John Harris’s powerful article exposes the growing assault on empathy in politics (From the US midterms to the hard right in Britain, empathy has become a dirty word in politics, 3 November). But why has empathy become such a threatening quality? Perhaps because extinguishing it completes the work of aggressive neoliberalism by severing the last thread of the social contract: our sense of responsibility for one another. If we can persuade ourselves that people are to blame for their own suffering, and that helping them merely enables dependency, we can abandon them without guilt.
We founded Compassion in Politics in the aftermath of Brexit and Trump’s first election because we feared precisely this erosion of compassion from public life. Yet evolutionary science tells a different story about human nature. Our capacity for compassion is innate. It is one of the qualities that enabled our species to survive through cooperation and mutual care. Crucially, it is not fixed. The cultures and institutions we create can nurture it or suppress it.
That is why defending compassion is not enough. We must actively build political institutions and a culture that bring out the best in human nature. We now have more than 60 MPs working with us across party lines, and our movement is spreading internationally. Compassion is the antidote to the politics of cruelty, and we must all urgently spread it.
Jennifer Nadel
Co-founder and CEO, Compassion in Politics; director of compassionate politics, Centre for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education, Stanford University
As John Harris points out, the hard right have indeed been fighting a culture war against all things empathetic, woke or ethical. However, his conclusion that “all over the world, compassion, kindness and other such virtues gather a thick layer of dust, like old hymn books in a long-deserted church”, while poetic, does overstate the effects of this culture war.
We know from science that empathy is partly influenced by genetics, from polling and surveys that between 60% and 80% try to be other-centred at least some of the time, and from our own lived experience (like the Guardian’s Kindness of Strangers series) that people can be surprisingly kind too – even in 2026.
And we also learned from the US midterm results that just because a lot of rich men say a thing is true on their social media channels, that does not mean all the people can be fooled all the time. Comfortingly, it’s looking like it will take more than a few billionaires to dislodge the tendency for compassion and kindness from the human experience.
Rob Harrison
Editor, Ethical Consumer Magazine
“Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable” is a sound principle for most serious public addresses. As a research professor in engineering and technology, Methodist local preacher and former parliamentary candidate, I am familiar with the weak sensibilities of most audiences and church congregations.
I have learned that a powerful, uncomfortable truth should be the cornerstone, because this is the nature of the evolving creation of which we are a part. There is no other hiding place, but because there seems to be a kind of unity and wisdom in all of this we can recognise and find some comfort.
But we, the media and our politicians need to be far more realistic, humble, and probably less demanding. Kindness and goodness, yes, but empathy needs to be very carefully used, because it is extremely difficult to be in another’s shoes.
Barry Jones
Malvern, Worcestershire
