I saw this chart on the GB News website. I don’t know what period it refers to, but the difference between gimme-free-gear, 10-tier Keir and other MPs is astonishing:
And then we mustn’t forget the delectable Lady Victoria Starmer who doesn’t seem to be allergic to pocketing a few bob’s worth of fancy frocks now that her husband is vying for the prize of being Parliament’s leading scrounger thanks to the selfless generosity of such pillars of the establishment as Lord Alibaba (or whatever he’s called):
I haven’t seen Neil Oliver so angry
I would disagree with a few issues in this video like:
Russia has already won the war in Ukraine
The chaos in Haiti is the fault of US meddling (my fear of Starmer’s thought-police thugs prevent me commenting further about the situation in hopeless Haiti)
Whether Colonel Douglas Macgregor (whom Neil Oliver quotes) is totally unbiased
and maybe a few other small points
However, (as US political ads often say) “I endorse this message”:
It’s all too easy to write Armageddon-style, clickbait headlines. So, hopefully most people see these for what they are – pathetic attempts by third-rate supposed ‘journalists’ to boost their own readership, profile and careers. After all, there’s the well-known press aphorism – “if it bleeds, it leads” – meaning the more shock factor a story has, the more likely it is to feature strongly in any media’s output.
But this time we really are doomed:
Legally-binding stupidity
What is dooming us is our useless, self-serving, expenses-fiddling, virtue-signalling, lying politicians’ decision to make the targets in their ludicrous Climate Change Act legally binding. Some readers may remember that only five or seven (I think) out of 650 MPs were smart enough to vote against the Climate Change Act and the irony that it was passed in April 2008 on a day when (if I remember correctly) there was unusually heavy snowfall in London.
We are now just beginning to see that disastrous effect that making the Climate Change act legally binding is having on British jobs, the UK economy and all our lives:
The billionaire-funded eco fanatics launched a legal challenge whether Surrey Council had acted unlawfully in approving the planning application by Horse Hill Developments Ltd to expand an existing site on the Weald to include drilling four additional oil wells. Their claim was that in their environmental impact assessment the council had failed to take into account the carbon dioxide emissions that would occur when the oil, or products derived from the oil, were burnt. The development was blocked by our ‘wise’ judges
The most recent casualty of this precedent is the High Court ruling against West Cumbria Mining who were pursuing permission for the UK’s first new deep coalmine in 30 years. The scheme had been approved in December 2022 under Michael Gove’s ‘levelling up’ remit. Again the complainants’ claim was that the environmental impact of the ultimate combustion of the coal should have been included in the decision on the planning application, but had not been. The development was blocked by our ‘wise’ judges
By making the targets set in the Climate Change Act legally binding, our waste-of-skin MPs have opened the floodgates for the billionaire-funded eco-fanatics to challenge any development on the basis that any development will inevitably increase CO2 emissions. For the moment, the climate catastrophists are only attacking proposed new developments. But how long will it be before they start looking at existing commercial acivities like factories, warehouses and infrastructure and start demanding that these be closed down (with the loss of thousands of jobs) by claiming that such activity makes it less likely that the UK will reach its 2050 legally-binding Net Zero targets?
A great time to invest in Britain?
You don’t have to be a clever economist like Rachel ‘Robber’ Reeves to see what effect these legally-binding Net Zero targets will have on the British economy. After all, what international or even British company will choose to build a new factory or warehouse or anything in Britain if they will be faced with years of legal challenges by the well-funded climate catastrophists? And what international or even British company will choose to build a new factory or warehouse or anything in Britain if they have to deal with raving red temptress Angela Rayner’s new employee rights whereby any employee can demand to work from home and to claim that any time their boss speaks to them this can harm their mental health requiring weeks or even months of fully-paid leave?
Brilliant Israel – delivering a kick in the Hezbollocks
It’s not often that one has good news to celebrate nowadays. But today the civilised world is rejoicing at the brilliance of what would seem to be Israel’s latest attack on the crazies of Hezbollah. Exploding pagers injure around 2,800 Hezbollan maniacs. Of course, the BBC and C4 News tried to spin the story as Israel injuring hundreds of innocents and we got the usual claims of ‘women and children’ being hurt. But these pagers were only issued to active Hezbollah fighters, so we should take the anti-semitic BBC’s and C4 News’s anti-Israel ranting with more than a pinch of salt. Moreover, the fact that Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon was also injured by his exploding pager rather gives the game away about Iran’s involvement in running Hezbollah.
A warning from 1972?
And while I’m taking the day off from reporting on doom and gloom in Davos-adoring Commie Kommissar Starmer’s increasingly-bankrupt, freedom-crushing, prison-camp Britain, here’s a short, rather prescient clip from a 1972 episode of Till Death Do Us Part. Enjoy:
So we hear that some lord or other has written yet another report about our collapsing NHS. I haven’t read it and won’t waste my time on reading it. So I don’t know what’s in it. But I suspect:
it doesn’t mention the pressure put on the NHS by our rulers allowing more than 5 million migrants coming to the UK from countries with limited to no health services and who will therefore use the NHS much more than the average British citizen. After all, that would not be politically correct
it doesn’t mention the fact that the NHS squanders over £100,000,000 a year on worthless DIE (Diversity, Inclusion and Equality) managers when the NHS workforce is already much more diverse than the UK population. After all, that would not be politically correct
it doesn’t mention the huge amount of NHS and social care resources being used to deal with the appalling and predictable consequences of consanguineous marriages. After all, that would not be politically correct
it doesn’t mention the fact that probably up to a third of foreign-born nurses and probably many foreign-born doctors got their qualifications by cheating and corruption. For example, after a disastrous crash in utterly corrupt Pakistan, it was discovered that a third of PIA’s pilots weren’t qualified to fly a plane. And a couple of years ago, it was found that nurses coming from utterly corrupt Nigeria had been cheating on an industrial scale in getting their qualifications. But mentioning that would not be politically correct
it will blame us for the NHS’s problems because we’re living too long and are too fat and unhealthy. So, to save the NHS the government needs to restrict what we can eat and how we live our lives. It will mention that because that is politically correct
More managers – fewer hospital beds
About 13 years ago, I wrote a book SQUANDERED about the massive scale of incompetence and waste under the Blair/Brown government. One of the charts I produced about the NHS showed that while the number of NHS managers went from about 25,000 to about 34,000, the number of hospital beds managed by those managers fell. So under Blair/Brown the NHS went from around 8 beds per manager to under 4 beds per manager:
I haven’t looked at the latest figures, but I suspect that the number of managers has continued to increase and the number of beds has continued to fall. So one might be tempted to wonder what all those managers do all day.
The strange case of the hospital car park
Whatever one may think about NHS managers, there seems to be one common behaviour – whenever there is a problem causing patient injuries or deaths, the managers do everything in their power to ignore what’s going wrong, to cover up problems and to persecute anyone daring to blow the whistle on such problems. We’ve seen that during the Mid-Staffs disaster, numerous maternity ward scandals, the Letby case and now the investigation of possibly 731 cases of medical malpractice at the ‘envy of the world’ Great Ormond Street children’s hospital.
I had my own run in with NHS hospital management a few years ago. I was elected as one of the governors at my local hospital. At the time the hospital had built a multi-storey car park for about £5,000,000. Having worked in almost 100 organisations in 15 countries you start to get an instinct about things which aren’t quite right. So I did a small investigation of how much other hospital car parks had cost to build comparing the cost per parking space. This suggested that the hospital where I was an elected governor should only have paid around £3,500,000 for its car park.
There were some other oddities about the contract:
this car park should have been cheap to build as it was on flat ground, far away from the town centre with easy access from a dual carriageway
the firm building it had built a shopping centre car park just about 2 miles away and this car park was a disaster which had to be completely rebuilt at enormous cost due to construction problems
the firm building it had been found by the Competition and Markets authority to be the most corrupt in Britain due to its use of what’s called ‘cover pricing’. ‘Cover pricing’ occurs when several construction companies are invited to bid for a project. They get together and agree which company will get each project by all of them submitting hugely inflated bids with the chosen company submitting an inflated bid slightly below those of its supposed competitors
Once I had gathered evidence that the hospital had probably been overcharged by about £1,500,000 on the car park, I submitted this to hospital management. In reply I got a letter informing me that the role of an elected governor was to represent the hospital to the public and not to get involved in hospital management. I also contacted the NHS fraud department. I was visited by two supposed fraud inspectors. They showed no interest in looking at the material I had gathered and informed me that they did not feel that my claims merited further investigation.
But I doubt the good lord’s report will cover the issue of much of NHS management being unnecessary, useless, incompetent, arse-covering, over-paid, over-pensioned garbage.
I have already bored readers many times by pointing out that Britain’s supposed success in reducing CO2 emissions:
Has resulted in Britain having some of the world’s highest energy prices:
This has led to a collapse in manufacturing as our manufacturing jobs have been outsourced to other countries:
The chart below should show even the most intellectually-challenged UK politician where our British jobs have gone:
This wilful and suicidal de-industrialisation of the UK has severely damaged the UK economy:
I have also written about how our rulers’ green delusions are behind the coming job losses (about 2,800 well-paid skilled jobs) at the Port Talbot steelworks and the 400 job losses from the closure of the Grangemouth oil refinery.
We’re told that the Grangemouth oil refinery is closing because it’s no longer competitive with refineries abroad. So, instead of refining some of our own oil and petrol, we’ll ship it abroad to have it refined and then ship it back to Grangemouth which will be reduced to just being an importing terminal.
I thought it might be worth spending just a couple of minutes investigating why the Grangemouth refinery is so uncompetitive. Part of the problem, I believe, is that being a smallish and older refinery Grangemouth is not as efficient or cost effective as some newer larger foreign refineries. But we can also look at the cost structure of a typical refinery:
You’ll see that most of the cost – around 85% – is due to the crude and other oils bought in to be refined. These are likely to be similar for all refineries. So, to understand why some refineries are more competitive than others, we we need to look at operating costs (the first column on the above table). Here we see that about 46% (40.7% plus 5.3%) of operating costs are energy costs. So, if a foreign refinery has energy costs like refineries in the US that are half the UK’s energy costs or refineries in China or India which have energy costs around a quarter of the energy costs for a UK refinery, there’s no possibility of a UK refinery competing on costs. Moreover, UK energy costs are likely to rise significantly due to Miliband offering energy firms installing new wind turbines and solar farms guaranteed energy prices which are 20% to 30% above current prices. Thus it’s bye bye to 400 jobs at Grangemouth. And it will also be bye bye to many thousands of jobs at other UK-based manufacturing sites.
Unite general secretary Sharon Graham said: “This is an act of industrial vandalism, pure and simple.” But it’s her party, the Labour Party, the party which is meant to support workers, which is taking over the useless lying Tories’ Net Zero industrial suicide and accelerating it. Sharon Graham has also been quoted as saying: “This is now the last chance for this Labour government to show whether its (sic) really on the side of workers and communities. The road to net zero cannot be paid for with workers’ jobs.”
Labour’s green policies are “hollowing out working-class communities”, said Gary Smith, the leader of GMB, Britain’s third-biggest union. The Government, he said, must stop “decarbonisation through deindustrialisation”.
When will our unions realise that you can have mad eco-clown Ed Miliband’s Net Zero, with its massively-increased energy prices and deindustrialisation, or you can have workers’ jobs but you cannot have both?
Net Zero and workers’ jobs are mutually exclusive.
Recently the Guardian and the BBC and most of the other mainstream media reported that 2023 had been the ‘hottest year since records began’ and that 2024 was on track to be even hotter.
Here’s what the ever-reliable Guardian wrote:
Summer 2024 sweltered to Earth’s hottest on record, making it even more likely that this year will end up as the warmest humanity has measured, the European climate service Copernicus reported on Friday. And if this sounds familiar, that’s because the records the globe shattered were set just last year as human-caused climate change, with a temporary boost from an El Niño, keeps dialing up temperatures and extreme weather, scientists said. The northern meteorological summer – June, July and August – averaged 16.8C (62.24F), according to Copernicus. That’s 0.03C (0.05F) warmer than the old record in 2023.
Here’s the chart Copernicus helpfully produced to back up its claims:
The Guardian added: ‘Copernicus records go back to 1940, but American, British and Japanese records, which start in the mid-19th century, show the last decade has been the hottest since regular measurements were taken and probably in about 120,000 years, according to some scientists.’
Let’s just take a moment to look at Copernicus’s claim:
I honestly don’t believe that reliable temperature records were being kept during the chaos and slaughter of the 1939-1945 war years. I suspect Copernicus’s records are based on computer simulations using the very few temperature-measuring stations which were available. And as we all know – GIGO
Due to the fact that temperatures were not measured in most of the world until recently, the first reasonably reliable temperature measurements didn’t start till satellites began to be used in the 1970s. Moreover, satellites don’t directly measure temperature or the surface where people live. Instead, they measure the brightness of Earth’s atmosphere. Scientists then use computer models designed by scientists, who know that their grants and even jobs depend on them proselytising the global boiling hoax, to convert this brightness data into temperature information. And as we all know, a computer model can always produce just the answer you want it to
The Guardian specifically mentions the long history of records in the UK, US and Japan. But we know that only around 17% of the meteorogical stations used in the UK are classed as reliable by the World Meteorological Organisation. The other 83% are corrupted by things like the Urban Heat Island effect. You’ll hopefully remember that the UK’s supposedly ‘hottest ever’ temperatures are regularlly reported at Heathrow Airport where the number of pasengers and amount of freight carried by ever larger planes increase every year, Coninghsby RAF base, where Typhoon jets regularly fly, and at a very secluded spot in Cambridge Botanical Gardens surrounded by large buildings whose airconditioning systems are pumping out hot air.
Just to use the Heathrow example, here is the increase in passenger numbers and freight:
Given this increase, it’s hardly surprising temperatures at Heathrow keep increasing.
And if we look at US temperature data, we see that the boiling hot 1920s and 1930s, the ‘dustbowl’ years featured in John Steinbeck’s novel Grapes of Wrath, when incidentally atmospheric CO2 levels were much lower than they are today, were much hotter than anything experienced in the last 90 years:
Here the key trick being played on us by the climate catastrophists at the Guardian and BBC and elsewhere is the choice of the 1940s being used as the starting point for their claims. Given that the 1920s and 1930s were a period of record high temperatures, it’s hardly surprising that the lying climate catastrophists in the mainstream media manage to find some excuse to choose to ignore them while claiming recent temperatures are ‘the hottest ever’.
But never mind that the whole ‘hottest year ever’ is complete nonsense. This won’t prevent crazed, demented eco-buffoon Ed Miliband, enthusiastically egged on by most of the British mainstream media, from wrecking the British economy by stopping all North Sea oil and gas exploration and trying to replace cheap, reliable fossil fuel energy with ludicrously-expensive, intermittent and unreliable wind and solar power making increasingly bankrupt Britain the laughing stock of the world.
I don’t have any profound insights to share with readers today. So, instead of me trying to think of something, here’s an interview with the mainstream media’s choice for the free world’s next leader:
At a time when the Starmer government starts releasing convicted criminals in order to make room in our prisons for people who dare disagree with Starmer’s and Cooper’s open-borders, bring-in-the-third-world free-for all, I am reminded of a quote by Russian dissident and author Alexander Solzhenitsyn:
“A Communist system can be recognised by the fact that it spares the criminals and criminalises the political opponent” Alexander Solzhenitsyn
I hardly need to add to that.
Labour’s 4 Horsemen (Horsepeople?) of the Apocalypse
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse is a metaphor depicting the end of times in the New Testament. They describe conquest, war, hunger, and death:
Gruppenfuhrer Starmer talks about economic growth. But his new Four Horsemen (Horsepeople?) of the Labour Apocalypse are actually bringing poverty, misery, unemployment and national bankruptcy while crushing our freedoms and terrifying us into docile obedience with threats of prosecution and imprisonment for any criticism of the coming Starmageddon.
Instead of the original Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse – conquest, war, hunger, and death – now we have Miliband, Rayner, Reeves and Starmer:
Ed MIliband’s unhinged Net Zero lunacy is wrecking our North Sea oil and gas energy industry and replacing cheap reliable fossil fuel energy with expensive, intermittent and unreliable wind and solar. Miliband is accelerating the eco-stupidity started by his ludicrous 2008 Climate Change Act and then continued by the fake useless Tories. This has already massively increasing energy prices giving us some of the most expensive energy in the world. The result is the decimation of British manufacturing industry, the bankruptcy of many British companies destroying hundreds of thousands of jobs and poorer people being forced to have to choose between heating and eating
Angela Rayner new workers’ rights will give employees the right to demand a 4-day week for a 5-day salary, to demand working from home and the right to refuse any employers’ requests they find ‘stressful’. This will dissuade companies from employing more people and dissuade them from investing in Britain when their investment will be much more welcome in increasingly wealthy countries like Poland and Hungary
Rachel Reeves’s tax assault on anyone daring to create wealth will drive entrepreneurs out of the country leading us to economic decline and increasing impoverishment
Keir Starmer‘s open-borders, import-the-uneducated-and-unemployable Third-World policies will wreck our communities, increase inter-community tensions, bankrupt the welfare state and destroy our country.
Crushing any criticism of Starmergeddon
We truly are living in momentous times when our government is intent on wrecking our country and immiserating us all. But perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the coming Starmergeddon is the way the government is using our worthless plods to stamp on anyone daring to criticise government policies. We’ve all seen Two-Tier Keir’s two-tier justice system in which the anti-immigration protestors were arrested, prosecuted and jailed within just a couple of days while our normally incompetent police manage to solve fewer than 1% of burglaries and only 1% to 2% of rapes.
But here’s yet another example of Two-Tier Keir’s corruption of our justice system which you won’t see reported by the BBC or any other mainstream national media. You’ll all remember the incident at Manchester Airport when two multi-cultural enrichers just arrived from Pakistan attacked police officers breaking the nose of one female officer. Well, rather than trying to prosecute the two enrichers, “a criminal investigation has been launched into who gave Manchester Airport CCTV footage to the Manchester Evening News following the police ‘stamp’ incident.”
This ‘shoot-the-messenger’ policy seems to be just another example of how Starmer intends to browbeat us into craven submission whereby nobody will dare criticise any aspect of his government’s demolition of our once great country.
And in case you don’t believe me about the police choosing to prosecute the person who filmed the enrichers attacking the police rather than prosecuting the enrichers who attacked the police, here’s a link to the Manchester Evening News article.:
To their credit, the Manchester Evening News has refused the police’s demand for the name of the person who filmed the Manchester Airport attack. At the moment our laws permit media to refuse police requests to name their sources. No doubt Two-Tier Keir will soon have that law changed!
Price drop on my book
By the way, I have just noticed that Amazon have reduced the price of my latest book – THERE IS NO CLIMATE CRISIS – from £8.49 to £7.33. I don’t know when this happened or how long it will last, but I thought it worth mentioning.
I obviously haven’t read the inquiry report released yesterday, a full seven years after the fire. But from the press reports I’ve seen, it doesn’t appear to be the usual establishment cover-up ending with the usual “important lessons have been learnt“. Apparently, the inquiry report actually exposes the guilty. Nevertheless, it seems that our wonderful plods, who can prosecute and imprison within a couple of days anyone who dares criticise Two-Tier Keir’s open-borders illegal migration free-for-all, will need another two to three years before they can even think about possibly beggining to prosecute anyone involved in the Grenfell disaster despite having a 1,700-page report to help them.
Moreover, as I explained in my blog written in 2017 and repeated on Wednesday this week, after the fire Labour tried to pin the disaster on evil Tory austerity imposed by Cameron and Osborne. 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.
But, in fact, the tower was run by the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation (KCTMO) an organisation set up under Labour government legislation, majority controlled by elected tenants and which had (if I remember correctly) the person who would go on to become the Labour MP as one of the 3 appointed Councillor members (from 2008 to 2012). The refurbishment, including installation of the rather inflammable cladding and decision not to spend £135,000 to instal sprinklers, which took place in (I think) 2014-2016, would therefore probably have been planned and negotiated while this Labour councillor and later MP was on the KCTMO.
Gaslighting us again and again and again
We all know now that we were lied to about:
the utter nonsense of human-produced CO2 causing climate change
the need for the economically-suicidal Net Zero
the origin and actual effects of the US funded, Chinese lab-leaked pandemic
the dubious safety and effectiveness of the ‘miracle vaccines’
the very limited group of people who got any benefits from the fake vaccines
the reasons for increased death rates in the most highly-vaccinated countries
how our rulers provoked the Ukraine invasion by ignoring Putin’s threat that he would not accept Ukraine joining NATO
and much much more
The latest mainstream media gaslighting campaign to fool us seems to be the rush by the media to deify the (IMHO) useless and incomprehsible word salad machine – aka Kamala Harris.
Here’s just one blatant example from a US news platform called ‘Axios’
Axios informs us on its website that: “We launched Axios in January 2017 based on this shared belief: The world needed smarter, more efficient coverage of the topics shaping the fast-changing world. We pledged to put our audience first, always.”
“We met our promise and offered an antidote to this madness. Now, we are focusing our minds and manpower on a much bigger problem faced by all consumers: the erosion of truth, trust, safety and sanity in news. This is an existential threat to our democracy. It will require extraordinary effort by us and others to correct.”
“We will go the extra mile to earn your trust. All employees are asked to refrain from taking/advocating for public positions on political topics.”
Axios, like most of the mainstream media, previously reported on April 14 & March 24, 2021 that Kamala Harris was appointed as Border Czar:
You might remember an excruciating interview from 2021 in which the great Kamala was asked if she had visited the border for which she was now responsible. Harris’s reply was “I haven’t been to Europe” an answer comprehensible to only one person on this planet – Kamala Harris herself.
Now that Kamala Harris is the Democratic candidate for president, the mainstream media is quickly rewriting history. For example, now the very same Axios (like the rest of the mainstream Trump-hating media) claims that Kamala Harris was never appointed as Border Czar and it’s only the evil Trump and Republicans who are claiming that Harris was the Border Czar:
Will voters really fall for this cr*p yet again and again and again?
Cackling Kamala – our next world leader?
And here, to cheer us up, is Tucker Carlson talking to a Kamala Harris impersonator:
Some report by the usual lawyer freeloaders who always make millions from such reports about the Grenfell Tower disaster gets published today (Wednesday 4 September). I doubt we will ever be given the truth as I suspect that politics and political correctness will prevent any real investigation.
Anyway, here’s what I wrote about the disaster in June 2017:
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 when the building had a £8m+ refurbishment in (I think) 2014-2016.
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, Tory and LibDems). 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. A Labour MP’s position
The Labour MP has been one of the most vocal critics of the Council and made her maiden speech in the Commons about the Grenfell Tower fire. The MP 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) I believe that this Labour MP 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 (if I remember correctly) she is named, says the committee scrutinised work on Grenfell Tower. Moreover, this Labour MP has been active in deciding building matters for many years as she was also, I believe, 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”. If my memory serves me correctly it was none other than the Labour MP and former Labour councillor for many years.
Ooops!
Of course, I am absolutely not suggesting that this Labour MP has any responsibility for the Grenfell Tower disaster.
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, you will hopefully remember, a majority of directors were residents) that was responsible for rubbish clearance.
Furthermore, I wonder how many people were living illegally in Grenfell Tower were some supposed tenants actually making a few quid renting out their council flats while living somewhere else.
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, as far as I remember ……………….. (censored for legal reasons)
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
Looking at the above facts, I humbly suggest that political correctness will 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 had majority control over the KCTMO which was accused of “not listening to tenants”
The KCTMO (not the Council) was responsible for the refurbishment during which it was decided not to install sprinklers
(Censored for legal reasons)
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 replacement of the previous non-flammable cladding to more flammable, supposedly environmentally-better more 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” and “the tenants are victims of the cruel Tory council” and “everything the EU does is wonderful” version of events
David Craig, on September 22nd, 2024
