David Miliband has made a rare intervention into frontline British politics to warn David Cameron his recent attack on state multiculturalism risks pushing people with concerns about race and immigration into "latent hostility or active enmity".
In a Guardian article, the former foreign secretary says the prime minister's "muscular liberalism" offers little to people who are craving what he calls a "greater sense of security" in an ever changing world.
Miliband, defeated by his brother Ed for the Labour leadership last year, makes his criticism of the PM as he endorses a report by the Searchlight Educational Trust into race, multiculturalism and identity. The report, in which 5,000 people were surveyed by the Populus polling organisation, found Britain is now divided into what it called six social "tribes": Confident multiculturalists, Mainstream liberals, Identity ambivalents, Cultural integrationists, Latent hostiles and Active enmity.