FURY AS LABOUR CALLS TOWER FIRE ‘MURDER’
McDonnell exploits Grenfell tragedy in Glastonbury rant
JOHN McDonnell was accused of exploiting the Grenfell Tower tragedy last night after saying its victims were ‘murdered by political decisions’. The Shadow Chancellor said cuts to the number of firefighters and stations had ‘contributed’ to the 79 deaths in the West London inferno.
But Mr McDonnell’s comments were rejected by the London Fire Brigade, which said there were no problems with resources or staff levels when it battled the devastating blaze. Tory MP Nadine Dorries said: ‘It would have been nice if he had let the dust settle, bodies be identified and given people time to grieve before he played politics with the lives of those who suffered.’
Mr McDonnell also blamed housing policies, echoing comments by Shadow Home Secretary Diane
Abbott, who said Grenfell was a ‘direct consequence of Tory attitudes in social housing’.
However other shadow ministers urged against ‘ playing party politics’ after it emerged that Labour councils also covered tower blocks with the flammable cladding believed to have caused the devastating spread of the Grenfell fire.
More than 3,000 residents had to evacuate an estate in Camden, North London, at the weekend after the discovery that its blocks were fitted with potentially lethal panels, which were installed in 2006 under a Labour government.
Mr McDonnell was greeted with rapturous applause from a thousand-strong crowd as he made his comments at Glastonbury yesterday. He was taking part in a debate entitled Is Democracy Broken? with Green Party co-leader Jonathan Bartley and economist Faiza Shaheen, chaired by Guardian journalist John Harris.
Mr McDonnell said: ‘Is democracy working? It didn’t work if you were a family living on the 20th floor of Grenfell Tower. Those families, those individuals – 79 so far and there will be more – were murdered by political decisions that were taken over recent decades.
‘The decision not to build homes and to view housing as only for financial speculation rather than for meeting a basic human need made by politicians over decades murdered those families. The decision to close fire stations and to cut 10,000 firefighters and then to freeze their pay for over a decade contributed to those deaths inevitably and they were political decisions.’
Mr McDonnell has previously urged trade unions to mobilise their members to help put a million people on to the streets for a protest march against the Government on July 1. Yesterday he ramped up his rhetoric as he called on people to force the Conservatives ‘into democracy’.
He said: ‘Never underestimate the ability of the Tories to keep their grip on power by whatever means.
‘We are going to try not just to defeat them in Parliament. We have got to mobilise in every community to demoralise, divide them and force them to the electorate, force them into democracy. And once we get that democratic vote, we’ll mobilise and this time we’ll have a majority.’
Miss Abbott directly blamed the Conservatives for the Grenfell death toll – which she suggested was far higher than 79 – when she spoke to a Labour Progress group at the weekend.
She said: ‘Grenfell Tower is not just an accident. Grenfell Tower is not just an unfortunate incident. Those hundreds of people that died are a direct consequence of Tory attitudes in social housing.
‘The Tories think people in social housing are second-class citizens. And, as we have seen from Grenfell House, they are offering them second-class standards of safety.’
And Labour backbencher David Lammy insisted the official death toll of 79 was ‘far too low’ and was ‘fuelling suspicion of a cover-up’.
He said it was ‘outrageous’ that rough figures for how many people would have been in the block had not been announced, and suggested information was being ‘withheld for political reasons in an attempt to avoid fuelling anger or unrest’.
Andrew Bridgen, Tory MP for North-West Leicestershire, said Labour was seeking to ‘politicise this awful tragedy’.
He added: ‘It is clear Corbyn’s allies don’t want to wait for the full public inquiry because its findings may not fit their Leftwing narrative. I wonder how the friends and relatives of the victims feel when their recently deceased loved ones are used as political pawns by the hard-Left.
‘With the hard-Left, the end always justifies the means – no matter how much upset they cause.’
More than 250 firefighters using 60 appliances tackled the Grenfell blaze. Asked if resources or firefighter numbers had any impact on its ability to fight the fire, a spokesman for the London Fire Brigade said: ‘Absolutely not.’
London Fire Commissioner Dany Cotton said that on the night of the Grenfell inferno ‘there were no issues about numbers of firefighters’.
In an interview with The Times, she added: ‘The number of fires has reduced significantly over the last ten years. I would not want any further cuts – I think we’ve demonstrated we need the fire engines we’ve got – but actually on a day-to-day basis we manage very well with the resources we have.’