https://socialistaction.org/2017/06/20/grenfell-tower-tragedy-shows-the-tory-government-is-illegitimate/
Grenfell Tower tragedy shows the Tory government is illegitimate
/ 3 hours ago
July 2017 Grenfell protestBy ANDY STOWE
Elizabeth Windsor, the English queen, isn’t supposed to make political
statements, but on June 16 she announced to the world that she thinks
Tory Prime Minister Theresa May is a morally gutless coward and a
useless leader.
Of course, she didn’t quite put it that way. Instead, she met survivors
of the Grenfell Tower disaster face to face in public. May had gone the
day before, and the official line was that security concerns prevented
her from meeting the bereaved and the homeless. The monarch was saying,
“I’m 91 years old, I’m not frightened, and I know what the job is
supposed to involve.”
Never before has a Tory leader been held in such open contempt by their
own party, the press barons who helped get her elected and every
mainstream political commentator. A BBC2 comedy show had the discussion
topic “Theresa May has been given a strong mandate to f*** off.” The
racist Tory propaganda sheet The Sun is saying that her own MPs are
giving her 10 days before they oust her. Tory commentator Michael
Portillo is saying that she’s toast.
In under a week after adding 5.5% to her party’s share of the vote, May
has led her party into its most significant crisis of legitimacy in
living memory. And the problem for the Tories is that there isn’t an
easy way out.
The source of the Tories’ woes is the Labour election campaign, which
made austerity the defining question of the moment. Peter Hitchens, a
maverick commentator in another racist Tory propaganda sheet, The Mail,
sums up its readership’s malaise:
“The country is, fundamentally, run on the cheap. Cheap wages, borrowed
money, skimped and half-finished schemes, leaky pipes, overloaded
cables, inadequate training, rotten basic education, ancient
infrastructure stretched to the limit and then beyond. And much of it is
controlled by unaccountable companies or bureaucracies that cannot be
contacted, whose owners are often thousands of miles away.
“Your late train (yet again), your moody broadband, your absent,
invisible police force, your potholed road, your dodgy bank and your
unreachable phone company, are all part of the same thing—a country
living beyond its means that thinks it is richer and more important and
more civilised than it is, and so neglects the basics of life while
concentrating on how it looks.”
The tragedy at Grenfell Tower is the logical endpoint of a Tory project
of ghettoising and stigmatising the poor, chopping 40% off council
budgets, effectively ending the construction of social housing, reducing
the time required for fire safety inspections from six hours to 45
minutes, scrimping a paltry £5000 to buy marginally cheaper cladding
panels, which seem to be the cause of the inferno that has claimed
dozens of lives.
The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea has pioneered the
retrenchment of public services, and its 37 Tory councillors are
unapologetically there to serve the interests of the borough with the
richest electorate in Britain. They are a class war council, and the
deaths at Grenfell Tower are directly attributable to their ideological
commitment to erode and outsource public services.
Jeremy Corbyn’s anti-austerity programme means that they can’t get away
with the customary handwringing anymore. Throughout the election
campaign he hammered home the message that you don’t get a decent
society with good quality public services on the cheap. That message is
now conventional wisdom for many more millions of people than it was
before the election. Everyone understands that if Kensington Council had
fitted sprinklers and paid for fractionally more expensive cladding,
more than 100 people would be alive today.
The Tories have no response to this, and while May deserves all the
criticism for the callousness of her public response to the tragedy, her
party’s problem is deeper.
The public response to the attacks at London Bridge and the Arianna
Grande concert was much more in keeping with Jeremy Corbyn’s values than
those of the Tories. It emphasised solidarity, community, and a
rejection of racism. The emergency services, a visible proof of the
value of the public sector, were acclaimed as heroes. These are the
people whose salaries have been frozen for a decade and whose jobs are
often outsourced. Corbyn has said that will stop when a Labour
government is returned.
And the response to Grenfell has taken this a step further. The tenants’
organisation has been pointing out the death trap they were consigned to
live in for years—and were threatened with legal action for their pains.
After the tragedy, thousands of volunteers of all faiths and none
rallied to bring provisions and solace to the bereaved, the homeless,
and the distraught. Hundreds marched in solidarity across London,
echoing the residents’ demands for answers.
Most of the print media is viciously pro-Tory. But it’s withering away,
and it’s not just that it’s losing readers. 50% of Sun readers don’t
vote, and much of the rest of the electorate is using social media to
get its information about the world. Using it was a very deliberate
strategy of a Labour leadership that knew the papers would trawl the
bottom of every sewer to ruin them. It didn’t work.
And, of course, there was the election result. May went from
anticipating a massive majority to being held hostage by the political
wing of the Old Testament, the Democratic Unionist Party, and this just
a couple of weeks before beginning Brexit negotiations.
Her party will get rid of her very soon, yet as Portillo observes, there
isn’t anyone palatable with whom they can replace her. Ruth Davidson,
who has led their recovery in Scotland, doesn’t have a Commons seat.
They need to find someone who can give a fairly convincing impersonation
of compassion while at the same time fighting the Powellite Brexiteers,
who now comprise much of their parliamentary group and doing a U-turn on
their commitment to austerity.
That can’t be Johnson, Gove, Hammond, or Davies. The party’s big names
are all too closely tied to everything that makes them toxic. They might
have to look slightly wider and opt for the independently minded Anna
Soubry to take up the poison chalice that is the Tory leadership.
May’s personal fate is irrelevant to everyone but her and her family.
They’ll find someone else. She became Tory leader just at the moment
when a new, self-confident Labour Party finally won the argument against
austerity. The tragedy is that over 100 people had to die in the most
horrific way imaginable for the truth of our arguments against austerity
to become irrefutable.
This article is reprinted from Socialist Resistance, on-line journal of
the British section of the Fourth International. Photo: The Independent
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June 20, 2017 in Europe. Tags: Britain, Grenfell
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