Thoughts with the family and friends of those killed or injured in Kensington today by a readily preventable design failure and a fundamentally corrupt construction industry – aided and abetted by decades of generic national decline and classism, followed by seven Pharoah-style years of active class war, combined with a local authority that’s always hated and tried to expel its public housing tenants.
It's almost certain that the bad decisions of RB Kensington & Chelsea, KCTMO, their architects, engineers and contractors caused the deaths.
— John Band (@johnb78) June 14, 2017
But this disaster isn’t restricted to council housing in Kensington & Chelsea. There are just as many Fancy New Flats that people are paying crazy mortgages or the best part of a grand a week to rent that will be found have the same illicit cladding. The warning shot that everyone ignored was a posh apartment block fire in Melbourne where exactly the same issue narrowly avoided killing anyone.
This is far more important, far more devastating an indictment of what the UK has become than the terrorist idiots can manage. This is the kind of bullshit thing that happens in places where it’s standard to put poison in babyfood because it’s cheaper.
Compromising on regulation – which is what Grenfell Tower is about – sets us back to that 200-years-ago point. Money doesn't save you.
— John Band (@johnb78) June 14, 2017
This is what seven years of hardcore lunacy by absolute bastards waging class war against even the middle classes – never mind the poor – has done to the country. This is why even though Jeremy Corbyn is a bit daft about a few things, he has to be worth a punt, compared with *waves arms around* LOOK AT IT. Oh, and read Dawn Foster, because she’s cleverer and better than me and has been on the scene all day.
Anyway London now has a massive smoke plume across the sky as a kind of physical manifestation of the last 30+ years of political bastardry.
— Anthony B, (@swearyanthony) June 14, 2017
And yes, before anyone raises the fact that I’m doing this from a distance, this is a major part of why I don’t live in the UK any more. Australia resembles the UK in many of its disasters, and has a whole bunch of other problems, but doesn’t have quite the same fundamental fuck-you-ish Tory breakdown in genericised everything.
Image nicked from the movie of JG Ballard’s High Rise, on the grounds of fair comment, even though those don’t exist because copyright law is stupid.