Former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s (pictured) has written about the London riots and to judge from a headline The Guardian put on his analysis you could be forgiven for thinking Blair rejected David Cameron’s “broken society” rhetoric in its entirety.

It’s true that Blair seemed to reject suggestions that there was an overall moral crisis, but then he appeared to contradict himself by describing Cameron’s speech on the matter as “excellent”. (He also said that the speech by current Labour leader, Ed Miliband, was excellent.)

In fact he explicitly acknowledged that many of the individuals involved had “a family problem”, that they came from families which were “profoundly dysfunctional”.

Mr Blair said that there was a certain section of society present in “virtually every developed nation” for whom the role models were “drug dealers, pimps, people with knives and guns, people who will exploit them and abuse them but with whom they feel a belonging”. 

“Hence the gang culture that is so destructive.”

Mr Blair acknowledged that this “is a hard thing to say and I am of course aware that this, too, is a generalisation. But 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.”

Blair’s comments bring to mind statements made by Limerick Garda Chief Superintendent Willie Keane who said in 2008 that many children involved in Limerick gangs were coming from “families where there is no great parenting skills or where the skills are not what they should be”.

Superintendent Keane said such children had “no role models” in these families, and no sense of responsibility was instilled.

Tackling the problem, said Blair, wasn’t “about general policy or traditional programmes of investment or treatment”.

Instead, he believes that specific intervention was needed to target dysfunctional families whose “kids have gone off the rails”.

However, Mr Blair was Prime Minister for 10 years, and that during that time, his Government did little to tackle the growth of the underclass to which he was referring. 

Furthermore, his ministers refused to acknowledge that the Government ought to acknowledge marriage as an institution, or to recognise the problem of fatherlessness and family breakdown.

Instead, his Government adopted the view that family structure doesn’t matter, that marriage confers no advantage on children or on society, and promoted Government programmes that effectively undermined marriage by robbing it of its special benefits, for example, its tax benefits.

Had his Government done more to promote marriage during his time in office, the riots may not have been as bad as turned out to be the case.