British Horseracing Demands Everyone be kind.

There is a category of English word that is essentially argument-proof. These words are not definitions so much as feelings — sounds that produce a mild glow of warmth in the listener and make disagreement feel churlish, or faintly sinister. “Caring.” “Nurturing.” “Inclusive.” “Compassionate.” And, above all others, at the absolute apex of the pyramid of words that make the world sound like a primary school with exceptional pastoral support: “kind.”

Kind. Even the sound of it is soft. It lands on the ear like a cup of tea on a cold afternoon. It conjures a specific person — someone who remembers your birthday, makes soup when you are ill, holds the door open without making a production of it. Nobody has ever been voted out of a governance meeting for proposing that everyone should be kinder. Nobody has ever read a mission statement containing the word and demanded its removal. The word is self-immunising. It spreads through institutions the way Japanese knotweed spreads through gardens — silently, cheerfully, leaving no room for anything more useful — because arguing against it makes you sound as though you are arguing for cruelty, which nobody wants to do, so in it goes. Into the school charter. Into the NHS values framework. Into the football club ethics policy. And now, on an otherwise sensible Monday, into the middle of British horseracing’s Code of Conduct – Section 23.

The code is, for the most part, a reasonable document. No bullying. No harassment. No sexual misconduct. No abuse of power. No discrimination. All necessary, all correct, all the sort of thing that anyone with common sense would have agreed to on a handshake forty years ago and that now, because common sense has been formally retired and replaced by a framework, needs writing down with a reference number. Racing needs this. The industry has long operated on the structural assumption that authority at the top is self-regulating, which it is not, and that the people at the bottom — young, often female, often earning wages that would make a Victorian mill hand feel modestly prosperous — will simply get on with it. They did, mostly in silence. So far, so good. But there is a lanyard in the machine.

Nestled between “respect” and an atmosphere of corporate wellness comes the word “kindness.” Everyone, the BHA declares, must treat each other with “politeness, respect and kindness.” And this is the moment the HR consultant — who spent Tuesday facilitating an empathy workshop at a Basingstoke hotel and arrived at the racecourse still faintly smelling of the complimentary diffuser — has redecorated the weighing room in a colour that does not suit.

Politeness is a behaviour. Observable, measurable, capable of being failed. Respect is a behaviour. But kindness is a virtue — and this is Aristotle’s point, made at considerable length in the Nicomachean Ethics and apparently unread by everyone who has ever drafted one of these things — an interior disposition toward the good of others that grows from character over years. You cannot install it from outside. You cannot switch it on by regulatory requirement any more than you can mandate courage or decree patience. What the word produces, when inserted into a code of conduct, is not kindness. It produces the warm sensation that something has been done when nothing has been done. It produces the workshop, the lanyard, the certificate, and the deep institutional comfort of having written down a virtue and mistaken it for a rule.

Consider David Flood. Flood, a trainer, posted what he chose to call a “recruitment video” to his 500 Snapchat followers last summer, in which he described two former female members of staff as “two different birds that were a nightmare,” noted that one “wanted more days off than Santa Claus,” and observed, in a phrase the Racing Post had the editorial distinction to reproduce verbatim, that one of the riders “wouldn’t hold a throbbing penis on that gallop.” The BHA adjudicating panel found this to be low culpability. He was fined £1,300. (£1,300 is approximately what it costs to shoe four horses. It is not what anyone in racing would call a deterrent. It is what anyone in racing would call a Tuesday.)

Then there is Jamie Osborne. Osborne was at a racecourse — in public, in daylight, among paying customers — when he was observed covertly photographing a woman’s clothed posterior on his mobile phone. Her partner confronted him. Racecourse staff were summoned. Three weeks later, the BHA came calling. It emerged that the image was intended for a WhatsApp group of which Osborne was a member, a group known as “Great Bums” or similar. Osborne himself conceded that this was, in all probability, not his inaugural venture into the field of unconsented posterior photography.

The response of the compliance machinery is instructive. Three-month ban. Suspended — meaning it did not happen. A £3,000 donation to racing charities. A written apology. And — here the HR playbook achieves a kind of magnificence that Aristotle could not have anticipated — a course on sexual harassment in the workplace. A course!!!

One pictures Osborne in a seminar room, biscuits on the table, while a facilitator works through a PowerPoint explaining why photographing strangers’ anatomies for a chat group called Great Bums falls short of the regulatory standard. There was probably an icebreaker. There may have been a group exercise in which participants were invited to reflect on what “respect” means to them personally. Everyone left with a certificate. The certificate will have felt, to whoever designed it, like progress. It was not progress. It was the warm feeling that progress produces, printed on A4 and laminated. He is still training.

Neither of these cases is a failure of kindness. What Flood did was not unkind — it was contemptuous and humiliating. What Osborne did was not unkind — it was predatory, systematic behaviour that the regulatory machinery absorbed, processed through a seminar and a charity donation, and returned to active service. The existing rules on sexual misconduct, harassment, and abuse of power cover both cases entirely without any need to reach for warmth as a legal instrument. What failed was not the vocabulary. What failed was the consequences — consequences so mild that they function less as deterrence and more as administrative closure.

And here, reluctantly, I must concede that the instinct behind the word is not entirely wrong. Racing has a documented problem with how it treats women, particularly those without seniority or contractual protection. The culture that produces a Great Bums WhatsApp group and responds with a charity donation and an afternoon in a seminar room is precisely the culture that makes “be kind” feel like it belongs in the rulebook. The people who wrote the code were trying to fix something genuine and stubborn and real. They just reached for a word that sounds like the answer, produces the warm feeling of the answer, and is not the answer.

You cannot mandate kindness. You can mandate accountability. You can make the fines sting rather than tickle, the bans real rather than suspended, and the consequences fall on the individual rather than a charity that had nothing to do with any of it. That is not kindness. That is a rule. And rules, unlike virtues, are things a code of conduct can actually deliver.

Aristotle understood the distinction. He never attended a workplace harassment seminar in his life, and his thinking has held up considerably better than a three-month suspended ban and a laminated certificate.

“Anyone who witnesses or is subjected to wrongdoing in British racing is encouraged to report this. Our anonymous reporting service, RaceWISE, now includes confidential WhatsApp, text, email or phone, with full contact details available at britishhorseracing.com/RaceWISE.”