SINCE the credit crunch, British middle-class shopping habits have changed. Their preferences have remained broadly similar, it's just they no longer like to pay for things — and are now shoplifting to “keep up appearances”, according to one report.

The great, sprawling iniquity of the way we look at crime is right there in the headline. You never hear about a blue collar criminal doing it to “keep up appearances”. You never hear about working-class crime at all, in fact, in terms of why they might be doing it — only that they do it relentlessly, being louts and scofflaws.

I have a friend who, in the middle of the last recession, used to steal by buying a Guardian newspaper on his way into the supermarket, laying it flat at the bottom of the trolley and slipping cheese into it. It was an imperfect dinner party solution, in my view, since the cheese had to be flat and relatively odourless.

It basically had to be gruyere. But the principle — that the middle classes don't steal — worked. Nobody would ever look inside a Guardian for cheese, and nobody ever did.

At the level of shoplifting, I would say this fallacious assumption of middle-class honesty is no more than a curiosity. The victim is a shop, the misdemeanour is pretty minor and who really cares?

These perceptions don't stop, however, at the doors of the supermarket. Research earlier this year conducted by the Fabian Society and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation asked people to estimate the social cost of benefit fraud relative to that of tax evasion — and their answers misfired by an order of magnitude that was laughable.

The majority thought benefit cheats cost more than tax evaders; in fact benefit fraud is estimated by the Department for Work and Pensions to cost GBP800m a year, while personal tax avoidance was thought to be running at GBP13bn.

This misconception is more troubling than assumptions about middle-class honesty if the taxpayer is thought to be broadly honest, while society's net recipients are all crooks.

— The Guardian, London