A couple of weeks after the 2017 Grenfell fire in London, I went to the site to witness the horror for myself. Like everyone, I had seen the fire raging on the TV and across the news feeds, I had read the gut-wrenching reports of deaths and destruction and the omni-present photo of the burnt-out, twisted hulk of a building remained utterly haunting.
I was, undoubtedly, intensely curious to take stock of a continuing news story (that was part of my day job after all) but much, much more than this, I went because I wanted to pay my respects to those who had lost their lives and to try and find a way to understand how such an awful, momentous and deadly event could have come to pass.
Arriving by tube, I walked the streets surrounding the blackened tower sickened by the sheer mangled hell of its reality as it loomed in the sky and pictured the terrible ways in which (we now know) 72 people died.
After a while I came to a small alleyway, which, in the short time since the disaster, had become a shrine to the victims and a meeting point for families and all those seeking solace from the nightmare. Photographs filled the walls of those - young and old - who had been killed, flowers and other mementos were hung around and there were many inscriptions written on pieces of paper and pinned to boards. Lines of poetry, words of love. Remembrances.
The atmosphere in that alley was incredibly powerful - intensely sad yet peculiarly uplifting and human at the same time. There was no escaping the emotion and I am not ashamed to say as I stood looking and reading I shed some tears. At one point, I got talking to a local vicar who was on hand along with other religious figures to offer what he could to those mourning friends and family members. We shared a few moment of togetherness about what a huge tragedy this all was and how for so many people the path to understanding and peace following such incredible losses was going to be long and hard.
Those few hours at Grenfell have stayed with me as an indelible memory. A visceral lesson of what a disaster of such magnitude truly means in terms of human cost.
And it was this memory that came flooding back yet again - as it has on numerous occasions since the fire - when the final Public Inquiry report into Grenfell was published the other day.
After years of evidence and testimony, after the tears of the families and the cold cut and thrust of the lawyers, after the many appearances of officials from the Prime Minister down to local councillors and from the Fire Brigade to the phalanx of companies responsible for the scandalous, slip-shod, death-trap building materials which had clad Grenfell in its cloak of acute vulnerability, here was the official word on what had happened and who and what were to blame.
No-one is spared. Years of government failure, local councils paying lip-service to responsibility, safety regulations ignored, Fire Brigade ineptitude and pages and pages and pages of lies, deceit, cover-up, passing-the-buck and everything in between from the devil companies who designed the cladding for the tower, produced the materials for it or installed it. All have blame erupting out of their ears. The 72 Grenfell deaths lay squarely on all their shoulders.
So, now, with the culprits known, named and shamed, justice will flow right? Those who ignored and turned blind eyes will hold office no more. Those who cheated the systems, said things were safe when they were not, and acted illegally will be dealt with by the law and the ones that should will go to jail, right?
Don’t hold your breath.
The recent past has been littered with politicians, millionaires and billionaires, officials et al doing wrong, breaking so called laws and walking away with not even a hair out of place. T’was ever thus, possibly. But it seems that in the last decade at least the sheer brazenness of the people getting away with it, and not even caring if everyone knows it, has shifted up a few gears. And it’s not now just people but companies, organizations and even public bodies escaping without a meaningful scratch.
Are there no sanctions today for these crimes. No punishments for the national scandals wiping out ordinary people’s lives, wrecking their homes and finances, sending them to prison and making their lives a misery for years to come.
The dodgy deals and the parties over COVID. Where are the jail sentences, the heavy fines, the public shame? Nowhere. Millionaires making millions of tax-payers’ money out of chummy PPE contracts have kept their millions. Ministers linked to dodgy contracts, whooping it up in Downing Street while real people died, have simply left the political stage to write books, pen columns for newspapers, go on TV, all earning fortunes. How many have gone to jail for Hillsborough? The economy wiped out by Liz Truss and her looney cohort and nothing.
Even the Post Office scandal, surely one of the most disgusting examples of modern corporate deceit and wrong-doing ever to emerge, is yet to see anyone punished, except of course the many sub-post folk who were jailed, made penniless, lost their homes and are still suffering to this day. Justice for them. Don’t hold your breath. Compensation, far, far, years too late, is not justice.
One of the companies nailed in the Grenfell report is Kingspan. The report found Kingspan, headquartered in County Cavan, was not directly responsible for the fire but showed ‘complete disregard for fire safety’ in how it marketed one of its products. It also demonstrated ‘deeply entrenched and persistent dishonesty...in pursuit of commercial gain’.
The other day I was riding my bike along the Thames-side near where I live and passed some new industrial storage units being built, the type that are walled with high, insulated panel frames. It was safety-lacking, poorly constructed and installed residential panel frames that, the Grenfell report confirmed, had catastrophically failed the night of the fire.
Riding by, I looked to see the name of who made the panels. Kingspan.
Just think of all those industrial units going up right now in Britain and around the world. Think of all that money involved in that business. And think - will there ever be real justice for the 72 dead at Grenfell?
Don't hold your breath.
The Grenfell Inquiry - https://www.grenfelltowerinquiry.org.uk/
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