NatWest has exposed the decadence of our second-rate new elite

Dame Alison Rose has given the game away. Too many of our banks and big companies are now run by second-rate, self-entitled, box-ticking bureaucrats who are less interested in building world-class businesses than in seeking to remodel society along woke lines. 

This is an intolerable state of affairs. Companies have no business telling us what to do, think or say, and no right to blacklist customers who don’t agree with the latest bien-pensant nostrums. Rose’s belated resignation as boss of NatWest must be the first step in a much wider counter-revolution, a fightback against the politicisation of ordinary commercial life, and a return to a world in which the customer is king and the business of business is business and nothing else. 

The mutation of big firms into quasi-activist groups is already badly damaging our economy. Everybody, even those in jail, should be able to have a bank account; every non-proscribed organisation should have access to the financial system. 

Nigel Farage was treated abominably. Will the FCA investigate Rose properly for leaking confidential information? Why is she the only executive to have quit NatWest? When will the boss of Coutts go? We urgently need a proper, investigation into how many other customers were denied financial services because of their opinions, not just at NatWest but across the industry. 

How many other vile dossiers have been compiled against customers, and by which banks? How much compensation will need to be paid out? Which executives are responsible across the industry? What other industries have been at it? It isn’t enough for banks to promise the Government that they won’t do it again, or that they will give prompt explanations next time they debank an innocent customer: we need to know everything that has happened so far, and binding, legally enforceable guarantees that it won’t happen again. 

We also need to know whether there is now a culture of discrimination in the business world: are Brexiteers, Tories or those with non-woke views not being hired or promoted in certain parts of corporate Britain? This is not just about the persecution of cultural conservatives: other groups, including certain Left-wingers, may be losing out.

Last but not least, we need a cultural shift in the corporate sector: companies aren’t NGOs. Their job isn’t to make political statements, or advocate for social change. Yes, they should be able to lobby on laws that directly affect them, but the rot set in when many started to campaign against Brexit and to take sides on BLM and trans ideology.

So what went wrong? Many corporate managers – the sorts who have spent their careers in gigantic, hierarchical firms rife with internal politics – are ambivalent towards free markets. These technocrats tend to view their success as due to luck or skill at outmanoeuvring rivals, and are therefore hard-pressed to justify their massive, “winner takes all” rewards. 

Rose was on over £5 million a year; too many chief executives of her ilk feel that the only way to legitimise such vast salaries is to woke-wash their businesses, pursue green or “socially inclusive” goals, and force staff to mouth Left-wing platitudes. It makes them feel better about themselves, and allows them to impress other, less prosperous members of the cultural elites at dinner parties. It also helps land the next job: many headhunters now value virtue-signalling above competence. 

Going woke is easier than actually being good at business: why bother with what Elon Musk calls “a hardcore work culture” if playing politics is all it takes to be lauded as a great leader? Why bother working long hours, obsessing about operational detail and customer satisfaction, labouring day and night to produce better products at a lower cost? The woke corporation, it turns out, is in fact the lazy, decadent corporation; social activism is a cover for managerial inadequacy. Pandering to the prejudices of a vocal minority of staff is less demanding than delivering profits – until amateurs like NatWest take on a professional like Farage and are eaten alive.

Traditionally, shareholders would have no truck with low-grade bosses that squandered their money on self-indulgent bilge. But it’s not just the management of many big corporations that is broken: so is the ownership. NatWest’s problem, as ever, was the state: scandalously still a 38.6 per cent shareholder so long after the financial crisis, it was asleep at the wheel, proud to be a useless absentee landlord. 

Yet the rest of the economy is in even greater trouble. The power of the individual shareholder has dwindled. Even active fund management is in decline: only a few geniuses (such as Warren Buffett) regularly beat the market. For most small or large investors, it makes more sense to simply track a representative portfolio, such as the FTSE 100. 

This has led to trillions of investor money being collected into gigantic tracker funds run by a tiny number of institutions with too much power. Partly because passive fund managers had to justify their existence, they started to impose requirements other than maximising profits on firms – the so-called environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) revolution which ushered in woke capitalism. 

Aided and abetted by regulators and central banks that have embraced goals such as net zero, they undermined the economy’s central feedback loop: to do more of what is profitable and stop doing what isn’t. Capitalism is mutating into a form of socialism-lite, complete with low productivity and deranged banking blacklists. 

Milton and Rose Friedman, authors of Capitalism and Freedom and Free to Choose, would have seen the NatWest scandal coming. They explain brilliantly why “social responsibility” is a “fundamentally subversive doctrine” in a free society. Pursuing goals such as environmentalism or wokery or egalitarianism means that companies impose a “tax” on shareholders (reducing profits), on front-line workers (lower productivity means lower wages), and on “customers” (by putting up prices). If companies are going to act like governments, then there is no reason for them to be privately owned. They may as well be politically controlled, with “social” objectives determined by politicians. 

As the Friedmans put it, private business has one social responsibility: to make the highest possible profit while staying within the rules. It is because it forgot its core mission that NatWest saw fit to ditch Farage. 

Have you left NatWest over its treatment of Nigel Farage and others who have been ‘de-banked’? We want to hear from you, email money@telegraph.co.uk