Chavs: The new underclass?

I've just been reading a few articles about the delightfully middle class slang word used to describe the "white trash" of England and I find it all quite amusing. In an article in The Guardian for instance; John Harris quotes Simon Heffer to caricature the attitude of Middle England:

"Our underclass has been allowed to get out of control ... They and their children regard school as optional. Drug dealing and theft are the main careers, nicely supplementing the old staple of benefit fraud."

...and goes on to argue that such talk is elitist nonsense which unfairly writes people off without giving them a chance. (Well, if you do insist on throwing up a straw man John!)
A similar line is taken by Julie Burchill of The Times, who goes on to suggest, with much middle class, guilt-ridden hand-wringing that calling people "chavs" is akin to racism:

"Whenever I stand up for chavs — on the basis that the white indigenous English working-class is now the one group you can insult without feeling the breath of the Commission for Racial Equality on your neck, which makes it pretty damn cowardly apart from being what I call “social racism"— there will always be some joker who will bend over backwards to reassure me that not ALL the working class are wasters..."

It is at this point that my blood (quite understandably I think) starts to boil.

Frankly, I don't think either of these columnists really have the faintest idea about what they are describing. The "chav" may be something approaching a caricature, but it has come to be synonymous with the underclass of Britain; many of whom who seem to wear it like a badge of honour. These people are not "working class," and to describe them as such is an insult to hard-working people.

No, these people populate the dole queues, benefit offices, STD clinics and street corners of our fair nation, and though we may laugh at the caricature. It is actually a symptom of a class who totally lack aspiration because they were born, not just into poverty, but moral despair.

The poverty of old had a cure. Namely, a rigid morality, which gave a pang of guilt when you did something wrong and which spurred you on to try harder. A morality embedded in a society where mutual concern was predominant and where "keeping up with the Jonses" was somewhat less to do with the size of the Satelite dish on your council house and somewhat more to do with decency and getting on in life.

I'm a libertarian, and I think that that liberty has a price, and that this is one of them. It is a sympton without cure, and the consequences of this are grim. Feel free to disagree.