“A little Xtra help.” “Make it happen.” Or really, “It’s a people thing.” Over the years, Halifax has had some pretty good slogans and ones that seem to have worked for a slightly boring financial institution that has its roots in the Victorian culture of hard work, thrift and saving. Somehow “Drop Dead You Reactionary Dinosaur” doesn’t carry the same customer-friendly ring.
However, now it seems he wants some of his customers to hear. Halifax isn’t usually in the news for anything more interesting than the latest move in mortgage rates. But this week he was caught up in a very different kind of controversy – and one that found him hopelessly out of his depth.
Along with several other large banks, such as HSBC, it decided to allow its employees to start displaying their pronouns on their badges and signatures by email. Why? Obviously in the unlikely event you can really find a branch that is still open and, even more unusual, that there is a real human being behind the counter, this would prevent anyone from accidentally thinking that Gemma could be a woman or Mike. – a man, not someone who might identify as something else.
But pronouns are not an indisputable subject. Many feminists believe that encouraging their use is the thin end of the wedge, part of the fear that biological women will be wiped out by radical awakened ideologues. Many other people simply do not like companies to engage in divisive political debates or indulge in blatant signals of virtue.
Still, 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 do not feel completely comfortable in the world of gender fluidity, it seems you have no right to start saving money and even less to take out a loan to buy a home.
This is not the first time such a thing has happened. When companies such as Vodafone were criticized for joining the boycott of GB News advertising when the channel was launched, the complaints were angrily rejected by some of the company’s social media teams. Ben & Jerry’s, the ice cream company, has always had leftist sympathies. But its Twitter account is in an exclusive dispute with Unilever, the company’s parent, over the sale of ice cream in Israel.
It doesn’t seem to matter if the management of these companies is comfortable with the messages being pumped on his behalf online. He seems to have abdicated the power of a small group of activist employees so imbued with Twitter culture that they cannot recognize the difference between social media and the real world.
And this is part of a broader problem with awakened capitalism, caused by companies paying too much attention to staff opinions and too little to customers. Disney, for example, found its tax status in Florida under threat after some of its employees tried to turn the Magic Kingdom into the Awakening Kingdom (or, as you think about it) through an LGBT rights campaign. Over and over again, companies find themselves embroiled in cultural wars, often forced to take certain positions in an attempt to appease their left-wing employees.
There are two problems with this. The first is that there is no need for business to take a political position. If they can make a decent product at a fair price and pay their employees and suppliers on time, that is more than enough for a social purpose. Everything else can be argued elsewhere.
The second is that handing over control to junior employees means that private sector companies are suffering, which is more common in the public sector. They lose the art of customer service and forget that respect for other people’s views and tolerance for a wide range of political beliefs are just ordinary courtesies.
They need to control the millennials. It turns out that Halifax needs a little Xtra help for this, as well as many others – before losing millions of customers through endless campaigns of confident signaling for virtue.
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