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.

12:52 am
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.
9:36 pm
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Nick Herbert on his visit to flood hit areas of Cumbria

Please note that the post below was published more than ten year ago on 21st November 2009 Nick Herbert MP, shadow cabinet member for the Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs, was in Cumbria this morning to see the areas affected by the flooding. He writes on Conservative Home about his visit. Here is an extract. I’ve been in Cumbria today to see the areas affected by the floods. I arrived early in Keswick where I met officials from the Environment Agency. Although the river levels had fallen considerably and homes were no longer flooded, the damage to homes had been done. And the water which had got into houses wasn’t just from the river – it was foul water which had risen from the drains. I talked to fire crews who were pumping flood water back into the river, and discovered that they were from Tyne & Wear and Lancashire. They had been called in at an hours’ notice and had been working on the scene ever since, staying at a local hotel. You cannot fail to be impressed by the
Read more

Quotes of the day 19th August 2020

Image
"Wise men profit more from fools than fools from wise men; for the wise men shun the mistakes of fools, but fools do not imitate the successes of the wise."  ( Cato the Elder , who lived 234 BC - 149 BC, quoted in "Lives" by Plutarch.) There is a similar saying by Germany's Iron Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck: Benjamin Franklin is supposed to have put the same saying in a more humorous form: "Wise men profit by the mistakes of others, while fools will not learn even from their own blunders." See also this thread on the "Quote Investigator" website . Let us all be wise and learn from the events of the last few days.
Read more

Quote of the day 24th July 2020

I was moved to put the passage below forward as a quote today when I saw a horrible post on twitter from someone writing that it was "excellent" that someone who took a different view from her about Brexit had died. I won't write which way round it was so that all the Remain supporters can assume the post was from a Brexit fanatic welcoming the death of a remainer and all the Leavers can assume it was a Remainiac welcoming one less Brexiteer. There's been plenty of nasty stuff on both sides but if you catch anyone of your own viewpoint  posting something like that who might listen to you, please do call them out on it - and point out that they're giving everyone on your side of the argument a bad name. Anyway, here's the quote from John Donne.
Read more