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In the wake of the UK riots, the former prime minister has emerged as someone we should listen to I truly hate to have to admit it. But one person we need to be paying some limited attention to, in the wake of the riots, is Tony Blair. In an article in the Observer last Sunday, he nailed, in a few sentences, the current extremity of a deep, ongoing social problem that has been underplayed in our society for many years now. “The big cause is 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 wrote. “And here’s where I don’t agree with much of the commentary. In my experience, they are an absolutely specific problem that requires deeply specific solutions. “The left says they’re victims of social deprivation, the right says they need to take personal responsibility for their actions; both just miss the point. A conventional social programme won’t help them; neither – on their own – will tougher penalties.” Bang on, unfortunately. Arguments about equality, arguments about citizenship – these are crucial debates for the socially included to have, and for the warring left and right to reach some compromise over. But the socially excluded, by definition, aren’t part of the debate, however keen some people are to see overt political motives in their actions. They have become the nihilistic victims of Britain’s failure to resolve these ongoing political fights. Social deprivation fosters lack of personal responsibility, which in turn deepens social deprivation. At this late stage, these people are caught in a vicious circle that has long since been self-perpetuating. If well-paid jobs for unskilled workers, decent social housing and so on were magicked into place tomorrow, and God knows they are needed, many people are too screwed up to respond appropriately. So direct, remedial and specific action is needed, in addition, to repair individual psyches, one by one. That’s what Blair is right about. Read John Heale’s 2008 book One Blood: Inside Britain’s New Street Gangs. It’s all in there. Of course, it’s a shame that Blair did not have quite this firm grasp on harsh reality back in 1997. Then, he and his government had the time and the money to fix matters, before the detachment of the underclass became so entrenched. Despite much hand-wringing and much action, sometimes of the wrong kind, sometimes of the right kind, but too shallow and patronising, Labour blew it. What’s needed now is a 25-year programme attracting sincere, long-term commitment from all political parties, and from the electorate as well. It will take a generation, at least, to turn this malaise around. It is important, however, to bear in mind where Labour went wrong. In short, they made sentimental assumptions, based largely on their own ideas about what worked for them and their own children. Even the 2012 London Olympics is part of that limited vision. Shore up the degree-toting, property-owing democracy, in a clean, sleek service economy, they reckoned, and the rest would fall into place. It didn’t. Meritocracy was just a fancy way of saying “rat race”. The key word, for Blair, was “aspiration”. The assumption was that given the opportunity to do bourgeois stuff – visit galleries and museums, take the children to the park, read bedtime stories as a matter of routine, sit attentively in bright classrooms with reasonably well-paid teachers – absolutely everyone would simply jump at it, and all would be splendid. Take care of the able and the rest will take care of themselves. That was the perverse logic of Blairite social ideas. The belief that “middle-class values” were virally transferable may now have been ditched by Blair, its former poster-boy. But it remains widespread. Take the outcry over last year’s government threat to remove £13m of funding from the charity Booktrust, which exists to ensure that “every child has access to the gift of a book”. I’m not saying that the idea isn’t lovely. It is. But for the vast majority of children – thank goodness – it’s simply a nice treat, of absolutely zero significance to the course of their lives. The number for whom this sort of gift really makes a difference is tiny, if it exists at all. Basically, if there is no culture of reading in your home, then one free book is a drop in a force-nine ocean of adverse influences. Anyway, teachers are the people best placed to provide books to children whose parents won’t, because children in this situation need people to talk to about their reading as well. That’s the very least of the outside adult support that they need. Likewise, the endless twaddle that the commentariat trundles out about libraries. Again, the focus is on the working-class child who is just waiting to be borne off on a shining chariot marked: “In reading lies knowledge. In knowledge lies wisdom.” Often, this admirable and idealised prodigy turns out to have been based on the writer himself. I loved going to the library as a child too, and I’m grateful to my mother for taking me. But I’d be wary of lionising anything just because it was a helpful addition to a stable, loving, working-class upbringing, 40 years ago. There’s something self-regarding about these misty-eyed arguments. They conjure legions of passionately literate children, all heroically fighting against the circumstances of their birth, poor but “deserving”. Typically, children accept their home environment, however brutal, drug-infested, neglectful or abusive, as “normal”. That’s why Blair quite quickly, when he was prime minister, concluded that the socially excluded were “hard to reach”. I’m by no means arguing that such schemes are worthless. Libraries are wonderful. Free museum entry is great. The increased public access to art that occurred during the New Labour government was a terrific thing. There is no reason why a sophisticated and developed society should not have a sense of ownership of the culture it has nurtured through centuries. A cohesive society absolutely should have. But this society is not cohesive, and these are all amenities that almost entirely benefit the socially included . The emphasis on their great power to transform blighted lives, rather than simply enrich already healthy ones, is wildly overstated. Kind as the book-access lark is, it presumes that small children have powerful independent agency, when they don’t. That’s the crucial point: piecemeal intervention, from school, from health and social agencies, from Booktrust, does not work on these children. They need to be prioritised, focused on. Where is the money to come from? I’m not a “deficit denier”, although I admit the position looks marvellously liberating. I don’t want to keep borrowing more and more money from the markets, year after year, simply because it is difficult to reform something that you are dependent on. I think the socially included could start by admitting we had a good run under Labour. BBC4, Radio 6, massive arts subsidy, family allowance for the comfortable, the dream of a return to free higher education for all – these are not current priorities. The dead-eyed children who pillage for kicks, given half a chance – they are. Young people UK riots Deborah Orr guardian.co.uk