McDonnell’s own MPs condemn his fire ‘murder’ slur

FURY AS LABOUR CALLS TOWER FIRE ‘MURDER’

Yesterday’s Daily Mail

LABOUR Mps last night rounded on John McDonnell for claiming the victims of the Grenfell Tower tragedy were ‘murdered by political decisions’.

They branded it the ‘language of the hard-Left’, while the shadow chancellor’s claim was also disowned by the party’s housing spokesman.

The backlash came as a Labour council was accused by ministers of a ‘massive failure of fire safety’.

Communities secretary sajid Javid said inspectors found 1,000 missing fire doors in five tower blocks in Camden.

He said the reason that tower blocks in the North London borough were evacuated on Friday night was ‘multiple fire safety inspection failures’, not just the discovery of flammable cladding.

Inspections revealed concerns about gas pipe insulation, inaccessible stairways and breaches of internal walls, he told the Commons.

‘Most astonishingly there were hundreds – literally hundreds – of fire doors missing,’ Mr Javid said. ‘The estimate by Camden Council itself is that they need at least 1,000 fire doors because they were missing from those five blocks.’

Mr McDonnell, a close ally of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, made his comments at the Glastonbury festival at the weekend. He blamed housing policies, cuts to the number of firemen and pay caps for firemen for contributing to the West London inferno.

‘Those families, those individuals – 79 so far and there will be more – were murdered by political decisions that were taken over recent dec- ades,’ he said. But London Fire Brigade said there were no problems with resources or staff levels when it battled the blaze.

yesterday John Healey, the party’s communities spokesman and a former housing minister, distanced himself from the claim. He told BBC radio 4’s Today programme: ‘I wouldn’t use the word “murder”. It’s not yet possible to point to direct cause and effect. We don’t know the full details.’

Former Labour cabinet minister Margaret Hodge told BBC2’s Daily politics: ‘I agree we should listen to the tenants and we clearly didn’t there. I disagree with the language and I think that is the language of the hard- Left which is not done in my name. I think it was inappropriate.’

manufacturer arconic, the firm that supplied cladding for the Grenfell Tower refit, yesterday halted sales for high rise blocks.

The aluminium reynobond pe panels have a plastic core which is believed may have been a factor in accelerating the spread of the fire.

Meanwhile, the Government said that schools and hospitals are to be tested urgently for flammable cladding.

WHEN he was first elected leader of the Labour party almost two years ago, Jeremy Corbyn promised to promote a ‘kinder, gentler politics’.

How hollow those words sound today as he and his ally, John McDonnell, peddle harder than ever their brand of ghoulish political sectarianism, seeking to exploit public tragedy for partisan gain. In doing so, they reveal the true face of socialist opportunism — and cruelty.

The Left-wing firebrand Nye Bevan once notoriously described the Tories as ‘lower than vermin’. At the weekend, McDonnell, the Shadow Chancellor, plumbed even greater depths by portraying the Conservatives as killers.

In an extraordinary performance at the Glastonbury Festival, McDonnell claimed that the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire ‘were murdered by political decisions’.

Offensive

With morbid and unseemly relish, he banged the anti-Tory drum as he attacked recent reductions in the fire service.

‘The decisions to close fire stations and to cut 10,000 firefighters . . . contributed to those deaths inevitably and they were political decisions,’ he told a 1,000-strong crowd.

With 79 dead or missing and presumed dead, and the search for bodies continuing, McDonnell’s outburst represents a vicious and calculated attempt to use a catastrophe to demonise the Tories in the public mind — just as Labour did, falsely, over alleged police cuts in the wake of the London Bridge terrorist attack.

He and the rest of Corbyn’s inner circle have absolutely no shame. The fact that the exact circumstances of the fire are yet to be determined has not inhibited Labour in its campaign of crude vilification.

Predictably, Diane Abbott, the Shadow Home Secretary, joined in, arguing that ‘those hundreds of people that died are a direct consequence of Tory attitudes in social housing’. This kind of language is not just tastelessly offensive, it is deliberately deceitful.

The Russian revolutionary Lenin once said that ‘ a lie told often enough becomes the truth’. That is what Corbyn and his cronies are trying to do with this tragic event, repeating over and over their charges of Tory inequality and cuts.

But the facts contradict so many of Labour’s claims. The key problem at Grenfell Tower appears to have been the installation of flammable cladding on the exterior. This had nothing to do with ‘Tory cuts’. On the contrary, it was part of a refurbishment programme costing £8.6 million, or £360,000 per floor — hardly an indicator of austerity.

Just as phoney is John McDonnell’s cynical lament about fire service cuts. Dany Cotton, Commissioner of the London Fire Brigade, has categorically stated there were ‘no issues about numbers of firefighters’ during the blaze.

Yes, there have been cuts in the fire budgets over the past decade, but that is largely because the incidence of fire has fallen so dramatically.

And to claim there has been ‘a cover-up’ of the death toll, as Labour MP David Lammy did, is a deplorable conspiracy theory that insults the grim work of fire investigators.

There are many questions yet to be answered about the failures that led to this disaster, but the pretence that dangerous cladding on tower blocks is exclusively the responsibility of the Tory Government is dishonest in the extreme.

If he wants to shriek about political murderers, McDonnell should point the finger at his own party, for Labour councils and past Government are perhaps even more to blame for these flawed installations. The majority of tower blocks that have so far failed safety tests are in Labour municipalities, including Manchester and Sunderland.

At Camden in London, where more than 3,000 residents had to be evacuated from several blocks during the weekend, the flammable cladding was fixed in 2006 by a Labour council working under the Blair Government.

Incidentally, McDonnell in the mid-Eighties worked as the Head of Policy for Camden Council. Is he certain that he bears no culpability for the failures of social housing in London over recent decades?

Of course, it is unlikely that he has any such self-doubt. He has the ideological fervour and certainty of the true revolutionary zealot.

‘He is unrelenting and everything is seen through the prism of his leftist politics. He is far more intolerant than most of us,’ says one fellow Left-wing MP.

Ruthless and cunning, McDonnell is the real driving force behind the hard Left’s takeover of the Labour Party. If Corbyn is the avuncular front man, McDonnell is the arch manipulator in command of the radical socialist project.

In recent months, McDonnell has tried to keep his sinister side under wraps. With his self-deprecating manner and smart suits, he sought to exude an air of moderation.

But it was all an act, as his antics over Grenfell Tower demonstrate.

Confrontation

His rhetoric about Tory murderers is entirely in keeping with the rest of his career, which has long been characterised by extremism. This is a man who was such a keen sympathiser with the IRA that in 2003 he declared: ‘It’s about time we started honouring those people involved in the armed struggle.’

His lack of instinctive compassion is also exposed by the sick imagery of political violence that laces his political language. He once publicly fantasised about assassinating Margaret Thatcher, while he has also boasted of ‘a recurring dream about garrotting’ the mild-mannered Liberal Democrat Danny Alexander.

The truth is that McDonnell is a lifelong hardliner who dreams of the overthrow of capitalism. When he was head of finance at the Greater London Council in the early Eighties, he was so doctrinaire in his anti-Tory posturing that even Ken Livingstone fell out with him. ‘He was so far to the Left that I couldn’t see him without a pair of binoculars,’ said one executive.

To this day, confrontation and provocation remain McDonnell’s favoured methods. He is urging unions to mobilise their members to put one million people on the streets of the capital on July 1 to protest against the Government and ‘ force it into democracy’.

Sinister

He is close to the trade unions and has pledged to repeal Tory legislation that restricts their capacity for mounting strikes. Last December, he expressed his ‘solidarity’ with the militant National Shop Stewards Network as they planned to step up disputes in the public services.

‘Whether it is in Parliament or on the picket line, Jeremy Corbyn and I will be with you,’ he told them.

Yet another sign of his radicalism is his honorary presidency of the Labour Representation Committee, an ultra leftist pressure group founded in 2004 that campaigns for an undiluted socialism.

The chairman of the Committee is Matt Wrack, the Leader of the Fire Brigades Union who is also claiming that the Tories have ‘blood on their hands’ over cuts.

Since the Election, Labour has become drunk with arrogance. Corbyn and McDonnell are acting out another lie as if they were the victors — when in reality they sustained a third successive heavy defeat.

During his own appearance at Glastonbury, Jeremy Corbyn — cheered on by ecstatic crowds and a compliant broadcast media — appeared to have swallowed the publicity that he is the new Messiah.

Before he went on stage, he told festival organisers he’d be PM ‘within six months’. This is the behaviour of a sinister cult, not a serious alternative Government.

Labour has badly overreached itself in its enthusiasm to vilify the Tories over Grenfell Tower. If it carries on playing politics with the tragedy, the only consequence can be public revulsion.