Thought for the Day and the elite empathy problem

Spectator

2 days ago

Like much of Radio 4's output, Thought for the Day is something of a curate's egg – sometimes enlightening and a source of inspiration or comfort. Often, however, it's sanctimonious; auricular masturbation for the comfortable.
The BBC has been heavily criticised for its segment on Wednesday morning, featuring Dr Krish Kandiah, a theologian and author, discussing 'fear' in relation to the migrant crisis. His reflections amount to a series of boilerplate platitudes beloved by open borders advocates. He calls for 'empathy over suspicion', 'listening before judging', 'building bridges not walls'. While the Church's managerial class will have nodded sagely along to all this, I wonder how representative this sort of intellectually diluted, unexamined rehashing of comfortable tropes about 'nasty xenophobia' really is among the ordinary people in the pews. After all, plenty of churchgoers will know what the less rose-tinted practical realities of mass migration actually look like.
Dr Kandiah speaks with total conviction, and a striking curiosity as to why so many British people feel as they do. 'Our fears are misplaced', he insists, citing 'xenophobia'. All this reflects a widely held belief on the liberal-left, that people only believe what has been fed to them (or, better yet, 'weaponised') by the tabloid press and social media algorithms. Accordingly, no fear can be rational or informed by actual experiences. This argument is becoming harder to maintain as we record more data on, for instance, migrant crime (something the government has been reluctant to do). Indeed, listening to Dr Kandiah yesterday, it already felt outmoded.
As a sidenote, it's very apparent that people are only ever accused of 'disinformation' when expressing a 'low-status' viewpoint. Treasury Minister Darren Jones confidently told a Question Time audience recently that the 'majority of people' arriving in migrant boats were 'children, babies and women'. According to the Migration Observatory, around 76 per cent of those arriving in small boats in 2024 were men over the age of 18.
Dr Kandiah likewise does his best to waft away such concerns. 'Most crimes against children are committed, not by strangers, but by people they know' he insists; a truism which crucially ignores the important point about likelihood of offending. According to data from the MoJ, foreign nationals make up around 9 per cent of the UK population but are responsible for between 15 and 23 per cent of sexual offences. Certain nationalities are dramatically over-represented in the available statistics. Even expressing these points remains controversial; Sky News recently attempted to 'fact-check' Nigel Farage for citing data on nationality and sexual violence, curiously arguing that he should have compared statistics from two separate metrics rather than using like-for-like data.
People like Dr Kandiah seem to possess an apparently boundless empathy for migrants, less when it comes to their fellow citizens. There are echoes of the 'telescopic philanthropy' of Mrs Jellyby from Bleak House, so busy directing her good works towards Tockahoopo Indians and tribes of Borrioboola-Gha in Africa that she doesn't notice or care that her own children are suffering. Comfortable England has an empathy problem; it is willing to contort itself into paroxysms of emotion for migrants yet remains incapable of listening to concerns of the communities affected by mass migration. Yesterday's Thought for the Day epitomised this; by throwing out a slur of 'xenophobia' the speaker thought he could shut down these concerns and proceed to moralise on his terms. That simply isn't going to cut it anymore.
Meanwhile, there are obvious theological counterpoints to express. Yes, Christ tells us to love our neighbours, to welcome the stranger. But he doesn't say to do so when they are putting others at risk and undermining the rule of law, nor when the poor, the vulnerable, the un-listened-to are begging you to do otherwise. He also tells sinners to repent, to 'go your way and sin no more', he encourages adults to 'suffer the little children' (i.e. nurture and protect them). He also speaks of sorting 'sheep from the goats', that 'by their fruits shall ye know them' and – in an intensely patriarchal society – he calls for the prayers and worries of women to be heeded. All these would be quite convincing starting points for rebuttals to Mr Kandiah's sanctimony. It is time the Church starts expressing them if it wants to be taken seriously, if and when its appeals for calm become necessary.
Frankly, theologians owe the public a better explanation than endlessly rehashing #BeKind platitudes. To dismiss the genuine concerns of a not-inconsiderable number of people as simply wicked and stupid, as Dr Kandiah did, not only shows an arrogance which undermines his cause, but a lack of curiosity about the many potential counterarguments to his view. That these don't appear to him to be worth engaging with suggests that his theological nous is not quite as sharp as he thinks it is.
Appealing for calm and seeking to avoid violence is obviously a key part of the Church's mission in the wider context of society, but to be able to do that it must have some credibility – it needs to have listened in the first place. Dismissing public concern with cant will not work, indeed it will almost certainly make people angrier.