I cannot away with JRM -- he's a horrible little man. But I also think he is being condemned for something that he didn't actually say.
I heard the clip of him being played on the news and thought "huh? That's not what people are saying that he said" and went looking for a left-wing or centre media outlet that was likely to have given the most damning quote available to see what that was. What I found in the Guardian was:
“The tragedy came about because of the cladding leading to the fire racing up the building and then was compounded by the stay put policy.
“And it seems to me that is the tragedy of it. That the more one’s read over the weekend about the report and about the chances of people surviving, if you just ignore what you’re told and leave, you are so much safer.
“I think if either of us were in a fire, whatever the fire brigade said, we would leave the burning building.
“It just seems the common sense thing to do and it’s such a tragedy that that didn’t happen but I don’t think it’s anything to do with race or class.”
and that looks like what I thought I'd heard.
I think it was stupid to say anything at all if he didn't have to, and I think it was badly-phrased, and I cannot for the life of me think why he said anything about race or class, but I really don't think the wretched man was saying that the people there were stupid.
I think he was saying that human instinct (his and the interviewer's and by extension that of the people in Grenfell Tower as well) would be to try to run away from, get out of, a burning building -- and I think he's probably right about that. Staying put is somehow very counter-intuitive, even if it is what the fire-brigade say one ought to do. And we now know the fire-brigade advice did not work, because of the illegal cladding. So in this one particular case, following instinct rather than obeying orders might have saved some people.
A lot of people use "common sense" to mean things at a level below actual thinking through, instinctive stuff; or at least, that is how I often hear the phrase used.
Doesn't mean I think him less of an odious weasel, mind. Just that I don't think this was quite as bad as it's being seen as having been.
Where I am I have an arch-ERG sitting MP, and it is described as a "very safe" seat for him; but I am clinging on to the fact that in 2015 he had almost 15,000 lead over Labour, but in 2017 he had only 6,600 or so. And it is a remain area, 52% to 48% leave. I think it is worth trying really hard for Labour here -- and if the 4000 or so Liberal Democrats joined in that would be triffic. Or if enough people just moved to them from the Tories. Crossed fingers anyhow. And dialling fingers too, not to mention fill the car with fuel on the day before the polls.