Some still think they are more equal than others

SOME of the best of humanity has been on display in west London in the last two days as resources, love and solidarity pour in for the survivors of the Grenfell Tower tragedy.

The sheer heroism of the fire crews, who suppressed fear, anger and their own safety protocols to go back into the flaming tower again and again is humbling.

Churches, mosques, people of all faiths and none have piled in to help.

But the horror of the shelled-out carcass of Grenfell Tower, the images of the flames and so many missing people who must have met the worst fate cannot be escaped.

Nor should it be. It should be faced lest these people be forgotten by officialdom in death as they were in life. Again, because the warning of residents about the firetrap risks of Grenfell Tower were repeatedly ignored.

Recommendations to improve safety, learned from other fires such as Camberwell in south London in 2009, have been ignored.

This Government and previous governments have not done enough to ensure these towers are safe. That is already an inescapable conclusion.

There will be a full public inquiry. There must be, because this is a national disaster and every tower block resident in the UK needs assurance that their home is safe.

There will be technical answers in time to the causes of the fire.

But there is a bigger picture and a thread that runs from the Camberwell fire directly to the blackened skeleton of Grenfell Tower. The same thread ran through the Hillsborough disaster for almost two decades.

It is that the voices of ordinary people, who raised concerns or challenged the authorised version of events, were ignored.

It is that common sense arguments to improve the safety of ordinary people were dropped. It is that ministers led, or allowed themselves to be led, into a culture where budget cuts were prioritised and health and safety denigrated as a pricy extra.

In that process the values of civil society were undermined so that recommendations for sprinkler systems were deemed not important enough to be acted on.

The attitude that made this acceptable stemmed from a deeper divide, one which deemed the public sector and public safety secondary to profit and loss.

Grenfell, and the anger that is coming to the surface on the streets around the tower, symbolises the polarisation of society.

Kensington is one of the wealthiest parts of this country yet the ward where this tragedy took place is one of the poorest in London.

The super-rich who live a stone’s throw from this poverty are not touched by cuts to public services and, like the wealthy in Scottish cities, feel all the benefits of council tax freezes with few of the downsides.

These tales of two cities, where the houses of the poor are clad so they are more aesthetically pleasing to the rich who have to share space with them, cannot continue.

That should be a wider lesson from Grenfell – all our citizens deserve equal respect and resources from government.

Their needs and their voices must never be overlooked again.