Grenfell Tower was a vertical village filled with a
wondrous variety of humanity, multiple skin tones, wide-ranging interests,
different religions, diverse cultures and all ages.
But Grenfell Tower was also a village worth of
people living in a chimney because, it seems, people who should have cared did
not.
Welcome to modern Britain…
I’ve hesitated to write about this unnecessary
horror. I do not live in London. My flat is not in a high-rise block. But the
causes of this wretched tragedy have their basis in much that I’ve written
about on this blog; greed, lack of compassion, the exponentially growing
disparity between those with un-spendable wealth and everyone else, political
short-termism and incompetence. There are different rules for the rich and
powerful and the rest of us, and we have a political system which is more like
a warped reality show than a test of competence.
IN the aftermath of this monstrous event, we have
collective responsibilities and obligations which I will deal with at the end
of this, slightly longer than usual and humour-free post.
The wider context for the Grenfell Tower tragedy is
that it was always going to happen – somewhere. I believe it is only the scale
of the horror and extent of loss of life and apocalyptic pictures of destruction
and mayhem that have taken our collective breath away. The scenes were reminiscent
of third world factories where workers die because they are trapped inside
sub-standard buildings because profit is all that matters. But this is Britain,
one of the most developed countries on the planet and the occupants regularly
complained and drew the authority’s attention to potential hazards. They were
ignored.
Everywhere you look, cheap architecture is being
quickly thrown up to house people who have limited choices due to their
socio-economic circumstances. Tory Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher sold off
the UK's precious social housing stock of good quality post-war housing that represented
Britain’s bequest of the 1939 - 45 horrors; the right of working class people. I
remember my Granny’s council house where she raised 5 boys and where I made mud
pies and picked apples in the garden. Over the years it was modernised by the
council including getting an indoor toilet early in the 1970s. But most of the
houses in that street are now privately owned. That social housing, legacy of
the war and sacrifice of a nation, has never been replaced.
Equally, Labour councils have put out public
services to private tender reducing regulation via the back door and no one did
more to introduce the corrosive private sector ideologies into the public
sector than Labour, from Tony Blair’s administration right up until it lost
power under Gordon Brown.
The current Labour crew were woefully ineffective
during last year’s referendum (see last week’s post) Labour failed miserably to
make the argument for stability, remaining in a reformed EU and celebrating
diversity and free movement of people.
Last week I posted a piece about Britain’s slumping
position in Europe but the scenes that unfolded in Grenfell Tower and the
subsequent, incomprehensible lack of official support for the victims would not
have seemed out of place in a Mumbai or Kenyan slum. And this in one of the
richest boroughs in one of the richest cities in one of the richest countries
in the world. SHAME SHAME SHAME.
There is no fire authority in the UK that could have
dealt with the Grenfell Tower inferno, funnelling flames inside the cheap
cladding. But there could easily have been sprinklers, central fire alarms,
fire escapes. One commentator from Kensington council said that residents had
not ‘wanted’ a sprinkler system as it would have slowed renovations – as if
safety issues were akin to the colour of the walls.
Families were, it seems, given inappropriate advice
on how to react in the case of a fire. Those who survived appear to be the ones
who ignored that advice.
But, I believe, Grenfell Tower has a wider
significance. The tragedy is an appalling testament to a country in a mess, where
greed, self-interest, short-termism and inequality are out of control.
Some of our immediate responsibilities as a nation
are these –
We must force ourselves, without sentimentality or
ghoulish voyeurism, to look at the pictures of the lost; the innocent faces of
the children, the open expectant faces of the young adults with their promising
lives ahead, the lined, experienced faces of the older residents who deserved a
better end.
Then we must remind ourselves that this simply did
not need to happen. It is the result of greed, incompetence and inequality. One
rule for ‘us’ and a different rule for ‘them’.
Also, we cannot just exist in a situation where,
when things go horribly wrong, politicians compete to see who can make the
loudest call for another costly inquiry. INFRASTRUCTURE NEEDS TO BE MANAGED. Politics has become an ongoing beauty pageant
with ‘leaders’ popping like a series of mad jack-in-the-boxes bouncing up and
down to the dull beat of opinion polls.
We must remind ourselves every single day that WE
CAN AFFORD A DECENT STANDARD OF LIVING FOR EVERYONE never mind what the media
barons in their tax exiles tell us and never mind how many stories they spew
out about immigrants and the disabled and benefit ‘scroungers’ causing the country’s
problems. They are lies peddled by people who, themselves, avoid contributing
fairly to society.
We must stop separating ourselves from each other
with technology and politicians must stop separating themselves from the people
with committees and quangos and barriers to government services. So when I ring
my local council I do not want to deal with an automated system. I want to deal
with a human being because I am a human being.
It goes without saying there must always be
residents on relevant housing committees. It was that way when I was a
councillor in the 1980s and chaired my local area housing committee, why has it
changed?
We need to stop trying to placate the xenophobes
pulling us away from the common good and achievable goal of a decent future for
everyone. We need to actively work against the downwards pull of self-interest.
The media must stop feeding the public a diet of
celebrity shit and start reporting real news, real issues about real people. If
they don’t then we must not fund them by buying their papers, clicking on their
websites, tuning in to their programmes.
And, as day 1 of Brexit negotiations concluded
yesterday, giving a brief startlingly clear glimpse of just how weak the UK
negotiating position really is, we should consider the behaviour of some
tabloids. Some of those now making headlines and front pages with the gruesome
images of Grenfell Tower were quick to condemn health and safety laws as the
scourge of Brussels.
The blackened carcass of Grenfell Tower stands as a
disgraceful monument to unnecessary death, wasted futures, unutterable sadness
and a failure in the chain of human compassion and kinship which should link us
all.
While it may be an eyesore to an affluent borough,
perhaps the remains of the tower should be stabilised and stay as a reminder of
what happens when greed takes over, when Mammon is god, when one group of human
beings is regarded as worth less than another.
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