Left must not be allowed to exploit Grenfell disaster
OVER the next few months we will be hearing harrowing accounts from survivors of the Grenfell Tower tragedy last June. It will be hard to bear the accounts of people who lost members of their family whom neither they nor the fire service could reach, and of those who remain traumatised.
The public inquiry will not just be a catharsis. It will be a forensic examination of the factors that led to the disaster: the cladding which had been wrapped around the building, the fire procedures and lack of equipment which prevented people being rescued, the faulty appliance which started the fire and many other things.
In order to learn the lessons the inquiry will need to sift through the evidence dispassionately – in the same way that investigations into air, rail and shipping disasters have helped hugely to improve safety.
But there is a danger that the serious work of the inquiry could be crowded out by attempts by the hard-Left to seize on the disaster for their own political ends.
No sooner had the inquiry opened yesterday than Jeremy Corbyn was trying to exploit the tragedy again. “It is a disgrace that the majority of Grenfell residents have still not been given homes and that tower blocks across our country have still not been made safe,” he blasted.
WHILE the immediate response to the fire by Kensington and Chelsea council may have been lamentable, it has made a huge effort and spent millions in rehousing those affected. According to the leader of the council it has taken on 300 extra staff – housing officers, lawyers, social workers and so on – specifically to provide help to survivors.
One reason why many former Grenfell residents remain in temporary accommodation is that they have rejected flats offered to them because they have been very specific about the area in which they want to live. They are holding out for brand new flats which the council is in the process of buying at huge expense.
Moreover the number of replacement homes which the council is trying to find has mushroomed. There were 120 flats in Grenfell Tower and a further 30 flats in an adjoining block that had to be evacuated. Yet the council says it is looking for 300 new homes. One reason for this huge discrepancy, council leader Elizabeth Campbell told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, is that families are taking the opportunity to move adult sons and daughters into homes of their own.
These are hardly the actions of an uncaring council – which of course has many other homeless people to contend with. But then so many of the interventions by Jeremy Corbyn and the Left more generally have been outrageous in their opportunism. In his Labour conference speech Corbyn described the burned shell of Grenfell Tower as a “monument” to a “degraded regime” which put Tory governments “not as the servant of the people but of global corporations”.
As Corbyn well knows the tragedy had nothing to do with greedy capitalists. The building was managed by a not-forprofit body called the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation. Whatever its failings it has no shareholders and is instead run by council tenants – any of whom could apply to join – and elected councillors. One of the latter, between 2008-2012, was Emma Dent Coad, the loudmouthed Labour MP for Kensington who has been trying to make political capital from the scandal.
The whole purpose of the organisation was to give tenants closer involvement in the running of the estates on which they live – exactly what Corbyn seemed to be advocating.
It is ridiculous to make out that the tragedy was the result of Tory “austerity”. Grenfell Tower had just undergone an £8.6million refurbishment, which works out at more than £70,000 for each of the 120 flats. It was a case of misspending money – on flammable cladding – not a lack of spending. The brutal truth is that the building would have been safer had no money been spent on it and it been left with its original, 1970s concrete façade. As became clear in the week after the tragedy it isn’t just Tory councils who were guilty of cladding tower blocks in flammable materials. Of 120 tower blocks tested in 37 local authority areas after the disaster, all failed flammability tests. Among the councils involved are Labour-controlled Camden, Salford and Islington, Corbyn’s own local party.
JEREMY Corbyn, though, is at the relatively mild end of Leftwing opinion on the disaster. At the other end is the Socialist Workers’ Party, which has marched declaring “the Tories have blood on their hands”, and Justice4Grenfell, a pressure group which claims to represent the local community but which some Grenfell residents have made clear has nothing to do with them.
The Justice4Grenfell website describes the fire as an “atrocity” while its founder, activist Ishmahil Blagrove, launched the group last June with the words: “You know me and when I’m ready to start a fire I’ll start a fire.” How crass can you get?
That residents of Grenfell Tower were left helpless as their homes burned is a scandal, the full causes of which will hopefully become clear. But attempts to exploit the tragedy for political purposes, using half-truths and outright lies, are disgusting.
They must not be allowed to distract from the real lessons.
Ross Clark Political commentator ‘Using it for their own political ends’