Tony Blair has urged Britain's black community to speak out against gang culture and violent crime as he warned it was threatening the renaissance of cities like Birmingham.
The Prime Minister said: "We won't stop this by pretending it isn't young black kids doing it." But the remarks were challenged last night by anti-gun campaigners and black church leaders.
But Bishop Joe Aldred, Birmingham-based chair of the Council of Black-led Churches, said: "I have to ask – where has he been? Who has he been listening to?
"Because up and down the country, there has been nothing short of total condemnation of gun, knife, gang or drug culture."
Mr Blair made the comments in a speech yesterday highlighting the regeneration of Birmingham's canal district as a "really encouraging" development which had revived the city centre. However, he warned that improvements to Britain's big cities were "blighted" by gun and knife crime, as well as anti-social behaviour.
The Prime Minister said: "The black community – the vast majority of whom in these communities are decent, law-abiding people horrified at what is happening – need to be mobilised in denunciation of this gang culture that is killing innocent young black kids."
The speech, in Cardiff, followed the deaths of 15 teenagers across Britain in gun or knife attacks so far this year, including Odwayne Barnes, who was killed outside a Birmingham college in March.
Attention focused on the issue of gun crime in 2003 following the murders in Aston of students Charlene Ellis, 18, and Letisha Shakespeare, 17. Earlier this month, The Birmingham Post revealed how the number of people under 16 arrested or dealt with by officers for firearms offences rocketed from 36 to 93 in three years. In the last seven months, there have been at least three fatal shootings in the city and a number of others resulting in injury.
Mr Blair stressed that most young black boys were not involved with knives or guns. But he said it would be wrong to ignore a problem in a section of the black community because of "political correctness".
The Prime Minister also highlighted other forms of crime and anti-social behaviour, including late-night drunkenness in city centres and nuisance neighbours. Gleen Reid, a Birmingham mother who founded Families for Peace after her son Corey Wayne, was shot and killed in 2000, said black parents were already campaigning against guns and knives.
Mrs Reid said: "We all know that we are losing our young black kids to guns and knives.
"But don't tell the black community that we are not fighting it, because we are."
She called on the Government to fund campaigns against gang culture, and to provide more training and opportunities including apprenticeship schemes.
"It is no use saying to those young people 'put the gun down' if, when they ask what you will put in their hands to replace it, the answer is nothing."
Bishop Aldred said the Government was doing too little to examine the reasons why young people were poorly parented or excluded from school.
"What each and every group I know complains about is lack of research, lack of support and short term and inadequate funding."
The Prime Minister's comments appeared to contradict claims made by a Home Office Minister last month.
Baroness Scotland, one of few black members of the Government, told a Commons committee: "The data we have doesn't indicate a bias towards one ethnic group or another."
Liberal Democrat President Simon Hughes said Mr Blair's analysis was "over-simplistic" and the shadow Home Secretary, David Davis, said the Prime Minister's comments were an admission his Government's law and order policies had failed.
