Bob Diamond, King of Barclays, now seen by many as the tart stealing Knave of Hearts has joined that elite club of overachievers forced into resignation when the organisation they have led is caught with their hand in the cookie jar. Coming hot on the coat-tails of other scandals and scams that include bank bounus payments, product miselling and what some believe to be the the worst financial crisis ever people are wondering if the banks can and do what they want, when they want.
An increasing number of people believe that it was bankers loose morality and unfair practices that caused the financial crisis when their analysis could only identify returns and bottom lines. It is thought that they were not capable of looking for the bigger picture or asking 'should I be doing this? Nothing in their vision or their ethics raised questions in their deliberately narrowed minds and as a result poor Bob is the latest in a growing line of sacrificial lambs (some would say scapegoats), that have fallen on their swords to save their organisations blushes.
It is probably unfair to blame Bob, or at least blame him alone. Whatever they say about him and the other lambs I ask you to notice the UK government is doing its best not to find out who is responsible for this and are practicing fairly advanced yoga (they are bending over backwards so far their heads will soon be up thier own backsides) in order not to allocate blame. There is little talk of punishment on these occasions and whenever there is talk of regulating these industries properly the banks simply suggest that if they can't act with impunity they will take their jobs and tax payments elsewhere.
So Politicians appear to be impotent and to rebut this they make a lot of noise about things they are fixing however fixing things that are not the problem will fail to get down to the nuts and bolts of this.
Lets face it all parties in UK government over the past few years have presided over lax regulatory reigime which created an environment within which blinkered thinking and tunnel vision arose from the rabid generation of short term profits that were so huge they they lost sight of what was happening to the system they were extracting the lifeblood from.
Let us not forget Bob Diamond's and his cronies real job is to maximise benefits for his organisation and anything less will get him sacked. It is the job of government to set the rules and punishments for rule breakers and apply these fairly, but it is unlikely that appropriatte punishment will be applied here. Despite indications that such wrongdoings are endemic within a banking system that regards us all as a crop and tries to make our money, its own they will never be chased down and imprisoned with the alacrity as, for instance, the participants in the recent UK wide riots. But they have done more damage. But this is not a Bob Diamond problem - it is wider than him and he is simply the fall guy for something rotten.
But weep not for Bob, he will be OK. These scandals have impacted upon others far more than he and he is better placed to get another job. Others lost their jobs long ago to pay for the mess he was part of. Not because they did anything wrong but because the number of decent jobs is falling faster than a teenage skydivers testicles
Whether you believe the banks are to blame for the crisis or not is irrelevant, that they have not been lending to small businesses ( even though the government has given them money to do this small thing) and this has driven many to extinction, there are less people paying tax and this has meant that the NHS investiment in medical services and performance is declining, services once provided are now not and this will, and probably has, ended in untimely death
And that is the real cost of these scandals, Bob and his mates last bonuses (not the ones they publicly turned down the one they took before) is probably worth more than many will earn in a lifetime, and this comes on top of their yearly pay packet which over the period of the contract would keep some smaller public services in the red for some years, while good people will die, lead less happy lives and will suffer poorer healthcare and smaller pensions all because of the activities undertaken by the financial sector.
Its unfair to blame Bob, but weep not for him. Weep instead for the people who will die because of what his industry and the political system, did.
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