Kindness at the Heart of Politics: A Lesson from PMQs

There are days in politics that remind you why you got into it in the first place, and days that make you wonder why you bother. At Sir Keir Starmer's final Prime Minister's Questions, the House of Commons gave us the first kind of day. As a Labour councillor, an immigrant woman of colour sitting in opposition on my own council, I want to tell you why it mattered.

Watching PMQs is rarely a lesson in grace. It is usually a lesson in performance: point-scoring dressed up as scrutiny, jeers standing in for argument. But today was different. Kemi Badenoch, leader of the party Sir Keir has spent two years opposing at every despatch box exchange, chose warmth over ambush. She paid tribute to his work on Ukraine, to his friendship with President Zelensky, and, most strikingly, to the private kindness he had shown her. Sir Keir, in turn, thanked her for reaching out to him during two of the most painful moments of his premiership: an arson attack on his family home, and the death of his brother. That is not the transactional language of politics. That is the language of two human beings recognising each other's pain.

Sir Ed Davey called Sir Keir a "true patriot" who had worked across party lines. Labour MP Carolyn Harris, visibly moved, spoke of his decency shining through. Rachel Reeves, beside him on the front bench as she has been for two years, looked close to tears. And Sir Keir, addressing campaigners watching from the gallery, said something that should be printed above the door of every council chamber and legislature in this country: that his politics was for "all across the country who struggle to be seen or heard." That is the whole point of public service, said as simply as it can be said.

I do not share this because I think politics should be softer for softness's sake. I share it because I have spent my career, as a journalist, community activist, early years practitioner and councillor, arguing that the way we treat each other in public life is not a decorative extra. It is the foundation everything else is built on. You cannot legislate well for people you have not first extended basic dignity to. You cannot represent a community you have not first tried to see.

This is why I have long argued that our public and policy discourse needs to move from tolerance to acceptance. Tolerance is a ceiling: it says I will permit you to exist near me. Acceptance is a floor: it says you belong here, fully, as you are, and I will build with you rather than merely around you. Tolerance is what you extend to something you have decided to put up with. Acceptance is what you extend to someone you have decided to walk alongside. For women like me, who arrived in politics carrying an accent, a faith, a face that does not always match the assumed shape of a councillor, the difference between those two words is the difference between being managed and being welcomed.

Today's PMQs was, briefly, a glimpse of what acceptance in politics can look like. Badenoch did not pretend to agree with Starmer's record. She still delivered her jibes, still needled Labour over Andy Burnham's uncertain start. Disagreement was not erased. But it was conducted alongside recognition of the other person's humanity, not instead of it. That is the model. Kindness is not the absence of political conflict; it is the container that keeps conflict from curdling into cruelty.

The New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, whose "politics of kindness" reshaped how a generation thinks about leadership, put it best when she said she hoped to leave behind a belief that you can be "kind, but strong." Those two qualities are so often set up as opposites in our public life, as though empathy were a weakness a serious politician must grow out of. Today's Commons suggested otherwise. Strength was on full display, in Starmer's composure, in Badenoch's restraint, in Reeves holding back tears in front of the cameras, and kindness did not undercut any of it. It was what made the strength recognisable as leadership rather than mere endurance.

For the Fabian Women's Network, and for all of us working to build a politics that reflects the country as it actually is, plural, imperfect, full of people who have known hardship as well as hope, today was good news worth naming. Not because our disagreements have disappeared, but because we were shown, briefly and publicly, that dignity and disagreement can share a chamber. If we want a politics that people trust again, that is the lesson to hold onto: lead with acceptance, argue hard, and never let the argument cost you your kindness.

Kamal Preet Kaur is a freelance multiplatform journalist, an elected councillor, a charity trustee and FWN executive Committee member