Fire at Grenfell Tower in London

Post to cut out and keep handy in one's pocket

the worst take... ever? https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-06-16/beware-of-blaming-government-for-london-tower-fire🕸

Well yes given that fire precaution work could have been included in the multimillion project last year.

Fingers also being pointed at national grid now.

One thing I don't understand, but hope we get some clarity on, is how this refurb coat @£10million. That's about £80,000 per flat, an mount you could get pretty close to building new units for.

I've had some experience of similar works (not in London) and enveloping is not cheap. Add in a new heating system and the reconfiguration of the lower floors, environmental works etc and that cost - though eye-watering on the face of it - is probably about right.

Was that just for one block? They said another two of those 5 had similar treatment.

£5m pledged to fix things.

It has been good to see, amid the tone policing from Deborah Orr and Marina Hyde, centrist hacks talking about four decades of failed policy rather than blaming everything on seven years of Tory austerity.

Marina Hyde was saying Clive Lewis hasn't got the class of Old Labour re: his "burn neoliberalism" tweet, she is a total arsehole. I think Nye Bevan would have dismissed her as "middle of the road" in quite plainly expressed english.

Lol @ ex-Sun hack and ex of Piers Morgan fronting as custodian of labour party tradition.

One of those hacks who used to rip into Blair and brown from the left, then reacted in total horror when the labour party finally shifted decisively in that direction

And daughter of the Baronet of Exeter.

Stephen Moss also equally terrible.

struck me just now that "tory twitter now: thisisfine.jpg" would be on the nose: in other words, having to work quite hard policing my own tone at the moment

£5m pledged to fix things.

yet another government pr bungle: 'here's half the cost of the cladding which killed people, aren't we generous'

there are currently 93 kensington properties on rightmove priced at £5m or more btw

As someone pointed out the £5m just covers stuff many in the community have provided and raised considerable funds for.

No housing is mentioned - what is the plan in regards to that?

Was catching with bits of footage this morning, and someone else made the excellent point that it must be the first time in a long long while where working-class voices are consistently being heard - we get to know their day-to-day struggles over various issues. Most of us may read about this but its now inevitably being screamed at while cameras are pointing at it.

Dan Johnson (numpt news24 hack) got a righteous paint-stripping hairdryer from an angry w/c woman yesterday for asking gormless questions in the name of creating "content". It was a beautiful moment.

Working class voices were regularly "listened to" when they suited a right-wing narrative (eg Brexit, immigration) but as we know immigration was the only working-class concern that anyone in the Tory Party gave a shit about. The aforementioned working class people were usually white, btw.

What's different this time is that the non-white working class is making its voice heard, loudly and angrily and repeatedly and actually being heard.

This hasn't aged well, has it @David_Cameron? pic.twitter.com/yoqUug6yF0

— hrtbps (@hrtbps) June 17, 2017

I remember Cameron making a speech to the Tory conference that literally included the line "Britannia did not rule the waves with armbands on", probably the worst line in any political speech ever for multiple reasons.

what a stirring orator he was

By contrast I just watched that interview with David Lammy and it deserves to be played again and again for decades.

it's beautiful

I hate myself for giving Orr No! another click. Will never do that again, ban hate-reading!

ugh i have to hateread something by j.harris today or tomorrow for research purposes (ostensibly abt music rather than politics, except it actually is abt politics)

This letter. #GrenfellTower pic.twitter.com/zEHlFcATAw

— James Rhodes (@JRhodesPianist) June 17, 2017

Brilliant

Oof

Fucking hell

that is incredible - hats off to whoever wrote that, it's an otm for the ages

The "Missing" posters that have started appearing on local bus stops are heartbreaking. The 'gofundme' appeal posters less so. That would be so easy to abuse.

And the tube lines between h'smith and Edgeware road are closed because of the fire despite me having used them on Thursday.

Mitchell & Webb parodied Cameron here.

At least Cameron's thinking.

I've been following this like crazy this week and I realized it's for a couple of reasons:

1. cascading organizational failures that lead to disasters like this are tremendously important to me in an almost prurient fashion, my interest in system failure such as this is deep and borders on the obsessive. If I had the discipline and drive I'd do a dissertation on interconnected institutions catastrophically shitting themselves and write books like Perrow's "Normal Accidents" but maybe even better, also modern and shit

2. I can't tolerate anything about my domestic political situation at present so this is a welcome distraction, as awful as that sounds

3. good luck uk

now a few days have passed the emboldened austerity apologists were getting a bit louder on Marr earlier. If I hear another dickhead trying to say a sprinkler system wouldn't have made a difference I'm going to snap.

2. I can't tolerate anything about my domestic political situation at present so this is a welcome distraction, as awful as that sounds

To be fair, this is why I read the Trump threads but tend to avoid the UK politics ones. (Actually, post-election I'm back to reading the UK pol threads tho' not posting.)

I think both perspectives are easy to relate to considering the two different shitshows that have been going down

tbh I usually enjoy best of both worlds but the hopelessness of trump and the tragedy of the recent fire have made both avoid zones at this stage

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jun/18/sadiq-khan-grenfell-tower-tragedy-establish-full-truth

The greatest legacy of this tragedy may well end up being the skyline of our towns and cities. In the postwar rush to reconstruct our country, towers went up in large numbers, most of which are still here today. Nowadays, we would not dream of building towers to the standards of the 1970s, but their inhabitants still have to live with that legacy. It may well be the defining outcome of this tragedy that the worst mistakes of the 1960s and 1970s are systematically torn down. Of course, this must mean people being rehoused in the same areas where they have put down roots.

This is pretty infuriating. It wasn't the standards of the seventies that killed 80-odd people, it was the standards of 2016. The idea that if you start tearing tower blocks across major British cities down, rather than making them as safe as they are in Germany, people will be re-housed in low-rise, new-build estates in the same neighbourhood is a fantasy.

I don't think Khan's position on social housing is any different to most Tories, so no surprise that he is talking absolute shite.

OTM, my sister loved living in her high rise.

he does of course have boundless enthusiasm for the affordable housing schemes that are being built over the homes of decanted social tenants, so at least he is being consistent.

http://www.standard.co.uk/comment/comment/i-wouldn-t-want-to-live-anywhere-else-but-a-block-of-flats-like-grenfell-tower-a3566606.html

^^^stephen bush there, good for him

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/jun/18/cladding-on-grenfell-tower-banned-in-uk-says-philip-hammond

Jesus, 60+ people dead in a forest fire in Portugal today.

http://www.standard.co.uk/comment/comment/i-wouldn-t-want-to-live-anywhere-else-but-a-block-of-flats-like-grenfell-tower-a3566606.html🕸

lol I missed the headline in the middle and was momentarily very impressed by how talk of moral hazard turned to the topic of Wonder Woman.

Eve Allison, a Conservative who sits on Kensington and Chelsea Borough Council, said the refurbishment of Grenfell Tower should have looked at the inside as well as the outside of the block.

“It is on our watch, it’s our responsibility, we do have a duty of care to all our residents and whatever findings and failings come out, they have to come out soon because all the community, the victims, the families, people need answers,” she told BBC Breakfast.

“All too often we’re a little bit too concerned with how the immediate streetscape looks, how a building fits into other buildings, does it detract from the immediate streetscape.”

“I was not involved with the actual planning of the recent refurbishment....from what I’m hearing, it would have been ideal if part of the refurbishment package had looked at actually trying to gentrify inside, not just outside. “

!

Nick Robinson was really grinding my gears earlier. I can accept that he is an ingrained Tory and the bbc allow him to bring his biases to work with him, but he can fuck and die atm. I don't how many other factors there have been in this disaster, but the simple connection of government drastically cutting local authority funding and local authorities doing shoddy and dangerous refurbs to meet reduced budgets isn't going to be waved away with that weak shit he is coming out with.

This is pretty infuriating. It wasn't the standards of the seventies that killed 80-odd people, it was the standards of 2016. The idea that if you start tearing tower blocks across major British cities down, rather than making them as safe as they are in Germany, people will be re-housed in low-rise, new-build estates in the same neighbourhood is a fantasy.

― Wag1 Shree Rajneesh (ShariVari), Sunday, June 18, 2017 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Was meeting a friend at the Barbican yesterday. Is there anyone who'd want to tear those down? Fucking scum.

The battle to re-house the people who have lost everything in the borough will be key - saw something on my TL around attempts to re-house people outside of London? Its just outrageous.

yup, some of them as far away as preston

really really hoping labour politicians and papers like the mirror can hold the line on this: obviously it instantly undercuts the "expropriation is the end of civilisation" argument

It becomes really difficult to counter the many overlapping arguments against different social housing developments by those that are hostile to them. I don't think it is satisfactory to simply say that High-rise is the only option or is *necessarily* the best option. Its a very complicated issue though. And High rise v low rise has become this very unhelpful but loaded faultline for people arguing all kinds of things about housing and its uses and what makes it good or bad and what is possible or what is necessary.

I do think that the postwar push in this country to build social housing was an extraordinary achievement, and there has been a successful pushback in recent years against various attempts to discredit social housing as a project. The sink estate narrative has deep talons and I think many people have internalised much of the terrible things said about estates and those that live on them. And the starving of estates for years from the 1980s of repairs and services did do much to undermine the integrity of estate communities. But its also not necessary to completely lionise every effort by the architects of the social housing boom and to swallow every modernist principle about the designs for living that was popularised in this period.

Its true that there is a deep hypocrisy that characterises the villainisation of tower blocks in particular. Tower blocks for the poor are painted as being inherently substandard, alien from the "natural" streetscape, meanly denying people of gardens,etc. These accusations are hardly ever levelled at the enormous piles of "luxury" housing I see popping up all over the capital. The stuff that is vaguely affordable, in the sense that it actually has people living in it, seems to me to incredibly mean, often smaller than the social housing units that it has replaced, and thrown up on expensive land with substandard building processes, on the cheap. Yet this housing rarely comes into the crosshairs for being substandard in the same way. It almost makes you suspect that there are other motivations for this concern....

It is true, though, that tower blocks are a rather sharp shift in terms of the traditional spatial organisation of people in relation to each other, and this does have many implications in terms of safety, crime, accessibility, community cohesion, access to other services and social spaces. In terms of urban living, high-rise living does open new questions in terms of governance that are more complex than high-rise bad low-rise good. (although again the notion that high rise allows more density is a rather fatuous density, there are extroardinary examples of low-rise high density housing all over london, much of it very successful, cressingham gardens, just by my house is one example, and it is constantly threatened with demolition by the council in order to build new high-rise, mostly-private housing in its place).

It would be a terrible shame if this tragedy became another way of attacking social housing at a time when the UK and London in particular is in desparate need of large social housing projects. In these attacks, a hatred of social housing has always masqueraded as concern for the poor against the arrogance of those modernist architects.

Someone finally said it. @DJISLA #GrenfellTower pic.twitter.com/YCN2Fke38p

— حمزه (@HamzLdn) June 17, 2017