mèþru wrote:I think he would make an awful PM regardless of what he believes in (although I'm staunchly opposed to his Israeli policy) because he simply isn't good at leading his MPs and is too ideological.
Sure, he had a leadership contest after being in charge of the party for a year. And, before the election, there were still some who had their doubts. But all (or pretty much all?) the former nay-sayers have since eaten humble pie. After all, the charge of 'unelectable' is a bit hard to stick to when you run a brilliant campaign and increase your party's vote by almost 10%. I think I've even heard some Tory supporters being about as positive about May as they are about Corbyn.
I didn't call him a Marxist based on his economic policies (which I mostly support). More based on the kind of people he surrounds himself with. Ah yes, and based on his past comments about how a reunification of Korea might lead to the introduction of free market policies into the North, which would be bad.
You have a stronger case on terrorism. However, it should be noted that in common parlance the phrase 'terrorist sympathiser' refers to someone who sympathises with the objectives and methods of terrorists, not just with them as individuals.
That's a distinction without a difference, as far as I'm concerned. Sympathising with an individual implies sympathising with what that individual wants and what that individual does.
Yes, he's called for peace in the middle east, but that doesn't make him inherently a terrorist. Here's what he actually said: "Does it mean I agree with Hamas and what it does? No. Does it mean I agree with Hezbollah and what they do? No. What it means is that I think to bring about a peace process, you have to talk to people with whom you may profoundly disagree … There is not going to be a peace process unless there is talks involving Israel, Hezbollah and Hamas and I think everyone knows that.
Oh, that's all he said? He didn't say that the goals of Hamas and Hezbollah are peace and social justice?
Oh, and while we're at it - here's what you wrote in the third post of this very thread:
- he has a lot of Issues that make political advisors scream. He's historically supported the IRA and Hamas,
Calling someone a mouth-frothing fascist for believing something you yourself told them sounds pretty rich to me.
Sure, some people prefer the "kill them all and God will know his people" approach.
You're trying very hard to create a false choice between talking to terrorists and killing a lot of people. I'll remind you that West Germany dealt with a wave of terrorism in the 1970s and 1980s without doing that much of either (aside from temporary negotiations during ongoing hostage situations). IMO the smartest approach to handling terrorism is simply to try to prevent as many individual terrorist attacks as possible before they happen. (Trying to make sure that people in general are as content as possible might help, too, but it's not the magic cure-all as which many people on the left seem to see it - there are always malcontents, no matter how well society is run.) (Generally, I think terrorism is an issue where the right and the left are probably both right about why the other side's approach won't work.)
So yes, those accusations were hysterical; and what's more they were pernicious, a dog-whistle for the worst excesses of the right. I'll remind you that this is not just a thought experiment here. This is a country where almost exactly a year ago a prominent supporter of Corbyn within his party was brutally murdered on the street because right-wingers considered her a traitor for her political views. Calling Corbyn a traitor, accusing him of hating Britain, of trying to undermine our way of life, of alliance with terrorists, this isn't just a game, it comes with a very real and deadly context.
It should go without saying that speaking out in support of terrorist organizations with genocidal aims is not a game, either, and has a very real and deadly context, too.
Israel literally has been forced both by necessity and by the international community to negotiate with terrorists all the time. When Americans or Brits say "We don't negotiate with terrorists", I don't know whether to laugh or cry. Suck it up already and negotiate. Also, that article confirms in my mnd my earlier opinion: Corbyn knows nothing about the Middle East. But I don't think May does. Or Trump does. Or Obama. Or Cameron. Or Gordon. Or Blair. Or Bush. Okay basically every American president from Truman onwards (don't really know what any PMs before Blair thought about the Middle East, but I doubt that any of them from the late 60s onward understood it). I've seen very few non-Middle Easterners get an accurate picture.
ìtsanso, God In The Mountain, may our names inspire the deepest feelings of fear in urkos and all his ilk, for we have saved another man from his lies! I welcome back to the feast hall kal, who will never gamble again! May the eleven gods bless him! kårroť
An unpleasant but necessary update to explain current and future events
There's two big issues right now. One is the ongoing direct fallout from the election: the talks with the DUP, Brexit and the Queen's Speech. I'll get to that in a future post.
First, though, rather more sombrely, there's what the political classes in Britain call* events, dear boy, events. In this case, the terrible tragedy of the Grenfell Tower fire.
For those abroad who don't know, or don't know the details - I don't know how much coverage its had elsewhere - but on the 14th, a 24-storey residential tower in west London, Grenfell Tower, caught fire. So far, 79 people are either confirmed or presumed dead, with more still in critical condition. The relatively low death toll is attributed to the high number of Muslims living in the tower - although the fire occured in the early hours of the morning, many residents celebrated Ramadan were awake for the pre-dawn meal, and were able to rapidly rouse their neighbours and encourage them to safety.
Obviously, any event that leave 80 people dead is a tragedy - it's the second-worst loss of life in England since the fifties. And the nature of the disaster makes it even harder to ignore that deathtoll. It's right in the middle of the city, and though it's not the only building of its height, it basically sticks up and is visible for a long away around (24 storeys might be small in New York, but it's really obvious when you put it in a residential London area), and now it looks like something from Stalingrad. And it's a fire, which is a horrible way to die, and everybody nearby heard people screaming for their lives for hours, and there's facebook posts and instagram pics and everything from people trapped in the building, and parents were throwing children and babies out of the windows. So... it's ghastly and hard to avoid. And that's emphasised by the fact that, you know, it's London, and everyone knows somewhere from anywhere. A prominent Labour MP was the one to unofficially announce the death of one of the first known casualties, who happened to be a protege of his mother. Adele has been hanging around baking cakes for the local firemen; Lily Allen is on the news blaming the Tories and accusing them of covering up the deaths. [at first, police only announced how many were known to have died, but in order to placate Lilly Allen they've now switched to announcing how many are missing presumed dead (a compromise - Allen wanted them to announce a number twice that size to ensure that nobody was left with any "hope" that might be later proven false)]. There's been a well-publicised celebrity concert, with many of the celebs being from the area, or knowing people from the area.
But even so, Grenfell has resonated politically more than might otherwise have been expected, for a whole range of reasons.
The very big picture
It is generally felt that a tower block should not burn down in 2017. In asking why this one did, it's hard for people not to notice some of the surrounding socioeconomics. Grenfell was social housing filled with mostly poor people, in a very poor neighbourhood... but it's in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, one of the richest places in the area. Only a few streets away, houses sell for millions of pounds. People are skeptical of whether the same disaster would have happened where the resident were wealthier, and whether the extreme disparities in weath in London, and particularly in Kennsington, might have contributed to the disaster. Inequality is an issue people care about a lot, but that is so chronic and unfocused that it can rarely come to the surface; this tragedy seems like a point where the iceberg under the water is able to actually break through the surface. The fact that, throughout the country, this sort of social housing has been sold off to "not for profit" non-competitive private companies who are paid millions of pounds in salaries and bonuses while not actually improving anything exacerbates the tension. As a result, there's an inevitable political dimension here: the left blaming capitalism and (effectively) corruption, the right blaming immigrants and environmentalism. For background context: the parliamentary constituency of Kensington and Chelsea has just gone Labour, by a tiny margin and on the third recount, for the first time in history.
The regulations
The building had not been starved of funds: only a few years ago, it underwent a £10m rennovation, which is apparently considered a lot of money for its size and age, so it's not as simple as the building being totally ignored. Unfortunately, it appears to have been this refurbishment that caused the disaster, through the addition of external cladding for aesthetic and "environmental" reasons. [i.e. energy efficiency. However, this wasn't purely a green issue - these old 70s buildings are generally being insulated to deal with cold and damp, making them healthier and cheaper to live in.] It strongly appears as though this cladding is the reason for the loss of life. It has emerged that what is believed to have been the original fire (from a faulty fridge in one flat) was put out by firefighters within minutes, and it was only as they were leaving the building that they realised that the outside of the building was on fire. Photos and videos from early in the blaze show clear - and even to a layman clearly non-normal - external fires rising up vertically or diagonally to the top of the building, while other areas remain untouched. Video of an additional fire crew first arriving at the scene shows the shear disbelief of the experienced firefighters, with such dialogue as "how the fuck is that even possible?" Because the fire seemingly rose so quickly up the building, almost nobody survived from the upper storeys.
It turns out that the cladding used contained a flammable core. While some say this cladding is safe if installed properly, it's known to have been implicated in a number of other fires around the world. It's in fact now banned in many countries, while others allow this combustible cladding but require external sprinklers on buildings that have it. We do not have external sprinklers in this country, and early reports had everyone insisting that everything was legal in terms of which materials were used. The government has now come out, however, and said that the cladding is in fact banned in this country. At the very least, the cladding used was completely inappropriate according to the manufacturers: they offer three grades on cladding with differing levels of flammability, with the most combustible only to be used in buildings under 10m tall, the fire-resistent version to be used up to 30m, and only the non-combustible version to be used over 30m. Grenfell is more than 30m, but the most combustible version was used. Was this illegal? If so, were the regulations appropriate in terms of ensuring that the law wasn't broken? An interesting kink is that information about which cladding was used didn't leak out from a police investigation, it was found out by journalists just looking it up somewhere, suggesting that it's not exactly as though the authorities were being cunningly hoodwinked.
Similarly, the developers used a form of insulation known to be combustible. Expert industry guidance requires that it only be used in tall buildings in very specific safe contexts - contexts that were not met. Oh, and as well as being combustible, it releases cyanide gas when burnt, and at least some of the survivors, it turns out, have had to be treated for cyanide poisoning.
There are other alleged issues with the refurbishment too. It has been alleged that the developers may have seriously damaged the internal fire safety of the building by removing fire doors and not replacing them, and it's been alleged they may have removed protective materials from pipes and wires and suchlike.
It probably doesn't help in this regard that the locus of responsibility was unclear. The local authority has sold the building to a not-for-profit private company. That private company hired another company to do the refurbishment - a company allegedly far too small for such a big task. That company hired another company to actually do the work, and since they're a small company from a small town not near London, they probably hired other people in turn. The company who were meant to do the cladding conveniently went "bankrupt" shortly afterwards, but in the way of modern corporate bankcruptcy they're still operating with the same people and a very slightly different name, but no debts or legal responsibilities.
The difference between cladding the tower in the cheap stuff and cladding it in the non-combustible stuff, incidentally, would have been about £5,000 in total. It's hard to see why there wasn't money to do that. Some may point at the £10m total alleged cost of the refurbishment, and wonder where all of that money really went. Some may point at the £11m yearly salary of the top executives of the arms-length 'not for profit' company operating it all. Some may point at the approximately £275m in strategic cash reserves that the local authority has been building up. some may also look at the £100 rebate cheques that the council had been sending out to celebrate its massive reserves and continual overspending - cheques only sent to the top-rate taxpayers (i.e. the money was given back to the richest people rather than being spent on the poorest).
But it's not just the refurbishment that's come under criticism. There are other features of the tower block that were perfectly legal, but seem to violate common sense. For instance, it's 24 storeys tall, and there's only a single fire escape (which is internal). This fire escape quickly filled with smoke, and became blocked with pannicking people and dead or dying bodies. There is no sprinkler system - although new tower blocks must be built with sprinklers, there's no requirement to upgrade older buildings. Sprinklers wouldn't have prevented the fire from destroying the building, but would probably have saved lives - not only can they slow the spread of fire, but they also help contain smoke and fumes, the main cause of death, keeping the fire escape survivable for longer. It would also perhaps have helped if there were fire alarms. Now, to be fair, there were fire alarms, but regulations only require them to alert residents of the specific floor the fire is on. Since that floor can be low down (this fire is believed to have started on the fourth floor), and can be an inferno before the people on higher floors know that they've been cut off from escape, this seems a flawed idea, even without considering how this fire seems to have spread externally and rapidly. The regulations are broadly based on the idea that there's no need to make landlords spend money, because big fires are basically impossible (they're "meant" to stay confined to the flat where they start). That's also why residents are told to stay in their flats and not evacuate the building. It's unclear how many of the dead died because they were paying attention to the fire safety instructions, and how many simply stayed in their rooms because they were asleep, or scared of the smoke in the hallways, or were physically unable to descend the stairs. [small query: does it really ever make sense to house people in wheelchairs on the twentieth floors of tower blocks anyway?] But at the very least, the confusing instructions seem to have added to confusion and hesitation and probably cost lives in this instance. Questions might also be asked about the initial fire service response - while individually they did their job well (and, later, heroically, ignoring their own rules on firefighter safety to continue to rescue as many as possible in a terrible and dangerous situation in a building that they feared might collapse on them at any second), it's clear both from their initial response (not checking that the external cladded wasn't smouldering from the initial fire) and from the reactions of the firefighters on video approaching the scene that they had not been trained for anything like this. Given that this cladding is now widespread (and certainly fully legal in smaller buildings) and that fires of this kind have now been seen around the world, it might at least be asked whether their training was being adequately updated to cover modern risks.
Nor, indeed, do they seem to have had adequate equipment, as their water cannons and external lifts could not, at least at first, reach the highest floors. [In Germany, for example, all such buildings have to have their own safe "fire lifts" to enable safe evacuation and the safe entrance of firefighters.]
And it might not have mattered so much about the cladding if it weren't so easy for the fire to spread into the building. Historically, these buildings were required to have external walls that could prevent fire from passing through them for at least an hour. that regulation was removed by Margaret Thatcher.
Perhaps it would have helped if any of these risks had been flagged up in advance. Except they were. In 2009 there was another, much smaller fire that killed 6 people in a tower block. There was an extensive inquest that made a range of recommendations on improving fire safety, including mandating sprinklers in all tower blocks, and the government hailed the findings, and then completely ignored them.
Oh, and then there's the sheer question of numbers. We don't know how many people survived the fire, because we don't know who was living there (the 'missing presumed dead' number comes from people reported missing by loved ones (only around 30 are physically known to have died so far, and only 5 have been identified), and it's possible the real number may be higher, since not everyone who was there may have had someone elsewhere able to report them missing; there may also have been some people in the country illegally, or whose only friends or family are here illegally, who don't dare report them to the authorities).We know there were around 220 bedrooms in the building, but the estimates for the number of residents are between 400 and perhaps as many as 600. Frankly this is faintly horrifying - that so many people should be living in cramped conditions, and that there should be no formal known number of residents - even to the nearest hundred! - sounds more appropriate to a third-world slum than to the richest borough in one of the richest cities on earth.
Underlying all this is the question of whether anyone really cared enough about poor people to make things safe for them. Emblematic of this is a vote last year, in which Labour attempted to pass a law requiring private landlords to ensure their properties were "fit for human habitation". [It's an old law, but the original version included price caps (basically saying that if you pay a fortune for your house, you don't need legal protection and can buy a locust-infested death trap if you really, really want to) - and since the law is decades old and had no provision for inflation, the origianl price caps are now so low in real terms that the law doesn't actually apply anywhere.] The law was voted down by the Tories, who felt that it wasn't important that poor people live in houses fit for human habitation - since that could reduce the profits of private corporations (or 'slumlords' as they're also called). This wouldn't have applied to Grenfell anyway (since it's social housing, not private housing), but it kind of shows the mindset...
[still, there is one triumph for regulations. Grenfell was built after a massive redesign of building regulations after the collapse of a substandard tower block some years earlier. And it seems to have worked - despite the building being completely gutted by fire, it has not yet collapsed. So that's something.]
Enforcement
Developers didn't have to submit detailed planning proposals for the refurbishment. Instead, they used a system of 'building notices', which basically means that for small projects you can just have people inspect you while you're doing it, rather than giving approval beforehand.
Is that appropriate? Well, no. Authorities have since clarified that that system is only appropriate for small domestic works, not for £10m works on 24-storey towers with hundreds of residents. So why were they allowed to get away with it?
It shouldn't have mattered anyway. The council did their job and did inspect the works as they were going on. They inspected 16 times. They just never noticed any minor details like "the materials being used were completely inappropriate". Were they incompetent? Were the building companies lying to them and showing them what they wanted to see? Should they have been able to tell they were being lied to? Perhaps enforcement should involve things like surprise inspections by roving inspectors looking at what was going on. Instead they apparently relied on pre-arranged 'inspections' that inspected only what the companies wanted them to see, and only inspected theoretical samples rather than the actual materials being used.
And again, you'd think that after a massive refurbishment like that, you'd want to make sure everything was OK, right? Well, no. The building was said to be safe and in compliance with fire safety regulations - but there hadn't actually been any inspection since the massive refurbishment. But the companies involved had said that it would be safe, and isn't that enough? [hey, the free market will take care of fire safety problems. If your landlord's houses keep burning down, you'll find a new landlord, and after enough deaths the landlord will go out of business. Unless there's a housing shortage and a state monopoly on housing in your area. (our wonderful mixed economy: state monopolies with no competition, combined with privatised profits!). And unless the companies involved "go bust" by just changing their name and setting up business again.]
Similarly, there are reports of ongoing mismanagement of the property, including with regard to fire risks: like combustible waste being left lying around in corridors. That's probably not a big part of the fire, which had bigger problems, but it kind of suggests that the local authority was not exactly right on top of things in terms of ensuring compliance with fire and building regulations...
The government has tacitly admitted how appalling bad enforcement has been by announcing that up to around 600 other buildings may also be using the apparently-illegal-all-along cladding, and that it's now testing every tall building in London to see whether the cladding is flammable, because it doesn't have that information already (and at least three samples from other buildings tested so far have already shown to be combustible).
There is now, at least, a formal police investigation, which has promised to, if appropriate, prosecute individual wrongdoers. Kind of too little too late, though. And given the legal system, it's hard to imagine anyone ever actually being held responsible. Although, to the credit of the police, they have apparently dedicated 260 officers to the investigation (and that's not counting the immediate police investigation to identify the deceased). If that's true, we may be hearing about this for some time to come.
Responsiveness to concerns
You can maybe get away with missing things when everyone else does too. But here? Not so much. It turns out lots of people had been worried about Grenfell in particular and tower blocks in general. The residents' association for the tower ran a blog filled with their continual complaints to the local authority, before during and after the refurbishment, specifically focusing on fire safety failings, and predicting a major disaster. Not only did the local authority pay no attention to them, but they threatened to sue the activists if they didn't shut up about the possibility of a fire.
Some of the activists they threatened to sue died in the fire.
Similarly, on a national level. The all-party working group on fire safety has, it turns out, been harassing the government for the last 7 years to try to get it to implement the recommendations of the Lakanal House inquests and to implement fire safety reform in tower blocks more broadly. They specifically sent letters to multiple government ministers warning them of the inevitability of a major fire disaster and that the blood would be on their hands. Only one minister bothered to reply, and his reply was a rather baffled complaint that he didn't know why they were concerned, since he'd already initiated the process of considering comissioning further research into the question preparatory to inviting submissions for an inquiry into the possibility of beginning a programme of considering whether any reforms of fire safety regulations might at some stage by assessed, so what more could they want from him? More lately, they've been wrangling with a minister over the idea of a full assessment of fire safety in tower blocks - which the minister decided to delay for another four years, because a snap election was called and, oh well, too late now, maybe after the NEXT election they'll look at it. Good news? The minister lost his seat and is no longer a minister. Bad news? He's been promoted to become the PM's new Chief of Staff.
Disaster response
Grenfell is in London, a city permanently on high alert for terrorism, and that had just suffered a major terrorist attack. So at least something like this could be taken in its stride, right? Well...
The response by firefighters was widely praised by the local community. And likewise, hospitals struggled valiently - despite the fact that many of the staff were already overstretched by the disaster situation in the wake of the London Bridge stabbings, and the Westminster Bridge attacks not long before that.
But there have to be broader questions about disaster response co-ordination.
What would you want to see in this sort of incident? First, you'd expect a centralised command point orchestrating all the emergency services. You'd expect not just ambulances for the critically injured, but also a fast-response team of nurses and doctors on the ground to deal with lesser health concerns - minor smoke inhalation, cardiac problems, psychological symptoms, people who have been forced to leave their medication behind, people who have sprained muscles or broken bones escaping the tower. You'd expect some sort of organised on-site triage sending people to the appropriate treatment. You'd expect professionals on site to deal with confused old people and terrified children. Because families were broken up, and there were children who escaped whose families were dead, or had been taken to hospital, or had just gotten just lost in the crowd. You'd expect someone co-ordinating information about patients between different services and locations. You'd expect a central information point for the affected to turn to.
Instead, there was apparently chaos. The worst-effected, rescued by firefighters, were taken away by ambulances, yes, but the walking wounded who got themselves out of the tower had to make their own way to makeshift rescue centres, where there was apparently almost no help. At one of the nearby rescue centres, for more than six hours there was only one doctor - and she was just some woman who happened to be driving by and realised she could help. For days to come, worried family members looking for loved ones had to each individually traipse round every hospital involved, some of which were miles away, to personally ask for information, because nobody was co-ordinating the lists of patients between the different centres (or if anyone was, nobody was sharing it with the public). Similarly, hundreds of people were instantly made homeless and impoverished, and you'd expect the authorities would be trying to deal with that. Instead, the immediate relief came entirely from the public, who donated vast amounts of food and clothing and children's toys and suchlike. [to a perhaps ridiculous level - relief workers had to warn that they didn't have a big enough supply victims to meet the demand from griefstricken would-be heroes, nor enough personnel to actually deal with the tidal wave of donations]
Much of this shouldn't be surprising, because this wasn't being dealt with by COBRA**, it was being dealt with by the local authority, and, let's face it, local town councils are not designed to deal with major disaster response management. Nor do they even have authority over many of the organisations involved (the police, for instance, are a single force for the whole of london (other than the City), and aren't answerable to each borough individually). It also doesn't help, of course, that the police, fire service and medical services are all reeling from deep budget cuts, with more on the way (hey, something has to go to pay for those tax cuts for the rich).
It wasn't until four days later than the government decided to create a unified taskforce to deal with the aftermath. It was also not until four days later that they decided to anounce that they'd be willing to give survivors £500 in cash to deal with their immediate needs.
The PM has since apologised for how bad the immediate response was. This is unlikely to placate people. Council offices have been besieged, innocent members of the public mistaken for council workers and beaten up. At one point there was a fear of a total collapse of law and order. A planned "day of rage" flopped, after survivors publically chastised the extremists behind it for hijacking their grief, but the anger hasn't gone away, and it has a very political edge.
About the only rapid response from the government has been to announce a public inquiry. That sounds good. Except that a public inquiry is a very long process, conducted by government-selected experts following a government-selected brief, and will allow virtually no imput from the survivors or their families. What it will do is prevent there from being any inquests into the deaths - inquests being shorter, independent, and with a right for the affected to be heard.
The optics
In a time of tragedy, people look to their leaders to inspire, encourage, and console them. The optics may not be the most important thing here, but they do matter - and they really do matter politically.
Unfortunately, just as in the election, this was a shamble from Theresa May. Jeremy Corbyn slouched through the streets, grief across his face, embracing survivors and grieving family members with warm, reassuring hugs, sharing grim and dignified nods and handshakes with those less expressive of their feelings. Sadiq Khan, the mayor, and future Labour leader if he can be persuaded to take the job, strode in a more animated fashion, with a polite anger that he's always been good at, speaking up for the People of London against an unfeeling, distant government and its cruel cuts and mismanagement (a local mayor finds it easier to get political, while the national party leader has to avoid looking like he's taking advantage of the situation). Labour, if you'll forgive the callous observation, handled the situation perfectly - at least in part because they genuinely gave the impression that they were at least in part not just there to 'handle the situaiton' politically. It helps, of course, that both their leaders are men of the people - Khan, in particular, being the son of an immigrant bus driver.
Theresa May might have been less of a target if not for the election. But the election gave us two powerful impressions of the PM: that she's weak, and that she's cold. She confirmed both impressions in spades with Grenfell. Her government was slow to get a grip on the situation, either politically or logistically (when you end up having to repeatedly apologise for something you did or didn't do only a week before, you kind of look like you don't know what you're meant to be doing). She seemed distant and unpained.
Worst of all, she didn't meet the survivors. She did eventually turn up, and posed for a number of carefully-managed photo-ops with firefighters and policemen. Critics suggested that perhaps she might have been talking to the weary ordinary firemen taking a break from their work in the tower, but instead it was high officials and people in shiny new uniforms, surrounded by bored-looking PR advisors. She even went to view the scene of the disaster - after the area had been cleared of all the public to allow a private viewing. What she didn't do was go and talk to the ordinary people. Instead, she claimed that "security reasons" meant that the PM simply couldn't go around talking to unvetted members of the public.
Then the Queen and Prince William suddenly showed up and went around talking to unvetted members of the public. Earning plaudits all round and prompting many commentators to say that they had showed why the royal family was necessary. The Queen, of course, talked with survivors during the Blitz. Prince William, while a little stiff and no natural politician, has a certain gravitas and authority from his work as a search and rescue pilot, and currently as an air ambulance pilot. When the royal family looks comparatively more at ease in an inner-city housing estate, more 'of the people', than the politicians, the politicians have a problem.
[The Queen seems to be making a point of giving May two fingers recently. May made her give a Queen's Speech that was almost nothing but Brexit, and the Queen responded by delivering the speech while wearing a hat that seems suspiciously redolent of the EU flag...]
Of course, if May had shown up, she'd have been yelled at. When, a couple of days later, she did show up to talk to relatives at a church (no cameras, a short interview, all interaction with the PM outside of the perimeter of the designated event area strictly forbidden), she did indeed have difficulty escaping - police had to hold a mob back as they screamed at her. And there's also a case to be made that politicians turning up with a media circus just makes things worse for the families. But then why turn up with the media circus at all? turning up and then refusing to talk to the people there is just...
But anyway. Someone like corbyn might have gotten away with that excuse. But May, after a campaign of empty photo-ops in empty hangars? It merely confirms the public impression of her: she's terrified of any interaction she can't predict and control, and she has no empathy whatsoever. A prominent former tory MP turned minor celebrity criticised her for "not using her humanity". Many people doubt whether she even HAS a humanity...
[tabloids have tried to wrest control of the story back for her by claiming that, oh, she was just distraught with tears when she got back to number 10, anonymous sources close to her say. Of course they do...]
The outcome
A Prime Minister who just a couple of months ago was popular, secure and headed for a historic landslide dominance of Parliament is now, as of a week ago, enjoying a net approval rate of minus 34 percent.
*It is unclear why this phrase is used. It's generally agreed to be a quotation from former PM Harold "Supermac" Macmillan, but nobody can agree who he was talking to, or what he was talking about. The phrase isn't particularly funny, and doesn't contain any particular insight. Nonetheless, it is obligatory to refer to it for some reason.
But the river tripped on her by and by, lapping
as though her heart was brook: Why, why, why! Weh, O weh
I'se so silly to be flowing but I no canna stay!
I had to stop reading partway through. It's all even worse than I'd previously been led to believe. All the coverage I've seen has prominently mentioned the cladding and the residents' association's attempts to draw attention to the problems but you've given much more detail about regulation and enforcement and it's all so thoroughly depressing.
Here if we ever do any kind of refurbishment work more extensive than a new paint job, the City of Evanston has to send a fire marshal to test every single sprinkler in two different buildings (since they share a PA system and thus are considered "one building" for the purpose of enforcing fire regulations), which takes the better part of a day and annoys the crap out of everyone. So the revelation that an apartment building in a developed country housing hundreds of people had no fire inspections at all is nigh-incomprehensible to me. As you say, it's a tragedy I'd sooner expect to hear transpiring in Lagos than London.
When the royal family looks comparatively more at ease in an inner-city housing estate, more 'of the people', than the politicians, the politicians have a problem.
SALT!
This got some play here, too, since (a) we inexplicably love the Royals and (b) it was a badass move.
Excellently summarised, Sal. I'll just add that the following footnote seems to have gone missing:
** COBRA is an acronym for Cabinet Office Briefing Room A-something (plus a more detailed explanation, of course)
I don't know if it bears thinking about what would be different if the fire had happened before the election rather than after it. Although I am glad that the "extremists" (I can make a good guess at who they might be) who wanted to hijack the "day of rage" were put in their place.
Zompist's Markov generator wrote:it was labelled" orange marmalade," but that is unutterably hideous.
LB: well, the royals are badasses. Have you heard about the incident with the Queen and the King of Saudi Arabia? The Queen couldn't possibly criticise the King's ban on women driving cars, so instead she offered him a tour of the Balmorral estate. He didn't realise that she intended to drive him - at extremely high speed over rough roads, while making a point of talking to him continuously until he had to beg her to slow down and keep her eyes on the road. [The Queen was an army truck driver and mechanic during the war, and loves driving fast. She still drives herself and her family around now, although she's 91. Not only is she the only living head of state to have served in the military in WWII, she's also probably one of the very few who know how to strip an engine down and rebuild it. Here, Future Queen is well aware that she is both sexier and more badass than you..]
And yes, unfortunately it seems like the more that comes out about the fire, the more of a fuck-up everything seems to have been.
Latest update? Seven more towers have been found with the most combustible form of cladding being used; at least one council are taking legal advice about suing the developers for not having used the materials the council paid them to use.
Meanwhile, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have all confirmed that there are zero towers in those countries with unsafe cladding because why would there be they're not third world countries damnit.
Alice: thanks, yes, forgot that. Yes, COBRA is an acronym for a gathering of top political, military and security officials who take charge of disasters, terrorist incidents, disease outbreaks, anything really important.
Yes, we know that COBRA are the villains in Action Force (or whatever you call it over there). Our governments like naming their things after villains. That's why our military satellite and AI system is called Skynet.
But the river tripped on her by and by, lapping
as though her heart was brook: Why, why, why! Weh, O weh
I'se so silly to be flowing but I no canna stay!
ìtsanso, God In The Mountain, may our names inspire the deepest feelings of fear in urkos and all his ilk, for we have saved another man from his lies! I welcome back to the feast hall kal, who will never gamble again! May the eleven gods bless him! kårroť
Wouldn't be surprised if it turned out to be J. K. Rowling.
Nah, there's a much simpler explanation: the government ministers in charge with naming these organisations/departnments just haven't seen the films in question.
Salmoneus wrote:
Yes, we know that COBRA are the villains in Action Force (or whatever you call it over there).
G.I. Joe, which is a very distinctively American name for what (I thought) was a very distinctively American toy line (and marketing TV series). I never knew it had gone over the pond, much less changed names along the way!
So, you get all angry with the government (national and local) for allowing a disaster like Grenfell Tower to happen when it was easily preventable. And then, you remember that the government is elected by people, and everything becomes clear.
It turns out at least 27 other tower blocks have combustible cladding. In particular, there's a whole bunch of them on one estate in Camden (north/central London), which were refurbished (at a cost of 66m) by the same company who did Grenfell. It turns out that not only are these buildings clad in illegal combustible cladding, but there are also a whole gamut of other fire safety failings in them, from missing fire doors to missing insulation around pipes and wires and so on. [And yes, they did repeatedly pass fire inspection tests, until the fire inspectors started actually giving a shit].
The council there is worried about hundreds of their residents living in what are clearly deathtraps, and has evacuated the buildings, found temporary accomodation for the residents elsewhere, and is paying for emergency removal of the cladding and improvements to fire safety. Great!
...and this has caused public outrage. Nearly a hundred residents initially refused to leave, until the council threatened to force them out. Improving the fire safety of the buildings is 'disgusting' and an 'outrage', say residents - they've never been burnt to death in their buildings before, so clearly there's no threat now, and the council are throwing them out, for several weeks, for no reason at all. [some residents have been not killed there for up to thirty years, so clearly there's been enough safety built up there that the big changes to the structure of the building a couple of years ago could possibly have had an effect.] Indeed, one of the towers there has already caught fire twice since the refurbishment, and on neither occasion did it turn into a towering inferno, which definitively proves that there is no fire risk. Besides, the only people saying there's a risk are experts, and we all know that whatever experts say must be the opposite of the truth. Why don't the Government focus on the buildings in danger, like the ones that are going to burn down in the future (whichever those are) and stop wasting time and money on the buildings that obviosuly can't possibly burn down (like the ones they live in personally, which have so far never burnt down, not even once)?
And you wonder why the systems of democratic accountability don't seem to be working...
But the river tripped on her by and by, lapping
as though her heart was brook: Why, why, why! Weh, O weh
I'se so silly to be flowing but I no canna stay!
I'm pretty much crying with laughter now, so thanks for that.
I generally forget to say, so if it's relevant and I don't mention it--I'm from Southern Michigan and speak Inland North American English. Yes, I have the Northern Cities Vowel Shift; no, I don't have the cot-caught merger; and it is called pop.
(The "strengthening our hand" bit is particularly amusing.)
That... is not only hilariously, but disturbingly accurate. And very well made (love how she keeps glancing at her sword for reassurance).
And on that note, we've got a bit more detail now on what sort of shrubbery the knights who say "Never! Never! Never! Never!" are getting. Specifically, it includes a pay-off of £1bn, or £100m for every seat they hold, in exchange for for only two years of support.
But the river tripped on her by and by, lapping
as though her heart was brook: Why, why, why! Weh, O weh
I'se so silly to be flowing but I no canna stay!
Something related to UK politics that I think is a bit weird if you think about it: The question of whether former (and possible future) UKIP leader Nigel Farage is relevant enough to be on TV.
Farage apparently gets invited by British TV channels again and again and again, all while cheerfully accusing the TV channels that keep re-inviting him of having a left-wing bias. His opponents argue that he shouldn't be on TV so often, given that he's not an MP, has never been an MP, and is currently just the former leader of a party with zero MPs. A has-been who, on top of being a has-been, never really was anyone in the first place. Question settled, right? Wait. He is a Member of the European Parliament, and as of now, the UK is still a member of the EU - so shouldn't MEPs be as relevant as MPs?
Except that, of course, Farage is opposed to the EU and to the UK's membership in it. So by his own professed standards, he should tell the TV channels "the only good excuse for having me on is that I'm a member of an institution whose very existence I oppose, so I must decline your invitation". (Being a complete git, of course he doesn't say that.)
Then again, the people who complain about him being on TV so much are usually his opponents, and his opponents are usually supporters of the EU, and of British membership in it. So by their standards, they should think "as much as we hate to admit it, as an MEP he's sort of relevant".
So, arguably, Farage himself can't claim to be relevant without being a hypocrite, and his opponents can't claim that he's irrelevant without being hypocrites.
Raphael wrote:Farage apparently gets invited by British TV channels again and again and again, all while cheerfully accusing the TV channels that keep re-inviting him of having a left-wing bias.
And it's not just TV either: he gets time on the radio too, especially LBC, a rather right-wing radio station which used to have Katy Hopkins as one of its presenters until she was sacked a few weeks back. It's frankly unbearable to see him keep popping up, particularly on the BBC who should really know better (I don't know how the amount they've given him is within their impartiality guidelines).
Raphael wrote:So, arguably, Farage himself can't claim to be relevant without being a hypocrite, and his opponents can't claim that he's irrelevant without being hypocrites.
Doesn't really add up. Surely being pro-EU doesn't mean that you believe MEPs to wield any that relevant power. They are among the natural choices of people to invite to panels or interviews touching on EU policies, but branching away to other areas of politics, wouldn't you rather hear what the current party high-ups have to say? For instance, why would I be especially interested to hear what an MEP has to say on things like healthcare or the defence budget?
Farage isn't relevent or irrelevent because he's an MEP. [For a start, there are 72 other MEPs who don't get his screentime]
He's relevent because he's the de facto paramount leader of UKIP and of the hardcore Brexiteers. He's the unofficial leader of the party who got most seats (and more than a quarter of the vote) in the last European elections in the UK. He's responsible for the Brexit referendum, he won the Brexit referendum, and he's the most prominent and respect voice for the ideological Brexit position (May being a Brexiteer only by necessity), in an era when everything is about Brexit (the government's admitted pretty much nothing but Brexit will happen for at least the next two years). More generally, he's the voice of about 50% of the population of the country.
The even bigger problem is that if you want to pay any attention to that 50% of the population, there aren't really any alternatives to Farage. UKIP have no other members anyone has ever heard of (apart from, dear gods, Neil Fucking Hamilton *spits*), and I'm not sure they even have an official leader at the moment. It's hard to put a Tory Brexiteer on you programme, because for one thing they're Tory (you can't have Tories representing all sides of the debate!) and for another thing they're Tory (so they're muzzled by their leadership, outside of real crisis situations). And once you rule out Tories and UKIP, you're left with... random celebrities? The BNP? The EDL?
But the river tripped on her by and by, lapping
as though her heart was brook: Why, why, why! Weh, O weh
I'se so silly to be flowing but I no canna stay!
