Woke capitalism is busily destroying itself
By abdicating power to Left-wing social media teams, firms are angering their actual customers
‘Alittle Xtra help.” “Make it happen.” Or, indeed: “It’s a people thing.” The Halifax has had some pretty good slogans over the years, and ones that seemed to work for a slightly dull financial institution that has its roots in a Victorian culture of hard work, thrift, and saving. Somehow “Drop Dead You Reactionary Dinosaur” doesn’t quite have the same customer-friendly ring to it.
Even so, that now appears to be what it wants some of its customers to hear. Halifax is not usually in the news for anything more interesting than the latest move in mortgage rates. But this week, it has been caught up in a very different kind of argument – and one that has found it hopelessly out of its depth.
Along with a few other major banks, such as HSBC, it has decided to allow its staff to start displaying their pronouns on their badges and email signatures. Why? Apparently, in the unlikely event you can actually find a branch that is still open, and, even more extraordinarily, that there is a real human being behind the counter, it would prevent anyone accidentally thinking Gemma might be a woman, or Mike a guy, rather than someone who possibly identified as something else.
But pronouns are not an uncontroversial subject. Plenty of feminists think that encouraging their use is the thin end of a wedge, part of a fear that biological women are being erased by radical woke ideologues. Plenty of other people just dislike companies getting involved in divisive political debates, or indulging in flagrant virtue-signalling.
And yet, the bank’s social media team decided to heavily promote the new policy on Twitter. And when a few customers objected, they were aggressively told to take their business elsewhere. If you aren’t entirely comfortable with a world of gender fluidity, it seems, you have no right to start saving any money, and even less take out a loan to buy a home.
It’s not the first time this sort of thing has happened. When companies such as Vodafone were criticised for joining the GB News advertising boycott on the channel’s launch, the complaints were angrily shouted down by some of the firms’ social media teams. Ben & Jerry’s, the ice cream company, has admittedly always had Left-leaning sympathies. But its Twitter account is engaged in an extraordinary row with Unilever, the company’s parent, over the question of selling ice cream in Israel.
It hardly seems to matter whether the management of these companies is comfortable with the messages being pumped out on its behalf online. It appears to have abdicated power to a tiny group of activist employees so imbued with Twitter culture that they cannot recognise the difference between social media and the real world.
And it’s part of a broader problem with woke capitalism, caused by companies paying far too much attention to the views of staff, and too little of customers. Disney, for example, has found its tax status in Florida under threat after some of its employees tried to turn the Magic Kingdom into the Woke Kingdom (or Person-dom, come to think of it) by campaigning on LGBT rights. Again and again, companies are finding themselves caught up in the culture wars, often forced into particular positions in an attempt to appease their Left-wing staff.
There are two problems with that. The first is that there is no need for businesses to take a political position. If they can make a decent product at a fair price, and pay their staff and suppliers on time, that is more than enough of a social purpose. Everything else can be argued about elsewhere.
The second is that, by handing control over to junior staff, it means private sector firms are falling for an affliction more commonly seen in the public sector. They are losing the art of customer service, and forgetting that respect for other people’s views, and tolerance of a wide range of political beliefs, is just common courtesy.
They need to rein in the millennials. It turns out that Halifax needs a little Xtra help with that, and so do many others – before they lose millions of customers through endless campaigns of self-righteous virtue-signalling.