Worse, deputy PM Angela Rayner has noted that “Of 4,630 buildings identified with dangerous cladding, 50% are in remediation works”. However, “only 29% have had the remediation completed”. Moreover, there is a “culture in this country where [tenants] are considered lesser people, and that's disgraceful”. So one might think the Government is taking this seriously.
But one would have thought wrong, if the scenes in Parliament immediately prior to Keir Starmer’s statement on Grenfell are anything to go by. This came after Prime Minister’s Questions; for this event, the Commons chamber is packed out. But then, after PMQs concluded, the Commons began to empty.
In fact, it was more of an exodus: scores, if not hundreds, of MPs from both sides of the House making themselves scarce before Starmer made his statement. Some commentators recoiled at this display of indifference, one of those being ITV political editor Robert Peston, who was simply aghast.
“I was genuinely a bit upset, actually, when I looked at the chamber. Actually, vast numbers of MPs simply left after Prime Minister’s Questions, that was not … I thought, for this statement, it would be bursting at the seams with MPs - it wasn’t. There were lots and lots of empty seats there, and I was quite shocked by that, actually. I mean, this was one of … Grenfell, for I think anybody … who’s not a child, was one of the defining moments in this country’s history, of the last thirty years”. He was not alone.
Easily identifiable by his gait, his appearance, and indeed his walking stick, was Labour’s “spreadsheet overlord” Luke Akehurst. Those no longer welcome in a Labour Party where Akehurst and his pals wield power were reduced to making their voices heard from outside the Commons. One of their number was former MP Emma Dent Coad, who did not mince her words.
“What we want is very clear lines of accountability ... we need to know who is actually accountable, who made the decisions ... and who can be pinned down and charged. Most people, when I talk to them, they want to see people in jail”. But she’s a Rotten Leftie™, and they get the blame dumped on them.
As I noted at the time, the assembled idiocy of the Tory right blamed her, Sadiq Khan, Jeremy Corbyn, Labour councillors, and definitely not anyone who had anything to do with The Blue Team - people like Eric Pickles, who wanted the Grenfell Inquiry to know that he was a very busy man, and had had to work terribly hard to fit his visit to that inquiry into his diary.
Corbyn said in the aftermath of the Grenfell fire that it “should never have happened. Every single one of those deaths could and should have been avoided”. Now, the game playing faction of Labour’s NEC just walks out of the Commons before Starmer makes his statement on the inquiry. Anyone might think that they didn’t give a flying foxtrot about ordinary people.
Who is it MPs are supposed to represent? Looking at the Commons scenes, one might think some of them would have a problem answering that one.
https://www.patreon.com/Timfenton
31 comments:
So corporate media propaganda clerks are "shocked" at the sight of MPs fleeing their responsibilities? The same clerks and mouthpiece MPs who promoted the social conditions which led inevitably to both Grenfell and Hillsborough? In the latter case even attacked the victims for decades......and still do. Peston even vomitted "....greed is good" in his book Who Runs Britain?, page 336.
The fact is they have created a rotten to the core far right bureaucracy at every level of their institutions. Places where everyone can say "It wasn't me, guv. And even if it was I was being economically efficient for essential profits."
Britain has become a nation shit scared of its own far right shadow, a pathetic copy of US paranoid insanity.
Nothing will improve until the culprits and their corruption are dumped in the dustbin of history. Quisling "Labour" will change nothing of substance.
None of them represent what remains of honest decency in this country. Inhuman detritus the lot of them.
What we want Starmer to say in response to grenfell is this - "every single piece of health and safety regulation cut by the coalition and Conservative govts will be reversed". Then see him do it. The chances of him actually offending Labours big business chums by doing so? Zero.
Never knowingly understated, eh Anonymous?
Still, you were right about that Outright Fascism (OF) a couple of weeks ago. Couldn't get near the Pearly Princess Parade last Saturday cos of marching bloody Squadristi again.
After Hillsborough, what did anyone expect except platitudinous hypocrisy in this devastating tragedy. The Hillsborough families warned what was likely. Peter Taylor exposed the causes of that horror too, but nobody ended in jail there either. A political system and its apologists that doesn't care about anything other than their own status. Beneath contempt.
To be fair, there were no surprises in the report. It just confirmed what we've known almost from the start.
Spot on !
Dent Coad seems to have very selective memory. The minutes of the council meeting held on Thursday 8th November 2012 indicates that some members of the Housing Committee expressed continuing concerns that 68 flats still had non-compliant fire doors, but Councillor Dent Coad "praised the refurbishment of Grenfell Tower which she felt showed the Council had listened to the residents."
Which is probably the most horrifying thing about it. Everyone knew it would be down to deregulation, incompetence, lies and a healthy dose of self interest. Yet, despite all that, the govt responsible got in again and again, and no-one will ever be held to account.
What's Murdoch lickspittle Mackenzie doing these days? Apart from being an ageing yellow shithouse waiting for death.....
To think there was once an idea for building designers to self-certify their designs.
The CPS will eagerly bang up innocent nurses on BS "evidence", but watch it take forever to take action against the wealthy and powerful.
The construction industry and its associated gang of "developers" and design consultants and accountants is a rat pit of corrupt thievery. It always was.
Which is why social housing was either eliminated or compromised in favour of scam "developments". It led directly to the growth of the rip off mortgage schemes in "financial services". Actually the latter is simply a network of thieves and conmen in suits supported by a rigged legal system.
Anyone who wishes to see the horrific effects need only see the high rise architectural slum of imagination that Manchester has become. London too.
Ownership of land and property is a key element in the capitalist system. The collapse of the so-called "sub prime mortgage" scam in the USA was the chief cause of the 2008 Depression and subsequent "austerity". Also aided by inflicted demise of the savings and loan institutions and Clinton's abolition of the Glass-Steagall Act. Britain's "contribution" was conversion of building societies into banks. All of which led directly to the thieves gambling economy currently ruining millions of lives.
Grenfell is a symptom of that evil and corrupt mentality.
In the wake of that report, that is a disgusting thing to write.
I hope that you haven't read it.
Self-certification is "marking your own homework" - what I have seen some electricians sign off just because they have a piece of paper that I don't scares me. Some of the electrical work that has been done in my own home I would be too ashamed to do, let alone sign off.
From the Guardian, quoting Blair: The former prime minister said on Thursday that tragedies such as the west London fire, which came after years of missed opportunities to regulate combustible cladding, were a result of unavoidable mistakes.
Some people really don't know when to just shut the fuck up, do they?
What makes no sense to me is why the government's first priority was an enquiry. Why didn't the police investigate it as a possible crime in 2017?
Justified excoriation of the lack of care and humanity displayed by those MPs.
Not only designers,but also owners and managing agents for buildings. In the good old days all large bulding had to be inspected by the local fire service and given a certificate to show the building was safe. In the drive to "cut red tape" this was changed to self-certification. In other words a tick-box procedure which almost always was positive and did not show any dangers.
Blair moves fast when it comes to diverting blame from lovely capitalists, right wing politicians, and of course, and most important of all - himself.
20:35.
Bliar/Brown had years in government but simply intensified far right policies and mass murder wars. They are up to their necks in innocent blood and destroyed lives at home and abroad.
Starmer Quislings and their apologists will support the same policies. They keep saying so.
22:16.
If corrupt politicians wish to quell immediate justified outrage and possible swift summary justice.....just boot the issue into the long grass of an "official inquiry" and rig the terms of reference, as was done at Hillsborough. When Peter Taylor STILL laid the blame squarely where it truly lay corporate media was deployed to blame the victims for years. In the end even proven liars were cleared by a legal technicality in 2021. Self-admitted guilty policemen have retired on full pension......in a move calculated to inflict maximum pain, New Labour Jack Straw even appointed one of them, Bettison, Chief Constable of Merseyside. That's the same Straw who let fascist mass murderer Pinochet go free. The network of evil has never been fully exposed.
With that as precedent, what open and honest justice can the Grenfell families expect?
None. Labour will do nothing to bring former ministers, council officials, suppliers or builders to justice. When Blurt announced an inquiry into the Tories mishandling of the BSE crisis, even I was shocked when ex ministers were allowed to blatantly lie to the inquiry, and surprise, sod all came of it. You knew then that Blair would look after his own. He's still trying to even now
'As someone who lives near Grenfell, my heart goes out to all those who lost loved ones on that terrible night.....'
Top marks for the crassest comment on the situation must go to 'red-tape'-cutting, £16 million Notting Hill townhouse resident David Cameron for the first 6 words of this statement.
(Apologies as usual for any imagined disgust suffered by the performatively over-sensitive).
Indeed, that does give Blairs 'not me Gov', 'it's no-ones fault' pile of steaming cack a good run for its money. Two despicable individuals, united in their favourite causes, raging insincerity and looking after number one. It's hard to pick which of them you loathe more?
PC Plod has now said it will take up to 18 months to decide if prosecutions are possible.
That would be 8•5 years after the fire, including over 7 years of inquiry evidence that led to the damning conclusions in the final report.
The Hillsborough families are still waiting for full justice 35 years after that terrible disaster. During that time there was and is organised resistance at every level of government, legal and media culture to full pursuit of justice. This by any definition is corruption throughout successive governments and the professional legal system.
The real question is WHO and WHY. At both Grenfell and Hillsborough we know most of the "how" thanks to testimonies from victims and honest witnesses, so that is scarcely at issue.
There is real organised evil and cowardice here. But this is now a country that either doesn't care enough or is actually willing for the rottenness to continue to destroy what's left of its decency.
None of this will affect the perpetrators and their forehead-knuckling apologists. They have neither conscience or courage. At this rate the likelihood is that at best a low level scapegoat might end up in jail and it will end there. Until the next time.
Only popular consensual action can stop this horror. It will never be changed by the current version of scum in Parliament and their paymasters and puppeteers - they have too much to lose.
Meanwhile, Essex barrow boy Streeting has met up with Geordie spiv Milburn.
Streeting is the far right Health Secretary Quisling responsible for further privatisation of the NHS. Milburn is of course a former Health Secretary Quisling Bliarite responsible for further privatisation of the NHS..... who has made millions from private health promotion.
Far right Quisling "Labour" corruption as usual.
But the truth must be withheld from the public in the interests of social cohesion, an establishment attitude exemplified in the immortal words of Lord Chief Justice Denning when he refused the completely innocent Birmingham 6 leave to appeal against their life sentences on the grounds that the truth might lead to the public doubting the authority of British institutions:
“Just consider the course of events if their action (the appeal) were to proceed to trial… If they won, it would mean that the police were guilty of perjury; that they were guilty of violence and threats; that the confessions were involuntary and improperly admitted in evidence; and that the convictions were erroneous… That was such an appalling vista that every sensible person would say, ‘It cannot be right that these actions should go any further’.”
That kind of disgusting and calculated deceit by an elite was ok, though; Plato had sanctified it in The Republic calling it the 'noble lie'.
Indeed. Even when the Police caught the real Guildford Four, the then head of the met said, "this changes nothing. The four convicted are Irish, they must have been up to something". The establishment indulging in two of its favourite things, bigotry, and stubbornly refusing to address injustice it created.
Equally disturbing is peoples response to the establishment lies. Long after the 7,6, and 4 had all been proven innocent, right wing folk were still taking just that line - "they're Irish so they were up to something". Which is why the establishment keeps getting away with it.
As for justice, as with Hillsbrough, somehow not one person was charged with anything, despite clear evidence of Police and political figures being up to no good.
The establishment must always be seen to be right...
Starmer will bring justice to the Grenfell families. Just as he helped the Hillsborough families when he was positioned to do so.
After all, he has never lied to or misled the electorate.
And so it goes on. The whitewash, sorry, inquiry, into the Letby case came out with this today, "the executive was influenced by the Grievance raised by Letby claiming she was being victimised". Bullshit. Management across the UK treat Grievance procedures with contempt, as an annoyance, and rarely, if ever act on them. The only use for them is if you claim constructive dismissal. Good luck with that btw. Second, they have stated they will be 'looking into the Grievance process to ensure it isn't misused in this way in other cases". In other words an organisation that is notorious for cover ups, for ignoring bad practise, and for punishing whistleblowers, now sees another opportunity to silence internal complaints. No 'lessons to be learned' are ever taken from these inquiry's just new ways to shift the blame.
I’ve just spent 2 days on a ship in the middle of the ocean with plenty of time to read the report having watched hours of the hearing. Fire service did inspect, the building was a mess the management were told, they did nothing. The issue is we have the regulations, but we have too few in authority who once the final warning is given proper action is taken. My local authority have closed dangerous residential apartments buildings in hours and had to house a few hundred. The question to ask the head of the fire service in London is “was the thought of thousands of vulnerable people being kicked out of their home for potentially years the reason why you failed to enforce?” So far it’s harrowing reading.
Post a Comment