Dame Alison Rose was back in the news last week, her flagrant breaches of client confidentiality over Nigel Farage’s former bank account at Coutts having been exposed. Dame Alison is emblematic of our times: the senior executive for whom a job is apparently not solely about satisfying customers, but arguably a means of exerting a political ideology, and of rampant virtue-signalling. The latter is carried out not for the public, but to impress fellow members of a progressive elite for whom customers are merely useful idiots.
When Dame Alison became chief executive of NatWest she made much of her political commitments: tackling climate change, and furthering LGBT rights. Her shareholders might have preferred a commitment to improving their dividends. On Friday those shares tanked, losing 12 per cent of their value. Sadly, we are all becoming used to corporations, government departments and institutions putting the people they serve last while gratifying the personal and political obsessions of those who run or work for them.
Last week, BBC employees circulated an email claiming some of them were crying in the lavatories over its coverage of the conflict between Israel and Hamas, their distress caused by the alleged “dehumanisation” of Palestinians. Meanwhile, millions of licence fee-payers remain bemused that the BBC couldn’t bring itself to describe people who behead babies as “terrorists”.
Similarly, we know too well the lengths civil servants have gone to obstruct the deportation of illegal immigrants denied asylum, who make further demands on housing, education and welfare services that cannot cope with the demand from those who live here legally. Other civil servants did all they could to prevent implementing the decision, taken after the largest democratic vote in this country’s history, to leave the EU.
Other state-funded institutions are already far down the road of self, as opposed to public, service. The NHS with over 1.2 million full-time workers, has become a job creation scheme for non-clinical and non-medical staff, while the opportunity to consult a doctor has become increasingly rare.
For schools and universities, what is traditionally understood by education – equipping pupils with fundamental cerebral skills and stimulating intellectual curiosity – has been perverted to serve various new ideologies, from advancing transgenderism to fomenting hatred of this country and its past, and increasingly ignoring and even vilifying the triumphs of western civilisation. And, incidentally, any attempt to argue the alternative is ruthlessly closed down, the freedom of speech and expression once considered implicit in educational contexts now regarded as offensive and abusive.
This poisonous politicisation of institutions is now, in varying degrees, imposed even on our recreational lives. The National Trust became, first, a vehicle to promote LGBT rights, and then after the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement – because of a killing in America, not here – became obsessed with portraying the “colonial” past of its properties, implicitly vilifying some of the benefactors who had given them to the nation. Even the Marylebone Cricket Club tried (and, for the moment, failed) to turn against its history by abolishing 200 year-old fixtures between Eton and Harrow, and Oxford and Cambridge.
When people complain about this attempted manipulation by self-serving political sects, they are accused of being reactionaries. But what really is the mainstream, and who are the real extremists? The public, overwhelmingly decent and reasonable, know when they are being used. As shown in the case of Mr Farage’s bank account, many have had enough.
Robert Johnson is a UK-based business writer specializing in finance and entrepreneurship. With an eye for market trends and a keen interest in the corporate world, he offers readers valuable insights into business developments.
