Just been listening to a very earnest radio documentary about ASBOs, whilst reading a Guardian article about "the New Snobbery". Must say that I find it hard to take a sympathetic view on the topic. Since moving to Cambridge, people who, I'm afraid to say, yes, were wearing shellsuits and baseball caps and speaking in broad Estuarian accents, have swerved cars at me, thrown beercans, lit cigarettes and bricks at me, verbally abused me and jostled me. My offence ? Erm, walking. Cycling. Existing. Not looking like them.

The radio show interviewed some kids who had been ASBO'd when younger and they sensibly suggested some shock revelations. Give kids something to do. Discipline them better if you are a parent. A social worker suggested that before using ASBOs, young children could be encouraged to sign up to "behavioural contracts", promising not to do "simple things" like scream in the street and throw stones. Wow.

I haven't met the parents of the kids who've given me grief. I doubt they're pleasant, in general. I don't doubt they're working-class. I don't doubt that they are poor, and that they have to cope with pressures which prevent them from exercising strong discipline. Or maybe not- I was fairly horrified when I saw Frank Field, who for years was Labour's leading guru on welfare reform, saying on TV that he'd reached the conclusion that the only way to deal with antisocial people was to ghetto-ize them.

I can only compare it with my past experience. I grew up on a middle class street just down the road from some estates. Any aggravation I remember I would put down now to kids being kids towards each other. As a student in Glasgow I spent my first year in a hall in a working-class area quite far from campus. We were given advice re behaviour which basically amounted to "don't rub it in" (they're long term unemployed and Catholic- if you're neither then keep quiet about it) and "watch your step" (there was only one pub considered safe for us). Violence in Glasgow is always implied very subtly but powerfully, apart from in areas where heroin has removed the rule of law. I still have the naive notion that, as those were the dying days of grant-maintained tertiary education, my fellow students and I were from a fairly broad range of society and didn't actually represent inherited privilege to the people of Maryhill.

I suppose that polarisation exists a hundredfold in Cambridge. But I still resent being a target for random oubursts of "proletarian" rage. What have I done ? And look at your lot- materially, is it really that bad ? If you have a car to swerve at me, then sorry, you are not poor. If the problem is simple lack of respect or lack of a culture of respect then I just despair. Like I said above, the rules of respect are fairly elementary (I would swear to make that more forcefully felt, but, to exemplify the notion of respect, I will refrain). If it's lack of opportunity, then I have a couple of suggestions- try attending school, and try voting. They're both free ! And if people's notion of how those two institutions relate to them is so eroded then I really don't know what to suggest.