He stood in the constituency despite having never contributed anything to our community, and split the vote

I am still in shock at what happened in Kensington in the early hours of Friday morning, when our Labour MP Emma Dent Coad lost her seat to Conservative candidate Felicity Buchan.

I am pessimistic, angry, baffled and bewildered, but these feelings are insignificant to the ones I had on 14 June 2017 when I stood at the base of Grenfell Tower, where at least 72 men, women and children lost their lives, and watched it aflame.

The general election in 2017, days before the fire, had resulted in Kensington electing its first Labour MP, Emma Dent Coad – a real community champion. There is no doubt that ex-Conservative, now Liberal Democrat candidate Sam Gymiah is to blame for the result in Kensington on Friday. He stood in the constituency despite having no previous links to the area and having never contributed anything to our community. In fact, his previous voting record on human rights and social inequality are atrocious – and certainly not in line with the community ethos here.

The early retirement of Dany Cotton,follows pressure for her resignation, when she so crassly suggested, at the Public Inquiry into the Grenfell Tower fire that the fire service “would not do anything different on the night”.

It is important that the fire service shows that it is an institution capable of learning and her early retirement should usher in a new phase where the incoming commissioner will be able demand that recommendations from report of Phase 1 of the Public Inquiry are actioned with greater speed and political will than they have been so far. Let’s hope that those ministers and organisations who have so far evaded scrutiny, are also held accountable and take responsibility for the cause of the fire in which 72 people needlessly lost their lives. It is time for a new era of safety so that a fire like Grenfell never happens again.

This is an appalling statement to make but unsurprisingly symptomatic of Rees Mogg’s ilk. His government failed to implement the recommendations from the Lakanall House Inquiry, leaving the fire service and local authority with ‘stay put’ advice as a national policy and no full evacuation procedure ( not even one that the residents knew) . Rees-Mogg has a privileged background. What is his experience of living in social housing? How many tower blocks has he lived in?

It was his government who destroyed the fire and safety regulations. It was a local authority run by his political party that cost cut and ignored residents’ concerns resulting in the Grenfell atrocity. To suggest that those who followed ‘his’ party’s instructions were not using ‘common sense’ is an absolute insult. That he thinks that this issue is nothing to do with race or class, reveals all we need to know about the upper class, Etonian , Oxbridge ‘ honourable member for the 18^th Century’.

He should be ashamed of himself.  But does it matter to him with a net worth of £55 million? He’s better off sticking to talking about Brexit.  He does not know anything about BAME and working class communities or their life experiences and this kind of statement is evidence of that.

May the 72 souls who died at Grenfell rest in everlasting peace.

QUIS CUSTODIET IPSOS –WHO GUARDS THE GUARDS?

The leaking of this report to the media has impacted on the ability of the BSRs and community to have had the time to calmly digest the recommendations made by Inquiry Chairman. The media has started with an onslaught on the firefighters who attended on the night; J4G feel that this outcome was embedded in the initial culture of the Grenfell Tower lnquiry. (GTI )

The fire at Grenfell Tower occurred within a historical background of cuts to public services, deregulation, privatisation, a culture of ignoring the concerns of social housing residents and social inequality. So the GTI should have begun with in this context; it would then have greatly assisted the inquiry’s investigation and subsequent recommendations.  Instead the Inquiry began with ‘Act two, Scene 1’ asking details about the fire on that fateful night .The Phase 1 Inquiry ‘stage’ seems to have been pre-set with a determined route that would lead to a determined outcome (blaming the firefighters); with no historical context the route appears to be one that let’s those most accountable namely, government and private companies, off the hook.

The Chairman has made a range of recommendations primarily for the fire service and Owners and Managers of high rise buildings including:

For the Fire Service:

• The development of national policies on evacuation from high rise buildings
• Improved equipment for fire fighters including upgraded communication systems and breathing apparatus
• The development of policies for emergency call handling

These recommendations all have financial implications which will have to be honored and prioritised by the same government that cut fire service budgets in the past.

For Owners and Managers of high rise buildings he has recommended:

• urgent inspections and regular checking of fire doors and the provision of fire safety signage.
• Regular inspections of lifts

These recommendations could have been made during the duration of the inquiry.

Moore-Bick makes no recommendation for the fitting of sprinkler systems. No recommendation has been made to ban the use of combustible materials in the external walls of high-rise buildings that are not of Euro class Al (the highest classification of reaction to fire in accordance with BS EN 13501-1); again he will look at this in Phase 2.

He does however touch on the lack of urgency by the government on the removal of combustible cladding from current buildings.

In 2010, after six people were killed in a cladding fire at Lakanall House, the coroner made a series of safety recommendations for the government to consider. But these recommendations were sat on by then Minister Gavin Barlow with devastating effects on ehat would happen at Grenfell. There are so many parties’ decisions implicated in the lead up to the fire: the government at all levels; the council; the planning department; the building management company (KCTMO); building inspectors; the building industry as a whole, architects to contractors and  manufacturers and retailers.

How could they all have failed in their professional responsibilities and in their duties of care, so abysmally? If the Inquiry had begun with Act 1 scene 1, the Chairman’s recommendations would have looked starkly different and the real ‘villians of the piece’ would have been in the headlines, rather than the firefighters who risked their own lives in a building that no-one should have been living in.

The inquiry must fully investigate all such issues, in addition to purely practical issues such as what technically started the fire, how did it spread, the role of the cladding etc. These matters are vitally important, but they are simply the final act in a long line of actions that (appear to us) to have led, inevitably but predictably, to the Grenfell Tower fire and its attendant loss of life. We submit that, left unchecked, the social, economic and political forces that have led to Grenfell will no doubt lead to further such preventable disasters.

We are also minded that there is nothing on the statute books that makes it mandatory for a government to act on any public inquiry’s recommendations. This will be about political will. Let’s hope they will!

This leaves us to ask the question – QUIS CUSTODIET IPSOS –who guards the guards?

RIP to all those whose lives were taken in this tragedy.

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