Faith & Spirit Quote by Ed Miliband

Tolerance gets framed here as Britain and its politics at their most flattering: calm, plural, basically decent. Miliband’s line is engineered to sound like a national self-portrait, the kind voters like to see hanging in the living room. It’s also a careful sidestep of the culture-war trap. By starting with “whether we have faith or not,” he signals to religious voters that they’re not being patronized, while reassuring secular audiences that public life shouldn’t be run like a church committee. The payoff is “by and large,” a politician’s pressure valve: broad enough to claim a social consensus, slippery enough to avoid responsibility for the cracks.

The subtext is defensive as much as celebratory. “Whatever their particular view” quietly admits those views can be sharply incompatible, even ugly, without naming which conflicts are at stake: immigration, Islamophobia, same-sex marriage, abortion, the wearing of religious symbols, the perennial anxiety about “British values.” Miliband is offering tolerance as a shared civic virtue precisely because it’s being contested. It’s reassurance aimed at a country he’s trying to keep from fracturing into mutually suspicious tribes.

Context matters: Miliband led Labour in an era when identity, faith, and belonging were becoming electoral flashpoints across Europe. The phrase “the great thing” invites applause, but it’s also a plea: let’s keep arguing without turning disagreement into exile. It’s political rhetoric doing what it’s supposed to do when a coalition is fragile: define a “we” roomy enough that more people feel included than threatened.