What does Grenfell tell us about the British malaise?
What on earth went wrong with the institutions we rely upon to protect us?
Why do so many people in positions of authority, in public and private sectors, seemingly hold ordinary people, including those who are vulnerable, in contempt?
Why can’t we build properly and decently?
Why does it take so long for justice to be done when companies and individuals seemingly engage in grotesque negligence and deception?
And why are intelligent leaders so useless at assessing risk and reward?
But many of them are also raised by the long wait for the truth to be told about the Hillsborough disaster, and the even longer-running scandal of lives ruined by transfusions of infected blood, and the way that Post Office executives had more confidence in a flawed IT system than in the probity of sub-postmasters, and indeed by the hapless preparations by NHS and the public sector more widely as Covid surged towards these shores.
I could go on and on.
As a nation, we’ve historically prided ourselves on the honesty, integrity and competence of the institutions that underpin the state and our way of life.
But Grenfell and the other debacles can no longer be dismissed as exceptions to an otherwise blameless culture. Something has gone badly awry in this place.
In the case of Grenfell, the summary of defects includes:
Private sector companies telling untruths about the safety of their products
Regulators who were captured by commercial interests
Criminal investigations only properly starting now, seven years after the needless deaths of 72 people
Ministers and officials culling so-called red tape as a matter of ideology without due regard to how they were exposing citizens to lethal risks
Officials and ministers who failed to learn lessons from previous fires and wrongly assessed that fire safety rules were adequate
Local government officials treating tenants as nuisances to be ignored when they raised concerns about safety
A council in one of the richest parts of the UK failing to provide housing and support for the stricken Grenfell tenants who survived
The rot had already set in before David Cameron became prime minister in 2010.
However, it got significantly worse when he started governing in coalition with the Lib Dems, and after that, he subsequently won the election in 2015.
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And what’s especially troubling is that the decay extended as much to the unelected servants of the state and to private sector bosses.
Sir Keir Starmer said today he wants his government to be judged by how he responds to the Grenfell report, whether he reforms the culture of relevant regulation and governance and also makes safe the many thousands of buildings still deemed at risk.
What is unclear is whether he accepts that the tragedy at Grenfell is symptomatic of a malaise that goes well beyond the appalling state of British social housing.
If he does then he will know that rehabilitation will be slow, painful and very expensive.
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