I sat down with some people affected by the Grenfell fire for a Mirror Talks special programme on Monday. I encourage everyone to watch it on YouTube and on the Daily Mirror’s platforms because I’m staggered to hear from some quarters that there are people who are over it. Or believe the scandal is a London media obsession.
The stark reality is that the lack of justice for the 72 victims, choked to death in that tower block in 2017, stands as yet another example of the country’s cover-up culture. And, regardless of where you live, it could easily, one day, affect you.
Hillsborough, Windrush, the infected blood scandal, the Post Office, there have been any number of legal miscarriages. Yesterday, the next phase of the Covid inquiry began, a year after ex-PM Boris Johnson promised his government’s actions would be put “under the microscope”. On the same day, the Lampard inquiry began into the deaths of almost 2,000 (yes, really) mental health patients in Essex.
Great Ormond Street children’s hospital has also just apologised after an investigation found children treated by one of its surgeons came to “severe harm” during limb reconstruction operations.
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Getty Images)
The secrets and lies exposed by last week’s Grenfell report are just the latest in a litany of examples of the stonewalling and can-kicking that have left millions of ordinary people with zero faith in the establishment. So, from a personal point of view, there is not a single politician I will trust to pontificate on it until action is taken. Nor a single person of political influence of any persuasion from whom I want to hear apologies, hand-wringing or crocodile tears. Get us some accountability first.
The families have heard it, smelled it, read it and experienced years of posturing and playing to the gallery from MPs who could have made a difference had they directed their energies towards demanding answers.
It is a national disgrace that justice for the dead may not come until the end of this decade with the building firms’ “arrogant” refusal to admit wrongdoing. And I still can’t get over that footage of the Commons chamber emptying last week, before Sir Keir Starmer’s statement on the Grenfell inquiry report. It is one of the most shameful, yet instructive insights into our political class I have ever seen. It will remain the enduring image of Westminster’s attitude towards the people they purport to care about.
MPs scurrying out in search of dinner, a dry white wine, a way of beating the rush hour or anything else other than seeing the bigger picture by sitting through a statement into one of the biggest scandals in modern history. You can bet your boots they’d have stayed if the victims had been in a higher tax bracket with double-barrelled surnames and places at private school.
As Natasha Elcock from Grenfell United said last week in response to the report which spelled out the catalogue of greed, mendacity, dishonesty and incompetence at every level – no government, of any persuasion, emerges from it with their hands clean.