Watching parts of our major cities descend into near anarchy in recent days has made me angry. Not because I want to lock up the worst of the rioters and throw away the key, tempting though that is. Nor because I agree with the prime minister that what we have witnessed is indeed a symptom of a sick society. No, I am angry because of the multiple and avoidable economic and social policy failures that have, over several decades, sowed the roots of this appalling display of violence and wanton criminality.

During the recession of the early 1990s I spent almost a year in Tottenham, scene of the initial riot last Saturday, as interim director of the Campaign for Work. As a working class Londoner, born in the late 1950s and bred in the inner city at a time when the welfare state was in its pomp and full employment taken for granted, observing the damage wrought by subsequent urban decline and mass unemployment was heart wrenching. The roots of this decline are obvious, while its eventual consequences – in the shape of this week’s appalling riots – were probably inevitable.

The Thatcherite austerity of the 1980s ripped the economic heart out of already relatively deprived communities, which have, ever since, been left largely dependent on income from state benefits and whatever limited resources were pumped in by various public agencies to keep the lid on the resulting social distress.

However, public investment on its own has always been insufficient to restore vibrancy to depressed local economies. Therefore, even in the boom years prior to the recession of the late 2000s, drug-dealing and related petty crime was at least as lucrative as the types of legitimate work available to poorly educated, inner city young people, many of whom were themselves brought up in families where nobody had worked in a regular job for years.

Yet, rather than tackle this head-on through a combination of tough policies on welfare, schooling and policing, the authorities have constantly turned a blind eye to criminality and career joblessness to avoid sparking social unrest. The underlying problem was therefore left to fester and gradually allowed to get worse, with gun and knife crime also becoming commonplace. But while this implicit policy of sanctioned neglect was just about feasible in a period of general prosperity, its flaws were always likely to be exposed once a serious recession reduced income levels in poor communities and dragged into the mire people who had previously managed to avoid the temptation to engage in crime or anti-social behaviour.

Although it’s virtually impossible to predict what specific event might spark riots such as those seen of late, I find it unsurprising that they have occurred against a backdrop of economic stagnation, sharply rising inflation and high unemployment. While much of the looting that has taken place has involved theft of expensive luxury goods, rioters also ransacked grocery shops to stock up on food. It’s no coincidence that the last time the UK experienced a similar spate of riots was in the darkest economic days of the 1980s.

I agree with those commentators who reject the suggestion that the riots are a response to the Cameron-Clegg government's austerity measures, since the impact of public spending cuts is yet to be felt with any force, though government policy is partly responsible for the anaemic economic growth we are currently experiencing. However, this offers little consolation, since it means that the full impact is still to come.

But please don’t tell me that there is rioting on the streets of our major cities simply because a minority of people suddenly decided to engage in mass lawlessness. The causes, both economic and social, go much deeper than this and are likely to persist so long as we fail to tackle them head on.

John Philpott is chief economic adviser at the CIPD