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Grenfell Tower: A Tory Wicker Man ?
SPECIAL
REPORT
15
June, 2017
The
week saw one of the worst urban disasters in recent history, as
runaway fires consumed a low-income high-rise council estate in the
London borough of Kensington and Chelsea. So far, police have
confirmed 17 dead and are have indicated that they expect to find
many more fatalities.
As
the old adage goes, there are no natural disasters, only
human ones.
But
this horrific scene in west London symbolises much more than simple
negligence. The image of a Wicker
Man comes
to mind.
Were
low-income residents sacrificed at the altar of austerity, greed and
corporate privatisation?
As
North Kensington’s towering inferno continues to smoulder into the
early morning, circumstantial evidence is beginning to emerge of
showing how Conservative MPs sidelined legislation that would
have required higher safety standards. According to reports,
a group of Tory MPs have consistently voted against tenants’
rights including voting
down Labour’s amendment to the recent Housing and Planning
Bill which would have required landlords to make their homes
“fit for habitation.” Perhaps not surprisingly, the 72
Tory MPs who
killed the legislation also just happened to be commercial landlords
themselves.
To
add insult to injury, Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson during his
tenure as Mayor of London instituted cuts that stripped London
of7,000
of its firefighters in the last five years, with numerous
Fire Station closures and other cuts to frontline emergency services.
So
how did Grenfell Tower turn into a death trap for so many ? The
organisation responsible for maintenance and safety at the social
housing block is the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management
Organisation (KCTMO). But the organisation’s name is deceptive –
far from being a tenant-run company, the ‘TMO’ are actually a
private company – an aloof ivory tower that sits far above the
actual residents, and who ‘manages’ 10,000 properties… with
handsome salaries and fees for selected executives and
contractors. Although
Grenfell Tower is owned by the Borough Council of Kensington and
Chelsea, the management of the tower block is subcontracted out to
the TMO.
Critics
of the public-private partnership, or PPP, management
hand-off claim
that the quasi-privatised TMO arrangement is rife with corruption,
including sweetheart deals to contractors. It also enables connected
board members to fleece poor residents while taking home enormous
sums of money for doing little if anything for it. Last year, the
KCTMO was paid £11million ($14 million) in taxpayer money to
manage Grenfell Tower. According to the Mail
Online, four senior members of TMO took £650,000 between them
last year. And that’s not all:
“There
are also claims that there that there was no central sprinkler system
– or it was also not working properly during the fire. Others have
claimed that the new cladding encasing the block added during last
year’s £10million refurbishment by Rydon
Construction caught alight ‘like a matchstick’.” This
[petroleum-based, flammable plastic] exterior cladding was apparently
added to the building to improve the view and cosmetic appearance of
the tower when seen from a new development or private luxury flats in
the locality.
Apparently,
this was all part of a “regeneration project” which was said to
be completed last year on only one building: Grenfell Tower.
Watch
the full-length live feed of the fire here:
“It’s
emerged that the local Council – the Royal Borough of Kensington
and Chelsea – actually threatened a local blogger and action
group with legal action for calling to attention the state of the
building. We’re told also that “Theresa
May’s chief of staff ‘sat on’ report warning high-rise blocks
like Grenfell Tower were vulnerable to fire.”
Resident
Darren Cullen said on Twitter: “Any attempt to depoliticise an
event like this is a political act in itself.”
Despite
numerous warnings by the residents of Grenfell Tower, local action
groups believe that the TMO did not take any significant action to
rectify fundamental health and safety flaws.
Reporter
Holly Baxter of the London
Independent detailed how a series prophetic warnings posted
by the residents’ advocacy group were routinely ignored:
“The
Grenfell Action Group residents’ association had
consistently warned about the possibility of such a tragedy;
this morning, they
updated their website with a post which reads: “Regular
readers of this blog will know that we have posted numerous warnings
in recent years about the very poor fire safety standards at Grenfell
Tower and elsewhere in RBKC [the Royal Borough of Kensington and
Chelsea]. ALL OUR WARNINGS FELL ON DEAF EARS and we predicted that a
catastrophe like this was inevitable and just a matter of time.”
“Links
to their earlier posts prove it: in
2013 they warned that shutting down the block’s car park
would mean just one narrow, restricted road for emergency vehicle
access, something which eyewitnesses reported slowed down the fire
engine response this morning; the same year, theywrote
a long post about continuous electrical surges which had
been causing fire hazards in the building (“decisive action was
only taken yesterday after highly distressed residents descended en
masse on the estate office to demand help and assistance. They had
woken to find smoke issuing from various electrical appliances in
their homes, including the light fixtures, and descended in panic to
the estate office to demand help”) ; and in November 2016,
their frustration about what they called inadequate fire escapes
culminated in
a frighteningly prescient post titled Playing With Fire:
“The Grenfell Action Group firmly believe that only a catastrophic
event will expose the ineptitude and incompetence of our landlord,
the KCTMO, and bring to an end the dangerous living conditions and
neglect of health and safety legislation that they inflict upon their
tenants and leaseholders… It is our conviction that a serious fire
in a tower block… is the most likely reason those who wield power
at the KCTMO will be found out and brought to justice”.
But
the Tories can’t take all the credit. It’s been said by some
party grandees (not to mention Margret Thatcher herself)
that the Thatcher Era’s greatest achievement was New Labour and
Tony Blair – both of whom helped to push Thatcher’s
mass-privatisation agenda over the goal line. Blair’s corporatist
trojan horse was camouflaged under the heading of a ‘New
Deal for Communities,’ along
with the Neighbourhood
Renewal Unit nested within the Department
for Communities and Local Government and fueled by millions
of pounds in “regeneration grants” from the EU – supposedly
designed to lift-up some of the
England’s most deprived
neighbourhoods, which instead paved the way for a bold social
engineering project which led to the mass-gentrification of low
income areas across the UK, where massive profits were booked on the
back of privatising council properties, taking advantage of an
over-inflated housing market. It was during this period that PPP
takeovers like the TMO took hold of large sectors of Britain’s
social housing.
21WIRE
staff report. Special thanks to contributors Jason Smith, Patrick
Henningsen and Basil Valentin.
UK Column News - 15th June 2017
Blogger gagged by council after warning about Grenfell Tower fire threat
14
June, 2017
A
blogger who warned the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea
council of the dangers lurking in Grenfell Tower was threatened by
local officials for writing about problems in the building.
Home
to over 600 people, Grenfell Tower, in the Lancaster West estate,
west London, was engulfed
in flames in the early hours of Wednesday morning.
The true scale of the tragedy is only gradually becoming clear.
As
early as 2013, a man named Francis O’Connor, a member of the
Grenfell Action Group (GAG), urged councillors and landlord
Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organization (KCTMO) to
address the fire safety
risks that new works on the building would
cause.
GAG
had several times tried to warn the council and the landlord that the
building of a school and gym next to the estate would restrict
emergency services’ access, including firefighting vehicles.
But
a leaked letter reveals that officials at the Royal Borough of
Kensington and Chelsea tried to silence the campaigners, sending a
lawyer to threaten O’Connor.
“I
am instructed that you previously posted blogs that have in general
been critical of everything that takes place at Lancaster West in
relation to the Kensington Academy Leisure Centre and investment on
the estate,” solicitor
Vimal Sarna wrote to O’Connor in July 2013.
It
then instructs the group to delete the blog – an order the group
did not follow.
council threating blogger who highlighted the danger in #GrenfellTower
In
2016, an article on the blog chillingly predicts that only a tragedy
would bring serious attention to the tower’s problems.
“It
is a truly terrifying thought but the Grenfell Action Group firmly
believe that only a catastrophic event will expose the ineptitude and
incompetence of our landlord, the KCTMO, and bring an end to the
dangerous living conditions and neglect of health and safety
legislation that they inflict upon their tenants and
leaseholders,” the
post reads.
“It
is our conviction that a serious fire in a tower block or similar
high density residential property is the most likely reason that
those who wield power at the KCTMO will be found out and brought to
justice!”
But
the scandal seems to reach beyond local council remit, as the Mirror
reports that former Housing Minister Brandon Lewis “sat
on” information
about the several fire risks in buildings such as Grenfell Tower.
According
to the newspaper, Lewis did not take action on safety irregularities
on tower blocks over 30 meters tall because it could “discourage
building.” Instead
he shrugged off suggestions that sprinklers should be installed in
the block. Other
ministers are believed to have also known about
the damning evidence.
The
following message came through to me this morning
British
hospital 18 months without fire alarms
I
couldn't comment this. But I work at a hospital. They have had no
fire alarm for 18 months because of a massive building project (
Mersey Gateway ) which cut the wires.. can you imagine. A hospital!
I'm not allowed to put this on social media - as per my contract of
employment!
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