Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 9: Grenfell Tower Fire

Episode Date: December 10, 2019

Today @donoteat01, @aliceavizandum, and @oldmananders0n talk about the events leading up to the Grenfell Tower Fire, and its repercussions. Vote Labour on December 12! Here are the slides: https://youtu.be/epkCrB8aKXA listen to trashfuture: https://trashfuturepodcast.podbean.com/ Here's the Patreon link so you can watch the Groverhaus episode: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod

Uh, and anyway, on that note, we should start talking about, uh, hey, welcome to, um, well, there's your problem, a podcast about engineering disasters. Yeah. Maybe I am starting to get sick at this point. I don't know. Yeah. We're all fucking decrepit, uh, just, just falling apart. This is awesome.

I love to talk about social murder and I just, I feel like shit, so I'm in the right head space for, um, people in the comments were saying we were going to do Bhopal and that was going to be depressing. Well, jokes on you motherfuckers, because this is the sad one first. Yes. Yes. And that's what we're here to talk about is one of the worst disasters, which was basically directly caused by, you know, politics, which we can think of.

You notice this, uh, large tower block in front of us, uh, is on fire. Yeah. Shouldn't do that. Yeah. It's not good for it. You'll notice all of the other tower blocks in this picture, uh, not on fire. That's what you want. Um, less on fire.

They are. God damn it. There is another fire truck in the background, hopefully not on the way to a tower block fire. Although I suppose that would be nicely symmetrical in the United States. We have fire codes that work most of the time. Yeah. Yeah.

This is, we'll, we'll get into this, but, um, this isn't the case where we talk about something being political and someone in the comments goes, how can you bring politics into engineering? No, this, this is transparently political, like it involves politicians and involves laws directly. Um, yeah, no, it's, it's very, very unsusable about that. Yes. So, um, with that, let's, uh, as we'll start by talking a little bit, a little bit about

the history of social housing in the United Kingdom. Hmm. Starts bad, gets better for a bit, then gets much worse. Yes. So, um, we all know like the traditional social housing in the United Kingdom is, uh, you know, Charles Dickens, like, uh, almshouses, workhouses, you know, prisons, like, uh, well, you know, the surplus population, they can go and, you know, work off their, um, their, their whore, you know, you can go break rocks and then you will give you gruel, right?

You know, that's the traditional social housing, which was advocated for by guys with mustaches and stovepipe hats, you know. Yeah. But then there was one guy with a slightly different style of mustache who kind of interfered with all of this. Uh, nothing, uh, making an Adolf Hitler reference, because he fucking bombed Britain hard enough that, uh, some sizeable percentage of the housing was just totally destroyed. Fuck his Hitler.

God damn it. I didn't make the connection because I was thinking of, uh, like, I don't know, maybe it was like, maybe there's like some good social reformer in Britain. Um, well, there are a couple, but not, actually not with mustaches, weirdly, because they tended to be Quakers, but, um, yeah, no, uh, Adolf Hitler wearing a stovepipe hat for some reason. Uh, Victorian Adolf Hitler, the worst steampunk novel I've ever read. Well, I mean, I, he, the Nazis were big into their, um, their zeppelins, so I mean, you've

got the steampunk thing right there. They did love their zeppelins. I just realized we forgot introductions and pronoun checks. Uh, hi. I'm just. Oh, God. Five and a half minutes. Sorry.

Every one of the comments was expected in the first 30 seconds. Yeah, everyone's very angry now. All right, go. Look, we're all, we're all sick. Okay. When, when I do my pronouns, it's, it's not going to be me answering. I'm going to be they, them for this one because it's just the accumulation of all of the fucking rhino virus cells, um, that are piloting my body like an Eva.

That's pretty tight though, honestly. Yeah. No rules. Yeah. We love it in here. I am. My pronouns are he and him. Uh, that's, uh, I am Alice called O'Kelly.

My pronouns are she and her, although I've been leaning more into the day and then thing, uh, not just out of the, the rhino virus thing, but also very much that I, I feel like I'm dying. Yeah, buddy. I am. I'm Anderson. Uh, the old man Anderson on Twitter, uh, feel fucking great right now, uh, pronouns are he, him, uh, go to hell trans, same shit as always.

Yes. Oh yeah. Okay. So back to Hitler. Right. Yes. Go hard. Yeah.

So in, in WW2, Hitler blew up a bunch of housing in the United Kingdom. Bastard. Yeah. He checked a lot of our, uh, shitty, shitty terraced housing and stuff. He was a Yimby. Yeah. Oh fuck. Thanks for nothing.

I'm tired. Yeah. I mean, the thing is in German, a Yimby is spelled with a J, so it's like a Jimby. Yeah. And to my backyard. So, um, after WW2, there's this need for a lot of housing very, very quickly, right? So we start to get like this concept up to council house, right? Well, we get a, we get a bunch of things.

We get things like new towns where we just decide, hey, we're going to build Milton Keynes on these fields. And we, we decide that like, uh, there's this wave of post-war socialism where the labor party gets elected, it's very, very good. And aside from doing things like, uh, creating the NHS, they want to create social housing. Uh, labor councils want to create social housing. And so they do. They just build houses.

Uh, and that's, that's, it turns out that's quite a good idea. Are you telling me you can just build stuff and then you could just do it? Yeah. Yeah. And then we never do it again. Ever. Oh, of course. But naturally, yes, because, uh, in, uh, you know, after, you know, the first wave of social

housing, um, which was, you know, based on like, you know, everyone gets, you know, this housing's oriented towards people of all income levels, uh, in 1951, the Tories come to power. Right. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly.

And they start to really refocus council housing on being, you know, welfare accommodation for low income earners, right? If you're a respectable person, you shouldn't need council housing, right? Yeah. Of course. Um, because the, the Tories by your bootstraps, God damn it. Yes. Is, is that you own your own home and if you don't do that, then you are lost to labor

forever. Uh, that, that's your like original sin and you're like condemned to socialism. Oh, no. What a bird. So this is when we start to get a, um, uh, council housing, which is oriented more towards the, uh, concept of slum clearance rather than adding more housing. Oh, that sounds promising. Yeah.

Yeah. So I mean, the thing is like the history of British slums is, uh, the, the area where Grenfell is that we're going to talk about, uh, was a notorious plague spot, uh, in which the biggest problem for like slums in the, in the 19th century, well into the 20th was that people were just keeping pigs and they were just pigs just roaming around just shitting everywhere. I like that a lot. And I wish I didn't.

Yeah. Right. And what happened is that this, this transformed into, um, a slum largely at the hands of a guy called, uh, Peter Ruckman, uh, who was sort of the prototypical slum lord. And he did this thing of like creating, cramming as many separate flats into one house as possible so you didn't have to have rank control, things like that. And so it became much more, um, of what you would think of as a, a, a modern slum. And then the government decided to kind of swoop in and think, Hey, we, we can do this

a lot better than this one guy who is like this one fat, organized crime guy. But, uh, yeah, so we start to get into like slum clearance and, and, uh, after the housing subsidy act of 1956, like building more units than were there before is banned. It's a one for one replacement. Dumb as dog shit. Yeah. Which this is not actually as dumb as, as housing policy gets, we'll get that. Yeah.

And if you, if you want to hear about how one for one slum clearance works, you can check out my two parter episode on public housing in the United States, um, on my YouTube channel. Um, shameless. It's, it's, it's very, no, it's, it's very relevant here. Uh, when you talk about, uh, public housing projects, what, what I would call a state. Um, yeah, we'll get to that, but there's a lot of the same politics involved. Yeah.

So we get, um, you know, so we have what results from this is like through some slum clearance, there's mass displacement of working class neighborhoods in the name of providing decent housing for the working class. Right. You know, we have support structures, just annihilated, you know, people may get better housing out of the end, end of it. But in the meantime, you know, it's just like, all right, someone shows up. They want to bulldoze your house.

You know, it's like, They have nowhere to live. That's great. That's great. The shitty thing is where social Democrats sign on to these things, which they do sometimes. Um, there's usually at a local level, like local councils, uh, there's always some utopian vision involved. We're going to have high rise tower blocks that are going to be streets in the sky where

you can just like everybody's going to know each other like on a street full of row houses. The row is going to be like 500 feet in the air or the Scottish edition of this is not so much we build tower blocks, but we build satellite towns where we just have an entirely new town built mostly out of concrete for all of the poor people and they can just live on the outside of town. And of course, those places turn into like holes immediately. Um, I mean, somehow it never occurred to these people that all I had to say was like, look, we're going to build a market on the corner where you can buy bacon instead of having

a pig that you own. Yeah. Well, back in the old days in Lancaster West, you could just like grab a pig and just like take a rasher off of it. It was a better time. Yeah. A more simple time, a better time. I'm just just ripping strips of bacon off a pig that's passing by.

Oh, that seems so mean. Yeah. All right. And this system, you know, goes on for a while. Dismally. Dismally. Yeah. I mean, you know, by and large, before 1951, it was sort of low rise houses like what we're

looking at in the fixture here after 1951 when the Conservatives come in power and it becomes like, you know, a land grab, a money grab. Yeah. We start to get tower blocks, right? And you start to get the figure of the estate, this like controlled housing project area that is its own form of social segregation. Yeah. And then in 1979, of course, under Thatcher's government, I was ready with the fucking bill.

This wonderful thing called right to buy. Yes. Where, of course, she got a generation out of that. Just as like a simple bribe. And this is a problem that the Tories are still facing because they just kind of kick the can down the road with this, which is that if, as we mentioned earlier, the Tory base is owns your own home, but the Tory ideology is to do capitalism in such a way that nobody owns their own home, then you kind of end up with an electoral contradiction.

And so you have to do this big government subsidy where you like let people buy their social housing so that they can be landowners and become Tories. Yeah. And then it's even more confusing when you like buy a condo in a social housing estate, you know, like a tower block like now, it's like real weird. But yeah, right to buy, you could, you know, buy your social house or flat for a discount of 33 to 50 percent off the market value, depending on how long you live there. And yeah, by turning people into homeowners, of course, they turned labor voters into Tories

Yeah. And after Margaret Thatcher, council housing construction effectively ended, right? Well, I mean, part of the thing is that because you're making councils sell all of these properties at these knockdown rates, you know, quite knowingly cutting the funding and the housing pools of local councils, you can't build more social housing with this because you're losing money on every house that someone buys out from Monday. Right. And then they'll say, oh, well, see how much money we're losing.

This just isn't working. Wait, wait. Yes. Nudge, nudge. I mean, it's really, it's funny that the way this was couched at the time still is, is that you run, you should run a council like a business. Yeah. Oh my God.

I know. But the thing is, it's that's not even true on its own merits, on its own logic, because I love to run a business in such a way that the government mandates that I sell all of my assets in such a way that I don't make a profit. I thought socialism was bad. It's just like the helium reserve. Yeah. Pretty much.

All right. So we've got to talk about, come on, next slide, please, tower blocks, streets in the sky. Yes. Everyone knows everybody because that's what fucking happened. So now a lot of these tower blocks that were built through, you know, the British social housing, this is their system built, right? Which is, you know, another way of saying they're prefabricated.

Yeah. What used to be in, if you do this over the Iron Curtain, that's called Plattenbell or a Khrushchevker, and that's bad because that's socialism. Yeah. Whereas if you do the same thing where you use prefabricated concrete slab construction and you just balance the concrete on the concrete all the way up, if you do that in, like, Denmark or Britain, that's called system building. Yes.

Like Legos. That's anodyne. That's not socialist. But if you do it in Russia, that's socialist. Oh, good. If you do it in the United States, it's usually in a parking garage and not a tower block. That garage just have a lot of problems. Imagine all the problems that happened with these buildings, but also add road salt.

Awesome. And just the weight of, like, a couple of hundred cars. Yes. Just shifting unpredictably. Amazing. Yeah. So they build a whole bunch of these tower blocks. They're all built off of similar, like, prefabricated, you know, construction systems.

They're all, you know, the sort of Le Corbusier towers. Sometimes he was OK. Most of the time, he was bad. He was an arco-syndicalist for a while before he became fascist. And then what happened? Yeah. Weird progression. Every architect is a piece of shit, all right?

I'm just going to say that. They're all bad. Yeah. That's true. It's true. They're all bad. We can't say anything positive about any architect ever. No.

So, all right. In the notes here, I mentioned British fire codes are shit. Oh, that's, yes. Jesus. Yeah. This is because they actually had a system. I forget the name of it. It's like the Bretton Woods system is what my brain is giving me, but that's not right.

There's something Morris system that set out like scales of everything for like living space and what you need to make an apartment livable and some of that included fire safety. And then the Tories immediately cut all of that in 1958. And it just sort of started a long, slow decline from there. So yeah, the fire codes are not good and we'll get into this, but in the immediate lead-up to the Grenfell Tower fire, the again Tory government passed a law shifting responsibility for fire codes and fire inspections from the fire brigade, the fire department, to local councils.

Who don't have any money to conduct such things, presumably. Even if they want to. They own the building. Yeah. So, they're definitely have no reason. They've a vested interest. Yeah. Passing it.

But we'll get to that in a minute. That sounds ethical. It is. Yeah. They made every local council in England and Wales into Grover certifying himself to pass his own shitty work. Yeah. See, there's your continuity, folks, subscribe to the Patreon and then you can have the bonus

episode. Yeah. That one has jokes on it because it's funny, unlike this one. Although we're cancelled for culturally appropriate Grover House. Jesus. All right. So, a lot of things that were common through these tower blocks is there's like one stairwell. Safe.

There's something called the stay put policy, right? Oh, fuck. And the idea with the stay put policy is that these concrete buildings, you know, they got fire doors. If there's a fire in one flat, there's no way that that fire is going to spread to another flat. Oh, that's bold. I like that.

It makes more sense from a certain perspective than trying to drag 300 people down 20 flights of stairs in the middle of the night. Oh, sure. Right. No, I have to say that. And it's very, very difficult to set concrete on fire. Yeah. It can be done.

It's very difficult. The real worry with these tower blocks was there was one of these called Ronan Point that collapsed. So the worry was structural rather than fire until about, like, I think 2008, maybe? There was another fire and another one of these. But like, until then, the thing everyone was worried about was that these were going to be structurally unsound and they were just going to collapse. Because Ronan Point was like a kitchen exploded near the top floor.

And it, like, blew out a couple of load bearing walls and about 13 stories that were on top of that flat just sort of came down with. Jesus. No, it happened there in the top of the tower and the four flats above it collapsed and then the 13 flats below it collapsed, or however many, if I recall correctly, right? They weren't necessarily built all that well. But I believe after that point, and I believe Grenfell was post Ronan Point, they built a lot better.

They were like, ah. When they built it, the architects mentioned Ronan Point as something they were trying to, as something they were mindful of avoiding, right? Well, that's good to hear. This will never collapse from a kitchen fire and God will never destroy the world by flood again. Do you see that rainbow? Yes, God swears he reels these that he'll never blow up the planet, even though we deserve

it. I love architects and I love engineers because much like militaries always fight the last war, they always prepare for the previous disaster. So yeah, the floors absolutely did not collapse. Like it's all still up covered, Grenfell Tower is still there and intact and covered in big white sheeting, so you don't have to think about it too hard. It's just sort of very burnt. Another thing is, so yeah, the state put policy worked pretty well before this incident.

We'll get into why after. There's no sprinklers in this building and no sprinkler system installed, which again, I think is bizarre. They're not common here at all. For almost any kind of building. Not sure why. I think that may just be a cultural thing that we just never appreciated them. But yeah, no, almost nothing requires you to install a sprinkler system now except higher

ice tower blocks in the aftermath of this. Well, thank God y'all have never had, say, a massive conflagration that burned, say, two thirds of your capital city or anything. Yeah, several times. Yeah, yeah, that will never happen, never happen. No, we, Britain said fuck sprinklers at some point for reasons unknown to me. I don't think y'all ever invented them. They didn't come over on like the land bridge.

Yeah, sprinklers never evolved here. Yeah. So, and then, yeah, as Alice mentioned before, in 2005, regulation shifted responsibility for fire code enforcement from fire brigades to local councils, which are, of course, in this case, the building owners, both of whom are getting cuts to their budgets. So to a certain extent, it might not have made a huge difference, but maybe you want someone doing your fire inspections, whose job is to prevent fires. Look, I mean, there's, there's, there's, there's very few.

Aspects of government that, like, I trust, like, implicitly or inherently. But firefighters, I always think the firefighters have my best interest at heart. Well, this is the thing. I've been on Twitter, I've been banging the drum for fire department based socialism for a long time, because especially in this country, they're actually quite well organized. We have a fire brigade's union, and they are not the most militant, but they're certainly not shy about going on strike when they have to.

And, yeah, no, quite, quite left wing, quite. Yeah, quite, let's say, class conscious. And I appreciate that. Aren't the French firefighters fighting the police right now? Oh, yeah, they do that about once a year. You'll usually see a picture of, like, a bunch of guys in Bunker Gear, like, fucking fist fighting riot cops and stuff. It's amazing.

Ho, ho, as you just get drilled with a 40 foot truck. So we got to talk about tenant management organizations, right? Running councils like a business. And like a business, you have to split everything up into like these black box organizations that, like, do the one thing at arms length from any sort of elected representation. It's horrific. Well, this was something which was, like, confusing when I was

organizing, when I was researching this, right? Because I looked at it and I was like, this seems like sort of like a homeowners association, but, like, for council housing or no. No, no, it's not like that. What it's like is the council going, OK, but what if we were a letting agency or what if we were, like, I don't know, a property management company and we just run that bit separately as a distinct organization? It's still, it's still filled with our people.

It's nominally accountable to us, but it's this distinct thing. So if you don't pay your rent or we won't fix your boiler, you don't get a letter with a letterhead saying Kensington and Chelsea Council. You get a letter saying KCTMO, which is Kensington and Chelsea Tenants Managing Association. So you can't, you can't get mad at us because the branding is different, right? OK, get that. And it's more, it's organized to be more.

And I'm doing air quotes, streamlined and efficient and like a business in ways that sort of aren't. Perfect. All right. I get, I get to ignore a lot of my notes then because I thought it was your you were ready for that, huh? Yeah, I thought it was like a homeowner's association, like, again, which is like a bad organization.

Yeah, it's like, aren't there like residents elected to the board of the well, this is the thing. It has elements of that. But when we look at in practice, how these things work, you can't even like you can't point to an example of a tenant management organization sort of capture from homeowners, right? You can't. There are no militant tenant management organizations.

It fucking should be that there should be. Yeah, that this is like a mechanism that in theory would allow for that. In practice is just kind of a way for a council to distance itself from its own social housing, which is always a good sign, never indicative of any neglect or anything. And it's certainly not if you have like half a dozen residents who are elected to this board, it's certainly not a way that you can like then throw them under the bus and say, yeah, it's this unpaid guy

who just lives here who isn't fixing your boiler instead of the councilor who's on like 180 grand a year. Jesus, OK. All right. I feel like I'm learning something today. So this is the one episode like this is why we have to do a British episode in between the Canadian ones. Is something to contribute?

So the Kensington and Chelsea tenant management organization so largest in Britain formed 1994 operated almost 10,000 buildings. Good Lord. I thought it was 10,000 units when I looked it up the first time. No, it's 10,000. They said 10,000 properties. So, you know, maybe a property has two buildings on it even. Who knows how many units they had.

And it's yeah. Kensington has we'll get into this, but this is a central area of London. It's very large, very crowded, huge income disparity, which means there's a lot of social housing, but it's also a conservative run council because it's like by the numbers. The actual borough is I think I don't actually know the number. It's one of the richest in London. And it's like that.

I'm sort of familiar with it because I've been there. Because that's where we stayed the one time I've been to England. It's like right on Earl's Court, Earl's Court, Earl's Coral's Court. How did you find Earl's Coral's Court? I was very sick. There seems to be a theme for you. This just seems to be a theme with us in Britain. Whenever we do any Britcon, we just like we all get sick at the horror

of this awful country. The last time I have the plague. It's back, motherfuckers. Bring out your dad. Just Ross throws himself into an ambulance. Just like, save yourselves. He's vomiting on the Queen or whatever. It's free here.

Not not any more for foreigners. No, they'll they'll bail you now. Oh, you dirty motherfuckers. I know. Wow. Good luck. Good luck getting it out of me. America, not a Commonwealth country. Yeah. Yeah. The last time I was in I was in England, I was also extremely sick.

We had run. We had kind of gone from Dublin to London to Paris. I remember just like my dad being like, yeah, well, if you're going to die, like do it now. That way we won't get charged for it. Oh, that's tight. Thanks. Oh, man. You don't have to like see the inside of a French ambulance

and be confronted by the French emergency medical system, which is strange. Clear. They're just applying the black face to you in the ambulance. Oh, you cleaned up so magnificently. This is actually there. There is one thing that I know about French emergency medical services. And this is absolutely true. Swear on the Quran that if you.

I saw a woman collapse in Paris and like a fire truck rolled up and they like tried to like she was conscious and everything. She was fine. But they got her some water in a wine glass from the back of the truck. Like they they just carry a wine. That's the most French the most French thing. That sounds about right. All right, so we're going to talk about the Grenfell Action Group, right?

Yes, this is the militant thing, right? This is the what what you might what you originally envisioned the tenant management, management organization as being. Well, I thought they were sort of like I don't know if you could describe them as a tenants union, but they're certainly a group of activist tenants. Yeah, a pressure group at the very least. Yeah, in opposition to the tenant management organization, right? Yeah.

And they were initially formed to protest the loss of a bunch of green space at the north end of the state, right? Promising so far. Which was Lancaster Green, because the the council wanted to put in a new school there, right? Kensington Academy and Leisure Center. Well, that's still because of the pocket. So so an academy is something that the Tories also invented. And it's well, you say this in the notes, but it's essentially a charter school,

like it will be privately operated and it's it's not fee paying. But yeah, it it'll be run by some fucking weird like trust that has its own like agenda, like making all the kids wear suits so they can learn about business. Yeah, exactly. It's like, you know, it like any charter school, you know, the deal is look. Look, we give you the money, you give us the grade, Capiche. I would like to point out this is quick aside, because I think it's fucking hilarious.

Is that the school I went to York Suburban High School, my beautiful modern New York, Pennsylvania, our school district was formed because in the 50s, York, the white parents of the York City School District refused to integrate. And so they started their own school district. And I just I need you to know that because this is that this ties out. No, this this ties in because all of the history of the Lancaster,

the Western state is tied in very deeply with race and racism because this area in Chelsea, yeah, was we had the first wave of largely like Caribbean migration to the UK was in the early 50s. And this was one of the first areas where that absorbed that migration because it was very cheap and shitty. And you had slumlords like Peter Rackman. And so since then, it like went through a lot of the same things

that Justin, you get into in your public housing thing, where like it becomes this sort of de facto segregated area. And so that that the idea that this is a largely more diverse area than the rest of London, which is pretty diverse already, but it was especially it was blacker, was contributes a lot to understanding why it might be neglected in this way. Yeah, I mean, it's not like, you know, in Virginia, when when they tried to integrate the schools,

they just shut all the schools down. I just I just felt like I need to get that out there, like not even like form a separate school district, like every school in the Commonwealth shut down for like two years. Yeah. Well, this this this this academy thing is an attempt to sort of revitalize inner city education districts. But we which had previously, of course, been cut back to the bone. And so now the idea is that you run them like a business

and that's going to make everything fine again. We have to use some kind of Steve and Pinker metric in order to do racism, as opposed to just doing racism. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, the really Steven Pinker thing is like free schools, which are another kind of charter school that just anybody you can just fucking set up a school with whatever like Wackadood less. Oh, yes.

Racial hygiene views that you have. This is this is more corporate. It's it's like you go you go to school on the set of the apprentice, basically. Anyway, the charter school got built. Right. Despite the, you know, the complaints of the residents of the tower were losing their nice green space, right? The Grenfell Action Group continues at criticizing aspects of the tower's maintenance and operation.

One of the most famous blog posts they put up was in 2013, whether like, you know, the fire safety in this tower is shit, right? You know, because it's like fire extinguishers had not been inspected for a long time. Most of them had expired. Yeah, they're all full of rats. Exactly. Like, like you pick up the fire extinguisher, you you push the button. A bunch of rats fly out. Very good.

No, I mean, the rats are too combustible for one thing. This is true. Not like that. The one thing I do remember from that thing was we were talking about the fire codes being shitty. There's one stairwell and they're like, yeah, this is blocks, like all the time, to some extent. There's always like old mattresses and like trash bags and stuff.

And if the building catches fire, we're just going to have to like, I guess, try to surf these like bags of trash down 20 flights of stairs. Yes. Well, it's super tight. So and after the first blog post where they're really complaining about it, the the the person in charge of the tower, like, threads to sue them. Yes. Oh, yeah. This is British defamation laws super tight.

So they might actually have lost that one, too. Two thirds of us are American, which is why this American podcast, we could say anything we want. Yeah. You know, we all know what the others didn't do is sign a goddamn treaty preventing us somehow from investigating the Estonian ferry wreck, which your dumb country did. True. I can't believe that we did that. Yeah. We're basically like we're like the Cayman Islands, but for podcasts.

Yeah, I can. Yeah, I'll do the Epstein stuff. You guys do the Estonia stuff and we like we're untouchable. It's perfect. All right. So pay attention to the tower as it looks in this slide, right? Kind of drab concrete, you know, whatever it's there. People live there. I'm sure they don't hate their housing that much.

So they called it the forgotten estate. Oh, that's good. Sounds good. After they build the academy, it's like, all right, we're trying to do a renovation on this tower, right? The renovation was mostly for the sake of energy efficiency. Well, I mean, the energy efficiency and the fact that you don't want your nice rich people who live in the rest of Kensington and Chelsea to have to look at social housing.

Yes. So it has to look like everything else. Well, look at this beautiful metal panel facade that they put on. Yeah, it looks absolutely incredible. Yeah, it looks gorgeous. I am a better person for having looked at this. Don't be too proud of this technological terror you've constructed, KCTMO. So there were genuine improvements they were doing to the tower through this renovation, right?

There's improvements to heating, individual water heaters per unit, right? They're putting in new windows. They are putting in new cladding. A, to match their fancy charter school. B, because, you know, it's going to improve like, you know, thermal efficiency, like release and heat to the environment, so on and so forth, right? They even put in a few more housing units, right? Most residents were pretty much in favor of the renovation

when it was proposed, because it seemed like a pretty good deal. Yeah, I mean, if somebody, if you're looking at this stairwell full of bullshit and the fire extinguishers full of rats and the council tells you, hey, we're finally going to renovate this thing, you're going to be like, of course, finally, you know, what took you so long? Yeah, so the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organization sends out the job for bid. One contractor came in at 11.3 million pounds.

They had budgeted 9.7 million pounds for the job. I'm sure this will add well. Another contractor came in at 8.7 million pounds. Hmm, that sounds fine. I came in a full million under while the other guy was two million over. I'm pretty sure Kensington and Chelsea Council runs a huge budget surplus. It's one of the only councils that does. So, yeah, no, this is this seems fine.

It's because of good cost control, Alice. Oh, it's true. Yeah, obviously. They're very prudent. All-starity works, God damn it. So one of the things, I guess, if you've ever worked in like municipal like construction with, you know, when you're working under a low bid system, it's like if it seems too good to be true, it is.

Well, so the regulations may force you to use that thing. Yes, because you have to like limit big government overreach by having the government come in and tell you that you have to run your council like a business. So they went with the low bid, right? Of course. Yeah. So they replace it with this, you know, they came in, they did a bunch of work. They did this metal panel facade.

I want to talk a little bit about metal panel. Go off, Ken. Yeah, so metal panel is a very flexible architectural material. I just, you know, I wanted to look at here's two metal panel buildings near where Liam and I live in West Philly. Well, yeah. Well, are you brewing the building? Oh, I was saying, it just sounds exactly like God damn safe because I'm sick.

So I mean, metal panel is interesting because you can do a lot with it. You can make it very interesting and colorful and fun. This is the hub. It's a student housing building in West Philly. Love they love using this for student housing buildings like all of the ones in Glasgow are metal panels, too. As was the one in Manchester that caught fire last month and did, you know, well, yes. You know, so this one's like it's got two kinds of wood veneers.

It's got some lime green accents. It's got like, I don't know, some weird corrugated bullshit. I like what they did with this building. I used to hate it. Now I'm kind of like, I like it because like the other option is what they did down the street where it's just all tan. Yeah, I kind of like the Legos thing over the over the over the one on the right. Yeah, in fact, that one on the right is also next to Elon Musk's old house,

where he lived when he was a student at the University of Pennsylvania, proving once again that there are no good panel on and go to hell all of you. It's very strange because they preserve Elon Musk's house, but they demolished the rectory for the Presbyterian Cathedral or not Cathedral, what's the word there? Or Episcopalian Cathedral right there because they put that tower up so they could raise funds to keep the church standing. But they kept Elon Musk's house again, I don't know why.

Oh, it's it's it's going to be important. It's like him getting mentioned on in the same breath as Edison on Star Trek. You know, we're all just we're all just basic on this one fucking bird dickhead to be he was on. He was on Rick and Morty. I was like, I thought they had some integrity on that show. Maybe I'm more too generous to Rick and Morty. But I was like, there's no way they bring Elon Musk on.

Oh, no, they did. That's just simply epic. Jesus, that's a podcast. That's it. Good night, everybody. Go to hell, all of you, etc. Yeah, we all just simultaneously die of flu. Well, cursing Elon Musk without dying breath. Well, probably he'll swat us because that's the thing Tesla does now.

Oh, yeah, Cybertruck bad. So in Grenfell, they use this metal panel to match the new charter school, right? You know, they had to make the tower a little more modern as we saw before. So if you just have kids looking out of the window during the lessons and they see social housing as opposed to aspirational metal panel, clad social housing, that they're not going to think like a business anymore. And it's going to ruin their education.

And it's going to be they might go into the arts. Yeah, you absolutely. It's just an absolutely unacceptable risk to the council of the Royal Borough of Kensington, Chelsea, that those children look out of their windows and see anything disturbing in the slightest about Grenfell Tower. That's that's called that's called four. So we got to talk about the the actual cladding that was used on this building, right?

So we have a material called Raino Band, P.E. Raino Band, P.E., excuse me, from a company called Arconic, right? So this is a metal panel. It's a sandwich panel, right? So you have an aluminum sheet here. You have a core made of polyethylene, right, which is a petroleum product. And then you have another aluminum sheet, right? Sure. And this thing costs twenty two pounds per square meter.

There's a more flame retarded version that costs twenty four pounds per square meter. So, you know, they they got some real big savings out of that one. Yeah, somebody worked out that to do the whole tower in the flame retardant cladding was about five thousand pounds more. Yes, there was a more expensive version they were supposed to use because even the the more flame retardant version was not enough. But, you know, I can't say that wouldn't have helped. And also, this particular kind of cladding has been banned in the United States for decades

or at least used in the way it was here, right? Yeah, but the as weak as our firecodes are, the idea was that if you go above a certain floor height, then everything above that has to be in fire retardant cladding. Yes. And they kind of did not do this. The whole thing is just the cheaper, shittier, highly flammable one. And the the the material specifications from the manufacturers say, do not do this. Absolutely.

Do not do this. So this was a this. This picture over here, right? This is for the rain, John Maddening. Yes. So the rain screen, right? If you look in the second image, that's the cladding here now. Yeah. That was that had an air cavity between it and the insulation,

which was because it was the rain screen, right? And this insulation was the Celotex RS 5000 PIR. That's poly iso cyanure it. I don't like the sound of that cyan in there. That's fine. Don't worry. Yeah, just just means blue. You have nothing to worry about. So that's thermal insulation, right?

And it's not rated for use with flammable cladding, only with fiber cement on the outside, right? So the thing about poly iso cyanure it is it's usually very flame resistant, but it does catch fire. And when it does, it gives off cyanide gas. Oh, good. Yeah. Of course. I love the smell of almonds.

And, you know, this is again another petroleum product. I believe one firefighter described it afterwards as pure petrol in the way it burned. Good God. And I'm getting ahead of myself. But, you know, pet petrol being being British for gasoline. Yeah, people. Well, this is the thing about like a lot of modern energy efficient materials. Is there all just straight up made out of oil?

But I thought we were going to green new deal this and like rebuild every house in America with like energy efficiency stuff that is made out of, I don't know, magic. The magic is made out of oil, actually. This is the most depressing version of, you know, those of Harry Potter, like it's all oil. Well, that too. Yeah. But no, I was thinking of those films that they make you watch at school

that are like sponsored by some industrial concern. And it's like, what would a world be like without zinc? You know, oil was found in everything around you. And it's just like, no, that's terrifying. The cladding on the building, oil, the energy efficient, you know, insulation. That's oil. The furniture is made of oil and wood, wood chips and oil. This is how we make a flame resistant furniture somehow.

And yeah, by by weight, Grenfell Tower was like, I don't know, 20 percent concrete, like 70 percent oil, five percent rats in the fire extinguishers and five percent some of the most vulnerable people in the city. Yes, terrific. So thanks to these two thousand five regulations during this renovation, I believe that I mentioned it was 2012. I believe it was in 2012, right?

Yeah, right. Yeah. So long after the fire, the fire brigade has lost the responsibility for inspecting any of this. So there were 16 inspections by the council and all of them failed to notice that all of the cladding they were installing was illegal and flammable. Well, I mean, anybody could fail to notice that 16 times. Uh, that's that certainly wouldn't like put the inconvenience of noticing.

Oh, hey, you've clad this entire building and the fucking death trap oil thing instead of the slightly less death trap oil thing. And you're going to have to redo all of this. It's going to take months cost a lot more than the insulation originally did. There's no like incentives that might be subconsciously or consciously weighing on anybody looking at that. Mm hmm. Yeah, there's no way the council

would have an interest in approving its own work. No, no, we upstanding upstanding members of society. God damn it. Yes. It's it's it's perilously close to load bearing drywall. Now, if they had done this properly with non flammable cladding, it would have cost about the estimate I saw on the internet was two hundred ninety three thousand three hundred and sixty eight pounds more over the whole building. Right.

Wow. So I mean, that's that's like that would have brought it up to nine million pounds as opposed to which is still seven hundred thousand pounds under the council's budget. Right. But I mean, two hundred ninety three thousand pounds. That's like what, two really nice cars? Or I don't know, what else could you buy with with three hundred grams? Like, I don't know, some nice furniture or I don't know. What else? Yeah, what else?

I got a house but not in London. A Cessna, maybe six Cessnas. Yeah, that's true. They could have they could have had like a council light aircraft. Several used Cessnas. Yeah, this is the thing. We can we can develop this as a theory and like our conspiracy theory of Grenfell is the cost saving leading to all of this neglect and social murder

is because Kensington and Chelsea Council wanted to build an air force. I buy that. Yep. So the fire again, here's the building. So this, the fire started at twelve fifty a.m. in the morning on June 14th, twenty seventeen. Yeah, the morning at sixteen. Yeah. Yeah. Love to love to have fire and a high rise building in the middle of the night.

That's always the best time for it to happen. Everybody's in the building. Yep. It's the most exciting. It's dark. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, some guys fridge got fire. But some got the iron. Got fire. Right. So yeah, the irony that which is meant to cause cold caused hot.

The ultimate act of betrayal. Yeah. How could you do this to me? Our one thirty four. It wasn't this guy's fault at all, either. There was just it was a defective refrigerator. It happens. Yeah. They kind of they do this a lot. Like, yeah, you get some some wiring that's like too close

to some insulation or something else and it just, you know, catches light. It's it's not a huge deal when this has happened previously. You just it stays contained to that one flat. And you put it out like maybe I lose this kitchen. And and and like also in the United States, we have better regulations against the fridges catching fire because our fridges have like big metal plates on the back. Yeah, I was done.

This was this was also because this is social housing. This is, again, the lowest bidder. This is going to be the cheapest possible fridge. Yes. So the fire brigade. Brigade, fire brigade, fire, fire brigade, fire brigade, fire brigade. The fire brigade arrived to fight the fire at about one a.m. Right. So like 10 minutes later, very good response time. Very good on the fire brigade overall.

And by this time, you know, the fire was spreading in the flat. The owner of the flat, I believe, got out. I mean, this was this was a low flat anyway. But yeah, I think they got him out when they were putting it out. And they had a couple of guys with extinguishers, I guess, just like inside the inside the flat trying to put it out and trying to keep it from getting out of the unit. One of the things is, of course, you know, this is a council flat, right?

Not all the furniture is provided by the council. You know, and the thing about modern furniture is it's made out of wood chips and oil, right? So, you know, it catches fire pretty easily. And keep in mind, again, this building is still has the stay put policy we mentioned before in terms of fire. So, you know, if people are awake and they know there's a fire, they know they're supposed to stay put, right?

Yes. Yes. And if you if you are as happened many times, if you are on the phone to the fire brigade at the time, the operator will tell you that it's safest to stay in your flat. Yes. So since, you know, it's burning through this guy's furniture and, you know, just generally the fire is taking over the flat quicker than firefighters can put out the fire at one oh eight in the morning, it breached the window and it set the cladding on fire. Oh, good. Right.

Well, to the best of my knowledge, it didn't actually like that. It breached the window first. They had the fire in the flat pretty much control and unbeknownst to them because, you know, inside the thing, it's full of smoke. Anyway, you can't see the outside. It's burning up the outside as they're fighting it on the inside. Well, a big problem here, right? Is this this external metal panel cladding is a rain screen, right?

Yeah, you have that air gap in between the cladding and the insulation. As such, it is intended to keep water out. Oh, good. Yeah, I'm sure that won't be an issue in a second. Yes. So, you know, once the fire started to get into the cavity between the cladding and the insulation, the insulation caught fire, right? And this cavity acted as a chimney. You know, it started shooting the flames right up the building, right? You wouldn't be you wouldn't even be able to figure out if the flames were there

if you were looking straight at the building. No, but even if you could see it, marriage, if you just, you know, if you shot, you know, a huge jet of water from a fire truck directly at where the flames were, the rain screen is going to be like, this is rain. I'm not letting this through your rain screen voice. Yeah, no, this is like this is nightmarish because as far as if you're a firefighter, it's just like it's burning up the outside.

You don't even necessarily know. And then just units are catching fire and like a line up one side of the building. And you have you have to work out where it's coming from and that you can't actually like put out the insulation, which, by the way, is also giving off cyanide gases. Oh, man, I just just looking at it, it's fucking. It's it's not. Yeah, I would imagine. I think the thing that fucks me the most about this is

at the time, I remember it felt like this huge transcendent moment because a lot of the mask really just came off a lot of a lot of neoliberalism and then sort of I just didn't matter. Yeah, yeah, it's yeah, it's it's strange. Like you you kind of expect everything to be different because you know, people were getting up in the morning and they're going to work and they have this absolutely charred. I don't know if we have pictures of it coming up later,

but just like the skeleton of the building just looming over them. And it turns out people just kind of just live with that because you have to and yeah, I don't know. That's that's that's really difficult. Yeah, I just imagine I remember seeing the pictures and just this it looking so goddamn out of place. And then I remember kind of been currently the reports coming out and just I remember thinking the same thing that I thought kind of after Sandy Hook

where I'm you know, obviously like a person who believes that like Americans have the right firearms and like I'm not a big fan of government legislation, but like it was kind of the same feeling. It's like, all right, so we as a society are OK with 26 kids dying. Yeah, well, just doesn't fucking matter. We can just we can just write this because yeah. I don't know. It's it's grim. There's there's some stuff that I'll I'll get into later

about some of the like social repercussions of this. But yeah, I'm back in fact. Oh, OK. I want to hear the fun fact. Oh, the fun fact is that currently a Lib Dem called Sam Geema is attempting to cast the Grenfell Tower fire as being the fault of the labor MP of for the constituency who was wildly overruled by the council

and who, in fact, led a lot of the campaign of the aftermath to it. And she might she might lose her seat to not him, but to a Tory on that basis. It's the Lib Dems. Fuck those guys. Oh, my God. All right, he's back, folks. He's fucking pieces of shit. I mean, you know what they're doing is like the traditional Lib Dem anthem is like the land, right?

Yeah, which is also like the traditional George's song. But I. Oh, yeah. And here are the fucking Lib Dems like proposing like direct subsidies to landlords as like, you know, like one of their major fucking campaign, you know, platforms, right? You know, like I have a lot of problems with like George's socialism as a concept, but these fucking Lib Dems are like appropriating the one of the few positive contributions

to society Pennsylvania has ever made. These pieces of shit. Oh, my God. I just, yeah, I want to see a slightly weird timeline in which we got the same shitty neoliberal party, but claimed as an outgrowth of like fouries socialism. So they're just they're just doing all the same shit, but they're singing about how the sea is going to turn into lemonade under communism. Well, man, good, lorick.

Anyway, yeah, so land value tax, probably a good idea, but Harrisburg, Pennsylvania is not exactly God's plan. Paradise, any paradise. So paradise, paradise, paradise. Rename the grip chat. All right. So anyway, so this fire. Through the chimney effect that the cladding created, this fire got out of control very quickly.

What I'm going to do now is I'm going to play a YouTube video that some firefighters took as they were heading towards the fire, which had rapidly gotten out of control. Content warning, this is some serious shit. It is. Yeah, it is. If if you were sort of I feel like almost everyone in Britain was on some level traumatized by this happening, this is going to do it again.

So, yeah, be be aware. Jesus Christ, my face. That's not a real block of people in it. Fuck me. My out of fucking me. Jesus Christ. It's a whole pitch. Oh, my God.

I feel like. We'll always have. I don't mean to feel like we know. No, no. Oh, come on, man, look. That's a real block. Oh, shit.

Well, it's towering in front, aren't it? How is that possible? It's jumped up all the way along the fence, look. How the fuck is that even possible? That was that, I mean. I mean, I think the thing that always strikes me when I see that, because I was the one who dug this up for this, is the disbelief, right?

Like, it's not something that's supposed to happen, even by the standards of, like, you you go to, like, stuff going wrong for a living. It's it's this sort of thing that's completely outside the context of even stuff that goes wrong. Yeah, it's like there's there's absolutely no way a tower block like this was supposed to catch fire in that particular way.

Like you could imagine a lot of bad situations, but not that one. Well, like just to be timely, the the commissioner of the London Fire Brigade, Danny Coffin, she just resigned over. Yeah, well, the thing is she the actual firefighting was, you know, I think as best as was possible, but she had a real problem with the PR afterwards,

especially like having been there and having like run that scene and having been like thoroughly traumatized doing it. But at the inquiry, the public inquiry into this, she had this she had two things. She said that she wouldn't have done anything differently, which, of course, not great. But then she also she got quite defensive and quite irritated because one of the one of the barristers asked her,

did you have an operational plan for, you know, a fire like this in a high rise tail block? And she said, no, for the same reason, I don't have an operational plan for the space shuttle crashing. It's not meant to happen. And that ended up being the thing that forced her out. But like at the same time, I do see where she was coming from. It's not something that you can reasonably be expected to plan for.

There are high rise fires and we'll get into this later in the podcast. High rise fires are very, very difficult to fight in any capacity, anywhere in the world. And no one has really a good plan for like fighting where it's gotten out of control like this. It's it's it's just it's a problem which has not been solved, except by to hear in chat in, you know, some videos on YouTube. Um, yeah, no, it's it's it's it's a series of horrible options.

If you send firefighters into that building, you're looking at the possibility that you're just going to kill all of them too. Which they did anyway, and they still saved some people. But yeah, no, it's it's it's the this is one of the situations where the only thing you can really do about it is prevention. Um, and as as we have seen in the previous slides, would they serially fucked every chance to do that? Yeah. So the scene we looked at, I believe, was around 130,

140 ish in the morning, the fire had already spread around the building in like an hour, smoke had filled the single stairwell, which made escaping difficult on your own, right? Yeah. And if you were still in the building at about 158 in the morning, you had about a 50 percent chance of escaping, you know, half the people in their diets. And that's if if if you made the choice to because at this point, the fire brigade was still on the phone,

which, you know, still you still have a mobile signal still telling people that it's it's safest to stay in your flat. And they didn't they didn't stop saying that till 247. Jesus Christ. Well, what they what they were trying to do was and this literally it came down to people, they staged in the like the building lobby and they had people running back and forth just like residents with slips of paper with who was in what flat when so that they could send firefighters up to get them.

But because it's it's full of smoke, it's people are moving around. And so you end up with a lot of cases where the firefighters miss people or they can't find people and there's just it's just an impossible situation. Basically, yeah, I mean, they so they abandoned the state put policy at about 247 in the morning. Yeah, which is like an hour after you like a hindsight being 2020, you would have wanted to. I don't think anyone and no one expected this fire to get as big as it did. I mean, that's the thing. And then, you know, you have the standards sort of depressing, high rise fire stuff,

you know, folks are jumping out of windows instead of getting burned to death. I believe someone one person managed to escape by knitting a rope out of bedsheets. Yeah. So good on that. Well, I mean, the the the hard the thing that really fucked me up was there was there were a lot of live streams, but there was this one woman on I think the 20th floor who was live streaming and just like, you know, could see the fire engines and everything, like 20 floors below her and just could do nothing.

So that's fucking horrifying. It's it's it is fucking horrifying. It's grim. And yeah, no, it's it's one of those things where where social media is a way where you can really fuck yourself up like that, because you just you have all of this, like, you know, what else were these people supposed to do? And yeah, no, now that's that's that's on the internet forever. Just well, it's one of the lucky things, though, was that it was Ramadan, right?

Yes. So a lot of the residents of the Tower Muslim and therefore they were awake for the pre the meal of Suho Suho. OK, thank you for saying that before. Yes, thank God. No, that's I mean, the I feel bad because like if you're Muslim and it's Ramadan, this is really the cap to a shitty day is you fucking you've been fasting all day. It's like this far north that lasts for fucking ever.

And then you finally get to eat. And then just what's the worst thing that could happen to you at that moment is oh, yeah, and your house catches fire. And you've got to go and wake up all of your neighbors. God damn it. I'm converting to Catholicism so I can drink of impunity. Yeah, no, I it's that's really just putting the cap on an absolutely shit day. Yeah.

So I'm I believe firefighters got up to about the tenth story and rescued most folks. But from the 20th story onward, I believe only two people got out of the Tower alive. Holy shit. Yeah, well, they still didn't. It took them until like four in the morning to get engineers out to be able to say this isn't going to fall down. And I think one of the concerns within the fire brigade at that time was if you sent if you sent a bunch of firefighters up to rescue people and it just, you know,

nine eleven and it just like pancake down. Yeah. So. So overall, seventy two people were killed by the fire and the aftermath. Sort of like what's the aftermath, right? Number one, Grenfell Tower held the sort of utilities for the entire state, right? So the three low three low rise blocks on the estate like lost hot water and they were uninhabitable. Yeah.

Well, this was why they were renovating it to have individual heaters was that it was built with like a gigantic boiler in the basement that just did the whole estate. Yeah, I was like really bad for like the flats because he did it too much, which I mean is, you know, kind of same thing here in Philly, but I thought you were going to say the same thing in the picture. I'm like, well, on a thermal level, yes. But a lot of residents of this tower block have not been permanently rehoused to this day. Nope.

That's fucking embarrassing. And of course, Jacob Rhys Mogg. Fuck Jacob Rhys Mogg. Oh my god, that fucking guy. First, I mean, on one level, I'm grateful to him for going full mask off. First day after the election was called, straight out of the barrel with, well, if I was in a burning building, I would just leave. I would simply leave.

Yeah. All right. Well, fucking go into a burning but again, asshole. These fucking dumbasses stay where they were like the like the like the fire brigade told them to. Well, fucking garbage person. I would be smarter than that and I would just leave. Very American mindset. Yeah.

I got to say that. Remember that time, Mark Wahlberg said. I'm sure Mr. Moggs would not like me to would not like to hear that. But luckily, we don't have your label was and Mark Wahlberg said if I was there, 9-11 wouldn't have gone down that way. And it was the fucking same fucking mentality. I just like. Was he going to fight?

I think he was going to like try to flight 93, all of them like by himself, which is. He was he was going to try and shoot them all down with a missile. It's that it's the end of Strangelove where he just rides a sidewinder into another plane. Bro, I have logged over 1000 hours in Microsoft Flight Simulator 10. I literally have. But I've never played Microsoft Flight Simulator 10. I would train simulator guy. Oh, of course.

I can definitely prevent the train 9-11. That's good. Congratulations. Yeah. Well, train 9-11 is probably King's Cross Station Fire, which will also do at some point. Yes. Or maybe maybe it's in shade. I don't know.

I don't even know how you pronounce that. The one with the German. Ashley's train. Ashley. OK. But I would say it would probably be the one where some teenagers flipped a switch as a prank on the Northeast Corridor and it threw a Northeast regional into a building. That was a long, long time ago.

Or whatever the equivalent of the Northeast regional was at the time. But so, yeah, Jacob Rees Mogg says common sense would say you should get out of the building. Well, you know, one of the things about common sense is, of course, it's not very common. But it's also not sense. Yeah. Also, like to hold onto your common sense while also breathing cyanide fumes coming up through your floor and also, like, trusting it over the professional rescue service that's meant to, like, understand what's happening to you and how you can best help yourself, that's not exactly

common either. But my house were on fire, right? And the fire brigade told me, you know, you should stay put. It would be safer. Yeah. Well, I know that there are exactly 12 feet between me and the outside. So I would leave. But if there are 20 flights of stairs between me and the outside, one stairwell, yeah.

Which is full of smoke, full of people going down, firefighters going up. Because that was the other thing about not sending people above the 10th floor was that they, you know, wearing the breathing apparatus and carrying tools and everything. If you're just sending, like, four guys, you block a stairwell completely. And, you know, nobody is getting down past you. It makes sense. Like, the folks would follow instructions here, right? You know, whatever, you know, Jacob Ries-Mogg's, maybe he could get him.

Maybe Jacob Ries-Mogg's could get Jacob Ries-Mogg's out of the building. I don't know if he could have gotten anyone else out of the building. No. I believe shortly afterwards, Jeremy Corbyn called for the state to appropriate empty housing in the area to house the victims who were out of house and home at this point. And that doesn't happen, of course. The thing is that's a particularly good idea because, as I mentioned earlier, Kensington and Chelsea is, I feel like in the States, it's much less common to have these areas where just

geographically and administratively you have incredibly rich and incredibly poor so close together. Well, we have a place like that in Philadelphia, which is called Kensington, actually. Well, perfect. Well, the very rich end, right, is full of property that's owned purely for speculation to play the housing market. And it's empty. It's always going to be empty.

And using it to re-house people who have been burned out of their homes seems like a very fundamentally decent and good idea, which is why we didn't do it. Obviously, yeah. It's not fucking right. This fucking country, man. I get back to me after the election to see if I'm fully blackbilled on this shit. Because I don't know. You just go straight up Tory, you know?

None of us would blame you for it. No, I would. I would. No. I joined those people who are at the energy conferences. Like, we should pump more coal into the atmosphere, actually, because it's good. Maybe we don't have enough carbon dioxide. I just joined those guys.

The CO2 coalition? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Theresa May, of course, announced a public inquiry that's ongoing. Never met with any of the victims. Oh, of course not. Why would you? Why would you do that? Yeah, she went there the day after.

She talked to some firefighters and then none of the people who, you know, lost their house. Oh, how noble. This did not hurt her politically at all, of course. No. Fuck the Tories of the Tire Iron. There was recently a civil lawsuit filed in Philadelphia against Arconic and Celotex, the manufacturers of the cladding and the insulation, respectively, you know, to say, how could you allow this to happen, right?

They sold their products to, you know, a project which was obviously installing it incorrectly. Right? Yeah. This is also ongoing. I don't have a lot of faith in that one, given that, as we saw in all of the spec sheets and all of the instructions, it's like, yeah, don't do this thing. Did they do it? Yeah, well, this is the problem is unbeknownst to them, they had had a printing error and

they had accidentally omitted the don't in all of the spec sheets. Exactly, right? You have both these manufacturers. I mean, the thing is, these products go through so many resellers on the way to... Right. ...the plant project. It's like really difficult for, you know, like, I don't know, some guy, hey, Tony, it's facade materials, hey, I'm going to sell you, yeah, you could probably use that,

it'll probably be fine, yeah. Yeah, Kensington Council, yeah, you can probably use that, yeah. Forget about it. I was waiting for the forget about it. You never let me down, bud. You know, high-rise fires, hey, what's the deal, right? What's the deal with high-rise fires? Brilliant, yeah.

Yeah, low-rise buildings catch fire like this, but high-rise buildings catch fire like this. This is how fire codes are oriented, though, right? Is it like we have these flammable claddings which were allowed to put on low-rise buildings, which were the kinds which were applied to Grenfell, a high-rise building, you know, the idea of building a low-rise building, well, you can probably get out of there pretty quickly, right? And we can have this slightly cheaper product, which is not, you know, flame-resistant. But when we apply them to high-rise buildings, you know, it's not a good time.

High-rise fires are just very, very dangerous and difficult to fight, right? Prevention is the only option. Yeah, I mean, unless you do the brains-genius Donald Trump thing of, why don't you just have a plane dump a bunch of water on it? Well, asshole, you know, nobody's tried that yet, so we don't know if it works or not. This is true, yes. Could have just like, we could have had a big plane just dump a bunch of water on it and collapse the whole building.

Even like the best prevention, I guess, is, of course, a sprinkler system, which for whatever reason, you don't have in the United Kingdom. Because fucks sprinklers, yeah. It's bizarre. Yeah, I don't. What I've put on the screen here is one meridian plaza, which is the closest thing I can think of, which happened in Philadelphia in 1991. Yeah, this was a high-rise fire.

It burned through three floors and then it hit the first floor where sprinklers were installed and it was stopped dead. No one could figure out how to fight it, but the sprinkler system, well, you know, that turned out to stop it. Now, it's crucially, this building didn't have flammable cladding, right? So it's not the same kind of fire. But if you had a sprinkler system in the Grenfell Tower, it might have stopped the fire before it reached the cladding.

But the thing is, the flammable cladding was still the problem. Yes. And there's still been a spate of these fires because building high-rises with this cladding is not unique. It's cheaper and it looks quite aesthetic, so it's happening, I think, to buy in Australia. There's been a couple of high-rises where it's just almost the same thing that's happened, but never with results as bad. And usually the difference is sprinklers.

Whereas this was, I feel like it became impossible to fight within minutes. Yeah, I don't. It's just absurd, right? Yeah. It's very bizarre. It's obscene. Obscenity is the hope. I hear about it, yeah.

Yeah, it's obscene. Like, I don't understand, like, when I first heard of this, I was like, wow, British fire codes are bad. They are, but it's like, I think the culmination of at the very least 40 years of politics in this country that have said either implicitly or explicitly that people like the people who are living in Grand Hotel who were Black or who were Muslim or who were refugees or asylum seekers, which, incidentally, we still don't necessarily know how many people were actually in the building at the time because of having a hostile environment and people not wanting to get deported means

you have to live like a fugitive. Superstite. Yeah, but when you conduct politics in such a way as to say that those people's lives don't matter, then this is what you're enabling. If you go back to the Grenfell slide, that's really the epitaph for neoliberalism, is that it's going to kill however many people. It could be 72, it could be 100, it could be 1,000 to be a million because it's slightly cheaper and their lives aren't worth protecting.

It's a vicious ideology that has to be defeated at all costs. It puts everyone at risk, too, because if these are the fire codes that we, if this is the code and we allow this sort of thing to happen, this is going to happen to anyone. Let's say the small business tyrant who votes for Trump or somebody who bought their council house under Thatcher might have had that upward mobility and think, oh, well, okay, this might play to them, but not to me. There was a video that came out at the end of the year when Grenfell happened of people having a Halloween effigy burning, literally burning Grenfell Tower in Effigy and somebody said something about them being benefits claimants and somebody said something

about how they should have paid their rent. And I mean, that does lead to you to become completely blackbilled and lose your faith in humanity. But the other thing is that for all of those people, this same kind of politics is coming for you, too. There isn't an upper limit on this. And the more the austerity increases, the more that this sort of rhetoric of dehumanization is allowed to proceed, the more likely you are to find yourself thrown under the wheels of it, too. There were there were 13 or 14, if I recall correctly, right to buy flats in the Grenfell Tower. Yeah. And it turns out turns out they burned the same fucking way. Yes. You have this most like the most humane, the most Smith, the most Hobbes, right of all under capitalism, your right to

property. And it avails you nothing at all. It still burns as it turns out. Yeah. Shit still burns the same way. Yeah. Yes. So anybody who tells you that these these like the this form of capital is immutable or intrinsic or it's rational or it's factual is lying through their teeth. Because when as soon as it meets something that actually is like, say, a law of thermodynamics, then it falls apart. It's a paper tiger. And it just killed 72 people and left left everyone feeling whatever it is that I'm feeling now just forever. And yeah, I feel like we have a juicy and moral duty not to let this become normal. And it's it's a stark example of exactly this kind of politics because this this happens. Renfield something like

Grenfell happens every single day, but it's it's always more distributed, right? You don't have this big black skeleton of a building, or you don't have heaps of bodies necessarily, because you don't pay attention to somebody dying because of homelessness or somebody dying of cuts to health care or whatever. But it's all the same thing. It's just a particularly stark example and remind to us about what this kind of politics does. It is socialism or barbarism. And this is the barbarism. Yes. Yep, I think you're pretty much nailed it. Vote Labour. Vote Labour. Please, please vote Labour. Please vote Labour. I want to get this out before the election. So I'm going to try and start to wrap this up. Of course, our next episode is on the Tacoma Narrows Bridge

disaster. Yeah, which finally finally we can get some jokes in because that one that's that's funny. I don't I don't give a shit about the dog in the car. I give a shit about the dog, maybe not the car. I don't care about the car. It's like an old Ford V8. And just like, yeah, you see how many people make them into like fucking stupid, stupid looking hot rods? Like, I assume I assume there's plenty of these things left over. I guess they're they're invincible. Yeah, a huge loss. That could have had flames painted on it. It could have had a giant fucking stupid engine sticking out of the hood. Awesome. Yeah. Well, now you're making me miss it. Now I think yeah. All right, I'm I'm excited for the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. It'll be a palate

clinic. Yeah. And for whoever was saying about the in the comments about us doing but the Bhopal disaster. Yes, but give us a minute. I feel like we have to do a couple of frivolous ones minimum to everyone like this. Yeah. I mean, just just as a final as a final like closing word, I feel like if there is any utility in what we do aside from making jokes, it's, oh, we saw in the video the firefighters being totally perplexed by this and one of them at the end says, you know, how does this happen? I think if we can do in any fucking stupid day minimis sort of way, if we can articulate how things like this happen, then that that is the value of us doing this dumb podcast. And you know, I'm I'm glad if we can ever approach that. Yes, I mean, it's it's it's just

there's no way you could in that profession like take a look at that tower on fire and think I can do anything that will make a difference here. It's it's it's too much to handle. Right. That's like it. The one guy who was like laughing as he was looking at it like I kind of relate to that the most because the brain breaks down. Yeah. What else? Yeah. What else are you going to do? Yeah, I can't I can't believe I there's nothing you can do other than like, wow, someone fucked up. And I gotta figure it out. I might die. Yeah. They they ended up with pretty much all of the London Fire Brigade there. It's we don't have alarms for fires. But we have like numbers of engines. And this was I think 40 in total at the

end of it. One of the last posts from the Grenfell Action Group blog was just one of the last people who are posting to it being terrified that the inquiry was going to blame the fire brigade for the response. Which it did. Yeah, which it did. Yeah. Which there was nothing they could do. Just straight up nothing to do. I mean, it's the same thing with like mixed feelings about Danny Carton, the commissioner, because yeah, like on the one hand, boo, who cares that she loses out on a two million pound pension or whatever. But on the other, like she was there. She did command that operation and then have to be extremely traumatized and then go to this inquest where she just kind of fucked it from a PR perspective and hurt a lot of people's feelings.

But, you know, it's a Kobayashi Maru situation. Yes. Yeah, it literally is. And I don't know. I don't know how you can you can get on the stand and say, yeah, I wouldn't have done anything differently to a room full of survivors and relatives. But but I don't know how you could express that otherwise that you were put in a position where you could do nothing to save a lot of people and that you're still you're still proud of the work that your firefighters did. It's just that nobody, I mean, I think it's a very human thing to look for blame. And like, I'm not, you know, obviously, if 72 fucking people are dead, like, that's a systemic failure, that's all sorts of failure. But like, at some point, you just there are some, I think,

things you can't win. And one of those is like, yeah, Renfell wasn't because the firefighters like decided to put the fucking cladding up. It's just I think speaks to institutional failure. People don't give a fuck about poor people. Yeah. If you needed a scapegoat, then instead of the Commissioner of the London Fire Brigade, I would suggest perhaps the councillor who is the head of the tenant management organization, who has the wonderfully Tory name of rock-fielding men. Oh, my God. Oh, Jesus. Who is still a Conservative councillor in Kensington and Chelsea and who the weekend after the fire went to just have a party at his stately home in Cornwall. Fall into the fucking sea. Yeah. No, garbage country. Nothing.

Well, how is his name organized? It's just like rock-fielding. His first name is Rock, like the fucking way the rock Johnson. Then someone someone took Peter to to literally. Yeah. Yes. And and the surname is Fielding, but I think it's spelled weirdly hyphen melon. Yeah. Never trust anyone with a double barrel last name. Myself included. Yeah, or me. The Tories. I mean, that's just these. This is a group of people which is bastards, you know, just completely alien to like human human kind. Like this is a they're basically lizard people just based on what they name each other. Yeah. You can I feel like you can get on whatever level of LaRouche you want to in that these people are lizards and demons.

It's just whether you believe that's a literal expression or whether we're being metaphorical. Yeah, Lord. Yeah. All right. Well, we're at one hour and 39 minutes by my clock. I suppose we should transcribe all of this shit. Yeah. Well, we only got three people this time. So it should be a little easier. I know it'll be a little easier to edit. Thank God. So let's go for the pitches the commercial at the end of the episode. Listen to Trash Future. We get very angry about other British politics things that all tie into the same underlying in humanity. Yes. Listen to watch my YouTube channel or I guess you could listen to it too. You could just listen to it and not watch the thing. Yeah. Yeah. You still you still get the views. Yeah, exactly. It's it's called do not eat

01 versus do not eat. Oh, how do you not know you're okay? Because I had to change them every time between every platform I go on because someone's always taking do not eat. You are you are do not eat 01 on YouTube. You are do not eat one on Twitter. Maybe you should get a better name. You know, you know, I got to keep the branding. You know, I'm not going to change it. So you got that little coin and everything. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It's nice token. So somebody in who did fan art for the show and I love that people are doing fan art for the show drew you as an angry gray ball, which is honestly perfect. Personally, I can't wait for the trailer guy fan art but spoilers.

Oh, I forgot we had it. I guess wrap this up for once and for all. I am William Anderson. I am at old man Anderson on Twitter. Vote labor. I can say as a Jewish person, the Tories are not your friends, folks. So I feel like I get to speak on anti Semitism. And I say you dick Tories. Uh, so yeah, uh, good luck to you in the election, etc. Yeah, thank you. Vote labor. Yeah, but labor labor labor. Yes. Just just famous pronouns are he him by the way. Vote vote vote. Vote labor. My pronouns are vote. Vote labor. Vote labor. Uh, did you just assume my political party? Yes, I did. And I insist you have my political apartment, my political party, which is labor and voting. Vote labor. Vote labor. Vote labor.

Vote labor. Vote labor. And I'm killing it. We'll keep going around until it becomes funny again. Oh, I like shake hands with labor. That's good. Shake hands with labor.