’s baby-fathers or laying off the alcopops. But, if nothing else, vicious observational comedy of this sort does at least serve as a safety valve for those of us who look on these social phenomena, helpless and aghast, and wonder why in God’s name no one is doing anything to stop them.

So just why have these social menaces been able to flourish? I know who I blame: the sort of humourless, Polly Toynbee-style Lefties who argue so passionately that we shouldn’t laugh about them. If, for example, you were very unlucky last Christmas you might have been given a book called Is it Just Me or is Everything Shit? This feeble socialist agit-prop masquerading as humour lambasted, inter alia, the existence of Nu Snobbery, ie, being rude about poor people.

What the authors failed to understand is that the reason we laugh at the underclass owes less to snobbery than to frustration and despair at the social consequences of bien-pensant misgovernance. We see young girls being given a financial incentive to turn into single mums; we see parents unwilling to discipline and schools afraid to teach; we see a Government hell-bent on expanding the State so that more people are reduced to the role of whining supplicants; we inhabit a society obsessed with human rights but apparently uninterested in personal responsibility. We laugh at the underclass for the same reason we laugh in wartime and after appalling disasters: because if we didn’t we’d only cry.

Times Recommends

• Preening populism has put us off democracy
• In 2009 as in 1931, debts must be repaid
• Here’s where all the women get off