Welcome to the Mona Charin Show. So glad you could join us. Today we're going to talk a lot about polarization. We live in an incredibly polarized time and most of us worry that it could actually be damaging for our societies, for trust, for democracy, for all the challenges that we face.

And to probe this matter more deeply, I am delighted to welcome the co-founders of More In Common.

More in Common does work in seven countries exploring matters of polarization

and also how to help democracies discover what they have in common and unite to solve their problems.

So welcome to Matthew Lefevre, who is joining us from Paris and Tim Dixon from

Yorkshire. So welcome to you both. So before we dig into what more in common is doing and what it has

found, tell us a little bit about how you two decided to form this organization.

It began with a murder.

Tim, do you want to start there?

Yeah.

Both of us and the other friends involved in starting more in common had led organizations before.

And so we had a kind of a feel for how to build things that address big problems.

But I was a good friend of Joe Cox, a member of parliament.

She'd been a member of parliament for a little over a year in the UK. I grew up in Australia, had worked several years in New York, had moved to the UK. And within a first few months of getting there, we'd become good friends. And in 2016, in the middle of the very intense debate about Britain leaving the European Union,

Joe was attacked and murdered on the street of the district that she represented.

And it was a very, very difficult time for the UK as a country because it's not a country that's used

to political violence outside of the experience of terrorism for the IRA a few years ago.

But it was a kind of, you know, I guess a little similar to the Gabby Giffith's attack

some years back in the US.

But it was, it was a strange intersection for me personally of I have

had this personal friendship. I work on these issues and suddenly this friend is, you know,

her murder is the big national story and the country really in this moment came together around that.

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