Grenfell shows Scotland is as unequal as Tory England

EVERY day a fresh scrap of information is revealed about the Grenfell Tower block disaster and the patterns of inequality that disfigure this country are more clearly defined. Today and next week, perhaps, they will challenge the authority of the Government but the week after that? What then? How long until the challenge fades and another Government breathes out again, having weathered the storm?

Earlier this week LBC’s talk-show prophet James O’Brien revealed the contents of a £100 emolument that Chelsea and Kensington Council had donated to its gilded citizens a few years ago. This was about the same time as the cut-price cladding that was to kill more than 79 people was being affixed to Grenfell. The following day we learned the cladding had somehow managed to pass 16 safety inspections despite containing flammable material.

By then we had witnessed the ineptitude of the council in responding to the needs of its poorest citizens. Their incompetence might be described as callousness. It was a paralysis of bureaucracy. Eventually some empty flats in a nearby luxury block became available to rehouse the traumatised Grenfell survivors. Predictably, some of its wealthy residents began to object.

Conservatives began slyly to talk of illegal immigrants and elsewhere in London several writers on England’s scarecrow press began to sharpen their pens as they spied a chance, any chance, to stay the tide of public opprobrium.

They know that outrage in this country in the face of greed or corporate criminality never lasts very long. Very soon a royal occasion or an expensive sporting jamboree, occasionally a war, will come along “to unite the nation”.

The flood of outrage will slow to a trickle and the most persistent voices will become easily picked off – to be accused of exploiting human suffering for political gain. What caused that suffering in the first place will be forgotten and the waters of our collective apathy will settle once more over the scene of the crime.

In JG Ballard’s 1975 novel High Rise, recently made into a film starring Tom Hiddleston, the lives of the residents of a luxury London tower block begin rapidly to unravel as they become detached from the world around them. Ballard introduces us to the concept of a sinister and well-defined class structure being preserved within the walls of this concrete structure. The most affluent residents dwell on the top floors; the least affluent occupying the bottom floors. This week as efforts to rehouse the Grenfell survivors grew more urgent we suddenly became aware that

Ballard’s dystopian vision was thriving in some of London’s tower blocks.

Even Londoner O’Brien was shocked when callers informed him about the ways that social inequality is nurtured in blocks where there is a mix of private luxury flats garlanded with limited social housing. We heard about the “Poor Door” through which the least affluent in these blocks are made to pass lest they otherwise encounter their affluent neighbours. And we learned that the simple pleasures of a garden near the top of the building were strictly off-limits to the under-classes and their children living on the floors beneath. Was there ever a more fitting, living metaphor for the way the British state controls the lives of the majority of its citizens?

The sheer, stunning genius of the establishment which sits at the top of this arrangement is in constantly finding enemies, most of them imagined, to divert our attention. Their pet media propagandists, many of them reared for this purpose in Britain’s most expensive educational facilities, are tasked with pouring scorn on the notion that such an establishment even exists. On her way to dismantling the UK mining industry, Margaret Thatcher referred to striking miners as “The Enemy Within”.

In the weeks ahead the opinionformers of the Right will be pressed into service once more seeking to demonise foreigners as the Brexit talks career towards a dismal conclusion.

All the shady attributes of UK government: profiteering; graft; greed; trimming margins and taking short-cuts have been revealed to have been at the heart of the inferno which took the lives of 79 poor and displaced innocents in the Grenfell Tower. And yet, there is a hope that Grenfell might yet drag the rest of us out of our acquiescence in this; our inert complacency. In my lifetime I can’t think of a tragedy that has brought forth a response of such sustained anger.

In a working-class pub in Lennoxtown this week, 420 miles from London, several men with considerable expertise in the construction of buildings were joined by a former firefighter. As they discussed the implications of their gathered intelligence of the Grenfell fire, gleaned by close reading of the reports, their sorrow turned to anger and a dawning realisation that these lost lives were the collateral damage from an insidious philosophy and credo that has never properly been challenged. It’s why the demonisation of Jeremy Corbyn has been an intense and a crazed thing: they know that he has the measure of them.

In Scotland we delude ourselves that the patterns of unearned privilege and the gospel of Help Thyself which holds sway in corporate and political England simply doesn’t exist here. Despite the false and contrived recovery of the Conservatives in Scotland this is a much more enlightened and progressive country, isn’t it? Aye, right.

We have witnessed the same forces at work in assorted mining disasters over many decades and in the scandal of the workers struck down by asbestosis and the wicked delaying tactics deployed to limit and avoid proper compensation.

We see it in the scandal of trafficking in places like Govanhill. Despite 18 years of devolved, unbroken left-wing government in Scotland membership of our senior judiciary and the highest offices of our civil service is still largely an old boys’ network born of unearned privilege. More than half the country is still owned by 500 or so private individuals.

Absolutely nothing is different in Scotland. And those scattered baubles that make us think we are different – free tuition, care for the elderly, baby boxes – have done nothing to improve the lot of the most vulnerable and needy people in this country.