SOCIAL MEDIA HAS LET THE MOB TAKE OVER

THE horror and grief of the torching of Grenfell Tower in London needs no further description. There will be a ferocious inquiry into exactly what happened and if any human agency was, even by negligence, responsible. But what really shook the detached observer was the blinding speed with which a single electrical fault in a domestic appliance turned all 24 floors of a tower block into a single flaming torch. I believe 15 minutes was the nearest estimate so far. Electrical fires are probably daily occurrences across the whole country. They may gut one room before they are extinguished. The effect of this one was like the torching of a tower soaked in petrol. It seems there were no fire alarms, no sprinklers, no fireproof doors to contain the blaze to one room, one flat or one floor. The words “official negligence” were quickly shouted from the scorched roof. But very rapidly there was another development.

It looks as if skilled manipulators moved in on the grief-stricken survivors and their friends and relatives to convert distress to hatred and there is little doubt the motive for this came from the hard-Left. Jeremy Corbyn turned up to minister to the bereaved and was hailed as a saint. Theresa May arrived to compliment the exhausted firefighters and was treated on social media like the devil incarnate. Lack of empathy with the grieving was the charge. She returned to visit them too and was barracked from start to finish.

It looked as if the mob had taken over, it was practically jubilating in the sorrow. Did that comfort the sorrowing? No, but it scored an apparently valuable political point – to promote the view that “Tory scum” are responsible for civic disasters.

Someone was certainly responsible for the catastrophic construction of that building but for the record no prime minister has ever been responsible for the cladding of tower blocks. Local government mandarins vet and approve these contracts and most of our tower blocks were built long ago by Labour councils.

The new weapon for the spreading of child-grooming, bullying and hatred is simply called “social media” and the extreme Left seems to be its skilled manipulator.

Is this just the cry of an old Luddite who loathes the so-called “social media”? Maybe. But consider this. We have always had nasty, vicious, foul-mouthed elements in our society. Not all that long ago they were there but had no power. Now they do.