London’s Grenfell Tower Fire Was No Ordinary Accident

Here is what actually happened: the cladding used does not meet UK safety standards, and there were warnings from experts and residents that the cladding was not safe to use.

The council decided to ignore the warnings, because cheap and dangerous cladding saved around £300,000 on a £9m refurb that residents argued wasn't needed in the first place and which they didn't particularly benefit from.

It certainly wasn't an energy saving measure.

The right-wing Tory council is not poor[1]. It has cash reserves of £200m, and gave council tax payers a £100 refund around the time of the refurb.

So yes - this is absolutely about right-wing greed, and right-wing disdain for the relatively poor.

[1] Although it's going to be a lot poorer once this is settled.

This may or may not be all well and good, but there is only the most tenuous of connections to the actual policies that are connected to the fire, specifically: The richest borough spent money fighting global warming through insulation, reducing their energy bills, and making the poor people's housing look good in the process (but without paying sufficient attention to its fire safety rating). THE MONSTERS. CAPITALISM KILLS.

(Play up the "making it look good!!" and the "not paying sufficient attention to safety" angles, whilst totally ignoring the use of this material in other places, and general UK-wide building standards which just shrug off the idea of sprinklers.)

Reading the article, one would think the idea of using lower cost materials on a construction project was a cunning idea conceived by Margaret Thatcher in 1979. It isn't, people substitute cheaper materials on their own very expensive properties all the time, and if councils are really preoccupied with saving money over all else they wouldn't have spent £9m on refurbishing Grenfell in the first place. (If you've ever lived in a comparable building, you'll understand why fitting insulating cladding was thought to be a good idea...)

There are serious questions to be asked about an architectural design which apparently involved flammable lining products in close proximity, a chimney of air and no firegapping between stories should or could have been identified as a fire hazard, there are questions about how it was installed, and questions about whether the council's poor communications with the residents over fire safety contributed to fewer evacuations (one of their big concerns was apparently concerns over a gas pipe in the stairwell which appears to be one of the few things that didn't go seriously wrong). And there are wider questions about whether standard instructions to stay put are appropriate for the building are appropriate and whether regulations ought to be changed to require mineral wool insulation and/or sprinklers on tall buildings in future.

It's also not a bad time to raise questions about cutting firemen numbers in London even though it isn't thought that lack of manpower to tackle the blaze was a problem.

But crudely reducing it to a "bad neoliberals hate poor people" to score opportunistic political points actually works against learning those lessons. Poor implementation Grenfell's refurbishment programme is no more a scathing indictment of "neoliberalism" than Ronan Point's collapse was a scathing indictment of the desire of the government to take the lead in housebuilding following WWII. The construction industry did learn from that one.

(Ironically, to the extent that "neoliberalism", or Thatcherite housing policy, was particularly relevant to this tower block, it was in having the effect of passing some of the leases into the hands of relatively wealthy private owners who had every interest in the building surviving to make a fortune on selling the flats in a few years' time)

The real trick here is to go a bit deeper and find out if this was just an "act of god" of if there was some kind of systematic policy that led to successive councils ignoring clear evidence of potential problems with one of their properties.

And when it comes to social housing there is very systematic problem of willfull blindness when it comes to problems that might require investment to infrastructure used by people that are not paying a lot in taxes. The problems might be worse in the UK but are not all that unique as even Scandinavia and Germany have unsolved problems with some of their public housing estates.

In a lot of ways the problem is that a lot of those building aren’t actually worth maintaining but cannot be replaced due to a preference for not allowing new social housing to be build.

In this case, as I understand it using the flammable cladding wasn't explicitly prohibited; it was effectively on a "use only if you have independently proved the way you're using it is safe" list.

So in this case I don't think there was a specific failure of regulations.

I think it was a failure on the part of the builders, along with something of a general understanding that "red tape" is something to be ignored.

Removing/relaxing building and fire regulations is neoliberalism.

Sadly, a lot of the narrative around the disaster and the resultant protests have been pushed by people like the Socialist Workers Party and their ilk.

What about moving to someplace less expensive than London?

The questions now being raised are over whether the building regulations were enough. Successive governments have reduced the "red tape" in the name of liberating the market, but it seems free markets will often compromise when it comes to safety.

That said, I'm not sure right now I would want to live at the top of the Shard (as some people do).

It is in fact elements of the state that have been vilifying the poor.

The state put in place the systems that mean the lowest bidder gets the job. The companies put the cladding in place then saved money further by not using the flame retardant cladding.

Making this to state vs private doesn't make sense, when both are part of the system that caused this.

The comment is so far from reality, it reminds me of one of the funniest things I've heard some Americans say on a train, near London; Kid: "Do British people love the government", Dad: "Yes they do". I almost spat out my coffee, it was such a hilarious misrepresentation.

It has half the melting point of iron, and shows no yellow-orange glow until it just collapse.

Basically it kinda seem to be all fine unless you have a thermal camera, until it just flops into a liquid.

now powdered aluminum do go off like firework when exposed to an open flame.

228, according to the assessment commissioned by the government.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/aug/25/grenfell-fir...

Edit: Now I've read it, there'a actually an answer in the article itself, although it's now superceded by the number above:

> Earlier this month, the government admitted that 181 other high-rise buildings clad in similar material have failed fire safety tests