Fire at Grenfell Tower in London

Grenfell report to be released..... 30 October.

hollow lol

Lunchtime update from the Grenfell Tower Inquiry:

- Rydon manager gloated about being 'quids in' as he discussed profit boost company would get through switching cladding to deadly ACM pic.twitter.com/qBmuZuamep

— Peter Apps (@PeteApps) September 7, 2020

https://i.imgur.com/78x2Q8b.jpg

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/nov/16/fire-test-for-grenfell-foam-cladding-panels-was-rigged-admits-ex-employee

It's bizarre how little noise the Grenfell enquiry is making when stuff like this is happening.

i would like to understand more about how the intense anger and extensively held sentiment of 'never again' at the time translates over time into something that seems to be treated with indifference.

• what I might call 'benign news churn'; headlines today supplant headlines of yesterday
• specific news displacement (covid, trump, brexit)
• calculated news displacement - it's baked into the ideology of many newspapers/commentators and their surround nexus of politics to not really care, and may be in their interests not to give it salience
• indifference to representing technical process and arguments in the news (probably best summed up by a flagship BBC programme - I think it may even have been Newsnight - saying that they wouldn't go into the technical details of a Brexit argument because it was 'a bit nerdy').
• complete non-existence of sustained campaigning journalism, unless you count the ceaseless campaigning of some papers against Europe or Labour, say. I think those examples are just built into the editorial/business model.
• a psychological condition of fatigue among the public (i'm always wary of this - awareness and interest seems to me to be such a function of media salience (eg Brexit) that I don't see how fatigue can be a function of its *lack* of salience.
• aversion to the horror of it, don't want to think about people dying in a tower block (i felt the overriding emotion at the time was anger)
• 'one of those things that happens' - nothing to be done (perhaps a corollary of the lack of sustained campaigning journalism informing people that it was directly caused by decisions made by nameable people and organisations)

absence of obvious path citizens can take to effect change would be a big part of it, I'd imagine

Like, once concerned people have signed the digital petition and expressed anger on social media, I don't know if it's clear what they can do *next*. Write to their MP? My MP was tweeting the above story at breakfast, he's already engaged. But where to place that anger next? And if it is not put into action, does it dissipate?

calculated news displacement - it's baked into the ideology of many newspapers/commentators and their surround nexus of politics to not really care, and may be in their interests not to give it salience

xpost well this is it. my very broad brushstroke on the social function of the media prior to the upheavals brought about by the internet and 24 hour news is to be the eyes and mouthpiece of their readership. in some respects the fact this ever overlapped with the key business model of 'keeping the ads apart' is a bit of a mystery, unless you assume that people were interested and willing to pay for a newspaper that found out things beyond that which was obvious - muckraking, investigative journalism, newsgathering - and also the professionalisation of that group.

Point about the 'mouthpiece' bit, is that it allowed newspapers to amplify editorially their readership's concerns to push back against public and private institutions. This view has mutated to a degree to the point where rather than 'amplify' we would say they 'create' their readership's concerns to have power over the rule-setting space of government.

I think a lot of the above is also bloody naive - newspaper ownership self-interest, readership and politics have always uneasily co-existed, and the editorial decision about what their readership cares about ≠ some sort of objective social good.

However, to your point stevie, in terms of that mouthpiece role, social media has given a lot more voice, but to a lot less end - it's less focused and amplified, there's more frustration in the process, maybe? It's become axiomatic that awareness - the 'eyes' part of that equation - has become a lot more editorially confused and undifferentiated, for good and bad. An editorial team does not decide what you see in the morning.

Started this post before a meeting, had the meeting, and now feel it's become a bit rambly to no end. so just hit 'post' i guess?

This is giving much too good faith but is probably the closest reason. The lives of those who died at Grenfell fundamentally don’t matter to the country as a whole, they were the wrong kind of people. You see this pattern repeated over the decades and even centuries, if the deaths at Hillsborough mattered to anyone outside Liverpool, then the Sun would have ceased to exist long ago. If Grenfell was to matter, then Amber Rudd wouldn’t have been welcomed back to cabinet six months after having to resign by the press, and there would be more interrogation of the fact that ordinary people were burning replica Grenfell Towers in their bonfires and sharing the videos. It’s all built on structural racism from the ground up but it comes down to the same thing: their lives didn’t matter to the government or to the press, and therefore the public.
― scampus fugit (gyac), Tuesday, 17 November 2020 11:28 bookmarkflaglink

Yeah, Hillsborough is an important comparison isn't it. There did seem to be a lot of widespread anger at Grenfell (and again, through what medium could i possibly know that - that mixture of the people i know, my social media vectors, and the mainstream media, and what sort of objective synthesis is *that*? but anyway).

it comes down partly to a question of agency. i'm not sure if this is even a meaningful statement, but i tend towards most people caring - ie 'something should be done' - if you took them through Grenfell, or asked them specifically.

but yes, i have *somewhat* benign view of 'people' probably based on my socio-economic (and indeed gender) definition.

Grenfell Tower Inquiry podcast still going strong, even after Eddie Mair's departure:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p066rd9t/episodes/downloads

It won gold at the British Podcast Awards but is getting zero promotion by the corporation.

There did seem to be a lot of widespread anger at Grenfell (and again, through what medium could i possibly know that - that mixture of the people i know, my social media vectors, and the mainstream media, and what sort of objective synthesis is *that*? but anyway).

Grenfell will be back, but not yet. British media is exceptionally bad at keeping sustained attention on slow-developing things.

There are a lot of factors behind that, but two key ones are the rules around court reporting - effectively, during a trial you can only report what was said in court on the day and it's very hard to give colour/context/background = often boring stories – and the public's attention, which moves on to things with clearer edges to them and ignores the boring/confusing ones.

This isn't just a Grenfell thing, it's playing out right now in eg the Assange hearings, and people paying close attention to them have despaired at the paucity of coverage it's getting. However, I'd expect them to go big on Jan 4 when the hearing returns and they can add in all the other stuff. (Although Brexit might well take up all the oxygen at that point).

Governments know all this, which is why they drape an inquiry over things they want to buy time on, or get the public to stop caring about. Even though inquiries don't have quite the same reporting restrictions, there's still this sense of "we'll talk about this when the inquiry reports back".

80% of the time, by the time the inquiry reports back, the public doesn't care any more and the government gets away with it. 20% of the time it doesn't. (And if they're certain it's going to fall into the 20%, they do other things to nobble it, like with Chilcott. Hillsborough is a special case but cuts similarly – the Taylor report bought them a bit of time, and did lead to real change, it just avoided actual justice)

I think Grenfell is in the 20% camp. Not just because of the genuine outrage and anger at the events, and the clear villains of the piece, but more coldly because its impact cuts across a lot of society. There are a lot of better-off people in cladded buildings unable to sell their dangerous homes – 20,000 buildings directly, more indirectly. There are very well-off people realising quite how shoddy construction standards have become, too. Sunday Times did a big piece just the week on a big Richmond estate that had a building burn down rapidly and it was all down to shit building regs and inspections, and one of the country's biggest builders was at fault.

I've been trying hard to avoid fire metaphors here, but this has all the hallmarks of something big biding its time.

great post stet, and of course - smacks forehead - i'd forgotten about the court reporting. it was interesting watching the attacking the devil documentary on the Insight team's investigation into Thalidomide, the gyrations they had to perform to manage that sustained campaign. And indeed my point about campaigning came directly from Harold Evans saying in that documentary that the moment when people internally are potentially getting bored with a campaign is exactly the moment you shouldn't give up.

aside from Hillsborough, the other example that springs to mind- for a number of reasons- is bloody sunday tbh

at the end of a marathon effort lessons will have been learned and apologies will issue, the structural (and indeed deliberate/necessary) underpinnings of why these things happen to the people they happen to, where they happen will have transformed sufficiently such that the govt of 2045 can confidently say "never again" and no individuals will be to blame because the situational aspects will have been ignored, disputed or obfuscated for long enough for time and distance to have done their work.

Yes I have a lot to say on that too ofc but I’m lacking Stet’s faith in the process given the government are trying to make Bloody Sunday retroactively legal and the press are doing a lot of work to cover it for them.

yeah I've got no faith in the process — it has evolved as if by design to help cover things up and smother outrage. But that only works if people allow it, and I have a degree of hope that this won't happen in this case.

stonking package on the 10 debunking the social housing “charter” but weirdly nothing about the current inquiry. couldn’t find a link to the video on the BBC News site.

very good and angering summary of the corporate and regulatory responsibility for grenfell by anoosh chakelian in the NS.

Lunchtime update from the Grenfell Tower Inquiry:

Cavity barrier manufacturer says installation of barriers on Grenfell was "some of the worst I have ever seen" pic.twitter.com/L39pnd07dR

— Peter Apps (@PeteApps) March 9, 2021

Chris Mort carried out an examination of the way his product had been installed after the fire in 2018. Says he believes there were areas where the products either weren't fitted at all or stuck on with sillicone instead of fixed with a bracket

unfuckingbelievable. You don't need to be a barriers expert to know that sticking important safety components with fucking silicone is rough as.

well of course hes going to say that, its his product.

I wouldn't expect lying at a public inquiry is beyond the realms of possibility but if the barriers really were stuck on with silicone rather than with the brackets, then he'd right calling it a cowboy installation.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DVUn3zMVoAAEw9n?format=jpg&name=small

lives could have been saved -- but at what cost?

see also, from today

This is such a powerful first-hand account from ⁦@MichaelSchuman⁩. “The state may have prevented COVID deaths better than many liberal democracies. But that success has come at great cost—to human dignity and to the human spirit.” https://t.co/YUZVxydtLC

— Josh Lipsky (@joshualipsky) June 14, 2022

drunk driving may kill a lot of people, but it also helps a lot of people get to work on time, so, it;s impossible to say if its bad or not,

— wint (@dril) May 9, 2014

strong essay by peter apps on the grenfell enquiry so far:

https://www.insidehousing.co.uk/home/home/the-grenfell-tower-inquiry-has-painted-a-vivid-picture-of-the-world-we-must-leave-behind-76600

Excellent, especially the last few remarks.

This also seems relevant.

How did one of the world’s wealthiest economies end up with housing so unfit for extreme weather? I wrote about how Edwardian moralising, cheap coal and Thatcher's bonfire of housings standards has left British homes unprepared to weather climate change. https://t.co/2eDJLlHb5R

— Phineas Harper (@PhinHarper) July 20, 2022

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/multiple-firefighters-who-saved-lives-28941465

"Up to a dozen firefighters who saved lives at the Grenfell Tower have been diagnosed with cancers; the majority of which are understood to be digestive cancers and leukaemia, for which there is no cure"

:-(

this is doubly grim bcz attached to this particular event but i assume the issue is baked in to all modern fire-fighting