Grenfell Tower Fire

Moral Maze

BBC

Society & Culture, Religion & Spirituality

4.5 • 609 Ratings

🗓️ 22 June 2017

⏱️ 43 minutes

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Summary

Rage is an understandable emotional reaction to the Grenfell tower fire. It's not just a response to the number of people who died or were severely injured and the many hundreds more who lost loved ones or have been evacuated from their homes in the area. It's when you look at the accounts of Kensington and Chelsea council that the emotion crystallises into something more morally troubling. In the last financial year the council had spendable reserves of more than £300 million and was running at such a profit it could afford to write off £1.5 million on subsidising Holland Park Opera. A sprinkler system for Grenfell tower would have cost around £200,000. Were those in Grenfell tower victims of the dogma of the free market - to which New Labour signed up along with the Conservative party - that has destroyed our sense of social obligation and the common good? If they were victims of bad government, is the answer more regulation? Or does "red tape" reduce morality and personal responsibility to a tick-box mentality? This Wednesday campaigners are planning what they call a "day of rage" to protest at the social injustice they say is at the heart of the tragedy. They are calling for people to "defy Tory rule". It's not hard to turn this tragedy into a political morality tale about rich and poor and it may even be understandable to do that, but is it a justifiable tactic when emotions are running so high? Anger is an energy that can be focused to achieve change, but it can also career out of control as we saw outside a mosque in north London this week. With3 recent major terrorist incidents and a fractured political climate you could argue that as a nation we're living through febrile emotional times. Do we all have a responsibility to choose our words carefully?

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to a program from BBC Radio 4.
0:03.9	Good evening. It was billed as the day of rage over the Grenville Tower disaster.
0:08.5	Hundreds of people marched on Westminster this afternoon.
0:12.0	Intent, they said, on overthrowing a government they described as murderers.
0:16.3	It was a terrible disaster.
0:18.0	There are serious accusations being made about the way the block was refurbished,
0:22.4	the safety concerns that were apparently ignored.
0:25.3	The anger with so many dead is understandable.
0:28.2	To the protesters, this forms part of a wider narrative,
0:30.8	a political morality tale in which neoliberal politics,
0:34.5	the widening gap between rich and poor and the economics of austerity
0:38.5	ended with dozens of poor people losing their lives in a death trap. In their manifesto for the
0:44.4	day, the organisers described their rage as righteous. To others, this smacks of hijacking a tragedy
0:51.1	to try to bring down an elected government. They say Grenville is the product of both Labour and Conservative housing policies,
0:58.1	and there are tower blocks with similar vulnerabilities in labour-controlled areas.
1:02.2	It may be an unequal society, but poor people, many recent refugees from abroad,
1:07.6	had been provided with subsidised housing in the richest borough in Britain.
1:11.8	Dangerous housing, as it turned out, but was it because of cutbacks or carelessness?
1:16.5	The tower had been refurbished at the cost of £75,000 of flat, even at a time of so-called austerity.
1:23.6	Is it right to try to channel the feelings that follow a disaster into a political campaign to bring down the government?
1:29.6	Or is it simplistic, cynical, and in a country trying to cope with tensions and divisions so vividly brought home by recent terrorist incidents, dangerous?
1:38.2	That's our moral maze tonight. Our panel, Melanie Phillips, social commentator on the Times, Claire Fox from the Institute of Ideas, Adam McElvoy,
	...

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