Human rights warning to Cameron

Mr Cameron said he wanted a fightback against “the wrong-headed ideas, bureaucratic nonsense and destructive culture” which had led to the disturbances, including the “twisting and misrepresenting of human rights”.

He said he was prepared, if necessary, to take on “parts of the establishment” in order to get to grips with the issue.

However former Liberal Democrat leader Sir Menzies Campbell made it clear that he faced a fight with his coalition partners if he tried to tamper with the principles of the Human Rights Act which enshrines the European Convention on Human Rights in UK law.

Sir Menzies said: “The European Convention on Human Rights was one of the most important contributions which Britain made to post-war Europe. It should lie right at the very heart of our constitutional circumstances,”

“My view is that the ECHR is a fundamental right and that is something we should not depart from. I do not want in any sense Britain’s commitment to the whole notion of human rights to be watered down.”

The spat once again highlighted the tensions within the coalition as the autumn party conference season approaches, with many Tories vehemently opposed to the Human Rights Act which they would like to see repealed.

In his article, Mr Cameron 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.

“The British people have fought and died for people’s rights to freedom and dignity but they did not fight so that people did not have to take full responsibility for their actions.

“So though it won’t be easy, though it will mean taking on parts of the establishment, I am determined we get a grip on the misrepresentation of human rights.”

Former Prime Minister Tony Blair, meanwhile, has issued a sharp warning that “muddle-headed analysis” of the recent riots by politicians from both left and right is in danger of producing the wrong policy responses.

In a rare foray into domestic politics, Mr Blair dismissed claims the country was in the grip of a “moral decline”, insisting the disturbances were “an absolutely specific problem that requires a deeply specific solution.

“Focus on the specific problem and we can begin on a proper solution,” he wrote in an article for the Observer newspaper.

“Elevate this into a high falutin’ wail about a Britain that has lost its way morally and we will depress ourselves unnecessarily, trash our own reputation abroad, and worst of all, miss the chance to deal with the problem in the only way that will work.”

The “big cause”, he said, lay with alienated youths from dysfunctional families living outside “any canons of proper behaviour” – a phenomenon affecting most modern societies in the developed world. “I think we are in danger of the wrong analysis leading to the wrong diagnosis, leading to the wrong prescription,” he said.

“The key is to understand that they aren’t symptomatic of society at large. Failure to get this leads to a completely muddle-headed analysis of what has gone wrong. Britain as a whole is not in the grip of some general ‘moral decline’.

“The truth is that many of these people are from families that are profoundly dysfunctional, operating on completely different terms from the rest of society, either middle class or poor.

“This is a phenomenon of the late 20th century. You find it in virtually every developed nation.”