We are losing faith in the various institutions at central or local government level that rule our lives. This is a very worrying development. What it means is that politicians can emerge who seek and even win power by saying the system is corrupt and cannot be trusted, writes Mihir Bose
The night after the fire at Grenfell Tower I was doing the Paper Review on BBC News, a program that no longer exists. The papers we were reviewing reported the fire extensively with all of them reporting how the fire had started, how many may have died, at that time there was no definite number of the people killed, and praise for how the fire brigade had responded. There was nothing about cladding or the real causes of the fire. The papers had complete confidence that the authorities bore no responsibility for this disaster and that they would handle the aftermath with great care giving attention to those who had survived. Sir Martin Moore-Bick’s enquiry shows how wrong the papers were although it has taken us seven years to learn the truth.
The 1,700-page final report makes it very clear the fire “was the culmination of decades of failure by central government and other bodies in positions of responsibility in the construction industry to look carefully into the danger of incorporating combustible materials into the external walls of high rise residential building and to act on the information available to them”.
In the days after the fire much was made that there was cladding at Grenfell to improve energy efficiency leading to criticism about those who campaign about energy. That says the report was not the case. The “initial motive for cladding Grenfell Tower was to improve its physical appearance and to prevent it looking like a poor relation” to a building next door. The argument to improve energy efficiency came later. The report makes it clear there was always a relentless focus on cost.
In the days after the fire much was made about how well the survivors were being looked after. But the report says survivors were “comprehensively failed” and “left to fend for themselves”. They were “abandoned” without information after the fire had taken place, killing 72 people, and this was a fire scene that was described as a “horror film” and “war zone”. The survivors were not sure who had escaped and as they looked for loved ones they experienced feelings of “utter helplessness and despair”. For the survivors there is “long-lasting trauma” and their “lives have been changed forever”.
As for the emergency accommodation provided by the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, which was extensively reported in the weeks after the fire and praised, this was not adequate and arrangements for obtaining food at some hotels made some people “feel like refugees”. “Survivors described it as living in a limbo, with no space to heal.”
The papers on the day I did the Paper Review and immediately afterwards praised the London Fire Brigade. The report says, “One significant shortcoming was a failure to recognise the possibility that in the event of a fire in a high-rise residential building a large number of calls seeking help, both from within and outside the building, might be generated. The LFB failed to take any steps to enable it to respond effectively to that kind of demand. As a result, when faced with a large number of calls about people needing to be rescued from Grenfell Tower, both those in the control room and those responsible for handling that information at the fireground were forced to resort to various improvised methods of varying reliability to handle the large amount of information they received.”
All this means there is a gap growing between those who rule us and the reality we experience. Grenfell is not the only example and comes after the shocking Post Office and contaminated blood scandals. In all of these cases people relied on government to help them only to find that they not only did not but often did not want to. Their attitude was the one the great dramatist Bertolt Brecht mocked when living in communist East Germany. “Some party hacks decreed that the people had lost the government’s confidence and could only regain it with redoubled effort. If that is the case, would it not be simpler, If the government simply dissolved the people and elected another?”
Looking at the government’s response to these scandals you do get the impression our government, despite being democratic, would like to elect another people.
Now in many developing countries this is common. I remember when I was living in India there was a coal mine disaster. Immediately a figure was given out by the authorities about how many had died. I was told that figure was obviously wrong. It had been understated. It was much higher.
In these former colonial countries suppressing the truth is not uncommon and they are, you could say, carrying on in the way the colonial authorities behaved. So, there is still discrepancy about how many were killed by the British at Jallianwala Bagh when General Dyer ordered his troops to shoot innocent people gathered in an Amritsar park. Read any history book on the subject and you will find two figures. One given in the Hunter inquiry appointed by the British Raj is 379 and the other figure, given by a rival inquiry held by the Congress party, is well over a 1,000. There is similar disagreement about how many people died in the Bengal famine, the worst famine in south Asian history, during the war with the difference running into millions, the British Raj figure being the smaller one. But then it suited a conqueror to conceal the truth. That in free India people do not believe what the government says after a disaster shows how in that respect society has not changed.
But however Britain behaved in its colonies, something many people in this country do not know and even now cannot come to terms with, we in Britain are supposed to be different. Here a disaster is followed by a report of inquiry which makes recommendations. Grenfell is part of that tradition. It is very likely that as a result of this report there will be changes in building regulations, the defects of which the report highlights. It recommends a single regulator, answerable to a government minister, so that officials and industry can be held to account. The government may well accept that recommendation to show it is responding. The police are also conducting a major inquiry with potential crimes under investigation including corporate manslaughter, fraud and misconduct in public office.
One problem is the time it has taken. The inquiry took seven years to finish its work, interrupted by Covid. Any trial as a result of the police investigation may not take place until 2027, ten years after the fire.
But more that, like former colonial countries, what the Grenfell fire shows is that we as a country now face a huge problem. We are losing faith in the various institutions at central or local government level that rule our lives. This is a very worrying development. What it means is that politicians can emerge who seek and even win power by saying the system is corrupt and cannot be trusted. In America this has happened and may happen again this November.
Donald Trump is the classic example of that. His whole strategy is to call his opponents liars and say he is the only man telling the truth. So much so that he has refused to accept his defeat in the last Presidential election and still insists he was cheated by the rigging of the vote. That is the sort of thing that we hear after elections in developing countries. That it is now coming from the country proud to have been the first to democratically elect its head of state shows how things have changed. It is because of such distrust that Trump’s followers do not find it outrageous that in the Presidential debate with Kamala Harris he claimed that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Illinois were eating cats despite the city authorities saying there was no evidence of it. When you have lost faith in institutions you will believe anything, and Trump thrives on it. He knows his followers will believe whatever he says and that is the path to power.
Our politicians in Britan do not go that far but there is growing sense in this country that when they, or an institution they run, says something they may be hiding the truth.
Sir Keir Starmer has promised to restore our trust in government. This may explain why he has become the merchant of gloom. But if this turns out to be just a political weapon to paint the Conservatives as unable to govern and not quite the whole truth then it will do nothing to restore trust. The distrust between the governors and the governed will in fact grow and we will be faced with politicians emerging in this country who are in the mould of Trump profiting from such alienation. A lot is riding on Starmer to fulfil his promise to make us believe that we can trust those we elect to rule us to tell it like it is.
(Mihir Bose is the author of Thank You Mr Crombie Lessons in Guilt and Gratitude from the British.)
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