Consider four recent events. First, the debate in the Tory party on whether to leapfrog Labour and adopt the radically redistributive anti-poverty policies symbolised by Polly Toynbee, the Guardian columnist. Then cast your mind to the impending defeat of the Bush-Blair coalition in Iraq. Next consider the nightmarish murder of Tom ap Rhys Pryce, the young London lawyer stabbed to death by two teenage robbers when he failed to hand over his Oyster card and mobile phone. Finally, turn to a story you probably haven’t noticed: the Royal Economic Society’s annual public lecture, on the subject of how to end poverty among the world’s “bottom billion” people and titled “War and Peace in Africa”.

What do these four news items have in common? The obvious answer is “economic deprivation”. When people lack the basic necessities of life (which in affluent Britain may well include a Tube card and a mobile phone), they naturally turn to violence and crime. Therefore, the surest way to stop the spiral of violence, whether it is in the backstreets of London or the killing fields of Iraq, is to create economic opportunities, to raise living standards and to offer the poor more generous financial support.

This obvious answer is not exactly wrong, but it is dangerously misleading. For in many cases the causal arrow points the other way: it is not economic deprivation that leads to violence and war; it is social and political breakdown that lead to economic deprivation.

In the ap Rhys Pryce tragedy, the trial quickly showed that greed for material possessions was not the real motive for the murder. Rather, it was a total absence of “moral training” that permitted his killers to take pride in murdering someone who had tried to defy them — and then to show no repentance for this grotesque act. These kids did not turn violent because they were poor and unemployed. They were poor and unemployed because they were members of a vicious subculture that rejected all conventional moral values and thus made them unemployable social outcasts. Once the police give up on a neighbourhood, schools abandon discipline and teachers lose faith in “bourgeois morality”, gang culture can all too easily take over and violence can become the only ethical norm.

The link with the Tory debate on social policy should by now be clear. Regardless of the statistical arguments about the number of families living in poverty under Labour, what the Tories should surely agree is that income redistribution is not the solution to the underclass problem. These families need routes out of poverty, but a Tory government, instead of just increasing social payments, should surely be trying to demolish the roadblocks to self-improvement for the poorest, the most serious of which today are street crime, ethnic fragmentation and, above all, the failures of education. And the real failure of the schools in helping the underclass out of deprivation has not been in imparting knowledge but in creating a sense of discipline, direction and moral standards for children not adequately socialised at home. Again, the causal links run from chaotic homes and unruly classrooms to economic failure, and not just the other way round.

We see the same phenomenon in vast and terrifying perspective when we turn to the world stage. The breakdown of law and order has been the real indictment of the US occupation of Iraq. The coalition’s failure to control the epidemic of violence has swept away all hopes of democracy or economic development and has left many Iraqis yearning, if not for a return of Saddam Hussein, at least for the creation of regional dictatorships under repressive tribal regimes. When faced with a choice between tyranny and anarchy, people will choose tyranny every time. The Bush doctrine may assert that people everywhere long for democracy and freedom, but there is little interest in democracy when people fear that they will be blown to smithereens whenever they venture out.

The prime responsibility of any state is to protect the lives and property of its citizens. A government that fails in this duty, whether through foreign invasion or civil war or even just rampant domestic crime, will soon lose legitimacy and will be unable to achieve any other political or economic objective, even if it can still cling to power.

Which brings me to Africa and global poverty. The RES lecture to be delivered tomorrow in London by Professor Paul Collier, of Oxford University, is not a demand for more Western aid and better trade terms to help to bring peace to Africa or to prevent tens of millions of people dying in civil wars. It is, in fact, exactly the opposite. Professor Collier, who until recently was head of research at the World Bank, argues that “increased aid and freer trade will make only a marginal difference” to the “bottom billion”, who have completely missed out on the benefits of globalisation.

The reason why is that this bottom billion live mostly in “failed states”, either in the midst of wars and civil conflicts or in conditions of “post-conflict collapse”. Until security and a semblance of proper governance is established, economic development is impossible, free trade is irrelevant and development aid is largely wasted, indirectly finances new war or ends up encouraging the battle for resources.

The duty of the rich countries in such situations is not to offer more money but “to provide military intervention to end civil wars, prevent conflicts from restarting or support long-term economic solutions”. After Iraq and Afghanistan, this may be impossibly idealistic, but the message from Sudan and Afghanistan is the same as it is from the streets of London. Money alone is not the answer. To have any hope of economic progress, law and order must come first.

Times Recommends

• In the real world, the public sector must pay
• Playing politics in a land of double Dutch
• Be like the plinth people: not set in stone