Last month it took 1,600 rioters and looters to cause £3 million damage to our economy - they were mostly uneducated, disaffected youths who have no sense of belonging, who don’t fit in their community, who were brought up by their single mothers, whose majority can even read…
It took one man to cause a damage of £1,5 billion and he was neither angry or hungry!
The difference is that Kweku Adoboli is no dumb thug he is a Quaker public school educated man, considered by his former colleagues to be a gentle, sensitive, and serious too goody shoes who never told jokes, and who used to speak to the other students on how his parents inspired him to be the best! His father, a retired senior UN official, has since come forward to declare his son “a man of integrity” and to ask us all not to make harsh judgements. It is indeed possible for Kweku to be a man of integrity but he has made a mistake and if we are to measure mistakes by their financial impact: a huge one!
But be aware of the quite ones…the smooth talkers who seldom get angry are the ones capable of causing the most damage!
This man of integrity had a dark secret, one to which he briefly alluded on his Facebook page when he said “he needed a miracle” …in the end there was no miracle and he had to own up to the fact that he had made a huge gamble with his bank’s money and lost. This was magnified by the devaluation of the Suisse Franc.
There is a lot to come out in this story in which a single man is being made a scapegoat by his employer in what is largely a game of greed gone wrong.
Had it gone right he would have been up for a huge bonus, a pat on the back and perhaps a promotion! Maybe it’s just me but I can never resist a chuckle when I see someone scoring their goal…It is almost as impossible not to laugh, just like when we see someone tripping over on the street! I guess I have a bit of juvenile sense of humour…well done UBS!
There is also another important lesson to be learn by the riots and UBS’ losses:
They put a price tag on education like nothing could have done it: take the round figure of £3 million worth of damage and divide it by 1,600 uneducated people, now compare it to £1,5 billion that Mr Adoboli (allegedly single handed) has lost…that is the price tag of a good solid education! Or is it…? That’s why it’s dangerous to measure things by their financial value alone…There are more important ways of evaluating commodities than by giving them a price tag. Greed is no good - Wall Street!
Now then: the rioters and looters…
Everyone has talked about them, emotions ran high with people spewing fire and venomous comments. People of all backgrounds and degrees of expertise have tried to find a justification for those three days of insanity that ran wild in our streets! Some beating themselves up, others symbolically beating the crap out of the mob.
And now that all the public figures have made their statements and given their interpretations according to their own agenda, the politicians are asking us common people what do we think it was the cause …
Okay, I had vowed not to write about the riots, and to let that go. I've tried to step gingerly over the psychological debris they’ve left on our community spirit… but I just can’t resist any longer!
If we are to make progress into addressing what happened during those three days of drug fuelled, sheer madness of consumerist greed imploding on itself, we must consider that there were various types of people causing chaos and that casting them all as just one type, like the justice system is doing, is only going to compound to the social void we are in.
To start with we should make a distinction between the rioters and the looters.
Although some might have crossed over, this was not always the case.
The rioters were angry.
Angry about many things, various things…and if you have been angry before, and who hasn’t? You know that you might start by being angry at one thing but that your inventory of grievances soon piles up! Now imagine this individual effect being fuelled by the anger of dozens, hundreds of people…it was big, it was explosive, it was caustic and it blew up!
The looters were hungry.
Some were hungry for food, and we heard of some reports of kids breaking into Macdonald’s and frying their own burgers! These guys must have had some training…I can tell you that if you were to let me lose in the kitchen of a fast food outlet I wouldn’t know where to start!
Others were breaking into Iceland and Lidl! I mean… no offence but if money is not an issue, wouldn’t you rather go to Waitrose and M&S? These rioters were not only hungry, they are also creatures of habit and stuck to the safety of what they knew. They have shopped at these stores all their lives so at least they knew where to find the frozen carrots and the toilet paper…
Looting is misplaced shopping, and the looters were the shops’ loyal customers!
This is why retail sustained such heavy losses: shops lost both their stock and their customers. Either because they’ve been in jail since or because they already got what they needed, they haven’t been back to the shops for a while!
We had the discerning looters:
Those who looked for particular items and brands and who wouldn’t settle for less…some apparently did home shopping, ordering their looting to be done by the lesser members of their gang - their personal staff…
Then the hoarders...
They just grabbed anything they could whether they needed it or not on a “it might come in hand later” attitude.
And lastly we had the recycling looters:
Those who just came behind looking at the damage and picking up after the more consumerist types, with the view that “ if it’s going to waste I might as well have it”!
