The Tories are trying Wriggle Out of Responsibility for Grenfell Tower Disaster - Don't Let Them

Speaking on 19 June 2017,five days after the Grenfell Tower blaze, the Chancellor Philip Hammond said; "My understanding is that the cladding in question, the flammable cladding which is banned in Europe and the United States, is also banned here..."

At prime minister’s questions in Parliament on Wednesday, Theresa May said her “understanding” was that the cladding that has failed the test “was non-compliant with the building regulations”.

She said as well as identifying who was responsible for the devastating fire at Grenfell Tower, the public inquiry would also need to look at “why it is that over decades, under different governments and under different councils, material has been put up on tower blocks that is non-compliant with the building regulations”.

Both of these statements from the most senior members of the Tory government are at best misleading, at worse completely untrue. I’m not saying they are lies, because that would require some evidence that Hammond and May knew what they were talking about, which I’m unsure of at this stage.

The statements are factually wrong though, according to experts in the field.

Barry Turner, director of technical policy at the Local Authority Building Control, told the Local Government Chronicle (subscription) that the document the prime minister referred to, Approved document B, was guidance, not a legally required regulation.

In addition he said Mrs May’s comments left out a crucial part of the guidance that allows use of a flammable cladding if it passes a “composite” test that includes other components surrounding the cladding, such as insulation.

Mr Turner said: “Within [the government’s] own guidance they’re very conveniently forgetting the paragraph that appears before the one they are quoting which allows an alternative method of testing a complete cladding system.”

Mr Turner said it was not surprising that cladding on all 137 tower blocks tested so far had failed as the Building Research Establishment (BRE) was carrying out a different test to the one specified in the guidance.

The tests being carried out for the government by the BRE are only testing cladding and do not take account of any other fire safety measures, such as flame retardant insulation.

David Orr, chief executive of the National Housing Federation, has also said that it is “possible for buildings to be safe with that cladding in certain circumstances”.

Interviewed on BBC Newsnight on Wednesday he said: “All of this cladding has been fitted according to the rules that were in place at the time, according to the rules that were presided over by government.”

Lord Porter, Tory chairman of the Local Government Association, said fire safety tests on cladding from high-rise buildings were flawed.

He criticised the tests for focusing on the core of the panel - rather than the panel as a whole.

He told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that "isn't the right thing to test", adding: "The government needs to listen to a wider set of opinions and not just the experts they have got."

So, the test they are doing on the Grenfell Tower cladding alone, doesn’t prove that the cladding was fitted against building regulations, it depends on the insulation used and other materials used that make up the whole construction.

But these regulations should have been tightened up, by the government, after an earlier fire at a residential tower block.

In 2009 a fire took hold in flats at Lakanal House in London which saw six people die. Following an inquest into the fire the coroner made a number of recommendations to the government and to other organisations like the London Fire Brigade and Southwark Council for how similar fires could be avoided in the future.

The recommendations made to the government in 2013 included:

‘Reviewing Document B (fire safety) of the Building Regulations to ensure that it is easily understandable and give guidance to those who are responsible for maintaining tower blocks, as well as building them.’

“Four years on and no review has been completed despite assurances from former housing minister Gavin Barwell, who is now Theresa May’s chief of staff,” reported the Telegraph.

The BBC reports that leaked letters from the All-Party Parliamentary Fire Safety Rescue Group to the government show that it repeatedly warned four different housing ministers that action needed to be taken on fire safety regulations.

One of the letters to the government says:

“Surely however when you already have credible evidence in 2012 to justify updating a small but important part of the guidance in the Approved Document, which will lead to saving of lives, you don’t need to wait another three years in addition to the two already spent since the research findings were updated, in order to take action?

The government says the work is still ongoing.  

Today, the BBC and the Times reported having seen documents showing that the original cladding specified for the Tower had been a zinc cladding with a fire-retardant core, but in 2014 this was changed to ACM cladding with a PE core to save £293,000 and to allow a change of colour. However, the BBC point out that ‘both types of cladding have the same official fire rating’ (it is not clear what is meant by the word ‘official’).

The motives of the local authority, Kensington and Chelsea, in changing to using this type of cladding are reprehensible then, saving money and making it a nicer colour when viewed from outside, but appears to be within the law as it stands.

But in the end, why did the government not amend the regulations when they had been warned that this needed to happen? Uncaring and incompetent, which just about sums up this Tory administration.

Come to the ‘Not One More Day’ protest in central London tomorrow against the Tory government. Tories Out!

Russian Revolutionary Art 1917 to 1932 - From Socialism to Authoritarianism

I visited the Royal Academy of the Arts exhibition 'Revolution: Russian Art 1917–1932' in London yesterday, just before it closes tomorrow. It is inspired by the exhibition shown in Russia in 1932, just before Stalin's clampdown on artistic free expression.

The exhibition covers paintings, films, sculpture, textiles and ceramics from the early days of the Russia revolution in 1917, and follows changes through the 1920s and into the 1930s under the influence of the Bolshevik leadership, particularly after the death of Lenin and the rise to power of Stalin.

In the early years of the revolution there was a great explosion of the arts, which built on the trend towards the avant garde that had already begun in Russian (and more widely) before the revolution. There was much excitement in artistic circles about the new dawn opening up in Russia, brought about by revolutionary thinking. Two examples are below.

(Ivan Kliun 1923)

(Lyubov Popova 1921)

The Bolshevik's were only a fairly small force with something like 350,000 supporters in a country with a population of 140 million at the time of the revolution. It was decided that propaganda was necessary to spread revolutionary thinking to the masses.

(I predict a riot: Bolshevik (1920) by Boris Mikhailovich Kustodiev)    

By the late 1920s the Soviet authorities condemned the avant garde style and promoted what became known as Socialist Realism, a style that was easy for the masses to understand. For a few years these different approaches co-existed, but in 1932 Stalin decreed that Socialist Realism was the only acceptable style for the Soviet Union, ending a era of dazzling creativity in the arts.

(Poster shows the workers triump over the capitalists 1920)

 (The power of the workers 1931)

(Andrey Golubev, Red Spinner, 1930) 

Stalin's principle goal was to turn the Soviet Union into a world power by expanding its industrial production. In 1928 he introduced the first of his five year plans, which set targets for each factory. A new breed of superhero workers known as 'shock workers' symbolised this synthesis of man and machine. Artists were encouraged to depict this in their work.

Workers were seen as the liberated proletariat who no longer had to sell their life and labour for the profit of others. Together they collectively owned the means of production interpreting what Marx called the 'dictatorship of the proletariat,' in this new worker led productivist system.

This conveniently ignored Marx's concept of 'freely associated' producers, in favour of what Lenin first called 'state capitalism,' which was ruthlessly and brutally driven forward by Stalin. The reality was that many workers were effectively slaves, and strikers and slow workers were imprsioned or even shot. Thousands died in accidents, of starvation or from freezing temperatures.

After the revolution, the peasants were promoted as equal partners with industrial workers, symbolised by the by Soviet emblem the hammer and sickle.

(The poster above is actually from the 1960s, but captures this partnership of industrial and agricultural workers)

(1930s poster depicting agricultural workers)

Stalin's plan involved the industrialisation of agriculture which included the collectivisation of farms into large operations, but took little notice of local conditions and practises. Famine was the result where millions died of starvation, through crop failures.

Stalin also promoted sports in Russia, with the competition with the US in events such as the Olmypics eventually. By the 1970s it was seen as a demonstration of the strength of the Soviet system over the capitalist USA. In the same way, Russia beat the US into putting a man into space, only 40 years after the revolution, which had started from a low point of a virtual feudal economy.

  (The Shot-putter, by Alexander Samokhvalov, 1933)

The 1932 exhibition was the last call of freedom for the arts, afterwards avant garde art was suppressed. Within a year it had vanished from public view, locked in storerooms. From this moment onwards the Union of Soviet Artists was the sole arbiter of Soviet art. Socialist Realism became the only approved style in the USSR.

I knew from political history much of what this exhibition portrays, but it was still interesting to view it through the prism of art. The euphoria and promise of the early years of the revolution, with its upsurge in creative arts, gradually ground down into simplistic propaganda, in the cause of authoritarianism and suppression. A vivid dream turned into a nightmare. The exhibition details neatly the bastardisation of socialism in the USSR, and left me feeling sad, an opportunity missed.   

  

If you carry a Firearm the Police will Assassinate You, it Seems

Photo credit: metro.co.uk

The fatal shooting by police of Yassar Yaqub in a slip road off the M62 in west Yorkshire on Monday, throws up many questions. Official details have so far been very limited to say the least, but it appears that Yaqub was shot by police marksmen, without any returning fire from the car that Yaqub and one other person were travelling in. The police have said that they have recovered a ‘suspected firearm’ from the scene.

As far as I can tell from what has been reported in the media, Yaqub’s car was stopped by a police car swerving in front of it and blocking its path, at which point other police vehicles surrounded the target car, and police marksmen opened fire, shooting through the windscreen and killing Yaqub. It doesn’t appear that any attempt was made by the police to arrest the people in the target car, before police opened fire. As I say, we don’t know much yet, and perhaps we never will.

The word assassinate is a strong one, but it was the term used by the victim’s father, Yassar, as reported in the Guardian, in an exclusive interview. He also raises some of the questions that he wants answers to. In the piece he asks:

“If they’ve gone all the way to Bradford and come back, would they not have stopped them when they thought the public were in danger or would they stop them when they were almost home?” 

“So what happened between getting on the motorway and getting off? Nothing’s happened in between has it?

He added: “The terrible thing is that if it was a fight you could understand it but this – somebody in the car just bang, finished – that’s what is killing me more.”

Yassar Yaqub is hopeful of getting answers to his questions, and he quoted the similar police shooting of Mark Duggan in Tottenham, London, which led to riots in the area and most of the English cities in 2011. In truth we never really got to the bottom of what happened when Duggan was shot, so I think Mr Yaqub may be disappointed.

This is what Stafford Scott, a community activist in Tottenham said after the verdict of ‘lawful killing’ in the inquest into Duggan’s death in 2014:

‘Firstly the family is struggling to understand how the shooting of an unarmed man can still be deemed a lawful act. The "safety net" for police officers in such circumstances is that the killing is lawful if the officer has an "honestly held belief" that he or others are in imminent danger. But in this case the jury themselves stated it was their belief that Duggan had thrown the gun before being fatally shot, so where was the immediate, clear and present danger?

At the inquest, V53 – the officer who fired the fatal shots – said that he definitely saw the sock-covered gun and was even able to describe seeing the barrel of the gun sticking out of the hole in the sock. He also gave this sworn testimony in the two trials of the alleged gun supplier, Kevin Hutchinson Foster. On each of these occasions he stated he was positive that Mark had the gun in his hand when he shot him the first and second time. Each time he described it as a "freeze frame" moment, adding: "This is something that you do not forget." He further justified the need for shooting Duggan twice by describing how the first shot spun Duggan around so that the gun was pointing directly at him when he shot him the second time.’

I would add, that there were inconsistences and contradictions in the police’s evidence, with eye witness reports completely at odds with the police’s version of events. Indeed, the word on the street in Tottenham, is that Duggan’s gun was in a shoe box, and he made no attempt to use it at all. The feeling is that the police took the gun out of the box and planted it some twenty yards away from the car Duggan was travelling in.

So, I wouldn’t expect we will get to the truth of Yaqub’s killing, officially, either. But it does appear that the police now operate a shoot to kill policy, if they suspect a person is carrying a firearm. We know that these instances are very difficult ones for the police officers involved, but they should be highly trained individuals, and act in a professional manner. By making no attempt to arrest armed suspects, the police are effectively acting as judge, jury and executioner.

Where is the rule of law in all of this? This cannot be allowed to continue, or else people in similar situations will fire first on the police, in what would be a rational case of self defence. The police’s actions are escalating these situations, basically encouraging a fire fight.  

     

50 Year Anniversary of the End of Capital Punishment in Britain

Last Sunday had another remembrance, apart from the war dead, it was the 50^th anniversary of the suspension of capital punishment (hanging) in the England, Scotland and Wales. It was abolished in Northern Ireland in 1973. The last executions were in 1964, when Peter Anthony Allen, at Walton Prison in Liverpool, and Gwynne Owen Evans, at Strangeways Prison in Manchester, were executed.

The Murder (Abolition of Death Penalty) Act 1965 was passed in Parliament with a ‘sunset’ clause, meaning that the legislation would be reviewed in 1969, which it was, and the practice was formally abolished in that year (for murder). Capital punishment was still technically possible for treason and piracy until the introduction of The Human Rights Act in 1998, but was never used again.

The death penalty is outlawed in the European Union, but France held its last execution (by guillotine) in 1977 and finally ended the practice in 1981, which was the latest of any country in Western Europe. France's last held public execution was in 1939, in England it was 1868.

Amnesty International says that 22 nations still retain the death penalty, with China thought to hold the most executions, followed by Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. The US still executes its citizens, although nineteen states and the District of Columbia do not have the death penalty.

Albert Pierrepoint is probably the best known British hangman, who executed over 400 people. He came to fame, as it were, for hanging many Nazi war criminals after World War 2, but it is thought he had doubts about capital punishment after retiring. In 1974 he wrote in his autobiography Executioner:

‘It is said to be a deterrent. I cannot agree. There have been murders since the beginning of time, and we shall go on looking for deterrents until the end of time. If death were a deterrent, I might be expected to know. It is I who have faced them last, young men and girls, working men, grandmothers. I have been amazed to see the courage with which they take that walk into the unknown. It did not deter them then, and it had not deterred them when they committed what they were convicted for. All the men and women whom I have faced at that final moment convince me that in what I have done I have not prevented a single murder.’

I heard an interview with a retired prison officer on BBC Radio the other day, he served at the time when capital punishment was still carried out. He was asked about how the condemned prisoners behaved in their final days. The officer said that there was always hope for them, up until the last day, first an appeal, and then a final appeal to the Home Secretary.

Public pressure to abolish the death penalty built throughout the late 1950s and the case of Ruth Ellis, the last women to be hanged in England, caused widespread controversy, in 1955. The case evoked exceptionally intense press and public interest to the point that it was discussed by the Cabinet.

On the day of her execution a Daily Mirror columnist wrote a column attacking the sentence, writing "The one thing that brings stature and dignity to mankind and raises us above the beasts will have been denied her – pity and the hope of ultimate redemption." The British Pathe newsreel reporting Ellis' execution openly questioned whether capital punishment - of a female or of anyone - had a place in the 20th century. The public though are said to have largely supported the execution.

Free votes were held in Parliament on reintroducing capital punishment right up until the 1990s, but were always lost.

Opinion polls on the subject of capital punishment regularly show a majority of the British public in favour reintroduction, but the gap gets narrower as time passes. An e-petition for Parliament to debate reintroduction in 2011 did not attract much support and had less support than a counter petition at the time.

It is strange to think, that in my lifetime, just, my country was still executing people. I’ve always felt it is abhorrent, the state taking away the life of its citizens. It feels like an ancient ritual, from a long ago barbaric past.