We are living in dangerously divided times. In the UK, most people feel the country is fractured rather than united, and many now censor themselves for fear of social or personal consequences. Public conversation has become brittle, defensive, and distrustful. We speak past one another, or not at all.
A divided country deserves a better quality of conversation.
This manifesto is an invitation to what we call the Radical Centre: a place of encounter that swims against the tide of polarisation. It is radical not because it is extreme, but because it resists the forces pulling us apart. And it is a centre not in the sense of a political midpoint or compromise platform, but as a shared, imagined ground where we agree to meet one another—across difference, uncertainty, and disagreement—for the sake of deeper, shared values.
We have to meet somewhere. If we walk toward one another, we will meet somewhere in between. The Radical Centre names that meeting place.
Twenty-five years into an information revolution, technology has transformed how knowledge, culture, and political life are produced and contested. Algorithm-driven platforms monetise attention and amplify outrage, fear, and self-righteousness. Social media rewards certainty over curiosity, speed over reflection, and tribal belonging over civic responsibility.
The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated these dynamics, confining many of us to screens while trust in institutions—political, media, and civic—continued to erode. Urgent national and geopolitical questions rightly demand collective deliberation: immigration and asylum, borders, foreign wars, climate and energy, national identity, economic justice. Yet these issues are now surrounded by such toxicity that many feel it is impossible to discuss them honestly, safely, or productively within our democratic structures.
This is a moment when people of good faith are longing for an alternative.
At St Ethelburga’s, we sense a widespread hunger for spaces that are neither performative nor polarised; spaces where disagreement does not automatically collapse into hostility or silence. We want to invite people out of echo chambers, out of despair, and out of algorithm-led debate—into an analogue world where real people can have real conversations with one another again.
The Radical Centre is not a political programme, a set of policies, or a new ideological brand. It is not a hidden attempt to smuggle one worldview past another, nor a demand that people abandon their convictions.
Instead, the Radical Centre is a practice.
It is a pragmatic, if elusive, space where people agree that our collective need to engage constructively with one another—even and especially in disagreement—has become an urgent civic priority. It is a space that welcomes curiosity, risk, and ambiguity. It asks something counter-cultural of us: to approach those we might consider our opponents not as enemies to be defeated, but as fellow citizens with whom we share a future.
The Radical Centre may sound mythical—and perhaps it is. Like the beginning of any quest, it calls together a group of people willing, out of hope, naivety, or courage, to leave the safety of their own certainties and travel through unfamiliar terrain for the sake of a future they cannot yet fully name. We do not claim to know exactly where this centre lies. What matters is the willingness to walk toward it.
The Radical Centre welcomes people from across political, cultural, and faith traditions. Conservatives and progressives, believers and non-believers, activists and sceptics are all needed. What is required is not agreement, but a commitment to good faith.
In an age dominated by the language of rights, we risk forgetting that we also have inalienable responsibilities. One of those responsibilities is civic dialogue: the ongoing practice of listening, speaking, questioning, and disagreeing well.
Dialogue is not a soft alternative to politics. It is a foundation of democratic life. When practised well, it helps to rebuild civic trust, strengthen civil society, create pathways of accountability, and counter the overreach or failure of institutions. It also plays a vital role in preventative peacemaking—addressing tensions before they harden into violence or irreparable rupture.
Dialogue is a muscle. It must be trained, stretched, and tested across a lifetime.
St Ethelburga’s is a charity with a long history rooted in conflict and reconciliation. In 1993, an IRA bomb detonated on Bishopsgate, killing one person, injuring many others, devastating the financial district, and destroying the medieval church that once stood on this site.
From that destruction emerged a new purpose. The church was rebuilt as a centre for reconciliation and peace, where people facing conflict—over geopolitics, history, faith, identity, or land—could meet in dialogue for the sake of a shared future. The centre opened years before the Good Friday Agreement, as a living sign of hope amid division.
At the heart of St Ethelburga’s is a circular tent in the courtyard garden, clad in goats’ hair and ringed with seven stained-glass windows bearing the word peace in seven languages. Over the years, people from across the world and across Britain have stepped inside—ducking their heads, removing their shoes, sitting together in a circle—to attempt conversations that once felt impossible.
That tent inspires our vision of the Radical Centre: a circle, slightly removed from ordinary life, where hierarchy is softened, listening is foregrounded, and people often leave more hopeful than when they arrived.
If the idea of the Radical Centre resonates with you, we invite you to take part.
You might:
Above all, you can choose—again and again—to walk toward dialogue rather than retreat into certainty or silence.
We invite you to consider making these pledges:
The Radical Centre asks for something modest and demanding at the same time. It does not promise easy consensus or quick fixes. It asks instead for patience, courage, humility, and a willingness to live with a little mystery—call it faith, if you are religious, or constructive doubt, if you are not.
A healthy relationship with the unknown keeps us hopeful, open to surprise, and capable of imagining a future together.
We hope you will join us.