Nobody Cares About Dad

It has felt like a heavy week.
Across the Atlantic, the United States mourns the sudden loss of Charlie Kirk. Here in the UK, we’re grappling with the shock of Ricky Hatton’s death. These are moments that might once have united people in grief, in reflection, in a shared sense of humanity.

Instead, the reaction has revealed just how divided we have become. Online, the commentary has felt less about remembrance and more about victory laps and tribal point-scoring. People on the left cheered the passing of those they disagreed with. People on the right shook their heads in disbelief. And in the middle of it all, the sense of empathy seemed to slip quietly away.

Tribes are nothing new. Football teams, political parties, even music scenes have always given us a sense of belonging. They give us a shorthand, a banner to rally behind, a way of saying “these are my people.”

But in recent years, those lines have hardened. It feels less like communities of interest and more like battle camps. You’re expected to be all in, on one side or the other. To deviate, even slightly, is to risk exile.

What’s disappeared is the ability to say: “I don’t agree with that person on everything, but on this point, they might have a case.” The space for nuance has shrunk, replaced by the noise of absolutes.

Take Tommy Robinson. For many, his name alone ends the conversation. And yet, dismissing every word because of who speaks it is not the same as engaging with ideas. At the Freedom March in London, the crowd wasn’t simply caricatures of the far-right. Among them were ordinary people: middle-class women, professional men, those unsettled by the pace of change in their country. To acknowledge their presence isn’t to endorse an ideology, but simply to recognise a reality.

I’ve always seen myself as broadly centrist, with perhaps a slight lean to the right. A few years ago, I took one of those blind surveys where you rank policies without knowing which party proposed them. My score?

• 40% Conservative
• 40% Liberal
• 20% Green

Hardly the profile of a hard-liner. Yet today, nuance is drowned out by noise. To step an inch away from one camp is to risk being cast fully into the other. The labels no longer fit, but they’re applied anyway.

It’s not just politics. We see the same polarisation in culture, sport, even public health. Social media amplifies this, rewarding outrage with clicks and calmness with silence. The incentive isn’t to find common ground—it’s to find the sharpest edge, the soundbite that will provoke the biggest reaction.

This week, I found myself stepping away from social media altogether. Each scroll brought fresh outrage, fresh division, fresh reminders that debate has become less about listening and more about shouting.

It hurts to see it. Because beneath the slogans and the hashtags are simply people: parents, neighbours, colleagues. People who want to feel safe, heard, and respected.

And yet, the way we talk online makes it hard to see the human being on the other side of the screen. A mother becomes “a leftist snowflake.” A father becomes “a far-right thug.” These words flatten complex lives into caricatures, making it easier to attack and harder to understand.

In quieter moments, I wonder what our children will make of it all. Will they inherit a culture where disagreement is a sign of strength, or one where it’s treated as betrayal? Will they learn that listening is an act of courage, or will they simply learn to pick a side and stick to it?

Perhaps the most radical act we can commit to now is the simplest one: to listen first. To hear words for what they are, not for the jersey worn by the person speaking them. To weigh ideas by their merit, not their origin.

Listening does not mean agreeing. It doesn’t mean abandoning principles or ignoring harm. It means giving ourselves permission to pause, to ask questions, to wonder whether the world is really as binary as our timelines suggest.

History shows us that progress is rarely made in the heat of battle slogans. It’s made in the slow, often frustrating work of dialogue, compromise, and understanding. The abolitionists, the suffragettes, the civil rights leaders—all faced fierce opposition. But they didn’t change the world by silencing every voice that opposed them; they changed it by shifting hearts and minds, one conversation at a time.

We forget that too easily. We forget that listening is not weakness, but the foundation of democracy itself.

What this week reminded me is that the world doesn’t need more noise. It doesn’t need more victory laps at the expense of empathy. It doesn’t need more caricatures of people we’ve never truly met.

What it needs is listening. A little patience. A willingness to step out of the trenches and meet in the difficult, fragile space in between.

That space feels smaller than ever. But maybe that’s exactly why it matters most.