Daily Inspiration Quote by Roy Hattersley

Hattersley takes a scalpel to a fashionable kind of “tolerance” that is really conditional membership: you can stay, but only if you sand down the parts of yourself we find inconvenient. The line is engineered around that chilling hinge phrase, “if, and only if,” borrowing the cold precision of logic to expose the coldness of the bargain. It’s not an argument about theology; it’s an argument about liberalism’s credibility. A free society, he implies, cannot demand invisibility as the price of inclusion without quietly becoming the thing it claims to oppose.

The subtext is aimed as much at the majority as at Muslims. “Stop behaving like Muslims” isn’t about criminality; it gestures toward ordinary markers of faith and culture - dress, diet, prayer, public identity. Hattersley is calling out a British reflex to treat minority difference as provocation, then rename assimilation as “integration.” In that framing, the state and the public don’t have to wrestle with pluralism; they just outsource the discomfort to the minority community and call it cohesion.

Context matters: Hattersley’s Britain is one where immigration, multiculturalism, and later the post-9/11 security climate sharpened public suspicion of Muslim belonging. His sentence anticipates the trap set by “British values” rhetoric when it slides from shared civic commitments into a demand for cultural conformity. The intent is defensive of liberal principles, but also accusatory: a society that offers welcome only on terms of self-erasure isn’t welcoming at all - it’s policing identity under a polite banner.