Must not speak the truth about bad attitudes among blacks

That there ARE a lot of bad attitudes among blacks is shown by their high rate of criminal offending

Oliver Letwin's words in a secret memo blaming 'bad moral attitudes' among black people for the 1980s riots 'border on criminality', equality campaigners said today.

The Tory MP has been accused of racism after he warned Margaret Thatcher in 1985 not to back a black entrepreneur scheme, saying they would just 'set up in the disco and drug trade'.

Mr Letwin, who is David Cameron's policy chief, also argued that social unrest could not be caused by deprivation because poor white people had lived in slums for years without rioting.

Civil rights campaigner Darcus Howe said today: 'If a black man had said something quite like that he’d have been called into Scotland Yard and he might be charged with incitement to riot. It is bordering on criminality'.

Mr Letwin's comments were discovered in files released yesterday under the former 30-year rule by the National Archives at Kew, west London.

He was a member of Mrs Thatcher's policy unit and wrote the memo in the wake of the Broadwater Farm riot in Tottenham, north London, in 1985. The country had been rocked by social unrest after riots erupted in mostly black urban areas.

After the document emerged last night Mr Letwin later apologised 'unreservedly' and admitted he was 'wrong' and his controversial memo, initialled and probably underlined by Lady Thatcher, was 'badly worded'.

Oliver Letwin and co-author Hartley Booth wrote a memo for Mrs Thatcher after major rioting in Tottenham.  They commented on government policy and what they thought were the root causes of unrest.

They wrote: 'The root of social malaise is not poor housing, or youth "alienation", or the lack of a middle class.

'Lower-class, unemployed white people lived for years in appalling slums without a breakdown of public order on anything like the present scale; in the midst of the depression, people in Brixton went out, leaving their grocery money in a bag at the front door, and expecting to see groceries there when they got back.

'Riots, criminality and social disintegration are caused solely by individual characters and attitudes. So long as bad moral attitudes remain, all efforts to improve the inner cities will founder.

'David Young's new entrepreneurs will set up in the disco and drug trade; Kenneth Baker's refurbished council blocks will decay through vandalism combined with neglect; and people will graduate from temporary training or employment programmes into unemployment or crime'.

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