How ‘kindness’ became big business

In those moments when I most fear that the West is on the skids, I find it helps to make a list of end-time signs, phenomena that indicate decay, like sparks along a piece of faulty wiring. So far my list goes like this: NFTs; babyccinos; liver-flavoured ice-cream for dogs; the fashion for encouraging children to cut off their genitals; the fact that Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury, thinks it deeply wrong to talk them out of it; freak shakes; Heinz ‘pink’ sauce; gannets dead all down the North Sea coast; swearing six-year-olds still in nappies (says my teacher friend in the North-East); risking nuclear war over Ukraine; the TV show Is It Cake?

My latest and favourite end times sign is buried in the minutes of a recent meeting of the London Ambulance Service NHS Trust board, in a section about the plight of call handlers. Both 999 and 111 are, as you might expect, in a desperate state. Staff are over-stretched, stressed and resigning at a frightening rate. The response, I read, is to send them on a ‘kindness workshop’, run by a private firm called A Kind Life. Frontline staff have themselves expressed concern that if they’re away for training days, it will inevitably endanger people’s lives, the minutes say. The minutes do not record that senior management are terribly worried. So patients may be dying because staff are attending kindness lessons. Isn’t that somehow so very 21st century?

For a start there’s the increasingly popular idea that almost any problem, however entrenched, can be solved by a workshop or training course. This is part of the general global takeover of HR. Training courses are their stock in trade. Then there’s the eccentric notion that the sort of training poor NHS workers need is not medical know-how, but behaviour training.