07/05/2026
Radical listening may be one of the quiet skills Britain most needs now.
A short reflection on George Monbiot, the person-centred approach, and rebuilding trust from the ground up.
Radical Listening, A Person-Centred Response To Division in Britain.
George Monbiot’s article on “radical listening” touches something that the person-centred approach has known for decades: people rarely change through pressure, humiliation or argument. They change when they feel genuinely heard.
What is striking in the British context is that many people moving towards Reform UK or other hard-right positions often still hold deeply social and compassionate values. Monbiot describes conversations in deprived communities where people expressed strong support for the NHS, fairness, tolerance, climate action and limits on concentrated wealth, even while intending to vote for parties that oppose many of those things.
This contradiction matters. It suggests that political division is not simply ideological. It is also emotional and relational. Many people feel exhausted, ignored and unseen. Years of austerity, collapsing public services, insecure work, loneliness, housing pressure and distrust of Westminster have created a profound sense of abandonment in parts of Britain. When people do not feel heard, anger easily becomes attached to simple explanations and convenient targets.
Zygmunt Bauman’s work is highly relevant here. In his reflections on “liquid modernity”, he described a society in which older bonds, solidarities and certainties have weakened, leaving people more isolated and insecure. In such conditions, fear becomes politically usable. People who feel unsafe may be drawn toward movements that offer hard boundaries, simple enemies and the promise of restored control.
Bauman also warned that freedom and security are both essential, but difficult to hold together. He argued that freedom without security generates anxiety and fear, while security without freedom risks becoming oppression. That tension is visible in Britain today. Many people are not simply searching for ideology; they are searching for dignity, recognition, rootedness and protection in a society that often feels fragmented and unstable.
What Monbiot calls “radical listening” interrupts this process.
The important thing is that it is not persuasion in the conventional sense. The volunteers do not arrive with scripts designed to “win” debates. They ask questions, listen carefully, and allow people to speak about their lives and concerns without immediate correction or judgment. Sometimes they gently challenge misinformation, but the primary act is listening.
And this is where the connection with the person-centred approach becomes so important.
Carl Rogers understood that human beings become less defensive when they are met with empathy, congruence and unconditional positive regard. When people feel psychologically safe enough to speak honestly, they often begin to hear themselves more deeply. Beneath rigid opinions there may be fear, grief, humiliation, loneliness or a longing for dignity. If these deeper layers are never reached, politics remains trapped at the level of slogans and reaction.
This does not mean agreeing with prejudice or abandoning ethical boundaries. Person-centred listening is not passive acceptance of everything said. It is the attempt to meet the person without reducing them to their most defended position.
In Britain now, that may be one of the most urgently needed public skills.
The remarkable thing in Monbiot’s examples is the relief people seemed to feel simply from being listened to. Some spoke as if “a bottle had been uncorked”. Others said it was the first real conversation they had had all week. In a society shaped increasingly by algorithms, outrage and social fragmentation, being heard has become psychologically and politically significant.
Perhaps this also reveals something important for person-centred therapists.
For many years, person-centred work has often remained inside the therapy room, while public life has become harsher, faster and more polarised. Yet Rogers himself never saw the approach as limited to psychotherapy. He believed the core conditions had social and political implications. He worked in community dialogue, conflict resolution and peace processes because he understood that empathic listening could change the quality of human encounter itself.
Eugene Gendlin and the Changes Group in Chicago also carried this wider democratic vision. Their work was never only about individual therapy. It was about helping ordinary people discover forms of communication that allowed genuine experiencing to emerge in groups, communities and public life. They believed that human beings could think more creatively and live more democratically when people were listened to deeply enough for something new to form between them.
There is also an important parallel here with Marshall Rosenberg and the Nonviolent Communication movement. NVC attempted to bring empathic listening and human needs into situations of conflict, including schools, communities and political tensions. In many ways, it carried a similar hope: that people might move beyond blame and enemy-making toward deeper recognition of shared human needs.
Yet perhaps some of these movements lost influence when they became too associated with methods, language systems or specialised training cultures. When listening becomes formulaic, people can feel managed rather than met. Radical listening only works when it remains authentic and rooted in real human encounter.
This may be the moment for the person-centred tradition to return more fully to its grassroots democratic origins.
Not by becoming party political. Not by telling people what they must think. But by helping rebuild the human conditions in which democratic life can survive.
So what role might person-centred practitioners play now?
Not as party activists telling people how to vote. Not as moral authorities standing above communities. And not as neutral bystanders pretending social suffering does not exist.
Their contribution may lie elsewhere: helping rebuild the conditions for a democratic relationship.
Person-centred therapists and facilitators understand how to listen without immediately controlling, correcting or categorising. They understand emotional defensiveness, shame, projection, fear and disconnection. They know how quickly people close down when they feel judged. These are not only therapeutic insights; they are civic skills.
Perhaps PCA practitioners could help train volunteers, canvassers and community groups in the art of listening itself:
• how to stay present;
• how to ask open questions;
• how to reflect rather than react;
• how not to rush into debate;
• how to hear fear without feeding hatred;
• how to remain congruent without becoming adversarial;
• how to create conversations where people can think and feel more freely.
This could happen locally and quietly: in libraries, community centres, churches, mosques, union halls, food banks, schools and neighbourhood groups. Not through large institutional programmes with rigid techniques and targets, but through small relational spaces where listening becomes part of civic culture again.
Simple questions could begin the work:
• “What is getting harder in your area?”
• “What do you feel no one is listening
to?”
• “What kind of Britain do you want your
children or grandchildren to live in?”
• “What would make life feel fairer
here?”
• “What do you think people are wrongly
blaming each other for?”
The aim is not to win an argument on the doorstep. The aim is to restore relationship where politics has become rupture.
The most important insight may be this: radical listening is not manipulation. The moment it becomes merely another political strategy, people will feel it. Its power comes precisely from authenticity. The listener is not pretending to care in order to secure a vote. They are recognising that democracy itself depends on human beings remaining capable of meeting one another across fear and division.
The hard right grows where people are isolated, humiliated and unheard. Bauman helps us see why: in insecure times, people search for belonging, certainty and protection. But if those needs are met only through authoritarian politics, the price is paid by migrants, minorities, democracy and truth itself.
Person-centred listening offers another possibility. It does not deny people’s insecurity. It meets it. It creates spaces where fear can be spoken without being weaponised, where anger can be heard without being turned into hatred, and where people may rediscover that what they most long for is not domination, but fairness, dignity, safety, belonging and care.
Person-centred listening cannot solve Britain’s structural crises on its own. It cannot replace economic justice, housing, functioning healthcare or political accountability. But it may help change the emotional atmosphere in which politics happens. And without that, even good policies struggle to reach people.
Perhaps this is one place where person-centred practitioners are being quietly called now: not only to help individuals survive a fractured society, but to help society recover the human capacities that fracture has damaged.
And perhaps this is also a moment to remember that the person-centred approach was never only about therapy rooms. At its best, it was part of a wider democratic hope: that ordinary people, when listened to with respect and empathy, can move beyond fear, rigidity and division toward more humane ways of living together.
In an age increasingly shaped by outrage, polarisation and algorithmic manipulation, radical listening may no longer be optional. It may be one of the few remaining ways of rebuilding trust from the ground up, one conversation, one community and one act of genuine listening at a time…
Reference
Monbiot, G. (2026). “ Imagine a technique that can heal Britain of division and keep out the hard right. I call it ‘radical listening.” The Guardian, 7 May 2026.
About the Author
Patricia Foster is a Coordinator, Focusing Trainer, and Therapist with The International Focusing Institute (New York). She is also an EAP Certified Person Centred Therapist. She offers training in Focusing for groups and individuals, and provides Person- Centred and Focusing-Oriented therapy. Her work integrates experiential philosophy with practical skills that help people listen more deeply to their own lived experiencing….
What is true is already so. Owning up to it doesn't make it worse. Not being open about it doesn't make it go away. And because it's true, it is what is there to be interacted with. Anything untrue isn't there to be lived. People can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it.
