#wokescreen

BMW openly admitting they don't do it to actually make a difference, they brand themselves to conform to the law of the land. Including the unwritten cultural rainbow law of June in the USA.

Every company that does this is either performing Pride Passover - that is, signalling solely so they're not the ones the activists go after for not doing it - or throwing up a Wokescreen - a deflection away from their own ethics violations; the bigger the Wokescreen the greater their corporate misdeeds.

By: Douglas Murray

Published: Jul 15, 2023

Twenty years ago there was a famous marketing campaign featuring a jolly banker named “Howard” dancing and singing about the allegedly great advantages of being with the Halifax building society. Last month the Halifax hit the news for a less happy marketing gimmick. Customers were no longer being invited to answer the question, “Who gives you extra?” Nor was there any other question or invitation. Just an assertion, “Pronouns matter”, followed by the hashtag “It’s a people thing”. Below was a photograph of a name badge of a Halifax staff member called “Gemma” with pronouns listed below. In this case “She/ her/ hers”.

A number of customers responded swiftly to the message. As they pointed out, there is no ambiguity about the name “Gemma”. Gemma is a woman’s name, so adding pronouns to Gemma’s badge was, as one customer said, “pathetic virtue-signalling” by a company hoping to hitch on to the end of the tedious Pride-month bandwagon.

But it was what happened next that was most interesting. Amid criticism from customers, a representative of the Halifax social media team called Andy M said: “We strive for inclusion, equality and quite simply, in doing what’s right. If you disagree with our values, you’re welcome to close your account.”

If the furious responses to this retort are anything to go by then hundreds of Halifax customers have indeed chosen to take their accounts elsewhere. Andy M’s intervention has been described by a number of market-watchers as Halifax’s Gerald Ratner moment.

If it was only Halifax behaving this way, perhaps that might be believable: a single company going off-piste thanks to an inexperienced junior marketing person with plenty of views and little judgment. But what is remarkable about the Halifax case is that it is nothing new.

Indeed the moment there was some customer pushback, another bank — HSBC — decided to speak out in solidarity with Halifax. Retweeting their competitor’s original message, HSBC said: “We stand with and support any bank or organisation that joins us in taking this positive step forward for equality and inclusion. It’s vital that everyone can be themselves in the workplace.”

Of course there was no evidence that “Gemma” was having any trouble being herself in the workplace. But for HSBC the whole contorted issue of pronoun usage (a core tenet of the new trans faith) appeared an important hill to stand on. They are not alone. In recent years nearly every high street bank has made similar statements of politically dogmatic intent. Five years ago Barclays bank celebrated Pride month by decking their branches in the rainbow flag and promoting the advertising line “Love happens here”. As I remarked at the time, it was a strange claim for a bank to make. After all, most of us do not want either sex or love to happen at our bank. We just want there to be an adequate number of staff manning the place and not to be overcharged when we lose our back statements.

Even the Queen’s bank, Coutts, has got in on the act. Last autumn the bank’s headquarters on the Strand in London was bedecked with an image of the footballer Marcus Rashford. An accompanying laudatory blurb on the building front talked of how Rashford was a “shining example” and “political activist” who “leads the way in celebrating and championing difference”. That is as it may be. But what does it have to do with Coutts?

Four years ago I wrote a book called The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity about the intrusion of woke identity politics into every facet of our lives. Increasingly, you could not avoid it anywhere. Not even eating. Marks & Spencer started producing an LGBT sandwich (lettuce, guacamole, bacon and tomato), as though sexual preferences are a suitable basis for sandwich fillings.

Back then I tried to describe the nature of the new quasi-religious movement being forced on our societies. Specifically, the intense doubling down on the significance of sex, race and sexuality just when most of us had hoped to have got past the stage of obsessing about these things. There were plenty of reasons why this change had come about. But it required another writer to fill in one of the last remaining pieces of the jigsaw.

Because in the four years that have followed, it has become clear that the movement known as “woke” is not just a grassroots movement. It is a grassroots movement that has gone so far so very fast because it is gigantically fuelled by old-school capital. This is what the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy described in a superb book published last year as Woke, Inc.

Ramaswamy filled in the blanks that had not previously been able to be filled. Why were “social justice” campaigns no longer about campaigns on the street, protest marches and much more, but about top-down lecturings by highly privileged individuals and corporations? Why had it become the case that we were being urged to “do better” not just by certain princes and duchesses, but by major companies and brands who would once have just taken our money and run? Why were firms like Goldman Sachs and Blackrock boasting about their commitment to such things as “racial equity and social justice”?

The answer starts with the way in which energy companies began to rebrand themselves in recent decades. From the early part of this century oil companies like Shell and BP went out of their way to present their public image as being one of unbelievable green-ness. As it happens, both companies, like most other energy companies, are trying to diversify their energy bases and are hardly any longer reliant solely on the pumping of oil. But even when they were, they presented themselves as though they positively existed to make the world greener and to ensure each field was filled with flowers.

And this in many ways explains the far grander and more comprehensive examples of something similar that is happening today.

What we now know as “woke” is a legacy product of legitimate and indeed venerable human rights campaigns. The campaigns for women’s rights, gay rights and racial minority rights were just and noble enterprises which ended up achieving the overwhelming majority, if not all, of their aims.

[ Shell, the oil company, presents a public image of great greenness ]

But at the point of victory something strange happened. People remained on the barricades long after the battle had been won. Partly because careers and pensions were at stake. But also because a new generation of activists wanted to experience the moral high of fighting for rights which had been honourably fought for before their time. So it was that legacy rights organisations like Stonewall ended up fulfilling the dictum of Eric Hoffer. Which is that every good cause “begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket”.

When Stonewall started out it was an important movement which did a great deal to improve the lot of gay people in this country. But by the time the fight was essentially won, with the passing of civil partnerships and gay marriage, Stonewall stopped being a good cause. For a brief time it became a business. But it swiftly degenerated into a racket. For the point of victory was of course the exact moment when everybody wanted to be on board. After the battle was won, who didn’t want a piece of the civil rights action? The big banks and corporations may have been nowhere when people were fighting for their rights in the 20th century. But in the 21st century, at the point of victory, everyone wanted a piece of the action. And some were willing to sell it.

As this newspaper has reported, in recent years Stonewall started raking in money from government departments and vast corporations. It came up with the brilliant idea of a “UK Workplace Equality Index”. Through this process Stonewall got paid by companies to approve them and mark their “social justice” and “diversity” homework. Of course the charity used this not just as a money-making scheme but as a way to push their agendas, which in the mid-2010s moved from concentrating on gay rights to trans rights.

As The Times reported last June, documents show that Stonewall used its equality index to force organisations to lobby for their policies. If a company, NHS trust, government department or local council did not lobby aggressively for what Stonewall wanted then the group would mark them down, or drop them off its “Top 100” employers index. Even firms that had bent over backwards to placate Stonewall would find themselves told they had room for improvement. For a healthy further donation of course.

It is quite obvious how this benefited Stonewall. They became richer and more powerful than they had ever been. And now the boot was on the other foot they used it to kick around companies and governments and get whatever they wanted while being exceptionally well paid for doing so.

But what did the companies get out of it? And there lies the answer to much of the corporate wokery of our time. Because it is clear by now that the relationship between woke lobby groups and the corporate world has become symbiotic. One side gets rich. The other gets a camouflage, or wokescreen.

Suddenly companies that certainly do not prioritise radical left-wing causes can present themselves as though they are on top of — even ahead of — all the social issues of their time. In the process they can do a number of things. One is to ask the angel of social media death to pass by their door. If they paint themselves with enough rainbow flags and diversity policies then they can evade notice.

For the benefits for Woke Inc are very great indeed. Even the negative publicity that may come from woke over-reach cannot even slightly approximate the negative attention that corporations might otherwise run into. For instance when the Halifax was in the news for its new pronouns policy, it was almost certainly banking that a sizeable number of people — perhaps especially younger potential clients — would be impressed by their “forward-looking” and inclusive policies. What people will not be focusing on is the fact that Halifax has become yet another one of the high street banks that has decided to retire from the high street.

In recent years the Halifax has continuously closed branches. It is a high street bank that has abandoned the high street. This year alone Halifax has closed 27 branches across the country. In other words, while it witters on about the pronouns of an employee called “Gemma” and people become agitated about either this being a great leap forward for humanity or that Gemma could hardly be anything other than a woman, they fail to notice their chances of ever having any interactions with Gemma or any other physical, actual employee of the Halifax. In reality you won’t need Gemma’s pronouns because a Halifax customer’s chances of ever encountering a Gemma diminish every week.

Other things that end up getting covered over include the Halifax’s simple poor performance as a bank. For example, its appalling mortgage rates. While the internet was tearing into the Gemma issue, you had to search the financial pages to discover that at the same time the Halifax had once again hiked its mortgage rates, with the lender’s 60 per cent LTV remortgage rate rising by almost 300 per cent in a year. Gemma may be better news fodder, but she actually covers over the real stories.

It is the same with corporation after corporation. What did HSBC think it was doing when it joined its rival in planting the pronoun flag as the most important issue of the moment? It doubtless thought it would get good publicity and public acclaim from tweeting about how much it stood for “equality and inclusion” and everyone being able to “be themselves in the workplace”. But these words are cheap. Just as it is comparatively cheap to bung some thousands of pounds each year to Stonewall or cover your branches in rainbow flags for a month, compared to the criticisms you might actually be having to face. Woke is camouflage for these firms.

The reality with HSBC, for instance, is that it has proven itself not just uninterested in equality and inclusion, but brutally, cynically, money-grubbingly uninterested in them. In 2020 when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) effectively fully subsumed Hong Kong into the communist state, there was a range of options open to individuals and corporations. They could either agree to the new regime, stay silent or leave. That year the CCP brought in new security laws which included making it illegal to criticise in any way the activities of the communist authorities, undermine their power or permit foreign interference in Hong Kong. HSBC could have left and gone to Singapore. It could have made a stand. It could have stayed silent. It did none of these things. HSBC backed the security laws. Because it prioritised access to the Chinese market over human rights. As clearly as anyone could.

When HSBC talks about pronouns, it hopes we won’t know about its complicity with the CCP. In corporation after corporation the same cynical game is played. Four years ago Nike started to run adverts featuring the black NFL player Colin Kaepernick, most famous for taking the knee during the playing of the American national anthem. Through this and other campaigns Nike likes to present itself as wildly on the right side on all racial and other justice issues. It should have come as no surprise two years later when reports revealed that parts of Nike’s products were being made in China’s forced labour camps by Uighur prisoners. The same revelations came out for Apple in due course.

It doesn’t matter where you turn, the cynicism of Woke Inc hits you every time. There is not a political issue that the fattening ice cream Ben & Jerry’s does not try to speak on. Why ice cream should speak in the first place is a question we might park for another day. But among much else, Ben & Jerry’s have in recent years expressed their views on Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Priti Patel’s proposed reforms on illegal migration across the Channel. All of which may well distract from the fact that Ben & Jerry’s parent company, Unilever, has been accused of underpaying £550 million in tax in the UK. Or that the parent company of this oh-so-woke entity still sells skin-lightening creams across Asia.

There was a time when people assumed that corporations were going woke because they wanted to get with the times. As Ramaswamy and others have now shown, nothing could be further from the truth. Corporations go woke because they know it is the best way to get away with worse and more expensive habits. So I would suggest that this should become a new rule in our society. As obvious as the fact that the most outspoken male feminists reliably turn out to be sex pests.

There was a time when people thought Woke Inc was well-meaning at best, naive at worst. But as the saga of Gemma reminds us, when a company advertises its woke credentials, we should assume it is trying to hide something. And then go looking for it.

[ Via: https://archive.is/ziEDT ]

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when a company advertises its woke credentials, we should assume it is trying to hide something. And then go looking for it.

Repeated for emphasis.