NOT happy with branding all cap-bearing youngsters "chavs" one national newspaper The Express - has gone a step further by coining the phrase "hoodies".

For those of you that don't already know, chav is a word created to describe the under-achieving, slack jawed, under class allegedly undermining today's societies.

Originally an internet joke devised by students, the term has snow-balled into a national phenomenon, with many people today regarding chavistocracy as representative of the lowest rung on the class ladder.

Ironically, in their desperation to crowbar this new phrase into every article, newspapers now accuse just about everyone of being a chav.

Footballer Wayne Rooney, because he dons a baseball cap; Prince Harry because he likes a drink, and even singer Charlotte Church because she enjoys a sly smoke.

All it seems, except The Daily Express, which apparently bored with the term and all that encompasses it, has set its sights on those of today's youth who chose to wear hooded tops hoodies.

According to this delightful newspaper, hooded tops are no longer a teenage fashion statement. No, they're a material accomplice to the crime blighting town and city centres a way of concealing one's identity.

Now steady on. I'm not saying the youth of today should be beyond reproach, indeed they should be open to ridicule and criticism like the rest of us. But blindly labelling tomorrow's future as a parasitic, crime-inducing underclass, complete with their own phraseology isn't going to help. In fact it smacks of class snobbery. Areas of High Wycombe attract chavs and hoodies in their droves. Groups congregate on street corners chatting loudly about sex, drunkenness and cars.

Yet aside from the odd expletive or revving petrol engine they're rarely any trouble not like the benefit-claiming generation that spawned them. They may dress strangely. They may well have a liking for cheap jewellery. And it wouldn't surprise me if they swigged cheap cider and puffed Mayfair fags.

But that doesn't make them bad.

We've all grown up through trends and fads some of us even stooped low enough to don shellsuits in the late 80s. Yet, whether we like it or not, society is changing. A gulf is widening between the wealthy and the poor. There is no longer an intermediate class you're either well off or you're not. So I don't see how anything can be gained by attributing society's woes on those less well-off who choose to wear caps and hoods.