The media have made fewer references to 'banana republics' in recent years than they used to do, and I wonder whether this is because Britain itself is taking on more of the character of such a state as the imperial past fades from memory.
Popular reaction to Mrs May since the fire in Kensington justly reflects the anger and incomprehension that her deadpan, delayed response to the incident has stimulated. It is notable that the 'victims' of the incident are almost all immigrants: I have just seen reports of two white British occupants of the Grenfell Tower, both elderly people of the sort who are left behind when the rest of the originally-indigenous population remove themselves as a block or a district becomes a focus for migrant settlement. To put it simply [albeit crudely] less-potent, mostly alien people were dumped in that building; and treated accordingly. The building was cladded to improve its appearance in proximity to multi-million-pound properties; but at the risk that was summarised in this blog yesterday. Mrs May is learning - all-too-slowly - that a sop of £5 million is received as an insult.
It is tragic that the mostly-immigrant people who have lost everything in the fire simply do not understand - and now they will not accept - that it takes many months to identify charred fragments of bones as people rather than dogs or cats, and then to attempt DNA analysis of the human remains. Of course, most of the dead who are yet to be found will be identified within a few weeks, from their location in the building and because their bodies will have been less completely consumed in the flames that the extreme cases mentioned in the previous sentence. In the vacuum, a head of steam is being stimulated: by genuine grief and anger, and by agitators who are gathering from the whole of the home counties. The government is so gloriously inept in its responses, in the face of glib repetition of carefully adapted Marxist slogans by Messers McDonnell and Corbyn, that control of the situation is moving away from them.
At the very least, there needs to be an immediate national programme to remove all flammable panels from tall buildings, which will leave a massive mess of ugly exteriors which will need to be patched to make them temporarily weatherproof. Simultaneously, sprinklers must be installed; at first in circulation areas: and the doors of supposedly-compartmentalised flats need to be validated as fire resistant, or replaced. Such a programme needs to be effected in a very tight time frame: not more than two years; after which the residual eyesores will have to be refurbished properly and safely. That will be a ten-year programme, and its cost will necessarily override Osbornian austerity. Thus it will make necessary a massive release of funding, both by the government and within the private sector, to drive forward the real economic growth that is required to make such schemes affordable from future national income. The many dozens of references in this blog to the need for productiveness to enhance productivity show the only way towards achieving this.
Hundreds of thousands of people have been put at increased risk as a consequence of cheapened cosmetic processes undertaken by cash-strapped local authorities and spun-off housing management companies who have been constrained by capped council tax revenues and diminished government grants. The whole direction of policy since the fake 'prosperity' promoted b the Thatcher regime must be reversed: though not down the dark alley to which Corbyn and McDonnell are pointing us.
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