Remembering the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire

A memorial service was held today for the 71 people who died in the tragedy at Grenfell Tower.

Whenever there is a disaster like this terrible event, people always say "this must never happen again."

What the investigations carried out after the tragedy appear to show is that there appear to have been systemic failures all over Britain, and on the watch of councillors and ministers from every political party and none, in making homes and other public buildings as safe as they need to be.

We must not forget the victims of Grenfell and neither should we forget the need to do more to improve fire safety.

Comments

Anonymous said…
it's not just fire safety though is it - it's everything you look at. Britain has a systemically useless civil service from borough councils to the secretary of state's representative, and politicians from borough councils to heart of government refuse to do anything about it.
It takes disasters, sorry foreseeable events like Grenfell Tower to wake you all up to the reality of Britain today, but for all the hand wringing nothing will fundamentally change. It'll be business as usual among the civil servants, it already is.

Chris Whiteside said…
Is any part of government perfect? Of course, not, they're all run by mortal and fallible human beings.

In a country where public officials are accountable to all of us either directly or because we elect the people they are accountable to, each of us faces a choice about what we do about those failings.

We can do nothing at all. We can limit our involvement to complaining about things being useless, but add that nothing will ever change, and achieve perhaps a tiny bit more than those who do nothing, but not much.

Or we can get involved, make constructive suggestions, and try, however imperfectly, to make what difference we can. If we do that we will get it wrong some of the time. But we will achieve more than those who don't make any effort at all.

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