I THINK I’M GOING to hug an SUV driver. As David Cameron said of hoody-wearers this week, they need our love and understanding. Indeed these two urban tribes — the skulking teenager brimming with attitude and the tiny stressed mother encased in her monster vehicle — are manifestations of the same mindset. Both are, as Mr Cameron put it, “more defensive than offensive”, trying to stake out space, to keep the scary, maddening, overcrowded city at bay.

Yet, in doing so, both physically menace the rest of us. If I take the short cut to Sainsbury’s through the flats after dark, a bunch of hoodies heading my way always makes me clutch the strap of my bag, calculate how much cash I’m carrying, where I put my keys. They dress like every South London Press photofit of a carjacker, tooled-up mugger, gang-rapist . . . For a second, I consider changing course. Then they pass and I see they’re just gormless, lunking kids, a few sizes up from my own.

And the SUV drivers looming down my street at school-run hour, like some trendy tank regiment, how do I hate them? Let me count the ways. Who do they think they are, up there, looking down at the rest of us, evil bullbars at child-head height, spreading their monstrous metal backsides across two supermarket spaces? “My kids are safe,” they say. “That’s all that counts. So screw you, tin-can drivers and saddo cyclists, your kids and the whole planet too.”

Such is my prejudice I never, ever let SUV drivers in at junctions. I scowl at their drivers at the lights. I’d never key their bodywork, but I might smirk if I saw a scratch. When I heard that Coldplay’s Chris Martin recently crashed his BMW X5 — a muscular, black-windowed SUV nicknamed “The Intimidator” — every fair-trade, forest-planting word he ever uttered was rendered void.

And I’m far from alone. Campaigners slap spoof parking tickets on SUV windscreens headed “Poor Vehicle Choice”. The New Economics Foundation described 4x4s as “Satan’s little runarounds”. Now Ken Livingstone has announced that “Chelsea tractors” will pay £25 a day congestion charge (ordinary cars pay £8).

So perhaps it’s time — as with hoodies — to examine whether this anti-SUV feeling is righteous anger or a conduit for other fears and loathings. Why, for example, is the same vitriol not directed at equally colossal people-carriers? Well, it’s hard to hate what you pity: driving a hired Ford Galaxy last summer, I’ve never felt more like a dreary, drudgy, brood-mare Mrs Mum.

Or what of my own Volvo estate, which glugs down just as much fuel in the city as an average 4x4 and is so unwieldy I end up doing those embarassing seven-point turns for which female SUV drivers are so infamous. Well, Volvos are worthy, ugly, the sensible footwear of family driving.

Or why does no one glower at a classic rich-boy Mercedes, whose “footprint” is larger than many 4x4s and is double the price? Well, this is discreet affluence slipstreaming past in the fast lane.

SUVs represent everything most hated by the British middle classes: ostentatious wealth enjoyed by the careless rich and copied by the aspirational working class. They are bling-mobiles, flashy and meretricious. Hatred for them is wrapped up in snobbery and anti-Americanism, hence the adoption of the insult “gas guzzlers”.

Only if SUV drivers have a second home do we forgive them. Pricing locals out of rural housing and commuting 300 miles every weekend is hardly green: but hanging out in Gloucestershire, dragging a horse box, denotes old money. As long as you’re not driving one just to show off . . .

Worst of all, 4x4s are driven by women who — since they had careers and status before kids — now refuse to squeeze their egos into little wifey runabouts. SUVs say: “I do the mum thing, but it doesn’t define me and I still care how I look.” These same women buy those aisle-blocking off-road pushchairs: they won’t be meek or small. Their reaction to their own urban anxiety — of traffic, violence, lurking hoodies — is to hold their ground.

The point is that an SUV does not congest a city any more than any other car in a beeping queue. Some models score worse in pedestrian safety tests than ordinary saloons, others about the same. Likewise their CO2 emissions: if Ken Livingstone uses the same criteria as Gordon Brown in his last Budget, boring Mondeos could pay £25 a pop, while Land Rover Freelanders go in for £8.

The point is that everyone should get out of their cars, including London’s mayor who claims virtue while travelling everywhere by expense-account taxi. Yet black cabs are far too expensive to count as true public transport. Whenever I take one, whizzing down the bus lanes, I feel like a Soviet- era politician in that special lane party bosses reserved for their Zil limousines.

British people make a pathetic 12 per cent of journeys on foot. Yet we condemn the road terrorist in the Terrano, while tootling our own motor down to the shops. An SUV packed with a school-run rota of kids is better for everyone than three one-child small cars. That is the way to tackle congestion: hate the car, understand the driver.

• GROWING up in the late 1970s, we knew who the uncool kids were: the hippy leftovers still listening to concept albums and prog rock. As punk swept away all the beardies and loon pants, special mocking was reserved for Pink Floyd and their psychedelic silliness about fairy pipers, gnomes and bicycles . . .

  So for the past 25 years, this has been a central tenet of my musical faith. Until at a summer picnic a pair of hip twentysomethings said they had to dash off to see Pink Floyd live in Hyde Park. They’d downloaded their albums: it was seminal stuff, I was told. Later a 26-year-old at my gym said he’d seen the Floyd too. They were one of three bands — the Stones and The Who — he wanted to see “before they die”.

  Whatever happened to young people laughing at old rockers and blasting away what went before? The eclectic download generation live harmoniously in the musical past, present and future. The rest of us stare at our broken musical compasses wondering which way cool lies.

  janice.turner@thetimes.co.uk

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