Even so, owning one is still beyond the reach of the average person. Halifax is not usually in the news for anything more interesting than the recent move in mortgage rates. But this week, he’s stuck in a very different kind of argument – and one that he found desperately out of his depth. Along with a few other big banks, such as HSBC, it decided to allow its staff to start displaying their pronouns on their signals and email signatures. Why; Obviously, in the unlikely event you can actually find a branch that is still open, and, even more surprisingly, that there is a real man behind the counter, it would prevent anyone from mistakenly thinking that Gemma could be a woman or Mike a man . , instead of someone who was probably identified as something else. But pronouns are not an indisputable issue. Many feminists believe that encouraging their use is the tip of the iceberg, part of a fear that biological women are being erased by radical ideologues. Many other people simply dislike companies engaging in divisive political debates or indulging in blatant signals of virtue. And yet, the bank’s social networking team decided to vigorously promote the new policy on Twitter. And when some customers objected, they were aggressively told to move their business elsewhere. If you do not feel completely comfortable with a world of gender liquidity, it seems, you have no right to start saving money and even less to get a loan to buy a home. This is not the first time this has happened. When companies such as Vodafone were criticized for participating in the GB News’s advertising boycott during the channel’s release, complaints were angrily dismissed by some of the companies’ social media groups. Ben & Jerry’s, the ice cream company, admittedly has always had sympathies for the Left. But her Twitter account has been embroiled in a bitter dispute with Unilever, the parent company, over the issue of selling ice cream to Israel. It does not seem to matter if the management of these companies is comfortable with the messages sent on its behalf on the Internet. He seems to have relinquished power to 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 it’s part of a wider problem with awakened capitalism, caused by companies that pay too much attention to staff views and too little to customers. Disney, for example, has found its tax regime in Florida under threat after some of its employees tried to turn the Magic Kingdom into a Woke Kingdom (or Person-dom, if I think about it) by campaigning for LGBT rights. Time and time again, companies are trapped in cultural wars, often forced into certain positions in an effort to appease their left-wing staff. There are two problems with this. The first is that companies do not need to take a political stand. If they can make a decent product at a fair price and pay their staff and suppliers on time, that is more than enough social purpose. Everything else can be disputed elsewhere. The second is that handing over control to junior staff means that private sector companies are falling into a more commonly experienced hassle in the public sector. They lose the art of customer service and forget that respect for the views of others and tolerance of a wide range of political beliefs is just common courtesy. They must curb millennials. Halifax turns out to need a little Xtra help with this, as do many others – before losing millions of customers through endless virtue signage confidence campaigns.
