YOU can see them on any high street on any day of the week. You can hear their music blaring from the bass bins in their souped-up hatchbacks in pub car parks and takeaway drive-throughs every evening. Thanks to the ever-buoyant black market and the spread of stores specialising in last season's stock, their uniform is made up of previously prohibitively priced designer labels.

Baseball caps (Burberry), trainers (Nike), tracksuit bottoms (Adidas), tops (Henri Lloyd) and plenty of garish gold jewellery, their slang - like their clothes - apes that of American gangsta rap. Typically, they drink, they smoke pot and get up to mischief. And they're rapidly being demonised as society's latest bete noir.

In populist - and for populist, read tabloid newspeak - terminology, they are The Chavs. And they're coming to get us. Apparently.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines Chav as: "a young person, often without a high level of education, who follows a particular fashion."

But hang on a minute. Just as the papers - including this one - queue up to create another target on which to project our wider dissatisfaction with the state of the nation, let's remember these are people first.

The Chavs are meant to be a new breed of youth tribe, a teenage underclass driven by acquisitive desires and a rejection of the straight and narrow. But maybe they're just kids. How many people reading this were Trad Jazzers, Teds, Mods, Rockers, Soul Boys, Punks, New Romantics or Casuals?

Scum is scum no matter how it's dressed. The vile yobs whose sickening and unprovoked attack on Nicholas Pengelly in Albert Road, Bournemouth last month damn near killed him have been called Chavs, but the chances are they would have battered Mr Pengelly regardless of what they wore.

It's a point made to me last week by a young British rapper called SkinnyMan who is coming to Bournemouth on Thursday to play the University. To all intents and purposes, Skinny is a Chav icon. He wears the clothes, walks the walk and, boy, he can talk the talk as well - as heard on his blistering album, Council Estate of Mind.

He's done time for cannabis possession and been kidnapped by crack addicts.

He didn't finish school and has no permanent address. In street terms, he's real - he knows it. He also offers a range of well-articulated, brutally accurate views on why things are the way they are.

He'll also tell you how petty schoolkid larceny turns into something far nastier when those kids get a taste for the cheap drugs that flood Britain's estates. He'll tell you how a generation has been shaped (by school, by the authorities and by dead-end jobs) so that it has no hope and no future.

Wind the clock back a couple of decades - before the advent of Thatcherism - and it would have been unthinkable to describe someone as a "loser", but not now. It's common parlance in Blair's Britain... and these people more than qualify.

Society's latest tactic in bringing this underclass in line is communal disapproval - to coax, chivvy, bully and bribe miscreants into behaving. Louts are named and shamed and placed under Anti-Social Behaviour Orders; parents of truants can be jailed; older hooligans are tagged and placed under curfews; respectable citizens are encouraged to report neighbours who drink-drive or worse. None of which seems too far from putting ne'er-do-wells in the stocks.

The thing is, class (or dress code) is no barrier to anti-social behaviour or criminality of any kind - people drink and drive home to half million pound homes as routinely as they do to council flats. Abusive behaviour is no respecter of social background either.

So, perhaps the problem isn't with Chavs, it's with people.

First published: Sept 25