Grenfell – what should happen now?

Six urgent priorities that should follow the Inquiry

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A tube train runs on a raised track, in the distance is a tower block wrapped in white material with a green heart on it.

I remember standing at the base of Grenfell Tower on the morning of the 14th June 2017, talking with firefighters, gathering clergy to act as emergency volunteers, praying with evacuees from the surrounding blocks, as the building still smouldered. At the time the question on everyone’s lips was: how could something like this happen in sophisticated twenty-first century Britain?

Now we know.

In one sense the Public Inquiry into the Grenfell tower fire told us nothing new. Few people who have followed the Inquiry over the last six years will have been surprised by its conclusions. What is new is to see the dreadful catalogue of ‘incompetence dishonesty and greed’ laid out in excoriating detail for all to see.

So what should happen now? At least six things must be on the agenda:

Combustible cladding on remaining buildings around the country should be removed as soon as possible. Government estimates suggest there are 4,600 buildings around the country with unsafe cladding. Less than one third of them have had their remediation completed, and work is yet to start on half of them. And, astonishing as it may sound, this is now more than seven years after Grenfell. Cladding that is illegal on new buildings can still remain on existing ones. Developers and owners who are responsible for this state of affairs should be made to pay for the remediation rather than passing those costs on to leaseholders, or delaying remediation for technical and bureaucratic reasons. Institutional resistance to this, as outlined recently by Michael Gove, someone who from my dealing with him on Grenfell, was one of the better politicians to deal with this issue, has to be overcome with urgency.
Prosecution of those who have been identified in the inquiry as bearing responsibility for the fire should also be brought as soon as possible. The police investigation suggests that it will be a number of years before court cases take place. The victims of this tragedy have already had to wait seven long years and now face the prospect of another three or even more years until justice is served. That is too long.
Those named and shamed in the report should examine their own hearts. Some remorse and apology has been evident from some, but not enough. Many still deny responsibility despite seven years of evidence-gathering. This is not a matter of revenge, but an indispensable step towards justice for everyone. Those named have presumably carried a burden of guilt over these past years. The Christian doctrine of repentance, confession and absolution tells us that there is a relief in finally admitting culpability, bearing the penalty, and finally, once all this has happened, receiving a measure of absolution.

We might look back on Grenfell as a turning point in our life together: a fitting memorial for those who tragically died on that terrible night.

The companies involved often have big pockets and the bereaved and survivors are ordinary people without the resources to pay expensive legal fees. The government should set aside a sum of money to enable victims, if they wish, to bring a civil case against those accused in the report. Arguably this should have happened many years before to speed up the process of justice.
A wider debate needs to take place in our society as to how we place love for neighbour at the heart of national life. A libertarian individualism which focusses on personal fulfilment and a view of freedom as doing what we like as long as we don’t harm others, rather than freedom to do the good has led us to this point. What would it mean in company law, for example, for each business or institution to have to explain how it is seeking the genuine welfare of its staff, clients and customers, not as an add on in their ESG agenda, but as the primary purpose of the organisation?
We need a spiritual renewal. Toleration rather than persecution of the neighbour was a good legacy of the Enlightenment, but it is not enough to build a well-functioning society. We are commanded not just to tolerate our neighbours but to love them. And this only be justified if my neighbour has ultimate transcendent value. The new atheism was an act of cultural vandalism, undermining faith in God, an objective basis for each human life, and having nothing to replace it with. As Nick Cave recently put it: “People need meaning. And secular society has not come up with the goods.” This is why religious traditions including Christianity have tended to link love for God to love for neighbour. What that spiritual renewal looks like is hard to tell, and yet we have perhaps seen a stirring of it in recent times.

If something approaching those six things happened, then we might look back on Grenfell as a turning point in our life together: a fitting memorial for those who tragically died on that terrible night.

Column

Assisted dying

Care

Comment

14 November 2024

4 min read

Proposed euthanasia safeguards insult our NHS

We must defend a collective sense of care and generosity.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A gable end mural depicts a nurse in scrubs and a mask turning and looking towards the viewer.

A mural of an NHS nurse during COVID, Manchester.

Mural Republic

It was, I believe, the late political satirist Simon Hoggart who coined the Law of the Ridiculous Reverse, which held that, if the opposite of a statement is plainly absurd, then it was not worth making in the first place.

This law comes to mind when Labour MP Kim Leadbeater promises that her Assisted Dying Bill will have the “strictest safeguards in the world”, one of which is that those patients who have ordered their fatal dose “would be allowed to change their mind at any time.”

Where, exactly, has it ever been suggested that an individual, having asked for an assisted death, would not be allowed to change their mind? I’m just wondering which legislator or medical professional has proposed that once a lethal draught has been prescribed then there is no turning back.

I’m struggling to picture the circumstance in which a terminally ill patient is pinned down and killed, the last words that they hear being: “I’m sorry Mrs Simpkins, but everyone’s gone to a lot of trouble. You asked for it and you’re jolly well going to get it.”

This is important because, apparently, being able to change your mind about asking for help to kill yourself is one of the strictest safeguards in the world. I hope Ms Leadbeater will forgive me for pointing out that this doesn’t really stack up.

And what’s serious about it is that it’s also a massive straw man argument. The clear and rather devious implication is that one of the arguments being made against the introduction of an assisted suicide law is that patients won’t be able to change their minds about it, which I think we can all accept simply isn’t a fact at all. It’s absurd – a Ridiculous Reverse.

So I’ll defend the NHS with a religious fervour. To my mind, healthcare is a holy mission. We meddle in law with the Hippocratic Oath at our very deep peril.

It’s also hugely contemptuous of the medical profession in general and rude to the NHS in particular. That’s because there’s a snide impression behind Leadbeater’s comment there may be hundreds of budding Harold Shipman out there, but her powerful safeguards are going to protect us from them.

We’re in danger of becoming inured to this kind of insult from politicians directed at the NHS. And it’s worth exploring why they might think we need to be protected from unscrupulous doctors and nurses. In this case, one possible reason is that the NHS isn’t being particularly helpful in giving the euthanasia enthusiasts what they want.

Doctors and their staff have plenty of ethical objections to assisted suicide. But leave those aside for a moment. At the practical level, the NHS has made it clear that it doesn’t have the infrastructure to operate a policy of assisted deaths safely. And it can’t afford to set one up. So a government that introduces assisted suicide is going to have to organise and regulate its own assisted death agency.

“Oh,” the assisted dying lobbyists seem to exclaim, “we’d presumed you’d do as you’re told.” Just hand out the hemlock. Take your instructions from the legislature.

But the NHS is better than that. And it’s that kind of high principle that so infuriates feckless politicians. It was the late Nigel Lawson who said, somewhat ruefully, that the NHS “is the closest thing the English have to a religion”. The right wing of politics regularly tells us it’s time to renounce that religion.

To worship the NHS as a religion would, literally, be idolatrous. But it’s not so to acknowledge its religious qualities. Just look at the word – the Latin religio means something like “good faith”, the essence of who we are, what makes us good.

The NHS, in its post-war incarnation, has been central to who we are as a people and what defines us. It’s something to do with our collective sense of care and generosity to one another. Its members, like our national Church, make up a single body.

This is not to co-opt the NHS as the medical wing of the Church. It’s no part of the NHS’s brief to proselytize – rather the reverse; Christian medical staff have been in deep disciplinary trouble for evangelising. It is a profoundly secular organisation.

So the NHS emphatically isn’t in the business of propagating the gospel. But that’s not to say that we can’t be in the same business. Many priests have stories of their most affirming work being in the company of people of other faiths or of none.

The NHS’s proud heritage is to offer treatment free to anyone at the point of access. Put another way, it will seek to heal anyone who comes to it. I make no apology for saying that sounds familiar.

So I’ll defend the NHS with a religious fervour. To my mind, healthcare is a holy mission. We meddle in law with the Hippocratic Oath at our very deep peril.

And when NHS professionals tell us where we can stick our assisted suicides, I respectfully suggest we give it our solemn attention, rather than patronisingly offering a Law of the Ridiculous Reverse.