Here is as good an example as any: last week 14-year-old Leanne Black, up in court in Newbury, Berkshire, over her second drink-driving offence (the first occurred when she was 12), arrived at court and threw eggs at the media and then went completely doolally when told she would be serving four months in a secure training unit, followed by four months under supervision in the community. Leaping out of the dock she punched Lesley Gilmore, the prosecutor, in the back, threw a jug of water over the magistrates and their clerk, kicked furniture as she ran around probation officers, swept effects off desks and onto the ground, and screamed abuse at the top of her voice until she was dragged off.

The court had heard how Black had drunk cans of beer at a friend’s house before driving off in her father’s car. When the police caught up with her, her response was: “What the f*** do you lot want, for f***’s sake?” She then told the arresting officer to “f*** off”. Outside court Black’s mother Nora, who has six other children, flashed her considerable backside at photographers, yelling: “Go on then, film this.”

Speaking about her daughter, who has repeatedly been up on charges of burglary, criminal damage, harassment and breaching a curfew, Nora said, “I’m proud of her”, adding that Leanne was “posh” and would make somebody a lovely wife. Don’t all rush at once, boys.

This grotesque story has been presented in the media as a bit of a one-off and, as such, an almost comical occurrence. Well, I’m not laughing. I’m sick to the back teeth, actually — sick of Leanne and children like her, sick of being kind and liberal and wringing my hands saying “Oh dear, how agonisingly sad”, sick of blaming that most useful of scapegoats, “society”, and sick to death of living in a world where an increasingly demented and vicious underclass appears to be taking over — whether it’s gangs of youths harassing people in the park, or in the street in broad daylight, for no reason other than because they can; or whether it is gangs of youths torturing young women to death as in the appalling, tragic case of Mary-Anne Lenaghan.

What is really bewildering about this is that, like many people, I grew up believing, correctly in my view, that the working class were the backbone of Britain. They may have been poor but, clichéd as it may seem, they really were rich in values — richer, actually, than anybody else: the upper classes were inbred and, more often than not, languidly bigoted; the middle classes were capable of the most spineless laissez-faireism; but the working class knew what was what and behaved accordingly.

Most still do. But something seriously alarming has happened to a swathe of them and that something isn’t chronic poverty or becoming dehumanised through lack of resources. Leanne Black, with her bling and her designer tracksuit, isn’t poor. The children who like to film each other beating people senseless on their expensive mobile phones aren’t poor either.

In the moral sense, however, they are bankrupt. They don’t merely have wonky values: they have none whatsoever. I can just about muster up an iota of sympathy (well, kind of) for Leanne Black and her ilk, because if you are brought up by monstrous people, you are clearly likely to end up fairly monstrous yourself.

Leanne’s mother and father, on the other hand, make me feel the opposite of pity — they make me feel overwhelmed by a kind of impotent rage. Their children have had access to food, healthcare and education. They were born innocent. It’s hard even to imagine the kind of disastrous parenting they must have been subjected to in order to end up like Leanne.

And yet, since there are Leannes on every street corner, we can only assume that morally bankrupt, pathologically inept parenting is not merely on the rise but an epidemic.

In a lecture to the Fabian Society last Friday David Miliband, minister of communities and local government, said that the government was committed to eradicating child poverty and that, I paraphrase, the solution lay in throwing money at the problem and in giving back power to the dispossessed. While it is inescapably true that allocating more funds to education in particular and the eradication of poverty in general can only be a good thing, the problem I am writing about doesn’t seem to me to be alleviatable by money alone.

Being morally bankrupt is not an automatic byproduct of deprivation, as generations of heroic people have shown us. You can chuck all the money you like at the Blacks of this world, but — what? Does anyone seriously believe that they will become benign, enlightened people as a result? Something in the British — something rather frightened, or Blairishly disingenuous, despite his talk of “zero tolerance” — finds it somehow impossible to broach in any honest way the terribleness of the underclass. We feel we are kicking people who are down, or right-wingishly frothing at the mouth, or exposing our class prejudice.

But anybody with a true sense of decency would see these vulpine individuals with their gold chains and filthy mouths for what they are: the least liberal, most racially intolerant, most sexist, most entitlement-grabbing mob in British social history.

• I’m not a great fan of Kate Moss, I could tell you stories that would make your hair curl about her lifestyle, but last Wednesday I found myself pitying her.

  I had nipped around the corner to a children’s clothes shop to buy a present for my godson. Turning into the street the shop is on I thought there had been a terrible accident. Cars had screeched to a halt and were blocking the street. There was a lot of shouting.

  As I approached the shop I saw that a dozen paparazzi were blocking the entrance and jostling with each other for room. They’d been joined by members of the public, all holding their camera phones aloft. The paps were banging on the shop’s locked (glass) door. And all of this was because Moss was buying her three-year-old daughter a pair of tights.

  When I went in after she had gone, the shop assistants were still shaken (they were worried that the door would get smashed). Moss, meanwhile, had hidden among the age 2-4 jumpers and Petit Bateau vests before she emerged, tiny and cringing, and jumped into her car.

  Say what you like about her but no one should have to live their life like this. The mystery is why British celebrities put up with it. I’d ship out abroad like a shot.

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