Towering Statesmanship

Since the National Johnson told Parliament that the Government would legislate according to the recommendations of the Grenfell inquiry, and the then Minister for Richard Desmond proclaimed that the Government would accept in full all of the report's findings, the fact that the Government neither accepts the findings in full nor intends to legislate accordingly will doubtless leave some people almost as surprised as your correspondent. The report recommends that disabled tenants be issued with personal emergency evacuation plans; but if decades of cripple-kicking have taught the British Neoliberal Party anything, it is that due exposure to the free market can quite easily turn people with disabilities into a self-solving problem. Therefore Her Majesty's Government has decided not to implement the report's recommendation for much the same reasons as flammable cladding was used and safety measures skimped in the first place: because letting renters die is a better risk than allowing landlords to be inconvenienced. Still, in a case like this even the Home Office apparently feels the need to make some sort of show at giving a toss, and ministers have expressed a willingness to share the addresses of disabled residents with fire services. Given the need for customer monitoring and the Government's long and happy relationship with the children of Babbage, this approach might well dovetail conveniently with the final transformation of the NHS into a data farm for the pharmaceutical and insurance industries.