ISHOULD like to try to clear up some unfinished business arising out of last week’s column. A reader wrote to Hear All Sides to tell me off for having a down on the poor and the working class. This is ridiculous.

I hold no such prejudice.

What I actually said was this: “Our public places and spaces are increasingly disturbed and defaced by an out-of-control underclass so consumed by the pressing need of their own immediate satisfactions that they behave as if no one else exists.

“And their habit of resorting to rage and violence when thwarted is turning our towns, streets, pubs, trains and buses into war zones.”

Does anyone deny this? Is there anyone who goes about his daily business so heedless that he doesn’t notice these things? People from all political parties and none agree that we are a broken society and that our social problems run deep and appear intractable.

Last week’s terrifying court case story about two boys who tortured almost to death two other little boys came after my column had appeared, but it is just another horrific example of the same malaise.

The point is that nowhere have I ever blamed the poor or what we used to call working class people for this breakdown. Some readers write to the Echo and suggest that I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth and that I don’t know how the other half lives.

Not true. I was born in a poor suburb of Leeds in the Forties when we actually knew the meaning of poverty: no billions of pounds handed out weekly in benefits. But this poor community was proud and hard-working.

There were family values and people knew how to behave in public. There was no street violence and football crowds were impeccably behaved. Poor as we were, we knew our manners. In a word, we were decent.

The people I criticised in last week’s column were not this sort. I complained about the vile underclass – who are not poor at all as we were poor growing up in the Forties and Fifties – but who are making the lives of decent people intolerable by their loutish anti-social behaviour.

This is a modern problem, but it has occurred before. On holiday, I happened to be reading a book by that great Cumbrian writer RG Collingwood. This is what he says: “From Plato onwards, Greco-Roman society was living its life as a rearguard action against emotional bankruptcy. The critical moment was reached when Rome created an urban proletariat whose only function was to eat free bread and watch free shows. This meant the segregation of an entire class which had no work to do whatever; no positive function in society, whether economic or military or administrative or intellectual or religious; only the business of being supported and amused. When that had been done, it was only a question of time until Plato’s nightmare of a consumer society came true: the drones set up their own king, and the story of the hive came to an end.”

Bread and circuses were the issues at the end of the Roman Empire. Their modern equivalents are handouts to the couch potatoes, to binge-drinking, shiftless, aggressive louts who behave like spoilt children and turn savagely on anyone who gets in the way of fulfilment of their demands for instant satisfaction.

This social decay put an end to Rome. It could easily be the end of us, too.