Our national malaise arises in part from the poor state of many of Britain’s private services. No, not a misprint. I mean private services. Many on the political right berate public services, implying that were they only to be privatised everything would be sweetness and light. Yet modern technology now makes it all too easy for companies to treat their customers with just as much high-handed disdain and bureaucratic inflexibility as any state enterprise.

Drive into a pub car park and forget to record your number plate and you’ll receive a fine of £100. Contesting this requires several hours of your time trying to find a receipt to prove you bought a drink.

One in four customers had felt ‘truly enraged’ by a recent experience

Or consider the technological hoops you negotiate to read a utility bill, cancel a credit-card subscription or locate an ‘unidentified object in the bagging area’. New technology has offloaded work that was once performed by workers on to hapless customers. Soon we may need a four-day working week just to spend our Fridays changing our mobile phone tariff or updating 17 parking apps when our credit card expires. This nonsense needs to be curbed by legislation.

When a right-wing capitalist like me, working in marketing, is calling for greater consumer protection, things have probably reached a crisis point. But why? Until this century, most transactions were conducted face-to-face. Such transactions are lubricated by a high degree of tacit trust and shame avoidance. By contrast, any online exchange must be designed to be proof against the world’s most dishonest people. This imposes a huge burden on the majority of honest customers.

But the wider problem is caused by the tech-financial-consulting complex, which has sold the management of large businesses on the nerd-god of perfect quantification: the idea that every penny of a company’s outgoings must be justifiable in terms of immediate savings or instantly measurable gains. This causes firms to emphasise cost-cutting at the expense of customer service. It is far easier and faster to prove the gains from cutting frontline staff than it is to measure the longer–term gains from an improvement in customer trust. Since the finance function in a business (like the Treasury in government) has an effective veto over all expenditure, it is akin to handing the reins of decision-making to the most short-termist people in the room. By the time problems start emerging (self-checkout tills causing an epidemic of shoplifting), the finance-tech-consulting locusts have moved on to ravaging something else.

But as the Dutch proverb has it: ‘Trust arrives on foot but leaves on horseback.’ This is why we need legislation. There are many good companies out there. But when trust in the overall system is eroded by a few rotten apples, the good companies suffer along with the bad. An independent consultancy called the Foundation, which specialises in the customer experience, recently published some re-search on this question, ‘The State of the Nation for UK Customers’. The research points to notable successes, some predictable (M&S), some less so (Aldi, easyJet). But the most telling statistic is that one in four customers had felt ‘truly enraged’ by a recent experience. One in six was ‘enraged’ in at least five areas of their life.

Even if you run one of the good companies, and your customers are largely happy, this affects you. If consumers start approaching all transactions in a mindset of suspicion, you suffer by association. Our levels of trust are not calibrated on an average assessment, but by our worst experiences. Once bitten, twice shy.

There is a glorious, creative side to technology. But a lot of it is extractive, bureaucratic, reductionist and dehumanising. It’s time we learned to distinguish between the two.