"The true outcasts" in today's Britain are those who hate the vision of a country enriched and united by its diversity, the Prime Minister, Mr Blair, told an international convention of Sikhs in Birmingham yesterday.
As Queen Elizabeth sent her condolences to the families of those who died and were injured in Friday night's attack on a gay bar in Soho, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr George Carey, said homophobia - like racism - should have no place in society. And Cardinal Basil Hume declared himself terrified that society itself might be "sinking back to a kind of barbarism".
As police charged a 22-year-old man with murder and three counts of causing an explosion with intent to endanger life, Mr Blair pledged his determination to bring the London nail-bombers to justice. And he declared an attack on any one section of the community was an attack on Britain as a whole.
Linking the fight against hatred and prejudice at home to NATO's battle against ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, Mr Blair told the conference: "When one section of our community is under attack, we defend them in the name of all the community. When bombs attack the black and Asian community in Britain, they attack the whole of Britain. When the gay community is attacked and innocent people are murdered, all the good people of Britain, whatever their race, their lifestyle, their class, unite in revulsion and determination to bring the evil people to justice."
In responding in that way, said Mr Blair, "we are doing more than bringing killers to justice. We are defending what it means to be British."
Patriotism in Britain no longer excluded people because of their colour, religion or ethnic background, the prime minister said, but rather took pride in a diversity which "enriches and unites" the country. "The true outcasts today, the true minorities, those truly excluded are not the different races and religions of Britain but the racists, the bombers, the violent criminals who hate that vision of Britain and try to destroy it." But they would not succeed: "They shall not win. The great decent majority of British people will not let them. We will defeat them and then we can build the tolerant, multiracial Britain the vast majority of us want to see."
Mr Blair acknowledged that, as shown by the Stephen Lawrence case, Britain still had a long way to go before that vision of the tolerant, multiracial society was achieved. But he insisted: "We can take hope from the distance already travelled."
Referring to Britain's role in the NATO campaign, Mr Blair said they were fighting for the same values there, the right to live in freedom from fear.
Mr Blair, who received a rapturous welcome, said: "The message of tolerance and respect which is at the heart of the Sikh religion could not be more relevant where blacks, Asians and gays have been under attack, or in Kosovo where racial hatred has caused scenes of barbarity not seen in Europe since the second World War." Events in Kosovo, London and the US, meanwhile, have prompted Cardinal Hume's fears of dangerous moral decline. "When I think about what's been going on in America (the Denver school killings), when you know of what's been going on in Kosovo, we seem at the end of our millennium to be sinking back to a kind of barbarism," he said.