Compassion as Political Infrastructure: Three Voices Argue Empathy Is Under Siege but Not Defeated

A cross-party movement with 60+ MPs frames compassion as structural politics, not sentiment. The counterargument: polling shows 60-80% of people already practice other-centredness. The real question is institutional design, not individual virtue.

Three Guardian letter-writers respond to John Harris's column on the retreat of empathy from public life, and the exchange crystallizes a genuine tension in democratic politics: is compassion being extinguished by design, or is the perception of its death a culture-war artefact that overstates the hard right's actual reach?

Jennifer Nadel, co-founder of Compassion in Politics and a director at Stanford's Centre for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education, makes the institutional case. Her organization, founded after Brexit and Trump's first election, now claims more than 60 MPs working across party lines and an international footprint. Her argument is structural, not sentimental: aggressive neoliberalism severed the social contract by persuading people that suffering is self-inflicted, and the antidote is building institutions that "bring out the best in human nature" rather than merely defending kindness as a personal virtue. Rob Harrison, editor of Ethical Consumer Magazine, pushes back on the fatalism. He cites Cambridge research showing empathy is partly influenced by genetics, polling data from GlobeScan indicating 60-80% of people try to be other-centred at least some of the time, and the US midterm results as evidence that billionaire-funded culture war has hard limits. His point is bracing: the hard right's assault on empathy is loud but may not be winning. The 2026 midterms showed that "just because a lot of rich men say a thing is true on their social media channels" does not mean the public follows. Barry Jones, a research professor in engineering, Methodist preacher, and former parliamentary candidate, introduces a useful complication. He argues that empathy — being in another's shoes — is "extremely difficult" and needs careful deployment, distinguishing it from kindness and goodness. The distinction matters: institutional compassion can be designed and scaled; empathy as emotional identification is fragile and easily weaponized. The exchange exposes two competing diagnoses. One says the machinery of public life is being deliberately stripped of compassion by identifiable actors — neoliberal ideology, populist movements, billionaire media owners. The other says human nature is more resilient than the doom narrative suggests, and the evidence from elections and polling supports cautious optimism. Both can be true simultaneously. What none of the writers fully addresses is the mechanism by which institutional compassion translates into policy. Sixty MPs in a cross-party group is a signal of interest, not a programme. The hard question — whether compassion-as-politics can survive contact with fiscal constraints, electoral incentives, and the attention economy — remains unanswered. The movement's international spread and Stanford affiliation suggest institutional ambition, but the gap between advocacy infrastructure and legislative outcomes is where most such initiatives stall. The most useful takeaway is Nadel's framing shift: from defending compassion as a value to building it as political infrastructure. If the cultures and institutions we create can nurture or suppress compassion, then the political fight is architectural — about what gets funded, what gets measured, what gets rewarded in public life. That reframing is more durable than any appeal to better angels.