Tragedy and EU dominate politics
I am sure that all readers of the PA will have shared my sense of utter horror at seeing the pictures of Grenfell Tower, a high-rise block of flats in London, ablaze. The official projected death toll is already at 79 but I would not be surprised if in the end it is higher still.
This is a tragedy that simply should not have happened. Buildings like that are supposed to be built to specifications that mean a fire will be contained within the flat in which it start – or, at the very worst, within one or two landings. That is why the advice to people in such a situation is to stay put and for the firefighters to get the fire under control from below without having people coming down through the fire.
As we all saw, however. That is not what happened. The fire leapt from storey to storey up the outside of the building, against all expectations, as evidenced by the footage that has been broadcast from inside a fire engine making its way to the scene.
I am not going to speculate about the factors that aggravated this place, there will have to be an inquiry and I sincerely hope that it will report swiftly and accurately on what went wrong, as something assuredly did. Lessons, of course, must be learned, but if there is blame to be apportioned that should not be shirked, either.
The outrages just don’t seem to end, do they? In Finsbury Park, the targets were, once again, lawabiding folk going about their legitimate daily business - on this occasion, attending Friday Prayers at the Mosque – when someone decided to turn a vehicle into a weapon, shadows of Westminster Bridge and London Bridge. Again, however, in the midst of the horror, there were stories of decent humanity. Like the imam at Finsbury Park, Mohammed Mahmoud, who saved the terrorist from being beating by understandably outraged onlookers and kept guard over him until the police arrived.
The business of politics, of course, continues as normal and this week we saw the Queen’s Speech delivered on behalf of a government that is still desperately trying to cobble together a majority in the House.
Most of it, unsurprisingly, had to do with Brexit, something that will loom very large in the weeks and months ahead and the Prime Minister has signalled she may need to seek the approval of the Scottish Parliament but we have heard that kind of pseudoconciliatory talk before and it has come to absolutely nothing.
This is, after all, a government whose idea of democracy is to take someone who has been rejected by the electorate and put them into parliament for life with a job in government.
Such a pity they don’t have the same regard for the many millions more whose livelihoods are threatened by their headlong rush to a hard Brexit.