The Gratitude Police

“The trouble with people these days is that they simply aren’t grateful enough,” says right wing newspaper columnist and former unsuccessful candidate for Mayor of London Reginald Hink. “Take the poor, for instance. You’d think that they’d be down on their knees thanking the better off for providing them with food banks. But no. They still complain about having no money and being forced to fall back on charity to survive. The ungrateful bastards!” Speaking at a press conference to announce his plans to run for parliament in a forth coming by-election, the Daily Excess columnist outlined his belief that a lack of gratitude lies at the root of many of the UK’s ills. “You see, that’s the point of charity – to make you feel good about providing it and those receiving it feel grateful,” he opines. “It reinforces the natural order of things: there’s a reason that these people are at the bottom. They are lazy and indolent, incapable of motivating themselves to do an honest day’s work. It is only right that the less well off, the lower classes, should feel grateful for the help the wealthy condescend to give them – it’s not as if we have to, we could just let them starve to death instead.” Hink doesn’t believe that just poor relief should be provisioned by charity. “They had the right idea, back in the old days,” he muses. “You know, the days when the only relief the poor could obtain was via charity – your health care, education and so on were ultimately provided at the whim of the better off. As it should be!”

Not surprisingly, Hink blames the welfare state for eroding traditional values of gratitude in the UK, although he concedes that their decline might well have pre-dated the 1945 Labour government. “Quite frankly, I think that the rot set in with the Poor Law Amendment Act in 1834 that established work houses and guaranteed minimal levels of poor relief,” he told the press conference. “That’s the trouble with all forms of welfare – it gives the recipients a feeling entitlement. They start to think that it is their right not to die of starvation or horrible diseases and to have an education so that they can ‘better’ themselves. Ridiculous notions! The only way people should be able to ‘better’ themselves is through hard graft – or coming from the right background – you shouldn’t be able to cheat by simply earning qualifications through study, rather than buying them! If you do it that way, you’ll never truly value what you’ve got!” Hink went on to commend successive Tory governments for whittling away at the system, making benefits applicants increasingly jump through humiliating hoops to ‘prove’ that they should be paid the benefits they are entitled to claim. “Mind you, they still haven’t gone far enough,” he says. “Which is exactly why I’m standing for parliament – to campaign for a complete abolition of the welfare system and its replacement by charitable donation. Believe me, it is the only way that we’re going to be able to put all the poor, idle and unwashed masses back in their proper place of being grateful for what they are given.”

The poor aren’t Hink’s only target in his campaign to reinforce the concept of gratitude in British society. “Refugees – are they grateful enough?” he asks. “I mean, it isn’t as if we ask them to come here, yet they still keep turning up s if they some right to asylum. Even when we fish them out of the Channel when they try crossing it in tiny rubber boats, are they grateful? I don’t think they are. Damn it, they should think themselves lucky that we don’t just let them drown!” The commentator is even proposing a ‘Gratitude Test’ for refugees arriving in the UK. “As soon as we get them ashore, they should be made to express their gratitude – get down on their knees, offer profuse thanks, perhaps even kiss the hands of their rescuers and pledge eternal fealty,” he says. “If they don’t meet a predefined ‘gratitude bar’, then we should drown them in the sea, there and then. Women, children, the lot.” Hink declared that he is particularly worried about the possible influx of Ukrainian refugees fleeing the war against Russia. “My fear is that, just because they running away from death, destruction and atrocities, they’ll think that they have some kind of right to come here, that we should feel some kind of moral obligation t take them in,” he ponders. “Will they show sufficient gratitude for us condescending to let them come here? Once again, we need some kind of ‘gratitude test’ as part of the visa application process.”

But Hink isn’t targeting just refugees and asylum seekers, but immigrants in general. “Again, they come here, buy houses, take jobs, sometimes even our women, but do they seem grateful enough? We even let them build their whacky churches and temples here, yet still they complain about prejudice and discrimination – that doesn’t seem like gratitude to me,” he says. “They really should be grateful that we allow them into our fine country at all, let alone tolerate them. They need to understand that we don’t have to have them here – we were doing perfectly well without them. But they come here, with their bloody qualifications and money and carry on as if they own the place!” Warming to his theme, Hink also expounded his belief that even the descendants of immigrants should be made to publicly show their gratitude for being allowed to live in the UK. “I don’t care how many generations removed from their families’ original immigration they are, as long as they look remotely foreign, or practice different cultural customs, they are still bloody foreigners and here on sufferance,” he contends. “Every year, they should be made to do some joyful public dance or something – you know, wearing loin cloths and waving spears about, that sort of thing.”

Ultimately, Hink argues, we must dismiss the archaic notion that we might help people for simply altruistic reasons, out of kindness or simple human decency. Instead, Instead, any such act should be seen as a transaction, that it puts the recipient into a form of debt. “That’s what people must understand,” he says. “That accepting help incurs a debt – a debt that must be paid off in gratitude toward those doing the giving.” Like all debts, the newspaper columnist believes that these should be enforceable, which is why he is proposing the establishment of a ‘Gratitude Police’. “It is very simple, if people visiting a food bank, say, don’t seem to be expressing sufficient gratitude for their good fortune, they should be given a bloody good beating by the uniformed ‘Gratitude Police’ on duty there,” he explains. “It would be the same for refugees, immigrants and all other recipients of welfare – if they don’t show appropriate levels of gratitude, in an acceptable form, they will face instant justice. I know that all the snowflakes out there will say that it is cruel, but just think how more hurtful it is to the feelings of those providing charity when they don’t feel the full warmth of the gratitude they are entitled to?”