We’ve all heard more than enough of the story of Coutts & Co, of NatWest, of Nigel Farage, of Alison Rose, of Peter Flavel and of Howard Davies. If ever there was a plotline required for a new episode of Tales of the Unexpected, look no further. The great cry is that woke banking – The Times in a leader referred to it as “jiggery wokery” – is over and the time has come for a reset. All I can say is “Dream on!”.
Farage, for all his failings and for all of his views and utterances with which one might disagree or on some matters even tacitly agree, has risen to prominence by refusing to submit to the prevailing narrative. He calls a spade a spade and if criticised for doing so, he makes sure that he says it again. The establishment hates him for his public image of the plain-speaking, unrepentant, beer-swilling populist. But what is it that scares said establishment about this populist? Farage is, pardon the pun, small beer compared to Marine Le Pen or Giorgia Meloni or, heavens forbid, Donald Trump. Pass them off as “extreme right” and, with the 1930s in mind, they’re easily tarred with the fascist brush. Since the heyday of widespread popular socialism in the 1960s and 1970s, it became routine to describe any competing populist movement which did not in essence adhere to left-of-centre maxims as fascist. Fascism, born in Italy, and Nazism, or National Socialism to give it its proper name, born in Germany were pretty clearly defined in their objectives and few, if any, of current populist movements bear any meaningful resemblance to those two mid-twentieth century political creeds.
This past weekend I took my better three quarters to see “Oppenheimer”. The subject of communism and what constitutes a “filthy and unreliable Commie bastard” is close to the centre of the narrative and the vengeance visited upon the left-leaning liberal Jew J Robert Oppenheimer by the right-leaning Jew Lewis Strauss, both patriots in their own way, did not escape my observation. Is that in itself not proof of diversity? As far back as his school days at Dulwich College, Farage has spouted right wing opinions, but must we not ask ourselves whether proof of the strength of a democracy might not be vested in the ability of a society to let these be freely expressed without them undermining its foundations?
For most of my career I worked on trading floors. They are surely, other than sports arenas, amongst the most democratic of workplaces where pure meritocracy is encouraged to run rampant. My two closest remaining friends from my trading days at Bank of America are a British born Pakistani and an Indian Tamil who had himself been transferred in from Hong Kong but who now too carries a British passport. They were there on merit and not in order to satisfy a diversity score. I have often retold the story of the outcome of a round of interviews I conducted in the Spring of 2007. I had spent two days away from the coalface in order to select from a motley bunch of second year undergraduates two summer interns.
I say motley bunch when in fact this was before the 2007/2008 banking crisis and the City and Wall Street were very much the top go-to destinations for any ambitious graduate with a quantitative degree from any one of the world’s leading universities. Why an astrophysicist or a theoretical chemist would want to become a banker slightly escaped me but that was the way it was. Whether rightly or wrongly, we had the choice of the cream of a generation. So, over two days I saw an ethnically diverse bunch of young people who were all busily trying to convince me that joining B of A for the summer would be the fulfilment of their life’s dream. Alas, at the end of the process I went back to see HR and asked for offers to be made to a Swede who was doing a master’s in finance and banking at Warwick and an Estonian who was studying for a degree in chemical engineering at Imperial College. What follows is as it happened.
The HR lady whose name I have forgotten looked at me after I had revealed my choices and perfectly seriously asked, “What about minorities?” to which I somehow entirely spontaneously and without malice aforethought answered “There are 1.2 billion Chinese and over one billion Indians. These boys are from Sweden and Estonia. Who do YOU think is the minority?” Both Johan and Tarmo were invited, took up their internships, were offered traineeships for the following autumn, joined the bank and both duly went on to solid and successful careers. Even then and over 15 years ago, when I recounted the story of the exchange with the HR bod, I was asked from where I had taken the courage to say such a thing? It wasn’t courage. It was instinct. Whether inappropriate or not remains a matter of opinion. In my opinion they were the two best candidates. End of.
Despite all the barking that the Farage affair, yet to be dubbed “Nigelgate”, will surely mark the apex in corporate wokeism, I have my doubts. I even have my doubts that Coutts has done anything wrong. Its proud declaration two years ago that it had achieved B-Corp status speaks volumes. B-Corp certification is equivalent to Stonewall’s Diversity Champion’s Programme and the powers that be at Coutts have done nothing other than what they thought was expected of them. How could an institution which suffers the stigma of being the bank of the white elite, Her Late Majesty the Queen included, do more to polish its halo?
Coutts is not alone in buying into the belief that only intolerance can protect what it believes to represent tolerance. It convinced itself that de-banking Farage was the right thing to do although it surely knew that querying whether doing so would in fact be right or wrong was best left. The Germans – who else? – have a term for this. It is “Vorauseilender Gehorsam” – pre-emptive obedience. And if you don’t want to know the answer, don’t ask the question. For seven hundred years, since the Acciaioli, the Bardi and Peruzzi families first set up banks and since the Medici proved that nothing makes money like money, bankers will do what they think is right for the P&L. Their ability to put lipstick on a pig is without equal. Deutsche Bank survived banking the Nazis and Coutts will survive de-banking Nigel Farage.
In a few weeks’ time the affair will have disappeared from the front pages and once again 1.4 billion Chinese and 1.4 billion Indians will be restored to minority status whilst questioning the relentless elevation of members of groupings which are anything other than white and male will remain a career threatening mistake. But that is not the real problem.
In our rush to create what is tantamount to a victimless world, a world in which nobody loses out and where nobody comes second, we are wasting enormous pools of talent and ambition. Is it not maybe symptomatic that the pathological virtue-signalling of the European politicians and business leaders is at the root of its relative decline? Poor things: they are coming up against rising Asian competitors who have yet to learn that making things for less than they can be sold for is old hat and that achieving and maintaining B-Corp status – or whatever the Chinese, Indian, Filipino, Indonesian, or Vietnamese equivalent might be – is the main reason for catching the early train to the city.
Whilst Vladimir Putin was this past weekend welcoming African leaders to Leningrad in order to spit bile at the nasty West with its original racist, imperialist, and colonialist guilt, we are busily trying to work out how we can lend them more money that we know we will never see again. This past week’s coup in Niger, inevitably backed and supported by the Wagner Group, was carried out under the pretext of being a legitimate uprising against post-colonial French racism and colonialism. Were our banks to be half as virtuous as they purport to be when flying rainbow flags during you know what, then they’d have to begin by de-banking more than half the planet representing two thirds of its population.
In the early 1970s, Berthold Brecht, the avowed socialist playwright, had he still been alive, would have seen himself become the first and only exponent of his trade to globally have more stages performing his work than that of William Shakespeare. And yet it was this arch egalitarian, this tireless fighter for the rights of the oppressed, who coined the phrase “First comes the grub and then the morality”. Current virtue signalling companies either appear to miss that point or, worse still, are hypocritical liars. Flagging corporate purpose is nonsense, especially when it espouses the wellbeing and happiness of its stakeholders, while the CEO waltzes off with compensation in the multi-millions.
The Sunday Times this past weekend carried an article titled “How Nigel Farage brought down the NatWest bosses”. No, he did not bring them down. They brought themselves down. They loaded and pointed the gun. Farage merely pulled the trigger. That they had picked the wrong guy, that they permitted their machinery to unstoppably ratchet along until the decision was taken, is bad. However, that Dame Alison Rose revealed confidential personal information, irrespective of who the client might be, was by all and any measures unforgivable and NatWest’s board under the chairmanship of Sir Howard Davies not grasping what she had just done even more so.
The Farage affair is not about woke. It is about those who should know better, about their not having the wherewithal to push back and about their pandering to those who have never run a business, who have never created jobs and wealth and who have in all likelihood seen too many superhero movies where in the end and after a huge, big fight, good – albeit flawed – always wins out over evil. Is woke banking done for? Of course it’s not. They’ll tinker with the wording, promise it’ll never happen again and continue as was. The only real regret will be that they picked the wrong guy.
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