Tick-box Britain: where courage and sense goes to die
Sergeant Stevie Bull sounded almost apologetic describing the daring deed that won her the Emergency Services Award at The Pride of Britain ceremony. Twentyeight-year-old Sgt Bull was at University College Hospital London on a routine call when she found herself facing a man pointing a gun at a nurse.
“We’re trained to run away from firearms because I was an unarmed officer,” she explained. “[But] I was so close to him that it was fight or flight mode and I just went for him. I tried to get the firearm off him and he didn’t want to let go, so we had quite a roll around down the corridor. I didn’t think about my own personal safety. I just acted on instinct.”
The slight young woman showed exemplary courage, putting the safety of staff and patients before any regulation about whether she was carrying a weapon or not. If a senior officer had been in contact, would they have told Sgt Bull that she should obey her training and “run away” instead?
The damning official report into the Grenfell Tower disaster, which is made public today, suggests an answer. It is exactly as we feared.
Increasingly, individuals like Stevie Bull, who show initiative and break the rules when a situation demands they be broken, are frowned upon (even reprimanded) in Tick-box Britain, that godforsaken land where courage and common sense go to die.
In Tick-box Britain, the London Fire Brigade continued to give advice to residents of a towering inferno to remain in their flats, “because the ‘stay put’ concept had become an article of faith in the LFB so powerful that to depart from it was to all intents and purposes unthinkable”. On the night of June 14 2017, between 1.30am and 1.50am, firefighters should have ordered a full evacuation, but the call wasn’t made until 2.49am; far too late for those trapped inside.
That is the grim conclusion of Sir Martin Moore-bick, a retired appeal court judge who chaired the public inquiry. Sir Martin says the principal reason that flames devoured the 24-storey building at such horrifying speed was the aluminium cladding used in its refurbishment. (The developers and builders will rightly face scrutiny in the second part of the inquiry.) Yet many of the 72 people who perished, including 18 children, one a stillborn baby boy, need not have died, if only the LFB had abandoned its protocol when it became clear it was putting lives in peril.
Two and a half years later, it is still deeply upsetting to think of those who were told to remain in their flats by firefighters and 999 operators for nearly two hours after the blaze broke out at 12.54am. Imagine their fear and mounting dread as they realised that the official reassurances, overriding the natural impulse to flee, were fatal.
Don’t get me wrong. There were individual firefighters who displayed remarkable bravery and endurance as they struggled up and down that vertical crematorium in hellish conditions. They have no cause to feel guilty. But my blood ran cold when Dany Cotton, the LFB’S Commissioner, told the Grenfell inquiry: “I wouldn’t change anything we did on the night.”
What, nothing? You could practically hear the legal advice Ms Cotton had been given as she not only avoided making an apology but showed the most appalling lack of respect to the victims and their relatives.
Ms Cotton is, I’m afraid, a typically lame, shamelessly complacent commissar of Tick-box Britain. Every sinew of the spirit and decency British people admire has been ironed out of such craven, calculating creatures. Whether it’s police who have ruined innocent people’s lives by slavishly pursuing a fatuous “believe the victim” policy or a fire chief who looks on as 72 are incinerated in a central London borough, but still thinks evacuating them would have been a bad idea. Because it’s not policy, see?
And the best thing is, if the correct box has been ticked, no one is to blame! Ms Cotton is being allowed to retire next year at the age of 50, on a full pension estimated to be worth £2million. Seriously, is there a single person who thinks that’s acceptable? A corporate manslaughter charge against the LFB feels more like it. And, yet, if anyone dare object, we are immediately accused of “scapegoating” the fire service.
But Sir Martin is surely right to pinpoint “serious shortcomings” and “systemic failure” in the London Fire Brigade.
On Twitter, the author Joe Nutt observed: “The problem is the rigidity of the protocol itself. My father was a firefighter and would have been astonished at the idea that his watch could not make crucial, life-saving decisions based on the changing situation they were confronted with.”
But that was then, back in the days before Tick-box Britain abolished human instinct and personal responsibility. According to the Health and Safety Executive, “there is often an unrealistic public expectation that officers will put themselves at risk to protect the public. Officers need to consider complex and competing legal and moral demands and to make tough decisions in what are often dangerous, emotionally charged and fast-moving situations.”
Do you reckon an unarmed Sgt Bull was balancing “complex and competing legal and moral demands” when she wrestled that gunman to the floor? Or did she think: “Hang on, I better stop him shooting that nurse”? I know which type of police officer I prefer.
The Pride of Britain Awards were set up to “celebrate British people who have acted bravely or extraordinarily in challenging situations”. Rightly so. Those men and women have the power to lift our hearts because they are a living rebuke to Tick-box Britain.
Rejoice in their courage while you can. It may soon be illegal.