A politics based on empathy is the only way to avoid the abyss

Jonathan Edwards

The decision of the UK Government to aim an axe at social support for the sick and disabled has inevitably set off a backlash from charities, some Labour backbenchers and its challengers from the political left.

I would be amazed if No 10 hadn’t gamed the fallout from slashing £5bn of support.

If there is one act that explains the ascendancy of Jeremy Corbyn to the leadership of the Labour Party, it was the decision of Labour in advance of the 2015 general election to not oppose the proposals of the then Coalition Government to cut welfare expenditure and to embrace Tory fiscal targets.

At the time I was running a social media campaign under the ‘RedTories’ hashtag that went viral, (to give due credit the actual term was devised firstly by Neil McEvoy). Now I am certainly not claiming credit for the rise of the Labour left under Corbyn, but it certainly didn’t hurt.

Moral crusade

On assuming the Labour leadership, Starmer quoted Harold Wilson by saying that the Labour Party is a moral crusade or it is nothing. He said the mission of a Labour government under his leadership would be to address inequalities.

In that context it is difficult to match the rhetoric and action. Surely the Labour Party understands that the othering and scapegoating inherent in their welfare plans serve to legitimise the populist right.

One of the most cutting interviews on the current proposals I have read came from the Shadow Chancellor during the Corbyn years, John McDonnell. He accused the UK Government of lacking empathy.

McDonnell now sits as an Independent after breaking the whip on a previous benefits vote. It seems an obvious statement, but when you think about it, it could well have a deeper meaning.

If I can shamelessly plug my forthcoming memoir Into the Abyss, I genuinely feel we are entering a very dangerous period in human history, and that one of the main reasons for that is that we are living in an unempathetic age.

Fuelling rage

Our political discourse has moved from seeking common ground and compromise to fuelling rage and polarising opinions.

I certainly do not believe that some of the major political decisions made by the UK Government during my time in Westminster were made with the best interests of the electorate in mind. Austerity and Brexit being the obvious cases in point.

Readers could quite rightly point to similarly unempathetic political ages such as the 1980s, but at least at that juncture it could be argued there was an empathetic alternative.

The left of today in embracing cancel culture, faux outrage, and moral grandstanding is equally at fault for the dark political age before us.

As is often misattributed to Plato, ‘empathy is the highest form of knowledge, as it requires us to suspend our egos and live in another’s world’. If we accept this as a truism then our politics across the spectrum isn’t populated with particularly bright people.

Before I am accused of hypocrisy I readily admit that as my former constituency neighbour Simon Hart describes me in his Chief Whip diaries, of being ‘wedded to the cause’(of Welsh nationalism).

I am personally no better therefore on many fronts.

Dangerous

The demise of empathy as a virtue in our politics and everyday life goes a long way to explaining the dangerous point we have reached in history.

Past horrors remind us about how carefully we now need to tread.

As G M Gilbert, the American psychologist tasked with monitoring the defendants at the Nuremburg trials, said: “In my work with the defendants I was searching for the nature of evil and I now think I have come close to defining it. A lack of empathy.

It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants, a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow men. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.”

Jonathan Edwards was the MP for Carmarthen East and Dinefwr 2010-24