The riots that broke out across England last month forced the middle classes to acknowledge the long-ignored plight of people living on deprived council estates, Iain Duncan Smith has said. The work and pensions secretary said the country was shocked "when the inner city finally came to call".

He suggested that the widespread disorder had exposed a society corrupted by a "distorted morality" that had stripped young people of hope and aspiration. Duncan Smith is the first minister to connect the disorder in London and other English cities with the problems of drugs, gangs and welfare dependency associated with some run-down estates.

"For years now, too many people have remained unaware of the true nature of life on some of our estates," he said.

"This was because we had ghettoised many of these problems, keeping them out of sight of the middle-class majority. But last month the inner city finally came to call, and the country was shocked by what it saw."

In an interview with the Times, Duncan Smith also made a link between the disturbances and a wider collapse in social responsibility, as the labour leader Ed Miliband has previously said.

"The distorted morality has permeated our whole society, right to the very top," he said. "Whether in the banking crisis, phone hacking or the MPs' expenses scandal, we have seen a failure of responsibility from the leaders of our society."

While there was no excuse for rioting, he warned that a culture of "do what I say" rather than "do what I do is unsustainable".