Amazing, I wonder what the difference is.
A Tory council is absolutely smashed for its apparently terrible and slow response to the Grenfell Tower fire, criticised for a chaotic reaction with no one being accommodated, people not able to find relatives, no instant database of everyone in the tower and where they were, no coordination of relief services and people apparently just couldn’t find those relief centres even when the council did eventually manage to open them.
Trouble is most of that it is nonsense…a huge ‘towering inferno; in the middle of the night in which hundreds of familes had to be evacuated…any wonder there was a level of ‘chaos’ to start with? Families bomb-burst away from the scene to sleep in cars and parks or wherever and some seem to have made no attempt to contact the council but moaned to the media about lack of contact and services…that’s despite the council setting up several relief centres that, as they were flooded with people and donations, seem to have been easy to find for most people….the council was on the usual internet locations, as well as on the ground, pumping out information. Those volunter services were in fact organised by the council and they had to register with the council…so ‘disorganised’? The council housed nearly everyone in a very short space of time in temporary accommodation…and yet was still being heavily criticised for not doing so. The council was forced to close its main centre by the violent protests of Corbyn’s street thugs, the BBC reported this as a council that just didn’t care about people and which had just shut up shop and vanished…not mentioning that the centre had been forced to close [ and not mentioning the very obvious windows boarded up havng been smashed by the Corbynistas]…and never mind the work had had to be transferred to other centres. The BBC had only one narrative..a council that didn’t care about the poor and were hopelessly disronganised and chaotic in their response.
We heard that Grenfell was a ‘story about poverty’..meaning the rich just didn’t care if the poor burned to death in their homes….despite the fact that many of the flats were privately owned and were renting out for over £2,0000 a month…or that so many other properties are clad in the same material….such as Premier Inns…..just how many private blocks of flats have the same cladding? Loads I suspect. You won’t hear the BBC working the rich and poor narrative then…it’ll be conveniently forgotten.
Compare all that to how Labour run Camden is treated as they make the astonishing decision to evacuate a block of flats in the dead of the night…amidst the same chaos and lack of information that RBKC were accused of having been guilty of. Plucky Camden gets praise and cheerleading, no doubt we will be getting the line that ‘it’s all the fault of Tory cuts’ very shortly. Listen to Sarah Montague ‘interview’ the leader of Camden council [08:36]….on Thursday Camden told its residents that their flats were safe, on Friday night they were being evacuated as the flats were deemed an immediate and extreme risk…fair enough Montague asked why such a rapid about turn happened…however no-where does Montague ask the most relevant and biggest question…how is it that these flats were not checked before, after all they get an annual fire safety check and building inspectors must have approved the cladding…how did they miss the fact that this building is apparently such a death trap that the residents have to immediately, in the middle of the night, be evacuated to safety? If this had been a Tory council they would have been slaughtered, as we’ve seen, but a Labour one doesn’t even get asked the difficult question by the BBC’s premier news programme…surely they might have thought such a question was relevant…how is it that your building was a deathtrap that could potentially go up like a roman candle at any time killing hundreds and you didn’t know? Do you not care about the poor and marginalised in society like your nasty Tory neighbors?
No such difficult, searching questions…in fact this morning on Broadcasting House the BBC was praising Camden for their rapid response, organised ‘chaos’ in difficult circumstances and the very fast and high quality work that they had done to remedy the situation.
Guess the BBC are still hopeful of a early second election.