>> a really warm welcome. it is really good to see you. we are really get. and we're really glad on such a beautiful sunday morning you made the time to come and we're really glad on such a beautiful monday morning you made the time to come here, especially our young people, having made the phone calls to make sure you were awake and appear on time. thanks ever so much for turning out. it's my great pleasure and privilege to ask you to welcome the prime minister, the right, honorable david cameron. [applause] >> thank you. thank you very much for that. and it's great to be back at base 33. i can see it hasn't gotten any cooler since i last made a speech in here but it's great to be here and grateful for you

to come. thank you. i do believe it's time for our country to take stock. last week we saw some of the most sickening acts on our streets. i'll never forget talking to morris reeves whose family had rub the reeves furniture star for generations. this was an 80-year-old man who had seen the business he had loved, that had his family had built up for generations, simply destroyed and burnt to the ground. 100 years of hard work burnt to the ground in just a few hours. but last week we didn't just see the worst of the british people but saw them the best, too. the ones tt called them the riot rumbles whoeaded to the hardware stories to buy brooms and those who linked together to stand by and defend their homes and businesses. the fire officers and police men and women who wore hardships sleeping in the

corridors and put their lives on the line for e rest of us. everywhere i've been the last week, manchester, birmingham, hampton, people of every background, color and religion have shared the same moral outrage and hurt for our country because this is britain. this is a great country of good people. those thugs we saw last week don't represent us and don't represent e young people in our country either, and they will not dra us down. but now the fires have been put out and slope has cleared, the question hangs in the air, why. how could this happen on our streets and in our country? now, of course we must not oversimplify. there were different things going on in different parts of the country. in tottenham, some of the anger was directed at the police. in sulford thereas organized crime, a calculate another tack on the forces of law and order. but what we know for sure in large parts of the countryhis

was just pure criminality. as we begin the necessary process of inquiry, of investigation, of listening and learning, l's be clear, these riots were not about race, the perpetuators and the victims were white, black and asian. these riots were not about government cuts. they were directed at high street stores, not at parliament. and these riots were not about poverty. that would insult the millions of people who whatever the hardship would ever dream of making others suffer like this. , this was about behavior, people showing indifference to right and wrong, people with a twisted moral code. people with a complete absence of self-restraint. now, i know as soon as i use wos like behavior and mor, people will say what gives politicians the right to lecture us? now, of course we're not perfect. our marriages and relationships break down. we get things wrong. but politicians shying away from speaking the truth about behavior, about morality, this

is actually helped to cause the social problems we see around us. we've been too unwilling for too long to talk about what is right and what is wrong. we've too often avoided saying what needs to be said about everything from marriage to welfare to common courtesy. sometimes the reasons for that are noble. we don't want to insult or hurt people. sometimes there are ideological reasons, we don't feel it's the job of the state to try and pass judgment on people's behavior or engineer personal morality. and sometimes there are just human reasons. we're not perfect beings ourselves and we don't want to look like hypocrites. so you can't say marriage and commitment are good things for fear of alienating single mothers. you don't deal properly with children who repeatedly fail at school because you're worried of being accused of stigmatizing them. you worry of talking about those who never work and never want to work if in case y're charged with not getting it, with being middle class, with

being out of touch. in this risk-free ground of moral neutrality, there are no bad choices, just different lifestyles. people are the architects of their own problems, they're the victims of circumstance. live and let live becomes do what you please. well actually what last week has shown is this moral neutrality, this relativism that is not going to cut it anymore. one of the biggest lessons of these riots is we've got to talk honestly about behavior and then act because bad behavior has literally arrived on people's door steps and we cannot shy away from the truth anymore. so this must be a wake- call for our country. social problems that have been festering for decades have exploded in our face. today just as people wanted crimins robustly confronted on our streets, so they want to see these social problems taken on and defeated. our security fightback must be matched by a social fightback. we must fight back against the futures and assumptions that

brought parts of our society to this shocking state. we know what's gone wrong. the question is do we have the determination to put it right? do we have the determination to confront the slow-motion moral collapse that's taken place in parts of our country these past few generations. irresponsibility, selfishness, behaving as if your choices have no consequences. children without fathers, schools without discipline, reward without effort, crime without punishment, rights without responsibilities, communities without control. some of the worst aspects of human nature tolerated, indulged, sometimes even incentivized by a state and its agencies that in part have become literally demoralized. so do we have the determinaon to confront all this a turn it around? i have the very strong sense that the responsible majority of people in this country not only have that determination, they are crying out for their government to act on it. and i can assure you, i will

not be found wanting. in my very first act as leader of this party, i signaled my personal priority to mend our broken society. that passion today is stronger than ever. yes, we had an economic crisis to deal with, clearing up a terrible mess we inherited, and we're not out of those woods yet, not by a long way. but i repeat today as i have on many occasions these last few years that the reason i'm in politick is to build a bigger and stronger society, stronger families, stronger communities, and stronger society. that's when i came into politics to do and the shocking events of la week have renewed in me that drive. so i can announce today over the next few weeks i and ministers from across the coalition government will review every aspect of our work to mend our broken society of schools, welfare, families, parenting, addiction, communities, on the cultural, legal, bureaucratic problems in our society, to from the twisting and

misrepresenting of human rights that has undermined personal responsibility, to the obsession we -- with health and safety that in many ways eroded people's willingness to act regarding to common sense. government can't legislate to change behavior but it's wrong to think the state is a bystander bause people's behavior doesn't happen in a vacuum. it's affected by the rules that government sets and how they're enforced by the services government provides and how they're delivered and perhaps above all by the signals government sends about the kinds of behavior that are encouraged and rewarded. so yes, the broken society is back at the top of my polical agenda. first and foremost, we need a security fightback. we need to reclaim our streets from the thugs who didn't just spring out of nowhere this week but have been making people's live as misery for years. i know there have been questions in people's minds about my approach to law and order. nothing in this job is more important to me than keeng

people safe. it's obvious to me to do that we've got to be tough, we've got to be robust, we've got to score a clear line between right and wrong through the heart of this country and every street in every community. that starts with a stronger police presence, pounding the beat, deterring crime, ready to regroup and crack down at the first sign of trouble. let me be clear, under this government we'll always have enougholice officers to be able to scale up our deployments in the way we saw last week. to those who say this means we need to abandon our plans to make savings in police budgets, i say you're missing the point the point that really matters in this fightback are the amount of time the police can fight if on our streets. for years we had a police force suffocatedy bureaucry and officers filling in forms and stuck behind desks spending their time. this won't be as keepinghings as there has been. as the home security will explain tomorrow it will be fixed by changing the way

police work. scrapping the paperwork that holds them back, getting them out on the streets with people can see them. our reforms mean police are going to answer directly to the people. if you want more tough, no nonsense policing, you ought to make sure the police spend more time confronting jobs in their neighborhood, less time meeting targetses by stopping motorists. you want the police patroling your streets instead of sitting bend their desks, elected police and crime commissioners are part of the answer. they will provide that direct accountability so you can finally get what you want when it comes to policing. the point of our police reform is noto save money or change things but to fight crime. already we're giving backing to measures like disbursal orders and toughening curfew powers and giving police officers the power to move face coverings from rioters and looking at giving them more powers to confiscate the offender's property and overhe months you'll see much more. it's time for something else, too, a concerted all out war on

gangs and gang culture. this isn't some side issue. it is a major criminal disease that has infected streets and our states across our country. stamping out these gangs should be a new nationa priority. last week i sat up a cross government program to look at every aspect of this problem. now, the last front in this fight is proper punishment. on the radio last week they interviewed one of the young men who had been looting in manchester and he said this. he said, i'm going to carry on until i get caught. this will be my first arrest, he said. the prisons were already overflowing so he'd just get a slap and live with that. what we've got to show to him and everyone like him, the party is over. i know when's people talk about policy and tough sentencing people sometimes roll their eyes. yes, last week we saw the criminal justice system deal with an unpcedented challenge. the courts sat through the night and dispensed swift a

firm justice. we saw the system was on the side of the law-abiding majority. buconfidence in the system is still too low. and believe me, i understand the anger with the lev of crime in our country today and i'm determined we sort it out and restore people's faith that if someone hurts our society, if they break the rules in our society, then society will punish them for it. but we need much more than that. we need a socl fightback with big changes righthrough our society. let me start with families. the question people asked over and over again last week was where are the parents? why aren't they keeping the rioting kids indoors. tragically that was followed in some cases by judges rightly lamenting why don't the parents even turn up when their chilen are in court. join the dots and you have a clear idea why some of these young people were behaving so badly. either there was no one at home, they didn't much care, or

they'd lost control. families matter. i don't doubt many of the rioters out last week had no dad at home. perhaps they come from one of the neighborhoods where it's standard for children to have a mum and not a dad, where it's normal for young meno grow up without that male role model, looking to the streets for their father figures filled up with rage and anger. if we want to have any hope of mending our broken society, family and parenting is where we've got to start. i've been saying this for years, since before i was prime minister, sincbefore i was leader of the conservative party, so from here on i want a family test applied to all domestic policy. if it hurts families, if it undermines commitment, if it tramps over the values that keep people together or if it stops families from being together, then we shouldn't do it. more than that, we've got to get out there and make a positive difference to the way families work, the way people bring up their children and we frany have to be less sensitive to the charge this is

about interfering or nannying. we're working on ways to help improve parenting. now i want that work accelerated, expanded and implemented as quick as possible and we need urgent action on those some call problem or troubled. the ones everyone in their neighborhood knows and often avoids. last december i asked emma harrison to develop a plan to help get these families on track. it appeared to me earlier this year as so often can happen in government, those plans were being held back by bureaucracy. even before the riots happened, i asked for an explanation. as the riots have happened, i will make sure we clear away the red tape and the bureaucratic wrangling and put rocket boosters under this program. i have a clear ambition that within the lifetime of this parliament we will turn around the lives of the20,000 most troubled families in this country. the next part of the social fightback is what happens in our schools. we need an education system

which reinforces the message if you do the wrong thing you'll be disciplined but if you work hard and play by the rules, you can succeed. this isn't a distant dream. it's already happening in schools like woodside high in totten ham and many schools in this constituent iscy. they expect high standards from every child and don't me excuses for failure to work hard. they foster pride through strict uniform and behavior policies. they provide alternatives to street culture by showing how anyone can get up and get on if they apply themselves. kids from haisburg to hackney. they're talking to each other. and we need more of them. and the reason these success stories are opening free schools inside the state sector and why we've pledged to turn around the 200 weakest secondary schools and 200 weakest primaries within the next year. but with the failures in our education system so deep we can't just say here are our plans, we believe in them,

let's sit back while theyake effect. i want us to push further and faster. are really doing enough to encourage these great new schools are being set up in the poorest areas to help cldren who need them the most? and why are we putting up with a complete sndal of schools being allowed to fail year after year. if young people had left school without being able to read or write, why shouldn't that school be held more accountable? now, just as we want schools to be prideful we want everyone to feel pride of their communities. we need everyone to have a social responsibility at the heart of every community. the truth is for too long the big, boxy bureaucratic state has helped drain that responsibility away. it used local leadership with its endless dictates and confused regulators with rules and regulations and denied local people about any real say about what goes on where they live. is it any wonder why many people don't feel they have a state in their community? this has got to change and

we're already tang steps to change it. we're training an army of community organizer to work in our most deprived neighborhoods because we're serious about encouraging social action and giving people a real chance to improve the community where they live. we're changing the planning rules and giving pple the right to take over local as sets. but the question i want answered now is this, are these changes big enough to foster the sensof belonging we want to see? that's what we're going toe looking at urgently over the coming weeks. but one of the biggest parts of the social fightback is fixing our welfare system. for years we've had a system that encourages the worst in people, that excuses bad behavior and erodes self discipline and discourages hard work and above all drains responsibility away from people. we talk about moral hazard in our financial system when banks think they can act recklessly because the state will bail them out. this is moral hazard in our welfare system, people thinking they can be irresponsible because the state will always

bail them out. now, we're already addressing this through the welfare reform bill going through parliament but i'm not satisfied we're doing all we can. i want us to look at toughening up the conditions for those who are out to work and receiving benefits and speeding up our efforts to get all those who can work back into work. work is at the hea of a responsible society. so getting more of our young people into jobs and up and running their own businesses is a critical part of how we strengthen responsibility in our society. our work program is the first step, local authorities, charities, social enterprises, businesses, all working together to provide the best possible health to people who want to get a job and this leaves no one behind and includes people -- and i've seen this myself who have been on welfare for years who are now getting a chance to work. now, as we consider these questions of attitude and bevior, the signal government sends, the incentives creates, we inevitably come to

the question of the human righ act and the culture associated with it. now, let me be clear, in this country we're proud to stand up for human rights at home and abroad. it is part of the british tradition. but what is alien to our traditioand now exerting a corrosive influence on behavior and morality is the twisting and misrepresenting of human rights in a way that undermines personal responsibility. we're attacking this problem from both sides and working to develop a way through this by creating our own british bill of rights and we'll be using our current chairmanship of the council of europe to seek agreement for often important changes to the convention of human rights. all this is frustratingly slow. the truth is the interpretation of human rights legislation has exerted a chilling effect on public sector organizations, leaving them to act in ways that often fly in the face of common sense, that offend our sense of right and wrong and undermine responsibility. and it is, if you like, the

sayings with health and safety where regulations have been twisted in all recognition to a culture where the words "health" and "safety" or property trotted out to justify the regulations that hurt our social fabric. i want to make something very clear, i get it. this stuff matters. as we urgently review the work we're doing on the broken society, judging whether it's ambitious enough i want to make it clear there will be no-holds-barred and most definitely includes the human rights and health an safety cultures. many have long thought the answer to some of these questions of social behavior is to bring back national service. and in many ways i agreeith that sentiment and that's why we're actually introducing something similar, national citizens service. it's a normal military program that captures the spirit of national service and takes 16-year-olds from different backgrounds and ge them to work together. they work in their communities where they're coaching even younger children to play

football or visiting old people at the hospital. it shows young people that doing good can feel good. the real thrill is from building things up, not tearing them down. teamwork, discipline, duty, decency. these words might sound old-fashioned but they're part of the solution to this very modern problem of alienated, angry young people, restoring those value is what national citizens service is all about. assionately believe in this idea. it's something we've been developing for years, years before i became prime minister. thousand of teenagers are taking part this summer. the plan is for 30,000 to take part next year. but in response to the riots, i say this. it should become a great national effort. let's me national citizen service available to all 16-year-olds as a right of passage. we can do that if we work together. businesses, charities, schoo, and social enterprises. and in the months ahead, i'm going to be putting renewed effort in making that happen. now, today i've talked a lot

about what the governmt is going to do. but let me be clear, the social fightback is not a job for government on its own. government doesn't run t businesses that create jobs and turn lives around. government doesn't make the video games or print the magazines or produce the music that tells young people what is important in their lives. government cannot be on every street and in every state instilling the values that matter. this is a problem that has deep roots in our society and it's a job for all of ourocieties to fix it. so in the highest offices, in the plushest boardrooms, the most influential job we need to think about the example that we are setting. moral decline and bad behavior is not limited to a few of the poorest parts of our society. in the banking crisis with m.p. expenses in the phone hacking scandal, we've se of the worst cases of greed, irresponsibility and entitlement. the restoration of responsibility has to cut right

across our country because whatever the arguments, we all belong to the same society and we all have atake in making it better. there is nohem and us. there is only us. we are all in this together and we must mend our broken society together. thank you very much for coming and thank you for listening. [applause] >> we have some time for question it is anyone wants to kick off. you say who you are and where you're from. there's a microphone coming to you. >> thank you very much, prime minister. on the specifics of dealing with these problems, your welfare secretary has talked about two specific things. one, the sort of intervention by police and gang leader's lives, pioneers knocking on their doors every day and also taking benefits away fro those convicted in the riots.

do you agree with those idea? will you see them put into place? and also, if i may, you made a very big pledge to turn around the lives of everyone of 120 of the most troubled families, you said, before the general election. how can you hope to achieve that and how will we know if you've achieved it or failed? >> let me take the second question first. the fact is, if you look at the facts on the ground and the figures, there are around $1 -- 120,000 of very dysnctional, very doubled -- very troubled families in our country. they've cost a huge amount of money and interved in a huge amount of different ways and they're the ones getting visits from social services, from the police, from probation, they're in touch if you like with many organizations of the state. but what we find is actually no one is really working on those families, they're not working with those families to turn em around. some counselors in swinden has

done excellent work and helping them get in the homes a turning the families around and solving the underlying families in those -- those problems within those families. we should be doing all those on 120,000 families. we must not be put off by the allegations of nanny state or interfering. these families cause he trouble for the rest of the society but alsoave huge problems for themselves so we shouldn't stand back and just accept they're going to have the odd intervention here or odd bit of help here and getin with your sleeves rolled up and turn some of them around. gunk an smith has any mull support. one of the reasons i asked him to sit with the home secretary on the task force on gangs is before he came back in the front line on politics, he ent a lot of time with the social justice commission looking at how we get to grip with family breakdown, societal breakdown and gangs specifically. i think it's very important we

bring expertise around the country and even around the world on how best to deal with the gang culture. it's a growing problem in our country. 's been getting worse and worse. some parts of our country have dealt with it with a combined approach. on the one hand, yes, quite a tough police action against gangs, hassling them and troubling them but also working with all the organizations within society, including youth clubs like this to try to divert people away from gangs so we want to learn the lessons and make sure we bring tm to good effect but with the home secretary they'll do very good work on that. sir? >> from reuters. can you tell me how much of a constraint the lowest social spending will be in conducting the social fhtback? and secondly, when looking to the united states for advice on policing, what do you say to those who have bids that may import u.s. style problems of even more overcrowded prisons with even more representation from primarily ethnic, minority

communities. >> first of all on the first question, i think the idea that the way you solve problems is just throwing a wall of money at them, that the answer to every problem is to open the taxpayers checkbook that little bit wider. i think we've proved that is not the case. it's been said if these riots were really about money, be having a debate today about money and how to spend money here and there to make a difference. they weren't really about money but about behavior and about moral breakdown. they were about people without proper boundaries. yes, of course, some of the things cost money but a lot of them is about doing things differently. weave some excellently funded police organizations in this country and we can get more of what we have by freeing people up from the back office and cutting the paperwork and getting them on e streets. we don have like other countries around the world much money to spend right now so we ought to be looking at anyway nonmoney solutions to problems but i argue many of these problems are not money problems in the first place. they're moral and behavioral

problems so it's time for different answer. in terms of importing advice from overseas. i think we should just recognize that different countries have done different things, some have succeeded, some have failed and you should always in politics be prepared to look around the world and see, where are good examples of practice an can we learn from that? and i think if you look at the united states, of course they have hugehallenges of crime and terrible situations in some cities with gangs, but they've been dealing with these problems for longer a i think when you look at some of the inspirational police chiefs there are in the u.s., it's right to learn from them, to listen to them andee what they have to offer and that's exactly what we're gng to be doing and i don't think anybody needs to be worried about that. michael white from the audience? >> my question, prime minister, is do the young people have any questions because we're here presumably to know what they think about it all, too. >> that's a good questi. i was being good in taking the people with their hands up

first but let's have the lady here. >> you said about families, is it not just e families causing the trouble, maybe teenagers have problems as well. >> of course. the point about families is that's the setting. that's one of the settings in which we can try to deal with and address people's problems. so every family has massive chlenges of dealing with each other's behavior. believe me, we had some at breakfast time in my family today. but the thing about families, it's the first line of dense, as it were, for trying to get people to behave better and understand that your behavior has consequence. now, lots of people don't have a supportive family and it's so important that we have other ways of helping people which is why school needs to do better at dealing with behavior. it's why we have youth clubs like this where if you're not getting what you need at home, you've got another setting w