I was driving to an indy meeting in Ayrshire when the evening news came on the radio. This is the only time in my life I’ve had to pull a car over because I wasn’t fit to drive. I was in floods of tears. I’d just listened to the first day of the Grenfell Inquiry, the one where the survivors talked about the dead. It was devastating,
Every other emotion I feel about Grenfell is anger. All the noise about how ‘things have to change’ after Grenfell made me angrier than anything else. Not only was it a lie, the opposite is what they all meant.
The final report of the inquiry is out today and it says (deep breath) 35 separate organisations are all culpable, to vary degrees. When one organisation is culpable you might possibly conclude that it is a rogue organisation; when it’s 35 you know your entire society is fucked. When the government and the local council were in on it, your democracy is fucked.
Grenfell is what Britain looks like when there’s a spark in a poor person’s house. It flies straight through the loose net of building and fire regulations, is waved on its way by a local authority which didn’t really want poor people in its boundaries anyway, reaches government where all anyone wants to do is clear a path for it through deregulation and then it shoots straight up the commercial interests of a bunch of rich corporations until it sets fire to their deathtrap insulation and kills children.
A spark in a rich person’s house does not do this.
In Britain, wealth creators never have to answer for their actions. They ask for red tape to be cut to ‘set them free’. What they do with their freedom is lie, cheat and destroy. They actually need to send emails that say "all we do is lie" and then kill someone before anyone becomes concerned about the lie.
They write things like that people who raise concerns about the intensely dangerous nature of their products are "getting me confused with someone who gives a damn" and that people who ask difficult questions can "go fuck themselves". These people are so, so important because of the ‘wealth’ they ‘create’ that they genuinely think people saying ‘please don’t kill my child’ are the real problem.
For the rich, for the powerful, culpability is always in the past
The politicians are on their knees to these people. They are sponsored by them, wined and dined, given lucrative board positions on leaving politics, remain happy that a fortunes being spent to lobbying them to protect them against their customers. No politician isn’t desperate to comply, because that’s how they achieve their post-politics pay-day.
And the whole fucking system stinks. It stinks to high heaven. These people died seven years ago, but everyone is protected. How? By holding a pubic inquiry that takes seven years. Culprits move on, enjoying their seven years of freedom and wealth. Corporations can claim that, yes, that corporation from seven years ago was a wrong ‘un but ‘us’ (i.e. the same corporation) are now totally different.
For the rich, for the powerful, culpability is always in the past. It is always time to move on. Lessons have already been learned.
But have they? Have they fuck. On the day that a report comes out proving conclusively and beyond doubt that slashing ‘red tape’ helped kill innocent people, I am still reading Scotland’s business lobby demanding that more red tape is cut. Because they’re wealth creators.
On a day that condemned the malign role played by politicians who weren’t open and honest and who didn’t operate in the wider public interest I could have read a review of a book on leadership by a noted war criminal, reviewed by a woman who is under police investigation in an embezzlement scandal. They demand perpetual amnesty. Because they’re ‘the right kind of people’ and they talk much about ‘their values’.
In every part of this nation the untrammelled access big commercial interests have to government where they can shape public policy for their ends continues apace like nothing happened. There is a word you will find again and again in the Grenfell report; dishonesty. It is a word you will also find in advice given to the Scottish Government about KPMG. The government ignored the advice. Because, you know, wealth creators.
Crooks, liars, cheats – in Britain they prosper
Crooks, liars, cheats – in Britain they prosper. Yes, they do learn lessons from their own failure. When they get caught in all sorts of unsavoury behaviour via WhatsApp in an inquiry into misuse of government power (the Salmond Inquiry), they learn lessons. They learn that, before the next inquiry (into the pandemic), they must put their WhatsApp onto auto-delete.
They’re not like you and me, the powerful. I am no friend of the far-right rioters in England, but I would note that they didn’t get police action into their misdeeds put on hold while a lengthy public inquiry was held into why it all happened. They were just jailed. Apparently it’ll be another three years before there is any chance of anyone appearing in court over Grenfell.
It truly is great being rich and powerful.
I could go on and on. Scotland is spending mental sums of money on never-ending public inquiries which seem 100 per cent designed to make sure no-one is held properly accountable and that once findings are published it is far too late for anyone concerned to face any consequences.
Our economy is fucked. Our democracy is fucked. Our society is fucked. If you doubted it, go and read the Grenfell report and then ask yourself how it is exactly that, nearly a decade later, not a single person has faced any consequences for what they did.
I can’t go on. I need to stop. I get too angry and too upset and I know myself. Writing when I’m too angry and too upset is unwise. So I just want to remind you one more time why I’m so angry.
I’m so angry because Rania Ibrihim did what she was told. She stayed put. She hid in the bathroom where there was less combustable material. She did this in a desperate effort to save her daughters Fethia and Hania. Their burnt remains were found in that bathroom, the mother desperately trying to protect her children right up until the fire ripped across their flesh.
Fuck Britain.