its very distasteful how the poster @sidney has jumped on this terrible tragedy to peddle his infantile and hate filled campaign against authority.
a deranged individual.
Nonsense.
The fire safety regulations hadn’t been updated for 10 years.
Grenfell Tower residents explicitly flagged the cladding and the lack of a sprinkler system as a major fire risk. Other fires around the world were clear evidence of the risk of this sort of cladding.
They only live there.
Like Hillsborough, this is the result of ordinary people being demonised at the altar of profit and “light touch regulation”. The UK media are part of it. “Unnecessary regulations”, “red tape” “nanny state” (pejorative phrases) “welfare reform” (positive phrases who could be against “reform”!), all the constantly pushed bullshit that is used to manufacture a climate where the likes of the Grenfell Tower residents are demonised and disregarded.
Even the phrase “light touch regulation” is a “positive” one. “Criminally negligent lack of regulation” would be far more appropriate.
The likes of you only care abut regulation when you want to crib and moan about a temporary homeless protest.
When it’s clear that your failed gospel of criminally negligent regulation is responsible for the deaths of 100-150 people, you don’t give a shit.
We already know from two years of your postings that people like the occupants of Grenfell Tower are irrelevant to you. They’re the exact type of people you moan about getting “free everything” (they paid rent). We get it - you despise these type of people.
Neither you or any of the other free market zealots on here have been able to defend one aspect of Tory policy or the failed gospel of criminally negligent regulation in relation to this, which is the very thing all of you came on here to defend.
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The Daily Mail’s most notable contribution in the wake of this disaster has been to do a bit of victim blaming by naming and printing photos of the man whose fridge caught fire.
The Sun impersonating victims to get access to a hospital.
And now this from the Daily Express.
There will be no Leveson II, however. The Tories have made sure of it.
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Did EU regulation mean deadly cladding was used on Grenfell Tower Sidney?
Don’t leave us hanging here.
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What do you do in life @sidney?
You strike me as someone who thinks everything is black and white and easily solved - all of which would lead me to believe you’ve very little real world experience in any industry or job but you’re clearly an intelligent guy so maybe I’m wrong.
.
In fairness, your dream date Katie Hopkins said that those responsible should be jailed in the Mail yesterday.
BBC reporting police think it’s 76 dead.
I was reading about the little 5 year old boy who got lost on the way out with the firefighters and his parents and is missing, I started thinking about my little nephew, I started crying uncontrollably, utterly heartbreaking
sad that poor Fintan wasn’t in your thoughts
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my nephew is the same age
as Fintan?
Mega lolz, Sidney going back to the class game.
You’ve bene shown up once again for the hypocritical BS merchant you are in trying to immediately go for the Corbz for PM button.
You cheerlead pitch invasions, which authorities aimed to eradicate to improve safety, as it’s a bit of fun for you.
A Tory councllor told this Labour councillor who raised 19 complaints about what was happening at Grenfell Tower that residents should “be truly grateful and stop moaning”.
Here’s Councillor Judith Blakeman again about how her complaints on behalf of the residents to Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation were dismissed.
Last night on Newsnight, the Tory leader of Kensington and Chelsea Council, Nick Paget-Brown, engaged in a classic bit of victim blaming, just like happened after Hillsborough. The dead can’t talk back, after all.
Yawn.
That’s a terribly black and white view of me you have there.
Some things are black are white, however.
Things like proper fire safety regulations for residential tower blocks, requiring rented accommodation to be fit for human habitation. These are absolutely black and white things. These are black and white things because people’s lives are stake. There isn’t anything more black and white than life or death.
Others choose to claim they’re not black and white things because these things don’t affect them, the people these things do affect are expendable, and because it offends their politics. It suits them to claim such things are not black and white.
And the fact that these things don’t affect them is usually a large part of the reason their politics is the way it is.
That’s always been the way.
Dion Fanning gets it.
…But maybe not this time, maybe this will the tragedy that brings real and revolutionary change. The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea may be the place where a country realised this was no way for people to live and if a system had helped create this, then it was time to break the system.
This was a world driven by the dangerous idea that there is no such thing as society, and which came to believe it was their duty to make it so. As many people have pointed out, the poor lived in Grenfell Tower as they might have done in a JG Ballard novel where the middle class are the proletariat and the poor exist only as stress-busters for the rich.
Grenfell Tower was where those who are demonised and marginalised lived and, tragically, died. It was a home for refugees and for families who may dream of just about managing, but for whom survival is the height of their ambitions. And then even that was taken away early on Wednesday morning.
In Grenfell Tower, children were left alone while the parents worked night shifts and they lived in a death trap, redolent of a past some in Britain still pine for.
And yet they will tell you that socialism has failed, that austerity is necessary and opposing it is an example of naivety, whether youthful or otherwise
If socialism has failed, look at Grenfell Tower and try to make a case for the success of whatever belief system contributed to this disaster.
The worshipper at the altar of the free market is as ideological as the Trotskyite or the Marxist. The solution to the fall of casino capitalism in 2008 was the socialisation of loss and the public bailout of banks, followed by the imposition of austerity, a measure which morphed from necessary measure to an ideological fetish for some with an unseemly glee.
Capitalism, like state socialism, is merely a power structure. They both feed off ideas which have a certain nobility but which are often exploited in practice. The market economy remains the best way to discover what people want and need, but the unregulated market or the lightly regulated one is full of dangers.
The light touch regulation was useless in preventing the crash in 2008, and the regulations in place this time failed to prevent this disaster.
As well as the inquiry, there is also likely to be a change in the approach to social housing in Britain, something which many feel was coming anyway after an election result that gave an indication that the mood of the country has altered.
But now there will be more. Theresa May’s decision not to meet residents when she visited Ladbroke Grove on Thursday was one of the most spectacular failures of leadership in modern times.
May had the opportunity to hear people’s anger, to listen to them confront her and her government about their failings. She did meet the heroic firefighters and while she might have felt it would be a distraction to talk to those who are clearly angry, it would have provided some sense, so lacking, that the government gets it.
Instead it has been left to the marginalised and the dismissed to provide hope. Grenfell Tower sits between Latimer Road and Ladbroke Grove in west London.
It is a multilayered part of a multicultural city, an area which has always been louche and bohemian, as well as a place where the dispossessed and immigrants could settle. There are fewer bohemian and louche parts of London these days. There is just rich and poor living, often uncomfortably, beside each other.
But something of that spirit still exists in Ladbroke Grove and it has manifested itself in the aftermath of the tragedy. It was community leaders who gave direction. It was churches and mosques and ordinary people who provided the embrace for those who are suffering.
It showed that of all the big lies spread over the past thirty years, one can be defeated even during this tragic time. There is such a thing as society. There is such a thing as community and, through these forces which are too often ignored, real change is going to come.
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Theresa May accused Police Federation members of “scaremongering” and “crying wolf” when they warned of the consequences of police cuts.
Boris Johnson wasn’t quite as diplomatic when he was asked how cuts to fire brigade services in London would not result in a poorer service.
“Get stuffed” was his response.
Betteridge rule
Cunts
Protestors are currently occupying Kensington Town Hall and the street outside it.
Hundreds of people matched there spontaneously from the area around Grenfell Tower.
I hope no violence erupts tonight in London but one has to consider that it might be a possibility given the huge anger around.