Campaigners have projected the slogan, '2 years after Grenfell this building still hasn't kept its promises', onto the Houses of Parliament.
Grenfell United - campaigning on behalf of survivors, bereaved and residents - carried out the protest.
Nobody has yet been arrested for the fire on the Lancaster West council estate of 14 June 2017 that killed 72 people.
Criminal
Police say they have identified potential suspects for corporate manslaughter and gross negligence manslaughter and have interviewed individuals under criminal caution.
But police say there is no guarantee that criminal charges will be brought.
Police are delaying charging decisions until after a public inquiry ends.
Caution
However, the inquiry has been delayed throughout 2019 so no-one will be charged before at least 2021.
One of the most complex criminal investigations ever also involves 45 million digital documents and 14,500 physical exhibits.
United Kingdom government policies have led to the systematic immiseration of millions across Great Britain, according to the United Nations (22 May 2019).
Philip Alston, the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, calls for a new vision that embodies compassion to end the unnecessary hardship.
“The results of the austerity experiment are crystal clear,” says Alston in his report following an official visit to the country in November 2018. “There are 14 million people living in poverty, record levels of hunger and homelessness, falling life expectancy for some groups, ever fewer community services, and greatly reduced policing, while access to the courts for lower-income groups has been dramatically rolled back by cuts to legal aid."
Undermine
“The imposition of austerity was an ideological project designed to radically reshape the relationship between the Government and the citizenry,” adds Alston. “UK standards of well-being have descended precipitately in a remarkably short period of time, as a result of deliberate policy choices made when many other options were available.
“The Government’s ‘work not welfare’ mantra conveys the message that individuals and families can seek charity but that the State will no longer provide the basic social safety net to which all political parties had been committed since 1945,” Alston says.
“It is hard to imagine a recipe better designed to exacerbate inequality and poverty and to undermine the life prospects of many millions,” reports Alston. “But in response to this social calamity, the Government has doubled down on its policies."
Brutish
The Conservative government's Work and Pensions Secretary, Amber Rudd, may officially complain about the work - especially as Alston compares her department's policies to the setting up of Victorian workhouses.
Alston has angered the government by saying austerity and welfare cuts threaten to make the lives of millions of less well off British people "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short".
Rudd says Alston is politically biased and his report is under-researched.
Charity to cope
“The endlessly repeated response that there are more people in employment than ever before overlooks inconvenient facts: largely as a result of slashed government spending on services, close to 40 percent of children are predicted to be living in poverty two years from now; 16 percent of people over 65 live in relative poverty; and millions of those who are in-work are dependent upon various forms of charity to cope.”
Alston acknowledges the Government has taken action on a number of the issues raised in his preliminary report. “I welcome the moves to adopt a uniform poverty measure, to systematically survey food insecurity, and to further delay the rollout of Universal Credit. That programme will be improved by plans to provide more time to repay advances, to reduce debt payment limits, and to reduce extreme penalties. But, for all the talk that austerity is over, massive disinvestment in the social safety net continues unabated,” Alston says. Homelessness The UN report on a 'shocking increase...in homelessness and rough sleeping' and that 'a growing number of homeless families - 24,000 between April and June 2018 - have been dispatched to live in accommodation far from their schools, jobs and community networks'. Alston says there are '1.2 million people on the social housing waiting list in 2017, but less than 6,000 homes were built that year'.
Crisis
“It is difficult to see recent changes as more than window dressing to minimise political fallout,” adds Alston. “The situation demands a new vision that embodies British compassion and places social rights and economic security front and centre.”
Alston accepts Brexit is clearly an issue of utmost concern to all sides but it has also become a tragic distraction from the social and economic policies that in the meantime are shaping a Britain that it is hard to believe any political parties really want. “It certainly won’t be a prouder, stronger, and more self-confident British community that emerges unless attention is given to the crisis of destitution and the chronic insecurity of low-income earners,” says Alston.
Impact
“Given the significant resources available in the country, the sustained and widespread cuts to social support, which have caused so much pain and misery, amount to retrogressive measures in clear violation of the United Kingdom’s human rights obligations,” Alston says.
“The Government should restore local government funding to ensure crucial social protection can help people escape poverty, reverse particularly regressive measures such as the benefits cap and two-child limit, and audit the impact of tax and spending decisions on different groups.”
Philip Alston, from Australia, took up his functions as the Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights in June 2014. According to the UN, Special Procedures’ experts work on a voluntary basis; they are not UN staff and do not receive a salary for their work. They are independent from any government or organisation and serve in their individual capacity.
I feel privileged to have lunched today (Thursday, 4 October) with the Italian guitarist Luigi Legnani (1790-1877), the German Baroque composer Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) and the British lutenist John Dowland (1553-1626).
Their 21stCentury central London medium today is the award-winning British guitarist Michael Butten. Butten's flowing lunchtime recital of pieces from each of those composers fills the air inside the cavernous church hall at St John’s Smith Square in Westminster. In Butten’s accomplished hands, their passionately composed music reverberates with searing clarity down through the centuries.
Berkshire-born Butten spellbinds around 60 lunchtime concert-goers with Legnani’s majestic and oft-frisky Fantasia in A Op.19. Yet Butten captivates most with his church hall resurrection of Dowland’s Praeludium and Lachrimae Pavane, the latter based perhaps on Dowland’s most famous lute song, Flow My Tears.
Lost Love
Butten’s Dowland interpretations are moving and evocative, inviting us to hear what Dowland wanted to convey with his soulful 17thcentury lute compositions.I momentarily close my eyes on Butten to open my ears wider to let this musical poetry fire my imagination. An image appears of a mourner of a lost love. The grieving soul wanders deep through a midwinter forest of England now long gone.
Butten later glides through Bach’s Violin Sonata No.3 in C and richly deserves his echoing ovation inside a church hall that itself echoes England’s past pain; St John’s Smith Square suffered a gutting direct hit from a Luftwaffe bomb on 10 May 1941, the last day of the Blitz. The entire church needed rebuilding.
Butten too seeks to resurrect, as he himself puts it, ‘the often neglected guitar music of British composers’ and the ‘lute repertoire of the British renaissance’, notably Dowland to whom Butten encores in tribute.
Butten’s subtle guitar playing stands alone as extremely good value; and exceptional value at just a tenner for an autumnal lunchtime. But it’s worthwhile too to keep an eye on Butten’s noble mission to infuse fresh interest into – what is, essentially - the soul music of 17thCentury England.
It’s not a delay if you stop to
sharpen the scythe.
Delay beats error and always trumps never.
However, such clichés don’t easily hitch to Crossrail,
London’s much-vaunted east-west railway.
Red-faces
It’s autumn 2018 and Crossrail should now be all set for a full operation
of new Elizabeth Line train services, scything through London's congested and overcrowded rush-hour commutes.
The tracks are laid in new tunnels under central London.
New trains are tested and ready and waiting to run along the Elizabeth Line (above).
But in late August the government and Transport for London
announce Crossrail will be delayed by ‘nearly a year’ due to the need for further technical tests following a raft of problems.
The delay and an attached cost over-run red-faces London’s
political establishment, chiefly because the government and TfL are allocating
£15.4 billion of taxpayers’ hard-earned money to Crossrail, up from the project's original £14.8bn.
Pricing out
Hence, the pressure mounts on Crossrail chief executive Simon Wright, TfL and the government to
deliver a fully operative Elizabeth Line for London as soon as possible.
It’s bad news to keep
a nonagenarian monarch waiting for a train, let alone millions of Londoners.
Yet Crossrail has already affected millions of Londoners even before a single train service has run - by raising house values for private homeowners near its suburban stations but also pricing out potential homebuyers.
"I want you to do right by our family," says Claudia Davies, bereaved ex-partner of Steve Power, one of the 72 people killed as a result of the Grenfell Tower fire.
Davies directly addresses her remarks to the Grenfell Inquiry chairman Sir Martin Moore-Bick after she and Power's daughter Sherry gave powerful testimony at the inquiry's victim commemoration sessions.
Toyin Agbetu of the Grenfell MediaWatch Update says Davies and other Grenfell residents are helping to steer "the inquiry in the right direction" with their powerful testimonies.
Homeless
Agbetu, in The Power of Testimony, the latest of the Grenfell MediaWatch's useful round-ups, notes with shock and indignation that, as of 24 May 2018, 130 of the 210 households affected by the fire still remain in temporary or emergency accommodation.
Hackitt review
Agbetu also highlights the conspicuous absence of government cabinet ministers and of MPs at the inquiry - focusing on their "empty chairs".
The government has said though that the use of the cladding on the Grenfell Tower was illegal.
Of the 156-page Hackitt review of building regulations, Agbetu says it contains "some good recommendations...but these could take a year to put in place".
And, of course, Hackitt did not call for an explicit ban on flammable cladding.
Ban
The government though announced it is to consult on a possible ban on flammable cladding. "This should've happened months ago," says Agbetu, who points out that the government's own Equality and Human Rights Commission called for such a ban.
The government says it will also restrict the use of cheaper desktop studies to see if building materials are fireproof.
In Wales, plans are afoot to ban all flammable cladding. Sprinklers are already mandatory on all new buildings too. "Wales has far less resources than England," says Agebtu. "But much more political will."
Croydon
Agbetu
notes that finally Barratt Homes will pay for the fire safety cladding
upgrade on private residential tower blocks in Croydon.
Flat owners had
protested against being asked to pay £30,000 each.
Stay put
The London Fire Brigade has reversed its 'stay put' fire policy and now tells residents in London's 100 or so residential tower blocks to 'get out' if there is a fire.
The 'stay put' advice is believed to have led Grenfell residents being trapped.
