Halifax customers are closing their accounts en masse today after its social media team told them to leave if they don’t like their new pronoun badges for staff in what is being branded one of the biggest PR disasters in British business history. MailOnline has more.
One account holder told MailOnline they have already pulled out investments and savings worth £450,000 while many more said they are closing ISAs, cutting up credit cards or transferring balances to rivals after they accused the bank of “alienating” them with “pathetic virtue signalling”.
The row began this week when Halifax, which was propped up by the taxpayer to the tune of £30billion as part of a 2008 bailout, tweeted its 118,000 followers on Tuesday revealing that it would allow staff to display their pronouns on their name badges, in a post that read “pronouns matter”.
It showed a photo of a female staff member’s name badge, which featured “she/her/hers” in brackets under the name Gemma, and said the policy was to help avoid “accidental misgendering”.
One customer replied: “There’s no ambiguity about the name ‘Gemma’. It’s a female person’s name. In other words, it’s pathetic virtue signalling and is seen as such by almost everyone who has responded to the initial tweet. Why are you trying to alienate people?” Within 20 minutes a member of the Halifax social media team, calling himself Andy M, replied: “If you disagree with our values, you’re welcome to close your account.”
Andy M’s response has outraged customers, and seen hundreds claiming they will boycott the bank with many saying they have closed their accounts. Others have cut up their credit cards or getting rid of insurance policies and said the threat was the final straw after it cut 27 branches alone in 2022.
One told MailOnline: “My entire family have now transferred their accounts to Nationwide, cards etc. Loss to Halifax is in excess of 450K in investment accounts and savings.” Another said: “I closed my credit card account today, after 15 years of being a customer”, while an existing customer who is now changing ISAs said: “If they politely said try to use the pronouns on the badge — I would have done my best”, but left because he perceived their threat meant “there would be hell to pay if I got it wrong”.
One customer from the Midlands said he has transferred £1,100 from his credit card to another company today, and said: “I’ve closed my account…. sick to death of woke.”
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: Howard Brown, the star of the famous Halifax ads, has branded the bank’s treatment of its customers “disgraceful”. MailOnline has more.
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Marvellous news.
I’ll have a drink to that tonight.
“If I disagree with you, its not because I hate you. Its because I have another equally valid opinion”
This is what the left are struggling to understand.
It’s really rather bad news as the customer outrage seems a bit drummed-up. Or really bad news, as it confirms that Natwest, Nationwide and HSBC have similar policies and that at least Halifax customers who are deemed to be somethingist or somethingphobic, exact meaning of these terms to be defined by the bank, may have their bank accounts forcibly closed. Somethingist and somethingphobic, as presently defined by Halifax, explicitly includes transphobic. In other words, Halifax customers who have in the past been guilty of stating that sexually reproducing mammals, including humans, have biologically defined sexes, may have their service terminated. Obviously, people suspected of being white supremacists, ie, Europeans with a non-neurotic view of their own, cultural identity and heritage, are also among the badguypeople to whom this may happen.
Depending on how this will work out in practice, some sort of businesses must not discrimante against customers based on whatever their employees happen to believe about them law seems to be called for.
Let me explain this very simply:
I am sick to the back teeth of Bloody Woke.
It does not require any deep sermonising, any deep intellectual philosophising, I am SICK OF WOKE!
That doesn’t turn the Mail article into good news.
Woke Logic
I want everyone to be more inclusive and accept me.
The best way I can do this is by being an awkward twat to everyone and scream at them if they don’t accept it.
You’re misunderstanding this. These people don’t want to be accepted. They want to hand out severe punishment to everybody who even silently disagrees with them and in order to facilitate this, they intentionally act in the most provocative way possible.
The Northern Irish are going to be in big trouble when they talk about people’s hair.
“Look at her her”
I was one of the customers who moved their accounts from the Halifax.
The pronouns nonsense was the final straw but the bank’s service and products have gone downhill over a period of several years.
I suspect this is at least partly due to their loss of focus on their main business and getting distracted by virtue signalling and identity politics.
I work in the corporate world and we are bombarded by this stuff from HR all the time. I’m tempted to report it as spam to my IT department just to see what happens, as it is unsolicited, unwelcome and is distracting me from my actual job.
Interestingly, all of these “we want you to bring your whole self to work” campaigns you see in modern corporate Britain don’t seem quite so keen on Brexiteers or the unvaccinated, or the unmasked, “bringing their whole self to work”. The tolerance is very narrow.
I have moved my accounts to the Nationwide. Judging by their advertising they are not much better than the Halifax in the “woke” stakes but if lots of people take their business elsewhere every time these companies make another public “woke” faux pas, maybe they will eventually get the message.
I’ll be closing mine on Sunday when I get back from being away. It’s not much but it sends a message.
I’m looking forward to going into Halifax on Monday and telling the manager that I’m taking up the AndyM offer to close my account. Get Woke go Broke. I might produce a name badge with “He, He, He” on
My pronouns are ‘we/us/our’