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The kindest among us are the quietest about it

JK Rowling has been threatened with rape and violence for her views, despite much talk about #bekind on social media - Joel C Ryan/AP
JK Rowling has been threatened with rape and violence for her views, despite much talk about #bekind on social media - Joel C Ryan/AP

When did people start writing Kind Regards at the end of emails? I first noticed it five years ago and found it deeply annoying. Then came Warm Regards, which is possibly OK if you know me I suppose. Lukewarm Regards is probably more fitting if you don’t.

This is about more than etiquette – which I confess that I don’t know much about. This is more the infestation of fake affection. Those who constantly say: “Love you babes” are invariably the ones who would happily stab you in the back and quite often wish their partners dead too.

We know in our hearts the difference between holding the hands of someone frightened and frail and the emptiness of a mwah mwah air kiss. Just as we know the difference between Kind Regards and actual kindness. Unspeakable kindness has been all around us. Real kindness is not Instagrammable. It is not a display. Individuals have been quietly helping out where they can and whenever they can. In communities volunteers abound. Small acts of benevolence towards neighbours, family or friends, for needs that can range from a thought to a lifeline. Small acts that the NHS, even at its most fraught, still embodies on a daily basis.

And yet, there are all sorts of people for whom kindness, rather like, “spirituality”, is a cause for self-congratulation and affirmation. The way they talk about it their “kindness” is rationed rather like a half-hearted food parcel. Take Rupert Grint , who played Ron Weasley in the Harry Potter films and who, like his fellow co-star, opposed the views of the woman who has given him his career (JK Rowling). He spoke out for the transgender community, he said at the weekend, because he “just wanted to get some kindness out there”. Well, isn’t that lovely? Are the women who disagree with Rupert and his entourage simply being unkind? Did the immensely philanthropic JK Rowling – who has been threatened with rape and violence for her views – just have an attack of unkindness when she formulated them?

We’re currently experiencing an epidemic of #bekind on social media, but what is real kindness? Much of what are considered to be feminine traits are indeed acts of random kindness: clearing up after someone else, listening to them, anticipating their needs.

Boris Johnson’s new press secretary Allegra Stratton tells us: “The Prime Minister believes that all of us in our political language and debate need to remember to be civil and kind to each other.”

And yet here we are in a situation where we see unkindness at the highest level. We find ourselves in a place where the poor are treated as subhumans who do not know the difference between a couple of cans of beans and a scratch card. They cannot be trusted to feed their own children, hence a voucher system has been replaced by prepared rations and it is left to footballers to tell us they are insultingly inadequate.

This view of the poor, not as people with less money than us but as people with fewer morals, is not only unkind but has very real consequences too. Consequences that are at the tip of the iceberg. The government can now choose to do the kind and right thing, or it can choose to further impoverish people by refusing to extend the £20 a week extra in Universal Credit that was given to six million families in the first wave of the pandemic.

For many in Westminster this is a taxi fare, for some in this country it is a choice between heating and eating. Kindness is a strange word to be using here; we know the Johnson administration likes to be seen as tough, but not cruel. This government has a need to be liked and yet is being confronted by those who are pointing out the inhumanity of its choices.

Kindness is not just for show. Kindness can and should be built and baked into the system. When Cummings left government, the hope was that a different, kinder mood would prevail. It is not a weakness to think of others. Common decency, which we see on display every day among ordinary people, is nothing to be ashamed of. Kindness isn’t a meme or something you can just say and therefore be. Real kindness saves lives and it makes lives worth living. It is a social glue that so many years of austerity and selfishness has destroyed.

There is no need to fake it. In the darkest of times many of us have seen the real thing and it is colossal. To mean anything at all, it is not just talking the talk but walking the walk. And that goes for government as much as it does for us individuals.