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The prime minister sticks to his claim that last month’s riots were part of a widespread ‘moral collapse’ in society David Cameron has dismissed Tony Blair’s claim that it was wrong to portray the riots in England as evidence of a widespread “moral collapse” afflicting society. In an interview on the Today programme, the prime minister said the fact that bystanders got involved in looting meant that rioting was not simply caused by members of a “criminal underclass”. Cameron insisted that his approach to the problems at the root of this moral breakdown could best be summed up by the term “tough love”. And, in response to reports that Labour are planning to depict him as a rightwinger, he said that he was best defined as a “commonsense Conservative”. In August, Cameron gave a speech in which he said the riots illustrated “the slow-motion moral collapse that has taken place in parts of our country these past few generations”. This prompted a rare intervention from Tony Blair in domestic politics, when the former Labour prime minister used an article in the Observer to argue that Britain “as a whole” was not “in the grip of some general ‘moral decline’” and that the rioting was only caused by a select minority. In his interview, Cameron rejected the Blair argument and defended his decision to talk about a larger moral collapse. “In the riots there was clearly a hardcore of people who were just breaking the law and had no sense of right and wrong or moral boundaries,” he said. “But, tragically, we also saw people who were drawn into it, who passed the broken shop window and popped in and nicked a telly. And that is a sign of actual moral collapse, of failing to recognise the difference between right and wrong. So I don’t think you can simply say this is just a criminal underclass and no other problem at all. I think it does go broader than that.” Cameron also indicated that he was wary of linking the rioting to the lack of responsibility in other professions, such as banking. There was a problem with lack of responsibility in banking that needed to be addressed, he said. But, in an apparent reference to Ed Miliband, who has made an explicit connection between the riots and lack of responsibility at the top of society, he went on: “What I think we shouldn’t do is say, as some seem to on the left: ‘Well, we can’t really do anything about the problem of the riots and criminality that we saw until we have dealt with selfishness and greed elsewhere.’ “I think there’s a slight tendency of some to say, until you can fix everything, fix nothing. The fact is, we should be fixing all of these things.” Cameron said he agreed with the comment made by Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, who said that people were not stealing from shops because Gerald Kaufman claimed for a flatscreen TV on his parliamentary expenses. The prime minister also reaffirmed the commitment he made in his speech last month to turn around the lives of 120,000 troubled families by 2015. He refused to confirm a suggestion that this would cost £2.5bn, but he said the government would be revealing details later about how the programme would be funded. The government was already spending money on these families, he said, because they had a “huge number” of contacts with state agencies. But no one was working with them properly to address their problems. “The point is, this will save a fortune,” Cameron said. More importantly, early intervention of this kind would also “save a lot of lives that otherwise would go to hell in handcart”. Asked about reports that the Labour party are planning to attack Cameron on the grounds that he is a conventional, rightwing Conservative, Cameron said: “I’m just a commonsense Conservative. I believe you do what fits with your instincts and principles and what you feel is right.” He also said that he would sum up his approach with the two words “tough love”. He went on: “You need both elements of it. For some of these children who ended up in this terrible situation, there probably was a shortage of not just respect and boundaries, but also love. But you do need, when they cross the line and break the law, to be very tough. So, to me, tough love sums it up.” Others in the government believed this too, he said, and ministers would be using this approach to rebuild society. Cameron also dismissed a suggestion from the interviewer, Evan Davis, that there was a similarity between the antics of the rioters and members of the Bullingdon club, the aristocratic club to which Cameron belonged when he was at Oxford which was notorious for rowdy, drunken behaviour. Cameron said: “We all do stupid things when we’re young and we should learn the lessons.” Asked if, when he was a member of the Bullingdon club, he witnessed people throwing things through windows or smashing up restaurants, Cameron replied: “No, I didn’t.” Seeming embarrassed by the question, Cameron went on: “As I say, we all do stupid things when we’re young. And I think that’s clear. But I think what we saw in terms of the riots was actually very well organised, in many cases, looting and stealing and thieving.” In his Observer article Blair said the riots were caused by the existence of a group of “young, alienated, disaffected youth who are outside the social mainstream and who live in a culture at odds with any canons of proper behaviour”. There was a group like this in almost every developed nation, Blair said. “Many of these people are from families that are profoundly dysfunctional, operating on completely different terms from the rest of society, middle-class or poor.” Lord Heseltine, the Conservative former deputy prime minister, also made a similar argument in an article published in the Times a few days after Blair’s intervention. Heseltine said that mainstream society was not broken. But in parts of urban England there was also an alternative society, “much smaller but with a different set of assumptions”. This society “accepts a very different set of standards to those supported by the majority of us,” he said. David Cameron UK riots Tony Blair Andrew Sparrow guardian.co.uk