A cross-party group of MPs and peers have launched a campaign to make politics more compassionate, with a focus on areas including providing more help to refugees and asylum seekers, and on equality and climate change.

Alf Dubs, the Labour peer who fled the Nazis in Czechoslovakia as a child and has campaigned to help child refugees will launch Compassion in Politics on Saturday. The campaign is backed by MPs from across the House of Commons.

Writing in the Guardian to mark the launch, Lord Dubs said he was concerned that politics based on the values of kindness and fellow feeling was being edged out by less generous forces, exemplified by the rise of the far right in places such as Hungary and Italy.

Dubs wrote that refugees crossing the Mediterranean did not have the same luck as he did in 1939, when he was given sanctuary in the UK. “But I would be naive if I thought that it is only refugees who were suffering mistreatment,” he wrote.

“In different ways, British citizens too are victims of an insidious political narrative that blames and punishes the vulnerable, the disabled and the poor, victimises minorities and deliberately divides communities.”

The campaign will seek to challenge “the oppressive narrative that says that all humans are just greedy and selfish and our political system and society must be built in that image”, Dubs wrote, pointing to policies such as the NHS.

“The experiences of my childhood mean I can never claim to be from one place or another. But I think I have benefited greatly through my life by meeting others like me who feel they belong nowhere – or everywhere,” he said.

“Those powerful friendships are far more important to me than any arbitrary divisions governments create between communities and nations.”

To mark the launch the campaign organisers commissioned polling that showed 60% of Britons think politicians are not compassionate enough and that 79% believe a lack of compassion is detrimental to our political system.

People who have signed up to the campaign include the Conservative MP Robert Halfon, Caroline Lucas of the Greens, and the Liberal Democrats’ deputy leader, Jo Swinson.

Swinson said the country needed a change from “the toxic political debate that we see so often”.

She added: “This movement could not have come at a better time. More than ever, we need politicians of all stripes to have constructive discussions and to work together, with compassion and respect, on the solutions we desperately need.”

The campaign will launch with a conference on the issue in Oxford.