Grenfell: Blame game must produce results

No one does the blame game better than the British. There is no tragedy so grim, no disaster so unremitting, that we cannot further darken the mood by naming both those responsible and the defective parts.

This is called accountability. Inquiries are intended to draw a line under whichever calamity it was, providing victims and their families with “closure” and the relevant authority or department the chance to aver that “lessons have been learned”. Typically, there will be at least one top-level resignation. Invariably, the government will promise “urgent action” to ensure that such a thing can never occur again. Then, with justice done, all that remains is for compensation to be awarded while the rest of us get on with our lives.

And perhaps there is no other way if we are to get to the truth and adopt a more sensible course in future.

In the case of the fire at London’s Grenfell Tower in which 72 residents died and 70 more were injured, the defective part was identified almost before the blaze was properly extinguished. It was the aluminium cladding fixed to the block’s exterior to make it look more modern and less “Seventies,” but which turned out to be highly combustible, that transformed an otherwise typical inner-city structure into a funeral pyre.

The guilty man – or in this case woman – was not immediately exposed. Witnesses had to be called and expert opinion delivered and assessed. Yet, with hindsight, it is hard to imagine that it was ever going to be anyone other than the head of the London Fire Service. Someone with a lot of braid on their uniform had to carry the can, and that person, inevitably, was Commissioner Dany Cotton, the first woman to hold the post, whose career until the night of the fire – June 14, 2017 – had been considered little short of exemplary.

Cotton did not help her case by telling the inquiry, led by retired judge Sir Martin Moore Bick, that she wouldn’t have done anything different on the night and that planning for a fire such as that which engulfed Grenfell would have been like planning for a space shuttle landing on the Shard (London’s tallest building). That was crass. She should probably have resigned instead of letting it be known that she would retire next April, aged 50, on a full pension. But the real question, which remains to be answered, is, was she wrong?

It is entirely understandable that the families of those who died, along with those whose injuries will in many cases remain with them for the rest of their lives, should demand acknowledgement of the wrong done to them. They have the right to be told what happened and why and to be assured that steps are being taken to ensure that no such catastrophe occurs in the future.

In this context, people are understandably cynical when they hear Boris Johnson insisting that justice will be done. While all the steps laid down in the blame game have been followed, only two facts truly stand out. The first is that the cladding on Grenfell Tower turned the building into a death trap. If that is so, why are scores of privately-owned tower blocks still clad in the same offending material? Why was the management company overseeing five affected blocks in Salford denied government funding for replacement work, and why did the government, led by Theresa May, prevent Salford City Council from loaning the £25m needed to finance the work?

If lessons are to be learned, surely the sooner the better.

The second key finding to emerge from the report of the inquiry is less that the fire service had not properly trained for such an emergency (though this is undeniably the case) than that one simple change in the appropriate protocol would almost certainly have saved dozens of lives. Standing procedure in London had it that in the event of an out-of-control blaze in a tower block, residents should stay put. The theory was that they would be placing themselves at unnecessary risk by venturing into the corridors and stairways of a smoke-filled building. In fact, many of those who died did so after dutifully following this instruction while a number of those who lived ignored it and made their way to safety.

Sir Martin’s inquiry did not hesitate to rubbish the stay-put ordinance. But again, most people, including the fire service itself, have long-since accepted that the instruction was futile and contributed to the deaths of an unknown number of Grenfell residents.

What most of us would accept without need of an inquiry is that Kensington and Chelsea Council was wrong to encase Grenfell Tower in highly flammable material. The widely held assumption is that it did so in order to make an unsightly block, within sight of the King’s Road, look better to those who didn’t live there but had to see it each time they left their privately-owned multi-million-pound homes.

If we are to heap blame on Kensington and Chelsea, why not include the many other local authorities and private developers who followed the same course? Why? Because if everyone is guilty, then, in effect, no one is guilty.

Further up the chain of causality, what are we to make of the cheapskate spending of the Tory government in the years leading up to the fire, or of the Tory-run Greater London Authority (Mayor B. Johnson Esq.), which had responsibility for the safety of buildings in public ownership?

Under Johnson’s stewardship, ten fire stations in London were closed, with the loss of 14 fire engines and 552 firefighters. At the same time, the mayor spent £225 million on his Boris Bikes initiative and £43 million of public money on his unbuilt Garden Bridge.

Would another 500 firefighters and 14 fire engines have made any difference to what happened in Grenfell Tower? Probably not. But voters will have taken note of the fact that the Prime Minister, who is promising to spend billions on the NHS, schools and the police, did too little to protect a vital service when mayor of London.

It will also be observed that the £20 billion promised by Theresa May, as well as the £3bn since promised by Health Secretary Matt Hancock, to boost the NHS is not so much new money, leading to a much-improved service, as money necessary to keep a cash-strapped show on the road.  In the same way, the Prime Minister’s promise of 20,000 more police officers will, if fulfilled, merely take numbers back to where they were when the Tory-led coalition took office in 2010.

The divisions over Brexit that have so marked Britain since the start of the referendum campaign have served to highlight not only conflicting opinions on Europe but a deepening sense of unease about the role of government in protecting the interests of ordinary citizens. Many voters may well feel that Jeremy Corbyn lacks a sophisticated understanding of how modern economies work. They may question his reliance on high levels of taxation and cultivation of a “magic money tree”. But they also know that under the Conservatives their lives and livelihoods have taken a downward turn, unrelieved by the party’s inept handing of the negotiations with the EU. Even those who want Brexit delivered want in addition that spending restraint be brought swiftly to an end. The question then becomes, who can they believe?

As for the Grenfell tragedy, it is almost certain that a month from now it will have dropped almost totally out of the news. Everyone will hope that lessons have indeed been learned, but few, I would wager, will honestly feel they can now sleep more easily in their beds. Britain is in turmoil. It doesn’t trust this government and it won’t trust the next one either, whether it’s Tory or Labour or a little bit of everything. A yawning gap has opened up between the British and those in whom they must rely for their safety and well-being. That gap needs to be closed and it would be useful if the election campaign that is about to get underway resulted in lessons learned, not prejudices confirmed.

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