Woke capitalism is a monster of the state’s own making
by David Frost, Telegraph:
Politicians believed they could use companies to enact social change. Now they’ve lost control.
Do you remember when TV adverts were funny? John West salmon, Hamlet cigars, Heineken and Castlemaine 4X? Nowadays it’s all virtue-signalling: feel-good tweeness from John Lewis, subtly political slogans like HSBC’s “We are not an island”, or just deadly earnest tedium from virtually everyone else.
You can see why this is. Big businesses think it’s more important to show that they are compliant with the dominant ideology than to showcase their actual products. That’s why the Nigel Farage affair is so momentous. Two chief executives have lost their jobs. Perhaps others will now think twice about repeating their errors. But that is just a start.
There is a theory that corporations go “woke” because of over-dominant HR directors and excessive deferral to indoctrinated younger staff. That’s too easy. I’m afraid the rot goes deeper.
We’ve got here in five stages over the past 25 years. Stage 1 came in the early Blair era. Labour recognised that it couldn’t control companies’ actions directly through nationalisation. But it could do so through regulation. That was the “Third Way”: the blitz of rule-making that has done so much to fur up the arteries of our economy.
We moved to Stage 2 when people began to realise that over-regulation was starting to do damage. So governments shifted to softer forms of control: supposedly “non-binding” codes of practice, using access and government support as a tool of control, or just simple exhortation. Trade associations were enlisted in spreading “best practice” among their membership. After the 2008 crash, many financial institutions depended for their lives on government support – so naturally they went along.
Then, in Stage 3, the agenda shifted. From purely economic issues, it became about getting companies to support governments’ broader political and societal agenda: diversity, “equity”, green investments, ESG, reformulation of food and drink, and so on. Companies had already conceded the principle and had no ground on which to resist. This began under Labour, but sadly Conservatives have done all too little to change it.
By Stage 4, companies don’t need to be told: they just do. Senior executives are selected not on whether they are good at their jobs but on whether they are credible advocates of this broader agenda and can work well with government. The ideology spreads through companies. Dissent starts to become difficult. Oh – and adverts become earnest advocacy of the ideology.
Finally, Stage 5 is reached, which is where we now are. That is when all this seems normal to the people who run the country. Highly controversial ideas are thought to be the middle ground, and public dissent from them jars. Advocacy of such ideas is not seen to be “political”, only disagreement with them. People who support such views slide into all kinds of jobs in the public, quango and private sectors, and if governments try to do anything different, they are told they are populists, politicising independent institutions.
That’s how it came about that Coutts could spend time collecting a 40-page dossier about Nigel Farage’s political opinions without anyone thinking there was anything odd about that.
Read here (£)
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