Insurers, the Fire Service and the Grenfell Tower Tragedy

Not many years ago, the local Fire Brigade would have been needed to certify the arrangements for controlling the risk of fire in the Grenfell Tower, Kensington; as they were for all such buildings. Since the millennium, governments of all parties have slackened the regulations and the Fire Brigade has no statutory role in fire protection. Whether or not the London Fire Brigade was aware of the innate vice in the sort of cladding that was recently applied to the Tower is a moot point, because the brigade was no required to verify the suitability of the material.

The local authority [as the ultimate owner of the structure] and the management company did what was minimally necessary to comply with safety law: which was thereby shown to be grossly inadequate.

In parallel with the slackening of standards for fire certification of structures, so insurers made economies [thus keeping down the cost of policies] by becoming much less interventionist in regard to the structures they insured. Half a century ago, an early stage in the career of any promising recruit to the insurance industry included a period - usually a few years - serving as an Inspector. By sending inspectors to make announced and unannounced checks on the buildings and the processes that they insured, the insurer could be reasonably satisfied that the conditions applied to the policy were being met. Thus the subject of the insurance was compliant with the law on structural soundness, health and safety and any special regulations relating to what the building or the machinery was used for. More recently insurers have shunted the burden of verification to the insured, who simply "warrants" that the conditions of the policy, including legal requirements, are fully met.

 If, in such circumstances, a George Osborne heavily influenced by the Econocrats come into power, the fire brigade and the insurer have no direct influence in the operational decisions taken by the occupant of a building [such as a housing management company].

On a national scale, admonished and applauded by the Econocracy, young George pursued his historic mission to eradicate the deficit on the national accounts: by imposing austerity. The only other way to remove a deficit of the size of the British budget deficit in 2010 would have been by a massive scheme of investment to kick-start economic growth: which was ideological anathema to the Econocracy. The coalition government in which George was loosed upon the economy deliberately decided on the austerity policy, as a whole government of Conservative and Liberal Democrats. Thus they were - entirely unintentionally - responsible for the impact of austerity on the Grenfell Tower. Combine that with the previous Labour government's decision to reduce the cost of the fire service by removing their role in building certification, and a diabolical cocktail of governmental failure was served up to the residents of Grenfell and [apparently] dozens of other towers.

Little local people all went along with the flow, and some may be faced by charges of personal liability; but the real chain of high command that was responsible for the tragedy is unambiguously clear.

The Edge of the Cliff?

There is just a possibility that Labour could be the largest party in the Commons on Friday; which would lead to talk of 'agreements' with the Scots Nationalists and [just possibly] a coalition with any Liberal Democrats who make it past the electoral hurdle that is to come. There is a greater probability that the Tories will be the largest party; perhaps, even, with an overall majority.

Mrs May has shown herself to be anything but 'strong and stable' and she has virtually excluded her colleagues from campaigning on a national scale. Her biggest ally, in my view, is Diane Abbot, whose utterly crass performance has shown the disbenefits of positive discrimination. May's biggest failure is not the vacillation on security that has embarrassed the entire country in the last days of the campaign, but her total failure to understand the crucial economic issues that will overwhelm any incoming government.

The precarious condition of the Health Service will become conspicuous in every community, just at the same time as the substantive cuts to school budgets affect every parent and grandparent in the country. Massive protests will spontaneously appear, and communities will take kinds of 'direct action' that will be entirely new [and alien] to the UK. If the Tories are in power, they will have to abandon the Osborne austerity. If Labour are the apparent winners, they will not be able to implement their manifesto promises quickly enough to prevent tragedies occurring. As the pound sinks in external value, prices will rise and that will massively increase the obvious underfunding of the essential services.

The next government will not rule: it will be subject to events. Neither set of leaders has displayed the capability to cope with the complex of problems that will overwhelm them. The civil service has been demoralised and stretched thinly: any contingency plans that they have been able to elaborate will be inadequate: and there are no real resources to allocate to them.

Hence a government of either party, or a squalidly shaky coalition, or even a 'grand coalition' will have no alternative: they will have to fund more police, more military, at least the existing numbers of doctors and nurses and beds, and the same cohort of teachers and other school staff. This can only be done by raiding the 'money tree': inflating the money supply. This will accelerate the rises in prices that will come from the diminished external exchange rate of the pound. Labour's tax policies would take far too long to implement, if they became the government, before the public finances were overwhelmed.

Whatever sort of government emerges as the 'winner', or is cobbled together over the next few weeks, will be in an incredibly weak position; and certainly not fit to press ahead with the Brexit negotiation.

China in the Driving Seat

It has been made known during the past week that the British Department of Energy and Climate Change [in my childhood, it was the Ministry of Fuel and Power] is in discussion with Chinese authorities with a view to installing Chinese-built nuclear power plant - funded by Chinese capital - in the United Kingdom. German and French companies have progressively drawn back from making any definite offers to construct the next generation of nuclear power plant for their UK subsidiaries as the euro crisis has developed and the probability of making a profit from providing electricity in the UK has diminished.

Britain was the world leader in nuclear research until the Second World War when a cohort of her leading experts in applied nuclear energy were exported, with their knowledge and their plans, to the safer territory of the USA to contribute to the Manhattan Project with the leading American experts. The rapid success of that exercise, enabling the first atom bombs to be used in anger in 1945, was significantly due to the British input: though the USA undoubtedly put in the greater intellectual resources as well as the funds that carried the project forward. At the end of the war some Britons came home; but the Americans embargoed any export of the technology, even to the UK which had freely contributed all that it had available. The Atlee Labour government decided that they must have nuclear weapons if they were to keep Britain as a power in the world, and despite the postwar austerity regime the funds were found to make a new start to bring this about. The civilian application of nuclear power was already projected, and nuclear-powered vessels - especially submarines - came on the planning horizon.

Thus Britain became a nuclear power, originally alongside only the USA and the USSR, in both military and civil applications. Nuclear power came into supply in just two decades after the war: with the power stations build by British firms with access to sufficient British [state] capital. Then it all went wrong.

Successive governments of both major parties cut back spending on the nuclear sector, as on defence generally, as they took up the socialistic agenda of subsidising unearned incomes for both the employed and non-employed members of society. The 'green' lobby emerged, with their profoundly irrational loathing of nuclear energy, and politicians could feel better about about allowing the UK to fall behind in this area of technology on the grounds that they were recognising ecological considerations. Facilities for designing nuclear installations were diminished and then stood down, and the residual capability to design and build nuclear power plant was sold abroad. In no area of economy or military technology has Britain more shamefully and shabbily sold out the future that in nuclear power and weaponry. The nuclear missiles carried on British submarines are bought from the USA and the suppliers hold a veto on their use: so the idea of an 'independent nuclear deterrent' is a sour joke.

And now the shabby political dwarfs who form the coalition government have admitted that the future 'mix' of power supplies in the UK must include a nuclear component: so they are toting around the possibility of profiting from British consumers - with cast-iron guarantees that they will make a profit on the whole venture, including eventual decommissioning - to the countries that have developed nuclear power-plant construction over the same period as Britain has withdrawn from the field. It is increasingly obvious that even with massive subsidies and fake pricing models the windmill obsession will be a costly disaster; before metal fatigue cuts short the estimated 'life' of twenty-something years for the turbines.

So the nuclear option becomes more obviously necessary: as it is accepted as a 'given' that the country has no capacity to produce the generating capacity itself; though that it not strictly true. Rolls Royce's residual capacity to provide nuclear propulsion for submarines could, with sufficient drive and resourcing, be scaled up massively. Just as most English water consumers pay for the profits of foreign-owned companies, so buyers of electricity largely do the same; and will do so even more in future if the present approach to the nuclear option is pursued. There is no better or clearer example of the devastation that has been caused to the real economy by the consensual all-party shambles that the politicians have delivered over the past half-century.