Grenfell Tower – will the truth ever survive the politics?

(Given the level of hysteria and the deluge of false claims and lies surrounding the Grenfell Tower disaster, Friday’s blog will be longer than usual. And I may also leave it up both for Friday and for the weekend because I believe it’s important for the true facts to be revealed and the politicians’ and journalists’ lies to be exposed)

After the Grenfell Tower fire disaster, Labour (as usual eagerly supported by the libtards at the BBC and Channel 4 News) were quick to build a narrative that went something like this – in London’s richest borough (Kensington and Chelsea) a Tory council, that didn’t care about housing for the poor, and Tory austerity cuts were responsible for the Grenfell deaths or “Grenfell murders” as Labour’s Shadow Chancellor, John McDonnell so elegantly put it during his Glastonbury speech to the politically-correct idiots at the music festival. And. of course, London’s Labour Mayor, Sadiq Khan, is busy scoring political points by insisting that commissioners be sent in to run Tory-controlled Kensington and Chelsea council.

So, in this blog, I’ll try to put forward a few facts which may paint a very different picture to the one Corbyn and McDonnell and Khan and Laura Kuensberg and Jon Snow and Cathy Newman and Krishnan WhateverHisName etc seem so keen to sell to us.

Here are possibly 6 of the most important facts:

1. The Tory council was not responsible

The block of flats was run not by the Council, but by Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation (KCTMO).

In the early 1990s, the tenants and leaseholders of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea decided to pursue their legal right to manage their own homes. Following two separate ballots in 1994 and 1995, the KCTMO was established on 1 April 1996 and the responsibility for managing 9,760 properties passed from The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea to the KCTMO.

The Council still owns the properties and retains responsibility for strategic housing policies and homeless people. The relationship between KCTMO and the Council is governed by a Management Agreement, which covers all areas of the landlord business. Whilst KCTMO still enjoys a close working relationship with the Council, it is a completely separate company.

In 2002 KCTMO took over the responsibility for major capital works from the Council to access extra resources and funding to enable KCTMO to bring the properties up to the Decent Homes Standard.

KCTMO is managed by a Board of Directors comprising of 8 elected tenant and leaseholder members, 4 appointed Councillor members and 3 independent appointed other members.

Shall I repeat that?

KCTMO is managed by a Board of Directors comprising of 8 elected tenant and leaseholder members, 4 appointed Councillor members and 3 independent appointed other members. This means that the majority of people running the KCTMO accused of “not listening to tenants” were tenants and/or leaseholders!!!!!

So, if Labour or Corbyn or John McDonnell or Khan and the BBC and Channel 4 News are looking for their “Grenfell Tower murderers”, they can find them among the people responsible for running the KCTMO and not the Council.

When the much-maligned head of the Council stated something like “the tenants didn’t want the disruption of installing sprinklers” he was probably correct in that it would have been the KCTMO, majority run by tenants (and not the Council), that took the decision not to spend an additional £138k on fitting sprinklers.

Of course, the Council’s response to the fire was dismal. Probably, most of the councillors are pompous, self-important, self-serving, verbally-flatulent, incompetent buffoons (as are most people serving on councils – Labour and Tory). But legally and morally, responsibility for management of social housing lay with the KCTMO and had the Council tried to interfere with the KCTMO’s work, there would have been the usual lefty libtard howls of outrage against the supposed privileged ruling classes denying council tenants the right to manage their own homes (as defined by the law – see point 2 below).

2. Labour introduced the legislation empowering tenant management organisations

The laws laying down the rights of tenants to create Arms Length Management Organisations (ALMO) such as the KCTMO were made under the Right To Manage legislation passed in 2002 as part of the Commonhold and Leasehold Reform Act.

This was put in place to give leaseholders and tenants stronger and well-defined legal rights to a greater say and the ability to self manage (which in some circumstances has clearly proven to be flawed).

Who was in a charge when this law was passed? It was Blair’s New Labour.

Moreover, as far as I  understand, many of the buildings now being found dangerous – due to flammable cladding, defective fire doors, inadequate sprinklers etc – (such as the Chalcott Estate high rises re-clad in 2006) were refurbished during Blair and Brown’s period in power from 1997 to 2010, not during supposed “Tory austerity”.

3. Labour MP Emma Coad’s responsibility

The MP for the ward is none other than Emma Coad who won the seat by around just 20 votes in the recent General Election

Ms Dent Coad has been one of the most vocal critics of the Council and made her maiden speech in the Commons about the Grenfell Tower fire. Coad has accused Tory-led Kensington and Chelsea Council of failures that led to the blaze, claiming “poor-quality materials and construction standards have played a part in this hideous and unforgivable event”.

But as a councillor (since May 2006) Coad was on Kensington and Chelsea’s Housing and Property Scrutiny Committee, which oversees “community safety issues”, until May 2014. A 2014/15 report, in which she is named, says the committee scrutinised work on Grenfell Tower. Moreover, Ms Coad has been active in deciding building matters for many years as she was also on the Council’s Major Planning Development Committee

Furthermore, guess who was one of the 3 appointed Councillor members (from 2008 to 2012) of the KCTMO, that was responsible for the building works and accused of “not listening to tenants”. Yup, you guessed, it was none other than Labour MP and former Labour councillor for many years Emma Coad.

Ooops!

4. Was the building a Third-World slum?

Apparently there was only one stairwell down which people could escape. But were residents prevented from getting down the stairwell and through corridors due to burning piles of rubbish left by residents themselves? 

If so, we can be sure that political correctness will prevent this fact ever coming out.

Residents had apparently been complaining about the rubbish for some time, but it was the KCTMO (where a majority of directors were residents) that was responsible for rubbish clearance.

5. Labour are responsible for the ‘under-funded’ London Fire Service

London’s Mayor, Sadiq Khan has made lots of political capital by claiming that London’s Fire Service was underfunded and that the Fire Service’s advice for people to stay put was responsible for so many deaths.

But who is in overall charge of London’s fire service? Labour London Mayor Sadiq Khan!

Moreover, Sadiq Khan as mayor of London produced a report to say that the fire service did not need further funding. And I suspect Mr Khan has been extraordinarily generous with taxpayers’ money when it comes to funding Religion of Peace community groups giving them millions that could have been spent on better equipment for the London Fire Service. Moreover, I seem to remember that just after being elected Khan spent several hundred thousand pounds of London taxpayers’ money setting up a special police unit to investigate ‘hate crimes’ and ‘hate speech’. Perhaps Mr Khan’s priorities were slightly misplaced?

Anyway, guess who is a member of Mayor Khan’s London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority – surprise surprise it’s none other than our favourite Labour Councillor and now MP Emma Coad. It seems that Ms Coad is very busy indeed with building management and fire safety issues in the borough and throughout London until things go wrong! Then she launches her (self-serving?) tirades of criticism (at the bodies of which she was and is a leading member)

Ooops and double ooops!

6. The role of EU environmental regulations

When the Grenfell Tower was built, the cladding materials were glass-based and inert. Fire could not pass through or behind the cladding. Since then, authority for specification of construction materials has passed from individual governments to the EU. The EU has decreed, as part of climate change initiatives, that the main purpose of cladding is to provide insulation, thus reducing the need to burn fuel. When, three years ago, the tenant-run KCTMO spent £8m+ on up-grading the Grenfell Tower, it had no option but to use cladding permitted by the EU.

What we don’t yet know is whether flammable or non-flammable cladding was specified in the KCTMO’s refurbishment contract and who specified the flammable cladding. But it is possible that a flammable cladding was used as it was seen to have better insulation properties and thus be more environmentally friendly than the non-flammable version. Hopefully the inquiry will shed light on why the KCTMO chose flammable cladding. But I’m doubtful.

Conclusion

On Thursday I wrote about the Hillsborough and Heysel tragedies. Whereas everyone was rightly putting blame on poor regulations and incompetent policing, I tried to make the politically-incorrect suggestion that the behaviour of hordes of drunken, yobbish Liverpool fans was the underlying cause of both the Heysel and Hillsborough deaths.

Looking at the above facts, I humbly suggest that political correctness will similarly prevent the truth about Grenfell Tower coming out.

And what is that truth?

• The tenants’ organisation (KCTMO), accused of “not listening to tenants”, was operating under laws passed by Labour to give greater control to tenants
• The tenants and a Labour Councillor (and later MP) had majority control over the KCTMO
• The KCTMO (not the Council) was responsible for the refurbishment
• The new Labour MP, Emma Coad, played a major role as councillor on Council building committees and as one of the 3 appointed members of the KCTMO
• Emma Coad seems to me to have done an excellent job avoiding responsibility for her own role in the disaster
• Many similarly dangerous refurbishments were done in Labour councils under the New Labour government
• Labour London Mayor, Sadiq Khan, was responsible for the fire service that he criticises so much
• It may have been piles of rubbish left by residents which helped spread the fire and blocked residents’ escape routes
• It may have been EU environmental rules which led to the specification of flammable cladding

But I doubt the lefties and libtards in politics and the media will allow anything like the truth to intrude on their “we hate the Tories” version of events.

(Readers can leave comments by clicking on the title)

(As regular readers – if there are any left – will know, only 0.1% of readers have bought my latest book FORGET THE FOREPLAY. Apparently 99.9% of readers are too tight to show some support for my work by buying a copy. Perhaps the work I have just done trying to expose some of the truth about Grenfell Tower will convince a few more tight-fisted readers to part with a few quid? Perhaps not!)