Grenfell Tower: the Symbols and the Suffering

In the aftermath of the horrific fire that has destroyed a residential building in West London, Grenfell Tower, one asks if the UK is like a sick individual who can only express their inner feelings through self-harm. We did not need a referendum on our membership of the EU, we did not need an election to strengthen the negotiating position of the UK, and we did not need to witness a tower block engulfed in flames in a fire that could have been prevented. And we don't need some of the responses to the fire which have exposed the very same endemic indifference and systemic failure which resulted in one of the primary symbols of the event: this is the worst single devastation of a building with major loss of life since British cities were bombed in the Second World War, it really is that bad. On Channel 4 News last night (Thursday 15th June) the actor Lily Allen who lives close by challenged the 'official' figure of 17 dead to say people around her had a minimum figure of 150, many of whom died by jumping out of their windows.

Symbolically, something has gone up in flames, and it is not just the lives of 8 and 80 year olds and those in between, it is the competence of local and central government, and the simple fact that to the Council and the government, the people in the block were not important then, or now.

The renovation of Grenfell Tower was put out to tender and of the applicants, the most expensive at just over £11 million was rejected in favour of the tender which succeeded, amounting to £8.6 million, and in that simple contrast of figures you have the most stunning if obvious clue as to what went wrong: the choice was made on cost and the cheaper option came through.
The contractor, Rydon, as usually happens in these deals, sub-contracted and sub-contracted and one doesn't know what quality control there was, but the renovation was met with a blizzard of complaints from the residents, ignored and in some cases treated with resentment by the Council, one (Tory) Councillor suggesting to another (Labour) the residents should be 'grateful' for the modernization of their homes.

That the 'cladding' on the exterior of the building contained combustible material seems insane, and it is, though in our insane country it may not be proven to have been illegal because the Council that owns the building, Kensington and Chelsea, followed all the 'guidelines' and in addition the fire service must have had an opinion on this too and their assessment will make interesting reading.

It is argued that not only was the cladding liable to combust, and did, but that shoddy renovation work meant that the fabric of the building between the outer layer and the interior may have been breached with new piping that was not sealed properly (incompetence? cost cutting?), giving flames engorged on combustible panels a vent through which to burst higher and higher at a speed that has shocked fire fighters with 30 years or more experience.

Residents complained that although the council fitted their apartments with new boilers, they were placed in awkward positions too close to the door, while others complained about pipes sticking out of the wall, and one resident says that when he challenged the builders who insisted on entering his apartment at their choosing, he was told, in local parlance, to go fuck himself.

The details of this will come out in some form or another, but the response of the Government tells its own story of systemic failure to understand that somewhere in all this technical stuff about cladding, pipes, and the absence of a sprinkler system (cost £200,000!), people, real people with names and jobs and families, are suffering.

Crucially, at a time when elections across Europe and the USA have been about 'forgotten people' and the 'left behind' we meet that other group -the Irrelevant, the people who can voice as much concern as they like about the most basic conditions of life, and be ignored. Nothing underlines this more than the shameful behaviour of Theresa May, who went to the site for a 'private' meeting with first responders, and who did not meet a single person affected by the disaster, not even in one of the careful selection processes that senior politicians go in for these days. Jeremy Corbyn was there, in the thick of it, talking to real people, just as London Mayor Sadiq Khan was too, and getting an earful from angry residents expressing the anger May should have had the courage to hear, and face down. Even though I suspect that as usual she was advised to do this, it has yet again damaged her image and her days in power will not be extended by this dismal non-performance.

But if that is bad, her decision to establish a Public Enquiry take a sledgehammer to accountability, for its pre-empts the right of the victims to an Inquest that would determine how their relatives died, and a process that can begin with greater speed than a Public Enquiry. Legally, the govt has no control over an Inquest, where relatives can appoint counsel to interrogate officials involved and the Coroner deliver a verdict with potentially damning conclusions on the council - and the government. A Public Enquiry may take months to be set up and years to report. The govt has decided that Grenfell Tower is a tragic event, but there are more important things to be getting on with.

The UK doesn't have enough buckets of shit to pour on the people responsible for the fire and its response. In a democracy the representation of the people does not just mean electing a councillor or an MP, it must also be a transparent system in which decision-makers are accountable to the people, without whom there is no government and no democracy.

Symbolically, this government-from-afar is falling to pieces; 'private better than public' shows no dividend other than riches for a few, poverty and an early death for the rest. The 'bonfire of regulations' was never more symbolically apt to describe the attitude of governments that put private profit before social responsibility, where 'virtue' produces neglect not empathy. I would like to think we can now move on from this and recover some form of decency in the governance of this country, but the compulsion to self-harm makes me wonder if there is a remedy that the patient is willing to try to make real change possible.

True to form a tabloid newspaper has tried to 'pin the blame' for the fire on the faulty fridge of an immigrant, because the furious criticism of Theresa May and the more positive portrayal of Jeremy Corbyn is driving them round the bend barely a week after they failed to destroy Corbyn's career; while the major factor here is not the cause of the fire but the reasons why it spread out of control so quickly and destroyed the entire building.

Similarly, although below I link a compelling list of failures from the Telegraph, to whom credit must be given for being honest about the leader of their own party, the comments to some of their reports bring out the scorched earth worms of ancient Briton to heap abuse on Lily Allen for daring to tell the truth amid claims she was pulled from the BBC-2 Newsnight programme because of the comments she made on Channel 4 reported in my original post.

I don't know what the Labour and opposition parties will do in Parliament, I would hope as a priority they seek to overturn Mrs May's decision to hold a public enquiry and insist on an Inquest which I think would put a lot of Tory MPs in an uncomfortable position. Labour is in a commanding position at the moment, but I don't know if they will use it to either gain an advantage for the victims in this criminal case, or go further to undermine the Conservative claim to be the government of this country.

The Telegraph article Eight Failures that left people of Grenfell Tower at mercy of inferno
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017...mercy-inferno/

wow, you really must care, since you copy and pasted all that. i wish i did it first. then i would have cared more.

maybe tomorrow right?

Someone needed to start this thread.

how about a TL:DR version. maybe just tell me what you thought without the fucking journal coz... you know, we're on hungangels. i'm not exactly hanging around here for the news

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Originally Posted by bluesoul

i'm not exactly hanging around here for the news

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Its the Politics & Religion forum, I dunno, I'm obviously missing your point. :shrug

Granted, Stavros is never going to be on twitter, but short version.

London.
Tower block fire.
At least 100 dead.
Political scandal and possible riots looming.

tldr enough?

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Originally Posted by Jericho

London.
Tower block fire.
At least 100 dead.
Political scandal and possible riots looming.

tldr enough?

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that's what i'm talking about. well, i mean the news, not the death toll. r.i.p.

you guys are on twitter? lol

:what:whatWTF bluesoul ? Have some compassion and put a sock in it.:stop:smh

not the time or place.

It's not just that this is a grave subject, which it is, but it's far too easy to troll someone who earnestly shares their thoughts on a serious subject. It's disconcerting to put thought into something and then receive this kind of flip, cryptic response. And the dialogue in the Jill Stein section sounds like David Mamet got kicked in the head by a horse. Enough.

My condolences for the loss of life.

Cynical old me can't help thinking "cuts" in local/public services or "austerity" as it's called nowadays hasn't played some part in this!
Handing over our public services to "cowboys" in the private sector is done solely for the purpose of cost cutting!
My local council have received £26m less from Central Government over the last two years!
Wouldn't be surprised if almost a 100 poor souls have perished!

Quote:

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Originally Posted by peejaye

Handing over our public services to "cowboys" in the private sector is done solely for the purpose of cost cutting!

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£2.00 per square meter.
Apparently, that's the difference in price between flammable and non-flammable panels.
Guess which one they chose?

I don't know about UK building codes but here in the US there must be exterior fire escapes and /or a sealed fire proof stairway with sprinklers and fire proof doors ,as well as regular fire inspections.
Where was all that ? That thing went up like a blacksmith's forge with a blower underneath it .

Quote:

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Originally Posted by sukumvit boy

I don't know about UK building codes but here in the US there must be exterior fire escapes and /or a sealed fire proof stairway with sprinklers and fire proof doors ,as well as regular fire inspections.
Where was all that ? That thing went up like a blacksmith's forge with a blower underneath it .

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7 years of austerity and deregulation.


We are surely living in interesting times.
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/theresa-cancel-next-years-queens-10640737

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Originally Posted by peejaye

Cynical old me can't help thinking "cuts" in local/public services or "austerity" as it's called nowadays hasn't played some part in this!

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I understand the cynicism Peejaye, but this particular disaster is operating on a different level than others I can think of, with the possible exception of the railway/train disasters in the late 1990s early 2000's which led to the demise of Railtrack and their control of the system reverting back to pubic ownership in Network Rail. But the railways did not undermine government in the manner in which Grenfell Tower currently does.

The disaster has taken place as, at one and the same time, the Conservative Party is preparing (or not, depending on which source for new you rely on) to open talks with the EU on Brexit tomorrow (Monday 19th), while negotiating an arrangement with the Democratic Unionist Party to support it and keep the Conservatives in power when voting in the Commons -the first test of which will follow at the end of the debate on the Queen's Speech which our Majesty will deliver next Wednesday (the vote may also come quicker than usual as the Speech may not contain a large programme of legislation, it is basically Brexit and a commitment to spend more on public services).

We are told in the Telegraph (I think it is also in Murdoch's paper The Times) that Theresa May has been given 10 days to sort herself out over the Grenfell Incident, and that any compromise on Brexit will force backbenchers to nominate a 'stalking horse' to challenge her for the leadership of the Party, which could be as early as this September (the Conservative Conference usually take place at the start of October) although a leadership challenge need not be linked to Conference. It appears many Tory MPs already fuming over the election they didn't need or want, are determined to make sure she is not their leader next time.

Theresa May has undoubtedly messed this up, yet I don't believe it is due to any lack of humanity on her part. She is famously uneasy with political stunts and is incapable of delivering the rousing speeches Mrs Thatcher could give, yet she also seems to rely too much on the advice of other people and for whatever reason she committed the cardinal sin in 2017 of not being seen in public showing empathy for the victims. In the 24/7/365 media world in which we live, Prime Ministers must either have an instant response to every event that hits the news, or be judged indifferent; one of the tricks the Blair government pulled was to follow the news as quickly as it tended to create it.

For whatever reason, May was badly advised, but she herself could have said no and insisted on meeting real people, even if it meant getting an earful of abuse, which is what Prime Ministers after these events ought to hear anyway. It was made worse by the fact that Jeremy Corbyn and Sadiq Khan did just that, and that the Queen and Prince William also ventured forth. Although there were no photos or video of it (that I am aware of), May's meeting with the victims yesterday was too little, too late, yet I wonder if she is broken, that the election 'defeat' and the fire have taken more out of her than she has to replace. Margaret Thatcher loved a fight, I don't think Theresa May as the desire to fight, and has privately conceded her days as PM are numbered.

But it gets worse because what we know about Grenfell Tower means that there is no good news to come, whether it is the final estimate of deaths, or what caused them.

When it comes to the relationship between the tenants and -Conservative controlled- Kensington and Chelsea Council, there is no good news when the details of the renovation of the Tower are fully revealed to add to what we already know; the Conservatives face damaging judgements over the original decision in 1987 to relax the regulations on building materials enabling construction companies to use combustible materials in their buildings, at a time when Mrs Thatcher was close to building mogul William McAlpine who became treasurer of the party. Building regulations, and critically, as Jericho succinctly put it above, their de-regulation will I think be a defining issue and with it the whole argument for an against government regulation, something I hope, will resonate out from the UK to other countries where it is alleged 'red tape' is killing jobs, when the lack of it appears to be killing people.

But let's also face another uncomfortable fact -Labour doesn't get out of this with much credit either. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown both presided over a degree of de-regulation claiming it to be a good thing, and the same mistakes made in the 1980s were not reversed through 13 years of Labour government, and Labour MPs are also landlords themselves, as The Guardian pointed out last year:

According to Guardian research, almost a third of MPs are now letting out their houses or flats, with 196 declaring rental income on the official register of interests this year. The majority of those are earning more than £10,000 a year from the property, topping up their basic MP’s annual salary of £67,060.

The Conservative party has the highest number of landlord MPs at 128, meaning 39% of Tory MPs are landlords, compared with 26% of Scottish National party MPs and 22% from Labour.
https://www.theguardian.com/housing-...t-housing-bill

Although it is not suggested that these Landlord MPs are running unsafe properties, it is the mere fact that they are involved in the rented sector that now resonates in a negative way.

Also damning has been the apparent inability of Kensington and Chelsea Council to cope with the immolation of one of its buildings and its aftermath. The phenomenal and near instant reaction of local people, and by the late morning on the day of people from across London who provided food, clothing, shelter and a range of other services stood in mark contrast to the Council which did react, but failed to take control of events and was seen to be inadequate. Questions here concern 'disaster management' because I am sure most Councils have spent money preparing contingency plans which, if they existed for this kind of event do not seem to have worked or been adequate.

And if the Council could not cope, where was the government? A housing crisis, but no Housing Ministers to be seen; a social crisis, but no Home Secretary (leader-in-waiting [?] Amber Rudd) to walk around see what needs to be done and ordering that it be so. If there were a major disaster in London, it doesn't look good for the residents, unless they have access to a helicopter and a spare palace or three to live in.

For me the rage and the energy released by it should be channelled into accountability, from the building contractors up to policy makers in government. And the Public Enquiry must be ditched in favour of an Inquest, that is crucial to the timetable and the management of public anger.

I should add that Councils have a legal duty to draw up contingency plans to deal with a crisis situation -it may the case that Kensington and Chelsea Council was overwhelmed by the scale of the crisis or that their plan was inadequate -this is from their website:
Under the Civil Contingencies Act 2004 as a local authority we have a statutory duty to have contingency plans in place to ensure the borough’s resources and staff are equipped to deal with a crisis situation effectively, while continuing to provide the usual day-to-day services of the Council. The Act classes local authorities in the same category as the police services, fire brigade, health authorities, environment agency, ambulance services, coastguards and port authorities.

In an emergency situation the Council will:

• support the emergency services
  
• support people affected by the incident
  
• provide mutual aid to other responders
• maintain normal council services
• plan for medium and long term consequences and recovery from the incident

The type of assistance that can be offered is the provision of:

• transportation
• rest centres
• examination of building structures
• highway closures and diversion routes
• site clearance
  
• specialist equipment
  
• welfare/support
• environmental health services

Once the immediate life-threatening period has passed, the Council will play a major role in restoring normality to the area as quickly as possible.
https://www.rbkc.gov.uk/community-an...gency-planning

I believe, all, if not most of the residents made homeless are staying in Hotels all over London at a phenomenal cost to the taxpayer, despite there being around, allegedly, 20,000 empty properties in & around the capital! Another fine mess they've got us in to!
Personally; I would put them all up at Buckingham Palace!

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Originally Posted by peejaye

Personally; I would put them all up at Buckingham Palace!

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^^ that place is already occupied by another family ;)

they'll be going to some luxury flats in kensington row: near the borough of kensington and chelsea.

btw: it was corbyn who asked for these flats to be purchased by the government to house victims but other ministers were opposed to this idea.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/...rtment-complex

Quote:

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Originally Posted by bluesoul

they'll be going to some luxury flats in kensington row: near the borough of kensington and chelsea.
btw: it was corbyn who asked for these flats to be purchased by the government to house victims but other ministers were opposed to this idea.

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As expected the news that comes out every day offers no relief, whether it is the number of times the building and its materials were inspected, the rebuttal by the Council of resident's claims, the existence of combustible materials in the cladding of 600 tower blocks around the UK, or the admission by Theresa May this morning that Kensington and Chelsea Council could not cope with the aftermath of the fire, without telling us why, given the Council's statutory duties and the availability of over £200 million in funds to deal with it. The Chief Executive of the Council has resigned as a consequence of the Council's failings.

The symbols resonate in bluesoul's post, because Grenfell tower is in Colville Ward, which includes Portobello Road and the site of numerous films from Performance, A Hard Day's Night and Notting Hill, to 10 Rillington Place, Love Actually and many others (see links below).

To understand the division between rich and poor, take a walk one Saturday morning from the posh end of Portobello Road where it meets Pembridge Road and pass houses that are valued in £1 million plus, then hit the antiques market and make your way through the fruit and veg stalls, the gourmet pubs and cafes, and notice as head towards Westway how much poorer it all looks- because it is. And don't be fooled by the Notting Hill Carnival that snakes its way up Portobello Road every August- Kensington and Chelsea Council have tried to shut it down or re-locate it out of the Borough for years, they hate it.

North Kensington has been associated with poverty and slums for as long as I can remember, Alan Johnson, former Labour MP was born there and describes the poverty of the area in his book This Boy. (see second link below)

My first awareness of North Kensington came in the 1960s when my father bought the Sunday tabloids with their lurid tales of saucy vicars and bonkers film stars, but in particular the slum landlord Peter Rachman, who died in 1962 but was in the press for years after because of his connections to people involved in the Profumo Scandal and the fact that one of his aggressive and violent rent collectors was Michael X -Black Power leader, pimp, con man, murderer...(see second link). Rachman became synonymous with the worst of Britain's post-war slum housing along with crime and corruption, though some of the bad press he got may also have been veiled anti-Semitism.

Most people when they think of immigrants in London think of the East End with its sequence of immigrant communities from the Hugeunots of the 17th century through the Irish, the Jews of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and the Bengalis in the 1970s, but other parts of London also had their immigrant communities, and North Kensington was one. And, just as the East End became a cultural melting pot built on a foundation of low-rent slum housing, crime and corruption, so too was Colville Ward.

And just as the accurate death toll in Grenfell Tower may not be known, in part because some of the people living there on the night of the fire were sub-letting from the registered tenant, so too has this been a feature of low-rent accommodation in Colville , as this 'colourful' quote suggests:
"When Mark Strutt inherited the Colville estate in 1948 he found “there wasn’t a cupboard that didn’t have somebody living in it… The houses had been sub-let and sub-sub-let without our consent, and they were filled with prostitutes, burglars, murderers and negroes.”

Labour has it wrong again, it is not about shifting the problem from one apartment block to another, it is about a comprehensive housing policy, and though I doubt even Jeremy Corbyn can magic up the amount needed to house Britain's poor, releasing Council funds for a new era of social housing construction must be a start. Labour has two out of three councillors in Colville Ward, one of them defected to the Liberal Democrats last year, and one is now the MP elected a week or so ago, so it will be interesting to see their record when it is scruitinized.

Social history of Colville Ward-
http://www.colvillecom.com/page/social

Peter Rachman and Michael X
https://darkestlondon.com/tag/peter-rachman/

Quote:

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Originally Posted by peejaye

I believe, all, if not most of the residents made homeless are staying in Hotels all over London at a phenomenal cost to the taxpayer, despite there being around, allegedly, 20,000 empty properties in & around the capital! Another fine mess they've got us in to!
Personally; I would put them all up at Buckingham Palace!

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i don't care. i'm happy to pay taxes to house those in need. it's why welfare exists, and why we all pay taxes.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by holzz

i don't care. i'm happy to pay taxes to house those in need. it's why welfare exists, and why we all pay taxes.

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You're probably in a privileged position not to care judging by your politics! You're lot are trying to scrap welfare despite paying taxes to subsidise it all! While your local council are paying for all this, other public services will suffer!

An intriguing consequence of the Grenfell Tower fire, has been the review of cladding on high-rise public housing, with the current estimate of the cost of replacing it and temporarily re-housing the tenants at £600 million. Had Labour won the election, with its generous plans in public spending, the inevitable problem for every government everywhere -the sudden intrusion into their plans of an expensive disaster -man-made or not- could have presented it with a dilemma: how to fund this emergency policy? Given that many people, including me, did not consider the Manifesto commitments to be feasible, this disaster would surely have meant either trimming other budgets, or changing the priorities to give housing precedence over, say, defence -? I would not be surprised if Labour is patting itself on the back for being able to criticise the government and not having to make the financial decisions it would if in power, and that is without holding Labour to account for is own role in maintaining a de-regulated construction sector. But the joys of opposition can quickly become the misery of government, as Theresa May is finding out, and Labour may yet in the next 18 months.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017...test-grenfell/

That's easy, just tax the rich another penny on their £££££££££££££££'s to pay for it, they've screwed us all enough out of enough tax!

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Originally Posted by peejaye

That's easy, just tax the rich another penny on their £££££££££££££££'s to pay for it, they've screwed us all enough out of enough tax!

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Come on Peejaye you can do better than that. The Gov has just found £1 billion a year for Northern Ireland (a closer look at the details reveals it could amount to £2.5bn over two years) which suggests that when it needs to, yes, governments find the money, but that doesn't change the overall situation, not least when it seems the £1.56 trillion debt or 89.1% of GDP is of no concern to the party of prudence and thrift.
At some point -perhaps as we drift towards the end of EU negotiations in 2019- this madness will either send us all into the proverbial loony bin, or someone will realise that income tax has to rise, national insurance has to rise, VAT has to rise, excise duties on tobacco and alcohol must rise, and interest rates have to rise- and then you will find out just how unpopular being in government is. Housing will be just another sector of the economy in crisis. Like the man said, 'You ain't seen nothin' yet'.

Interesting times lie ahead Stavros but how did we get in this mess? We both know the answer!

Grenfell Tower remains standing, a monument to incompetence and greed, and it doesn't get any better with advance notice of an official report that identifies 'botched refurbishment' of the building as a primary if not the primary cause of the fire

Gaps around windows, wrongly fitted cavity barriers meant to stop fire, and dozens of missing or faulty door closers were also responsible for helping to spread rather than limit the fire that claimed 71 lives in June 2017, according to details that emerged on Monday.
and
Cavity barriers that are meant to expand and seal the gap between the concrete surface of the building and the cladding in the event of fire were of “insufficient size specification”, the Evening Standard reported the experts as concluding.
They were designed to close a 25mm gap but were installed with a 50mm gap. Some were installed upside down or back to front and the failures “provided a route for fire spread”.
There were gaps of 15cm between the window frames and concrete columns that were filled by a rubberised membrane, rigid foam insulation and uPVC lightweight plastic panels, the paper reported.
The report said that “none of the materials used would be capable of providing 30 minutes’ fire resistance” and this allowed “a direct route for fire spread around the window frame into the cavity of the facade … and from the facade back into flats”
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/...-leaked-report

It is worth pointing out again that the Thatcher government lifted regulations on building materials in 1987 and (as the report above notes) that even after the Lakanal fire in London in 2009 the Labour Government did not (re-) impose more severe regulations on the construction industry.

And in the same paper and on the same day another report underlines how Grenfell has exposed a chasm between the dream of owning one's own home and the post-Grenfell reality -a 'much sought after' apartment with a river view over the Thames at Greenwich which was purchased for £450,000 but is now worth £50,000 because the cladding is vulnerable and tenants are being asked to pay for the refurbishment.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/...style-cladding

Imagine, if you can, in 2018, a des res apartment in London at £50k but nobody wants to buy it!! Maybe London should issue a compulsory purchase order, pay for the refurbishment and house the city's homeless in New Capital Quay, like they do in Finland.

I forgot to add this article on homelessness and the solution they have found in Finland as indicated in the last sentence of my post-

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/...-homelessness/

The public inquiry into the immolation of Grenfell Tower that began two weeks ago has ended its first phase, the witness statements of survivors and family members of those who died. This has been a difficult phase as it relates directly the pain and the loss, and the Guardian has produced a welcome dossier of the victims to let us know who they were. It can be found here-

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/...nfell-thrasher

But what is most shameful about this first phase, the most personal phase of the Inquiry is the absence of those who may, through their political office or commercial links, be accountable to the public- thus:

The housing secretary, James Brokenshire, and the housing minister, Dominic Raab, have been absent and have no plans to attend the inquiry. The same is true of Nick Hurd, the Home Office minister who is the main government contact for survivors and families and friends of the victims.
Executives from Rydon, the company that refurbished the tower with combustible cladding, are not coming. Neither are those from the cost consultant Artelia, which was involved in “value engineering” by cutting costs. The architects, Studio E, declined to comment on whether it would have anyone in attendance. There was no sign of anyone from the firm in the first days of the commemoration hearings that will continue this week.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/...ers-at-inquiry