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PM’s claim of moral decline is ‘highfalutin wail’, says ex-Labour leader who blames riots on minority of alienated young David Cameron has reaffirmed his belief that the riots were symptomatic of moral decline in Britain as Tony Blair dismissed this argument as a “highfalutin wail” that ignored the true cause of the problem. In a relatively rare intervention in the world of domestic policy, Blair said that there was no problem with moral standards in society generally. The riots, he said, were primarily caused by a minority of disaffected and alienated young people who were outside the social mainstream and who constituted “an absolutely specific problem that requires deeply specific solutions”. Cameron and Blair set out their rival analyses in articles in Sunday newspapers. They clashed as Scotland Yard revealed that 3,296 offences were committed during the rioting in London, leading to 1,875 arrests and 1,073 people being charged. More than 1,000 of those offences involved looting. In an article for the Sunday Express, Cameron said that the riots illustrated the need to “reclaim” society. “The greed and thuggery we saw during the riots did not come out of nowhere,” he said. “There are deep problems in our society that have been growing for a long time: a decline in responsibility, a rise in selfishness, a growing sense that individual rights come before anything else.” But Blair, in an article in the Observer , said that to make this argument was to “trash our own reputation abroad”. Although he famously warned about moral decline after the murder of James Bulger, when he was shadow home secretary, Blair said he now realised that that 1993 speech was “good politics but bad policy”. “Britain, as a whole, is not in the grip of some general ‘moral decline’,” Blair wrote. Young people now were generally more respectable, more responsible and more hard-working than they were when he was young, he said. Instead, the rioting was mainly caused by “the 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”. Blair said that his government developed specific policies to deal with these people and that they required intervention “literally family by family and at an early stage, even before any criminality had occurred”. Ministers agree with Blair about the importance of early intervention – Cameron said last week that he wanted to use intervention to turn around the lives of 120,000 troubled families by 2015 – but Chris Grayling, the employment minister, claimed that Blair was wrong to say that the moral crisis did not affect society as a whole. “Take, for example, the issue of discipline in schools and the classroom,” Grayling said. “There has clearly been a breakdown in the last generation of discipline in the classroom. Teachers say today that their job is more crowd control than teaching. That obviously has a disproportionate effect on a hard core that come from difficult backgrounds for whom there is a risk that they will go off the rails when they get older.” In his article, Cameron said that as a result of the riots he had decided to roll out his national citizen service scheme, which will involve 16-year-old volunteers from different backgrounds working together on community projects, more widely than originally planned. “Before the riots we were already looking to roll this out across the country, with up to 30,000 teenagers taking part next year, but after the riots, I feel our ambitions weren’t big enough,” he said. “I want the national citizen service to be available to every teenager after GCSEs. I want them to learn that they can make a difference in their communities and that real fulfilment comes not from trashing things or being selfish but by building things and working with others.” Downing Street was unable to give any details of what this would mean in practice. About 11,000 teenagers are taking part in a national citizen service pilot this summer, and more will follow in 2012, but aides acknowledged that making it available to every 16-year-old would be hugely expensive. Cameron also used his article to restate his belief that the “misrepresentation of human rights” had contributed to moral decline by undermining personal responsibility. “We will fight to ensure people understand the real scope of these rights and do not use them as cover for rules or excuses that fly in the face of common sense,” Cameron said. His comments prompted Sir Menzies Campbell, the former Liberal Democrat leader, to say that he would oppose any attempt to water down Britain’s commitment to human rights. “The European convention on human rights was one of the most important contributions which Britain made to postwar Europe,” Campbell said. “It should lie right at the very heart of our constitutional circumstances. I do not want in any sense Britain’s commitment to the whole notion of human rights to be watered down.” UK riots David Cameron Tony Blair Crime Youth justice Police Metropolitan police Social exclusion Andrew Sparrow guardian.co.uk