The Grenfell questions

A million words have already been written about the terrifying fire at the Grenfell tower block in North Kensington which claimed 80 lives and probably a lot more by the time the forensic scientists have completed their job and the police have traced everyone who was living there including the illegal residents. But there are some totally obvious questions and even more obvious answers that don't require a judge-led inquiry to uncover. It is now clear that hundreds of similar tower blocks throughout the country were provided with the same inflammable cladding that was placed around Grenfell. So here is the first question: how is it possible in the 21st century when we are supposed to know pretty well everything about health and safety that an agreement was made in local authorities up and down the nation that it would be a good idea to put cladding around tower blocks that contained inflammable material? Was this done in ignorance, to save money or just because they didn't care, ie the blocks were going to have poor people in them and nobody puts as much effort into caring for poor people as they do about building posh car parks or roundabouts and putting flower beds round trees in local streets or filling up holes in the roads or paying big salaries to council officers? If it was to save money, then the Jeremy Corbyn argument has to be considered. He said that the dangerous cladding was installed because of the government's austerity programme. So his argument presumably is that local authorities have been so squeezed by cuts in government grants every year that they had no choice but to choose the cheapest sort of cladding to put around tower blocks and to hell with the consequences. Well, that argument simply doesn't hold water. Every local authority every year gets a certain amount of money to spend each year. It's their individual grant allocation. Their responsibility is then to assess the priorities, and the things at the bottom of the list might just fall off for a particular year to make sure the key programmes are maintained. No council planning committee chairman should ever be able to decide: "Hey, we can save 300,000 pounds by putting inflammable cladding on each of our tower blocks, so let's do it." No planning committee should EVER pass that, because it would be immoral, outrageous and totally irresponsible. So, it's not austerity per se that is at the bottom of the Grenfell tragedy, it's a cockeyed judgment about priorities. But what I don't understand is that once such a decision was taken and a company was contracted to install the dangerous cladding, why didn't the building inspectors and the local Fire Brigade not intervene and say: "You can't put this stuff around this tower block. What if there is a fire?" Nobody spotted it?! Is that possible? Surely there can't have been a giant conspiracy, involving the planning committee, the council top officials, the building regulators and the Fire Brigade? All over the country?? I can't believe that. So, complacency and negligence must have played a part. Another question: how come there are companies who make money out of producing inflammable cladding to put around buildings? It's like that old advertisement on the television about some car or other where a bloke goes into shop with his son and asks for two life jackets to go sailing. He is told there's one type that costs 50 pounds or so and another one that looks similar but is only 10 pounds. The customer goes for the cheaper one because the shop assistant tells him he is pretty sure it will be all right? Is that what the planning committee chairmen were told? "Look, this cladding is much cheaper and it should be fine. Come on, when did you last have a serious fire at one of your tower blocks?" I bet that's what the judge will discover at the end of his long investigation.