ON THURSDAY I had to suppress the kind of paroxysms of vengeful rage and desire to mete out levels of physical violence that I haven't felt since I was about 15. The path to potential homicide opened up when I bumped into a couple of pals I hadn't seen for ages in a bar in the centre of Glasgow.

The pair were getting married soon, so talk turned to babies and mortgages and, inevitably, the effects of the screwed global economy on ordinary people's lives. We mentioned how maybe a brief financial nightmare in Europe might help create a fairer and more equitable economic system: where the greedy aren't simply rewarded for being greedy, and where the poor get a fair crack of the whip. A friend of a friend, who was hovering on the sidelines, didn't like that opinion. His suggestion for dealing with the coming 1920s-style depression? Shoot the poor. No kidding. He was a seemingly intelligent middle-class Scot. Why should he hate someone who wasn't as rich as him? In fact, he's not rich. Like 95% of us, he's two pay-checks away from homelessness, if only he stopped to think. I uttered a few poetic Anglo-Saxon put-downs and went home. I didn't fancy getting a criminal record for busting some spoiled tyke's snotty nose in the middle of the street.

I don't know if it's because I used to go to my auntie and uncle's farm in the Antrim glens often as a kid, where I'd pick up all their rural superstitions and hocus-pocus, but I'm one of those people who can tell you it's going to rain about five minutes before the heavens open. I get a shiver across my skin and a funny smell in my nose, and bingo it's raining.

Something is starting to change in this country. You don't need a hillbilly gene in you to sense the rain is on its way. Down in cosy, middle-class Glasgow the friends of my daughters, who last year were hiring limousines for a 10-year-old's birthday party - without ever thinking what empty, selfish myths they were filling their child's head with - are this year going to the Odeon with a stopover at Burger King. People are desperately trying to clear credit cards just in case they might one day have to buy their groceries or pay their mortgage courtesy of Visa.

All the while, our TV screens and newspapers are filled with belittling images of the poor, and an ever-growing cult of vacuous celebrity. And now we as the British people seem to be turning our trust towards a Conservative party filled with old Etonians to save us from disaster.

Class hatred still runs rampant in Britain, and where there's hatred there is fear. Those middle-class mums in leafy suburbs who've switched from limos to Big Macs are scared. So was that stupid guy in the bar, so are the voters turning their eyes to Cameron. They know that the system they bought into, the system that offered them a few good years of consumer gorging at the expense of others, is about to turn on them and eat them alive. When it does, they know they could find themselves without a house, without an iPod, without the wherewithal to buy the latest must-have food for their dumb middle-class dinner parties. That's where the hatred comes from. You hate what you fear: the people you could become.