Government policies which undermine the family will be vetoed, Prime Minister David Cameron (pictured) has pledged, in response to last week’s arson and looting. 

In a defining speech yesterday, Mr Cameron returned to themes which he has stressed since becoming leader of the Conservative Party, promising to tackle what he calls “broken Britain”.

Specifically, he said that the Government would look to address the problems caused by about 120,000 dysfunctional families.

In his “fightback” speech yesterday, Mr Cameron pledged to tackle the “moral collapse” in Britain with more “no nonsense policing”.

The Prime Minister said that the collapse of families was the main factor which had led to last week’s turmoil and said that politicians had to be braver in addressing decades of erosion of traditional social values.

Mr Cameron said that politicians shying away from talking about right and wrong”had actually helped to cause the social problems we see around us”.

He said “We have been too unwilling for too long to talk about what is right and what is wrong.

“So you can’t say that marriage and commitment are good things – for fear of alienating single mothers.

“You don’t deal properly with children who repeatedly fail in school – because you’re worried about being accused of stigmatising them.”

And he said that the a collapse in parental authority had also contributed to the disorder.

“The question people asked over and over again last week was ‘where are the parents? Why aren’t they keeping the rioting kids indoors?’,” he said.

“Tragically that’s been followed in some cases by judges rightly lamenting: ‘why don’t the parents even turn up when their children are in court?’

“Well, join the dots and you have a clear idea about why some of these young people were behaving so terribly.

“Either there was no one at home, they didn’t much care or they’d lost control.”

He added: “I don’t doubt that many of the rioters out last week have no father at home. Perhaps they come from one of the neighbourhoods where it’s standard for children to have a mum and not a dad, where it’s normal for young men to grow up without a male role model, looking to the streets for their father figures, filled up with rage and anger.

“So if we want to have any hope of mending our broken society, family and parenting is where we’ve got to start.”

The Prime Minister added that “schools without discipline” were part of the problem, and that they needed to be replaced with “an education system which reinforces the message that if you do the wrong thing you’ll be disciplined but if you work hard and play by the rules you will succeed”.

Mr Cameron pledged to introduce a new “family test” which would be applied to all domestic Government policy in future.

“Hereon, I want a family test applied to domestic policy,” he said. “If it stops families from being together then we should not do it.”

Last December, the Prime Minister asked social entrepreneur Emma Harrison to develop a plan to help get problem families back on track but Mr Cameron said he was frustrated that “those plans were being held back by bureaucracy”.

He said: “Now that the riots have happened I will make sure that we clear away the red tape and the bureaucratic wrangling, and put rocket boosters under this programme, with a clear ambition that within the lifetime of this Parliament we will turn around the lives of the 120,000 most troubled families in the country.”

The Prime Minister also pledged to introduce new measures to tackle gangs and gang culture – and to improve discipline in schools. Yesterday afternoon, a group of ministers including Theresa May, the Home Secretary, and Eric Pickles, the Communities Secretary met to begin drawing up firm new policies.

However, within hours of Mr Cameron’s announcement, the Treasury confirmed it was pushing ahead with plans to strip more than a million families of child benefit from 2013.

The move announced by George Osborne at last year’s Conservative Party conference will lead to families with a higher earner losing more than £1,000 a year and has been criticised for penalising stay-at-home mothers.