Are we muddling our national crises?

David Cameron says society is broken and talks of slow moral collapse. Ed Miliband talks of a values crisis in which our whole country is held back by irresponsibility.

Both seem to think the national crisis we saw last week is because of another national crisis – of morality and values. Do you feel as though your morality and values are in a state of crisis? Or just other people’s?

So far – in very round figures – around 3,000 people have been arrested and around 1,500 have been charged. Let us say, for the sake of argument, that the police caught only one in twenty of the troublemakers. That makes 60,000. Call it 100,000 for the sake of generosity. From a population of 62 million this is 0.16 per cent. Let us again be generous to the argument and say they must all have morally bankrupt families. Call it 1 per cent of the public. Are we in national moral crisis territory yet?

At the same time as David Cameron talks about turning around 120,000 troubled families he says “These thugs we saw last week don’t represent us and they don’t represent the young people and they won’t drag us down”. So it is just parts of Britain that are broken, not all society in moral collapse. Just parts. But which parts?

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He says the riots were not about poverty, race or spending cuts. So there must be another reason why the unrest started in Tottenham after a protest following the shooting dead by police of a black criminal suspect. And there must be another reason why most places where the rioting spread were either in, or close to poor urban populations. Why do these places have moral crises when others do not? If there wasn’t much rioting in Mr Cameron’s green and pleasant Witney constituency why do they seem to have their morality in order?

The underlying causes of the riots may well add up to a series of national crises – gangs, education, employment, drugs – take your pick. And what happened last week in the failure to stop violence, the lack of confidence people felt in government and police and the closure of city centres was clearly a massive national crisis.

It is also obvious – as Ed Miliband points out – that dastardly bankers, corrupt MPs and devious hackers are all morally deficient in different ways. But do they all add up? Are they all linked? Do we have a national crisis of morality and values? Case not proven yet, perhaps.

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