Ross Clark

across the country, ever since the Blair government launched its Decent Home Initiative in 2000. It was that programme which demanded that councils retrofit social housing with better insulation but failed to specify sufficient fire regulations.

All political parties should be working together on the fallout from the disaster, not falsely trying to make it out to be a result of “Tory cuts” or of callous neoliberalism. It came about as a result of an attempt, however misguided, to improve the lives of people living in social housing.

As for Jeremy Corbyn’s address at Glastonbury on Saturday, I would love to know what some of those cheering him had been taking. Much of his speech was utter nonsense. He claimed, for example, that in the great socialist struggle “nothing was given from above by the elites and the powerful – it only ever came from the bottom”.

In saying that, he was dismissing the work of 19thcentury social reformers such as Robert Owen and Lord Shaftesbury, as well as by early Labour party figures like the aristocratic Sidney and Beatrice Webb. He also seemed to forget his own middle-class, privately educated background and the socio-economic class of the crowd before him.

Glastonbury is what Iron Maiden lead singer Bruce Dickinson has described as “the most bourgeois thing on earth”. The class warriors whom Corbyn seemed to think he was addressing had paid a minimum of £238 for a ticket.

While Corbyn received cheers on the day, there will be many others who will be deeply disturbed by what he apparently said to his host Michael Eavis: that he expected to become Prime Minister within six months and that he would then ditch Trident.

Labour’s manifesto for the general election included a promise to replace the ageing Trident nuclear missile system. This commitment helped neutralise the issue of defence – in contrast to 1983 when Michael Foot crashed to a humiliating defeat partly as a result of his own promise on disarmament.

But now we know that Corbyn didn’t mean it at all. If he ever reached Number 10 he would find some pretext – maybe even a round of spending cuts to help stem a surging deficit caused by his irresponsible spending plans – to ditch Trident.

MICHAEL Eavis won a warm tribute from Jeremy Corbyn on Saturday but he has done the country a great public service by reporting a conversation which Corbyn seems to have intended to be private.

If we do have another general election in the near future – and that remains all too likely – voters will know full well where Corbyn stands. He wants to give up Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent at a time when Kim Jong-un seems close to acquiring his own nuclear missiles.

We would all love a world with no nuclear weapons – or no weapons at all, for that matter. But in the absence of that impossible dream a straightforward question confronts us all: do we want to help bring about a situation in which the only countries with nuclear weapons are those led by malignant dictators?

If the answer is no then it is not possible to vote for Jeremy Corbyn.

‘Seeking to exploit the Grenfell fire’