Westministenders: The bookends to a year of political chaos. Just how far have we come?

[RedToothBrush]

The 15th June 2016.

The Thames was filled with a flotilla of boats in a publicity stunt for the Leave campaign to draw attention to fisheries. Nigel Farage and Kate Hoey in their heads thought they were Leonardo and Kate, but the moment was rather more titanic in nature and could not have been more Alan Partridge if they had tried. Coming up behind was Bob Gedolf in a shameful and cringeworthy display of swearing and abuse that really didn’t help the Remain camp in anyway. Largely unnoticed was a small boat with a family following it all unfold…

The next day things went from fiasco to horror.

Farage unveiled the Dog Whistle Poster and Jo Cox was murdered. And the UK seemed set on its course for 7 days later when the world was turned upside down by the referendum itself.

14th June 2017.

Fast forward 365 days later and another tragedy unfolded. This time of a very different nature but with no less political significance.
Grenfell.

A moment of national shame. A symbol of so many things that had come to pass in the previous twelve months.

The election just the previous week had changed the direction of travel we seemed to be headed and left the Prime Minister exposed and looking wildly out of touch. The Maybot was given one more chance.

And the Maybot seems to be failing the test of her party who had the grace to grant her a second chance.

The Queen dressed in the same shade of blue, May delivered her ‘victory speech’ in, ignored the security threat and visited the ranks of the poor and the forgotten. A deliberate message to May not to forget who she serves? A Queen who feels aggrieved and angry by May’s behaviour? Who knows.

As for Brexit. The government looks lost. Adrift. The ‘Fight of the Summer’ over the EU’s plan for talks sounds out the window despite the denials from the Brexit Department. Hard Brexit is still on the cards. Apparently. But what does anyone believe now? May’s and the Brexiteers domination of the agenda is shattered, its power starting to be questioned.

What next?

This evening the anger is building.

Who knows, what will happen. Some of it might be predictable, but the future is far from certain and we have definitely entered a new era. We just don’t know who will lead it, or what its ambition or what the end goal now is.

What we do know, more acutely than ever is that we are all human and the wise words of Jo Cox about having ‘More in Common’ ring though ever more strongly.

Once again we feel ‘on the brink’.

Outsourcing services can work fine - the Docklands Light Railway and London Overground, for instance, are outsourced and work very well. But outsourcing ONLY works if a really watertight contract is agreed and then the public sector organisation responsible for the service manages the running of the contract very tightly indeed.

In know Pink, who'd have thought it.

Thanks Red, as ever.

I'm not especially a royalist, but the Queen's birthday message is a masterpiece of sobriety, empathy and unity. Bravo.

I'm absolutely not against outsourcing - it can work well where the contracts are sufficiently watertight, where funding is adequate and above all where there is accountability (and the possibility of applying effective sanctions when things go wrong).

The way it has been done by Tory councils, and by the government in cases like the DLA/PIPs debacle, is another matter entirely.

I work in the private sector btw, where much the same applies (eg outsourcing of IT and of management decision making to consultants - often disastrous. But outsourcing of specific specialist tasks can work very well.)

.

I have to say I've never understood that obsession with the idea that the private sector is always more deficient than the public sector TBH.

I'm not sure whether there is a typo here (deficient/ efficient) or whether I expressed myself really badly in my post up-thread.

Both private and public sector organisations can be efficient or dysfunctional. It makes little sense for the public sector to be involved with some activities, like making cars or running mines.

Some forms of outsourcing make complete sense - no local council will have the expertise in-house to perform specific and specialist building refurbishment tasks like installing cladding. The problems arise, though, when the whole process is outsourced, removing accountability. Large urban councils should be able to employ architects and property managers to commission and oversee large oublic works of this sort. What happened at Grenfell Tower - where it appears that there were numerous subcontractors all seeking to preserve their margins - is a recipe for lack of accountability and poor quality work. Add in a contempt for your clients, as is manifestly the case here, and you have a recipe for disaster.

Absolutely agree with you misti!

I have seen a lot of contracts for outsourcing public sector work that do not allow for proper sanctions when the service delivered does not meet the required standards. Also there is often a reluctance to admit that the wrong decision was made and pull out of contracts, because the senior management does not want to take responsibility.

@grannycake if the school began with P then yes, we are.

One of the reasons council tax is higher in Wales (not sure about Scotland) is because the council tax revaluations were completed there before Westminster got cold feet and postponed the same exercise in England. We were living in Wales at the time in an area that had seen house price rises and our house moved up two bands. I suspect a lot more council tax would be collected in London if England had done the same.

misti I fully agree that there are times when using the private sector IS the right thing to do.
And times when either the public sector or the private sector can be good or really bad at something.

My point was that I didn't understand the idea that the private sector was ALWAYS more efficient than The public sector, hence why it was a good idea to privatise everything (council, NHS, trains etc etc).
Which is basically the idea that I've heard again and again here. Plus the fact that you never hear that it's better that xxx is done by the public sector for example.

Eliot Higgins‏*@EliotHiggins*
Seems pro-Brexit people are in a lose -lose situation, go ahead now in an incredibly weak position or delay and likely never have it happen

David Allen Green‏*@davidallengreen*

And it is the (well-grounded) fear of the latter which means Brexiteers want to press on with the former.

If - and it is merely if - there were to be a shift then next week would be natural point.

But don't get hopes up: government not rational.

This is an article from The Times:

The leading candidate to be Britain's chief trade negotiator after Brexit withdrew when the head of the civil service refused to negotiate over the £160,000 salary, The Times has learnt.

Jonathan Fried, a Canadian trade negotiator who played a leading role in brokering deals with the US, the European Union and China, was considered to be the best candidate but he walked away at the final stage of talks because Sir Jeremy Heywood would no budge on the salary, sources said.

Sir Jeremy approached several overseas experts to serve as chief trade negotiation adviser for Liam Fox's Department for International Trade (DIT) but they walked away for the same reason.

A number of other prominent trade negotiators said that they did not bother filling in applications for the job because of the poor salary on offer.

Officials said privately that the failure to secure Mr Fried's services was a blow to Britain's prospects after Brexit, given his experience in negotiating deals with the country's two largest trading partners. it highlights the challenge that Britain faces in attracting top talent from abroad as it prepares to negotiate hundreds of trade deals when it leaves the EU in 2019. Talks with the EU are scheduled to begin on Monday.

Andrew Lilico‏*@andrew*_lilico
I admit I was wrong abt something. I never imagined leading Remain-ers wld be so desperate to stay, they'd support a Marxist-socialist govt.
I thought after the Brexit vote we'd debate what to do next, & cos Remain supporters agreed with me abt most things, we'd get the economic & immigration & foreign affairs programmes the majority wld then want.
Instead, former advocates of Remain have bn so bitter & nihilistic + that they've preferred to blow up the world to make Brexit a bad idea rather than to make the best of a situation they found themselves in.

James O'Brien‏*@mrjamesob*
In which imminent Brexit disasters are somehow blamed on people who warned that they would happen. Expect a lot of this.

Talking about Grenfell...

BBC Radio 4 Today‏ @BBCr4today
"The lesson is to listen to experts who can tell us things... and to envisage what is the worst case scenario" - Damian Green.

Jo Maugham QC‏*@JolyonMaugham*
A man of your quality, @michaelgove, won't stand for this sort of nonsense, surely?

So we shot ourselves in the foot re negotiators? Now, there's a surprise.

Andrew Lilico is a bit of a shit, isn't he? Still smearing the Labour party, even now that the good stuff is impacting the ventilation...

The idea that private enterprise is inherently more efficient than the public sector derives from the principle that a profit motive will squeeze out unnecessary expenditure. This process is popularly referred to as "letting the markets decide".

When someone says to you that they believe "markets should decide", you should challenge them with the simple question "how?". Take, as a completely random example, building safety standards. Left to their own devices, markets will decide on the cheaper materials until any further reduction in price will be too unsafe. (If we want to measure safety in pounds, then we should think, for example, of potential compensation payouts and factor that into the costs). Now, if we really let the market decide (as opposed to restricting it with burdensome legislation and regulation), then the only way to determine the appropriate safety level is by experimentation, viz, actively putting people's lives at risk.

In fact, built into the whole free market ideology is the principle of failure. Businesses have to fail so that they can be weeded out and only the successful strategies remain. This is why free market principles applied to things like health and education can't really ever work – who's going to flood the market with hospitals in the first place, and then who's going to tell you that, by design, some fraction of them are unsafe and the only way to find out is for people to die in them.

A further 58 known to have been in tower who are missing that figure likely to go up, missing presumed dead. Search starts up again this afternoon after pause because of instability in the building.

No its not a further 58. Its 58 which INCLUDES the 30 dead bodies they have found...

I don't understand why May is chairing a Government task force on the disaster Why would the PM be chairing this, especially May?

Exactly my reaction when I heard this on the radio news. And her Newsnight comment that she couldn't stay in Kensington to meet people because she needed to get back to set up the public inquiry, and sort out the £5m. A telephone call to the right people should have sorted both. She's a micromanager of the worst sort.

And where is Amber Rudd? I know her father has died recently but I'm sure she was in the HoC this week and was seen in Paris too.

I'm beginning to think the tide has turned on Brexit too. No longer saboteurs and enemies of the people. Whether it's in time to stop us going over the cliff though ...

OK red my gdd just corrected me too.x

So we shot ourselves in the foot re negotiators? Now, there's a surprise.

We can't even negotiate getting a negotiator.

Some points about 'body count suppression'

I simply don't think there is no incentive for the police to cover up. Likewise the fire service. These services are under strain. In a perverse way, this illustrates so many of the arguments they have been trying to make.

That includes the decision to tell people to stay in their flat which has been criticised, given there are so many other factors at play and seem to be far bigger contributing factors. The fire service was in a position where they would have problems and would have been criticised if they had told people to leave their flats when it became apparent that shoebox principle of containing the fire was just not possible. In the flats, people did not immediately come into contact with smoke. If they did leave their flat they would have been exposed to it.

Nor is there an incentive for the media to cover up the number of deaths, to be bluntly cynical, more deaths is good for business as it generates sales and clicks for many.

Where suppression comes into play is when it comes to the reason for the disaster and vested interests. This comes into play further down the line.

There are some other possible thoughts about differences between the number of dead circulating in the community and the in the press.

Jo Maugham QC‏**@JolyonMaugham**
Am told @RBKC now running things at Westway; small charities excluded; a very traumatised victim with no immigration status has taken off.
Obviously not easy to corroborate this stuff but comes from a person who has been working at Westway for days. Still very difficult to get comfortable with @RBKC - which has many conflicts of interest - having a direct role in managing this situation.
Obviously there's a sense in which it's convenient to those in financial or criminal firing line for victims of Grenfell Tower to disappear.
And - if you want proper care for victims of this appalling disaster - that's precisely why those in the firing line shouldn't be involved.

em‏*@civetta*
Don't know how it could be done but there needs to be a complete amnesty for victims with irregular immigration and/or tenancy statuses.

Jo Maugham QC‏**@JolyonMaugham**
A Government seriously interested in justice for victims of Grenfell would announce exactly this. Yesterday.

(Maugham has since said the person in question has returned and has asked if anyone with the relevant expertise can help them)

And also this:

There have been some suggestions of lots of illegal immigrants were subletting in the building

Kelechi Okafor‏ @kelechnekoff
They don't want us to know that:
•The death toll is looking like a three figure number.
•as many as 15 people were in some flats.

which has lead to comments like this:

Shannon Clarke @clacksee
I'm reminded in some ways of the El Al flight 1862, which crashed into a tower block near Schiphol Airport in 1992.
#Grenfell #ElAl1862
I can't be the only one thinking this.
Bijlmer, the Dutch tower block that was destroyed, was home to a high number of refugees and undocumented immigrants.
^Poverty forced high concentrations of people into small flats.
#Grenfell #Bijlmer^
The death toll and identities of victims has been in dispute for 25 years because no one knows for sure who was supposed to be there.
I have no idea how we can prevent this added element of tragedy — people who will never be remembered because they were already forgotten.

If this is true or even suspected, even for one flat, then this might also explain the slow response in numbers from the police/fire. They simply can not just say a number. They have to be sure of what they are saying for a number of reasons.

They have to be sure no one has tried to fake a death (which can and does happen. This by default might point some prejudice that people connected with the building might have criminal intent.) so just going on people reporting people missing is not enough. The police have said they received reports of 400 people missing initially, which they have had to verify and follow up.

They will also have to ensure that they match the people who were registered to the building whose immigration/rental status is completely above board with bodies because of this.

The possibility of people being in the building who were not residents / not full above board in some way slows the whole process down.

The police have just said that they have formally identified 1 person and there are a total of 58 missing presumed dead from reports. It may increase if they find people have not reported missing. (This figure of 58 includes the 30 dead they know about).

This is lower than the BBC's initial figure of 70. This is going to lead to further questions. I did see one story about how a family of Syrian refugees with two parents and three grown up daughters were thought to be missing but did turn up yesterday safe and well. Which highlights why the police were just so reluctant to give figures until now. Again this highlights why possible questionable immigration status or problems with little english might come into play as they might not have known how to report themselves safe. (I stress there is no suggestion that this refugee family is anything but legitimate, and also make the case people in this position might still fear the loss of documents which prove their legal right to stay here). People who 'shouldn't be there' or have fear of authorities for some reason might have disappeared rather than report to the authorities.

I am starting to think that this is going to be a sore point.

However as say I do not think that the police / fire have reason to suppress. The fire and police have, and continue to, put their lives at risk to find out the number of people who have died. They had to halt searches yesterday due to safety reasons again which has not helped the timescale on this - note if there is a flat with 15 people living in it, then that would fails into the realms of sparking a criminal investigation.

Suspicion of this comes down to the huge amount of lost trust in authority and a steady but sure build up of being on the receiving even of prejudice that comes from being at the bottom of the social hierarchy.

In this though, the reality of subletting and the plight of people who are on the fringes of society when it comes to housing should be talked about because the invisibility of them is relevant.

Met commander Stuart Cundy pleaded with any people who escaped the tower but haven’t made themselves known to police to get in touch with the Met’s casualty bureau.

I don’t care the reason, I want to know and we all want to know that you are safe and well.

This poor man, I believe him.

Is May's deport first ask questions later, one of the reasons why there may be a numbers discrepancy between survivors and those lost.

cross post.

Well thank you for that Red very informative and helps me understand a lot better what might be going on now. Got to say I didn't think about whether people were there illegally. X

Some things are fine to be outsourced - pretty much everyone buys in specialist software eg databases, printing of stationery, that kind of thing. It's when whole services get outsourced to the point where the council claims they are no longer accountable.

Also there are some out there who are happy to use the tragedy not to find justice but to exploit it and create greater division and problems for their own political agenda.

The Socialist Worker placards were whipped out pretty damn quick weren't they?

That's not to say there isn't a very real need for a more socialist agenda here. It is to say that some were not just doing it for the benefit of Grenfell and 'the many' out there.

There were people calling for riots yesterday. That would undermine the calls for justice and gives the worst elements of society the excuse they are actively seeking to dismiss real concerns.

This isn't solved by conflict. It has to be a focused and measured campaign with clear goals that pressure can be applied to achieve.