Labour leader says party will set up its own public inquiry into England riots if government fails to do so

The Labour leader, Ed Miliband, has said his party will set up its own public inquiry into the causes of the riots if David Cameron continues to insist he will not hold one.

Cameron has said he will await the outcome of a parliamentary inquiry, being held by the home affairs select committee, which begins in the autumn.

Speaking during a visit to Brixton, south London, Miliband said: "If the government doesn't do it, then I will make sure we do it."

Labour officials said Miliband was convinced, after talking to local communities in Manchester, Tottenham and Brixton, that a formal judicial inquiry was not what was needed.

Instead, he wants some form of inquiry that gives communities an opportunity to describe what their lives are like and what may have caused the eruption of violence in England. He has also spoken of the need for a commission on social equality.

Miliband has made it clear that he does not see the cause of the riot as purely cultural – the phrase used by the prime minister in the Commons on Thursday.

He said: "We have got to avoid simplistic answers. There's a debate some people are starting – is it culture, is it poverty and lack of opportunity? It's probably both."

He said the Scarman inquiry into the riots of the 1980s had had a long-term beneficial impact.

"Currently, the government is saying there is a select committee in the House of Commons that is going to look at these issues, and that's enough. But that select committee is only looking at the narrow policing and home affairs issues."

The Labour leader accepted that his party must bear some of the blame for the culture in which the rioters grew up, saying the party had not done enough when in power to reduce inequality.

"We did better at rebuilding the fabric of our country than the ethic of our country," he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.

But he added: "There are issues about responsibility in our society, parental responsibility is a big issue … there's also an issue about responsibility of people at the top of our society and the message they send to our young people, because of course what happened in the banking system, what happened with MP's expenses, what happened with phone hacking isn't the same as the looting we saw, but it is about responsibility.

"And there's responsibility on those at the top of Britain to send the right message out, because if we are going to change the culture and have a culture of responsibility in our country, it's got to start with the most powerful as well as talking to those without power, and what they need to do.

"I also think it's about opportunity. It's about showing people they have a stake in our society, and the best thing they can hope for isn't just to go and loot a telly or vandalise a shop, but they have something to hope for from our country."

The shadow local government minister, Jack Dromey, admitted that all governments had to take their share of the blame. He called for rioters to be named and shamed.

The Conservative deputy London mayor for policing, Kit Malthouse, accused the rioters of "criminal venality".

Earlier, Lord Tebbit, the employment secretary during the riots of the early 1980s, said on Today that a "complex set" of circumstances seemed to lie behind this week's disorder.

In the 1980s, he said, "you could fairly precisely point to bad relationships between the police and local people, considerable problems with the Caribbean-origin residents".

What was different this time, he suggested, was the extent to which the rioting "really was a multicultural affair … people of all races participated".

Tebbit added: "It could hardly be poverty which was driving some of these people who have been identified as looting shops, because they are comfortably off people."

Other elements in a complex set of circumstances, he said, included increasing numbers of "illiterate and innumerate" school leavers who were virtually unemployable, greater welfare dependency and more families in which nobody had ever worked, seemed likely to work, or even wanted to work.