The riots have shown that white working-class boys feel distanced from society, Mel Stride has said.
The Tory leadership candidate argued that the unrest took place against s backdrop of both job security and home ownership feeling out of reach for disadvantaged white boys.
He said Britain needed to think “much harder” about providing them with access to opportunities.
Violence broke out across the UK after the Southport attack, in which three children were killed, amid false information on social media claiming the suspect was an asylum seeker who arrived on a small boat.
Some protests saw chants of “we want our country back”, with disorder taking place in many of England’s most deprived areas.
Some 1,024 arrests had been made as of Tuesday night, with 575 charged.
In an interview for The Telegraph’s Politics Newsletter, Mr Stride, who was Rishi Sunak’s work and pensions secretary, was asked about the underlying causes of the riots.
“I think it does throw up deeper issues, some of them around social media and the way that has played into the problems, and the responsibilities of social media platforms,” he said.
“But I think the other thing is about community cohesion and is to a degree actually about poorer, white, working-class males, who I think we need to think much harder about in terms of making sure that we give them the kind of opportunities that society has, that I think many of them feel quite distanced from at the moment.”
Seven out of the 10 most deprived areas in England have experienced rioting in the past fortnight, according to the Financial Times.
White teenagers are proportionately the least likely ethnic group to attend Britain’s top universities, while only one in four poorer white pupils passed at least five of the tougher GCSE subjects last year.
Saying that improving the life chances of white working-class boys amounts to a “levelling up issue”, Mr Stride added: “I think it’s got to be jobs, careers, it’s got to be getting on in life. It’s got to be getting a stake in society.
“So that means the kinds of things that I benefited from, so I had an education which didn’t set me up with loads of debt.
“I managed to go and seize opportunities there, in my case growing businesses, I managed to get on the property ladder, which really set the foundation for the rest of my life.”
Mr Stride is the self-described “dark horse” in the race to replace Mr Sunak and was the force behind sweeping welfare reforms in the past year.
He also declared he wanted to see net migration capped at five figures, a Tory manifesto commitment that was made by Lord Cameron and Theresa May.
“I would say it’s got to be down in the kind of tens of thousands,” he said. “But I think these are issues that we need to work out in the parliamentary party and come to a settled view on it.”
He said he would also consider ensuring “some kind of relationship between the amount of housing that we’re building, for example, and the level of net migration that we permit”.
Robert Jenrick, one of Mr Stride’s Tory leadership rivals and a former immigration minister, has previously pushed for an annual cap of 100,000 net arrivals.
Mr Stride entered the Commons at the 2010 general election, aged 48, and argued that his “outside experience in the real world” would help him unite the party.
“I spent many years creating my own businesses sitting at the kitchen table, coming up with ideas, working with teams of people, delivering on that, climbing metaphorical mountains.”
Mr Stride has been heavily critical of Nigel Farage over his response to the riots, accusing the Reform UK leader of fuelling conspiracy theories in the wake of the Southport stabbings.
Denying his attacks on Mr Farage were “personal”, he said: “I do think it’s appropriate to call him out when he says things such as suggesting that the police are being untruthful, at a time when there was an acute crisis around rioting.”
The MP for Central Devon declined to be drawn on future membership of the European Convention on Human Rights, but echoed Mr Sunak’s insistence that Strasbourg should not “stand in the way” of controlling British borders.
Asked for his message to voters who abandoned the Tories in last month’s general election drubbing, Mr Stride said: “That there is a Conservative vision of the future based on conservative values of aspiration and opportunity and achievement. That has sadly been obfuscated and lost – but I will bring it back.”
