Katy Guest: I'm with the Earl: it's not snobbish to hate chavs

Wasn't it a disgrace what the Earl of March said about the lower classes last week? According to most of the press, the Goodwood heir has been attacking salt-of-the-earth working types, saying that commoners are not welcome to watch the "Glorious Goodwood" races on his estate this weekend and that anyone without a title can bugger orf. It's the sort of class-based snobbery that ought to make the British ashamed. Except, of course, that the Earl said nothing of the sort.

What he actually criticised were the increasingly embarrassing forms of undress worn by some Goodwood punters. "We have too many chavs, I'm afraid," he reported – suggesting that anyone who especially wants to bare flesh and get trolleyed is welcome to attend "certain other racecourses whose patrons dress as though they are going to a nightclub". But the Earl's big mistake was in using the C-word. Because unfortunately you can't call anyone a chav any more without becoming a class enemy.

In fact, chavness (or chaviosity, to give it its Non-U name) has nothing to do with class. If the term were a way of putting down poor people, then why is it that the King and Queen of Chav are Prince Harry and Zara Phillips (third and 11th in line to the throne, respectively)? Why has Peter York added the category of "Chav Sloane" to his Sloane Ranger Handbook? And how come the only person I know who regularly wears hot pants to the office comes from a class that doesn't even know the meaning of "working"?

Nor is it about education. Anyone who thinks that a chav must have struggled his way through a bog-standard comprehensive should attend a Cambridge University drinking society, where posh chavs attempt to hospitalise each other with alcohol. Nor is it even about taste. Instead, chav is all about attitude.

The existence of Tribe Chav is nothing new. Before the internet, which ironed out regional variations of insult and appellation and universalised the one term, "chav", they had different names. In Scotland they were neds. In parts of East Anglia, they were barries. Sometimes, they were just townies. Where I grew up, in darkest Plymouth, we called them janners and they called us crusties – anyone who didn't wear the required uniform of shell suit and trainers being a certified soap dodger, in their eyes. Usually they drove past us in their souped-up Fords, rattling our windows with their pounding bass and threatening to set their pit bulls on us. For some reason, they always had faces like Wayne Rooney.

Not for nothing does the much-maligned website chavscum.co.uk refer to those it reviles as "the Asbo generation". We all have our tribe – I am writing this in Birkenstocks, and, to prove how easy I am to prejudge, I'll be going to a folk festival with my parents next weekend – it's just that some tribes don't get off on terrorising the others.

There is nothing snobbish about steering clear of people who hang around in intimidating groups, drinking Tennent's Super and wearing a uniform that says "fit in or fuck off". Those people who defend "chav" because they think it equals "working class" couldn't be more patronising if they tried.

But the silliest thing about criticising Lord March is that his comments represent just about the only prejudice that is guaranteed not to offend. How many people would have read his remarks and thought, "I am a chav, and I am very hurt"? Nobody thinks they are a chav, and so nobody thinks that his comments refer to them. Which obviously explains Zara Phillips's outfit at Goodwood last week.