Cash for the plumber - everyone's guilty of that

Now a study conducted by King's College Centre for Crime and Justice Studies makes clear, once again, Ballard was on the money.

The writer who anticipated the deathly cult of celebrity and the looming environmental crisis can now add well-to-do criminality to his list of successful predictions.

For, as the King's report makes abundantly clear, far from crime being confined to the margins of society, in 2007 it's flourishing behind privet hedges.

Sixty-two per cent of the 1,807 people surveyed admitted to offences that could earn them a criminal record. Top of the list was paying cash in hand to workmen, but significant minorities had a penchant for stealing from their employers, using fraudulent ID documents and cheating on their insurance.

In truth, the report only confirms what all of us know to be true, if not of ourselves although, who among us will cast the first stone, especially if we have to pay the glazier by cheque? then of our friends and acquaintances.

There is a brazen quality to middle-class felons, with plenty of boasting over bottles of Pinot Noir about how this rule was bent or that one broken. Of course, one bourgeois's peccadillo is seen as an utter no-no by his fellow, while the reverse is invariably the case, too.

We may despise people who trouser extra change in a shop, while happily flogging our faulty electronic goods on eBay, but we're united when it comes to dubbing the least well-off in our society as the "criminal classes".

This lawbreaking may not be the flagrantly antisocial behaviour Ballard's Chelsea residents go in for, but the motivation appears to be similar: the middle class view themselves as a separate order of moral creation the deservingly lawless, if you will while it's the scuzzy and the squalid who are real crims.

Unfortunately the King's survey wasn't comprehensive enough to give us an estimate on the cost to the common wealth of middleclass acquisitive crime, as against old-fashioned impoverished acquisitive crime. However, I'd hazard a guess that these thieving Hyacinth Buckets are carting away more dosh than your trad' tealeafs.

The middle-class crims are constantly on the lookout for new scams and frauds. It makes the endless appeals of both Labour and the Tories to be the party of law and order a complete farce.

On the contrary, seen from the Ballardian perspective, party politics is a conspiracy to put more and more poor in both senses criminals in jail, thus leaving the field wide open for their more successful colleagues..