Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer delivers a speech during a reception in 10 Downing Street, London, to mark 40 years of London Fashion Week, September 16, 2024
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Starmer has worked to undo the steps taken by his predecessor Jeremy Corbyn to empower Labour members, reducing conference to its status under Tony Blair, an extended rally for loyalists to cheer the all-powerful leader.
The crackdown on members’ democratic rights was welcomed by right-wing MPs who resented efforts to make them accountable to the grassroots under Corbyn, but now extends to MPs themselves. They are cast from the back benches for defying the whip — unprecedented authoritarianism in a parliamentary party and one that has left it so cowed that just one MP dared to side with the labour movement and the public in voting against winter fuel cuts.
MPs will only find the courage of their convictions when pressure other than that of the whip’s office is brought to bear — pressure from the trade unions which founded their party and from the constituents who can kick them out.
Defeating Reeves on winter fuel payments at conference might not change government policy right away — but it will encourage the gathering revolt we need.
Former Labour Party leader and now Independent MP Jeremy Corbyn on stage to address a march in central London organised by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, July 6, 2024
LINDA PENTZ GUNTER reports on speakers highlighting global conflicts, from Gaza to Manipur, as Jeremy Corbyn’s initiative gathers leading lights of the left to grapple with Britain’s progressive political future
EVERY morning, Lubna Masarwa repeats the same task. She views footage and photographs and decides what her news outlet will publish. Except that these are no ordinary images. These are the pictures coming from Gaza and now the West Bank, and, according to Masarwa, they can be summed up in a single word: horrible.
“I have never witnessed such a thing,” said Masarwa, the Jerusalem bureau chief of the news website Middle East Eye, who has been covering Israel’s genocide in Gaza since it began.
The material she is forced to view includes “mothers grieving near Nasser hospital trying to recognise the bodies of their children,” says Masarwa, children who are often only identifiable by the shoes they were wearing that day or even their teeth. “I would say Israel went mad,” she said.
Masarwa was the opening speaker of a day-long conference last Saturday in London, hosted by the Peace and Justice Project (PJP), an initiative launched in December 2020 by Jeremy Corbyn and his wife, Laura Alvarez. The PJP said Corbyn was designed to be “a political home for the politically homeless.”
Exclusive: Ex-Labour leader gives speech at event where organisers say they aim to start party named Collective
Jeremy Corbyn has addressed a meeting for a new leftwing political party named Collective attended by the former Unite general secretary Len McCluskey and a number of former independent candidates.
Key figures in the group said they hoped the party would act as an incubator for future leaders who could replace Corbyn as a figurehead of the left, and aim to contest seats at the next general election.
At the private meeting on Sunday, where Corbyn gave the opening speech, founders said they would begin drawing up democratic structures for a new party to launch.
A source close to Corbyn said his attendance was not an official endorsement and that he had attended the meeting to “listen to and share a variety of views about the way forward for the left”.
After 14 years of billionaires doubling their wealth, the political elite’s choice of starving pensioners and children shows austerity as a complete con job.
Jeremy Corbyn MP, former leader of the Labour Party
Every day, my constituents make tough choices. Tough choices like deciding whether to heat their homes or put food on the table. Tough choices like taking out a loan to pay for this month’s rent. Tough choices like selling their home to pay for their family’s social care.
People are making tough choices because governments have made the wrong choices. We warned that Tory austerity would weaken our economy and decimate our public services. We were ignored, and the poorest in society paid the price. Austerity is not just a buzzword. It is the ongoing, brutal reality for millions of people who have been pushed into destitution. It is the face of desperation and anxiety of those forced into a spiral of debt. It is a freezing cold night for the record numbers of people sleeping rough on the streets. It is the graveyard for those left without vital support: more than 300,000 excess deaths have been attributed to austerity policies.
We often talk about austerity in terms of cuts to public spending, but that is just one side of the coin. By starving public services of resources, the government manufactured a convenient excuse for their privatisation. We saw this most acutely with the NHS: an underfunded public service does not just cause satisfaction to plummet, but the belief in the principle of public healthcare itself. Austerity was never about saving money (the UK’s debt pile increased every single year under the Tories). It was about transferring money from the poorest to the richest. Between 2010 and 2018, aggregate wealth in the UK grew by £5.68 trillion. 94% went to the richest 50% of households. 6% went to the poorest 50%. As child poverty was heading towards its highest levels since 2007, Britain’s billionaires more than doubled their wealth.
It was a political decision to defund, dismantle and auction off our public services. And it will be a political decision to repeat this failed economic experiment. ‘It’s going to be painful’, the Prime Minister told the nation last week, prepping the public for ‘difficult choices’ ahead. Did he get permission from the Tories to reuse their trademark slogans? Other ministers have gone one step further, indicating that they do not have any choice at all but to impoverish children and pensioners. Keeping children in poverty is unavoidable, apparently, if we want to restore the public finances. Scrapping the winter fuel allowance is a necessity, we were risibly told, if we want to stop a run on the pound.
It is astonishing to hear government ministers try to pull the wool over the public’s eyes. The government knows that there is a range of choices available to them. They could introduce wealth taxes to raise upwards of £10 billion. They could stop wasting public money on private contracts. They could launch a fundamental redistribution of power by bringing water and energy into full public ownership. Instead, they have opted to take resources away from people who were promised things would change. There is plenty of money, it’s just in the wrong hands — and we will not be fooled by ministers’ attempts to feign regret over cruel decisions they know they don’t have to take.
Grenfell Tower is shown in west London on September 3, 2024.. (Photo: Lucy North/PA Images via Getty Images)
“The Grenfell Report gives us official confirmation: 72 people needlessly died because of corporate deceit, deregulation, privatization, ignorance, and contempt for working-class communities,” wrote Jeremy Corbyn.
Seven years after the U.K.’s worst residential fire since World War II, the second half of a report on the causes of the Grenfell Tower disaster partly attributed the deadly blaze to corporate greed.
The Phase 2 report, released Wednesday, blamed both private malfeasance and government deregulation for the fire on June 14, 2017, which claimed the lives of 72 people, including 18 children, when the cheap, flammable cladding surrounding the building ignited.
“The simple truth is that the deaths that occurred were all avoidable and that those who lived in the tower were badly failed over a number of years and in a number of different ways by those who were responsible for ensuring the safety of the building and its occupants,” inquiry chair Sir Martin Moore-Bick said in a statement.
“The system isn’t broken, it was built this way.”
The inquiry, which was launched the day after the fire by then-Prime Minister Theresa May, reviewed more than 300,000 documents and 1,500 witness statements. The first half, released October 30, 2019, focused on how the fire ignited and spread. The second, which took longer than expected, examined the “underlying causes.”
Those include the “systematic dishonesty” of the companies that sold the flammable cladding and insulation used to refurbish the tower in 2015, namely Arconic Architectural Products, Celotex, and Kingspan.
“They engaged in deliberate and sustained strategies to manipulate the testing processes, misrepresent test data, and mislead the market,” the report authors wrote.
For example, Arconic had known since 2005 that its Reynobond 55 PE, used on Grenfell as rainscreen panels, “reacted to fire in a very dangerous way” when sold in cassette form and since 2011 that the cassette form performed worse under fire than its riveted form.
“Nonetheless, it was determined to exploit what it saw as weak regulatory regimes in certain countries (including the U.K.) to sell Reynobond 55 PE in cassette form, including for use on residential buildings,” the report authors noted.
The report authors also blamed quality control bodies such as the British Board of Agrément, Local Authority Building Control, and the U.K. Accreditation Body for failing to do their due diligence. The Building Research Establishment, a former government agency that had been privatized in 1997, was actually “complicit” with Celotex in misleading consumers about the insulation RS5000 by devising a strategy to rig tests to ensure the material passed.
At the same time, the companies took advantage of a period of deregulation in the U.K. during the 2010s, specifically in the Department for Communities and Local Government. The report authors concluded:
The government’s deregulatory agenda, enthusiastically supported by some junior ministers and the secretary of state, dominated the department’s thinking to such an extent that even matters affecting the safety of life were ignored, delayed, or disregarded.
During that period the government determinedly resisted calls from across the fire sector to regulate fire risk assessors and to amend the Fire Safety Order to make it clear that it applied to the exterior walls of buildings containing more than one set of domestic premises.
In addition, the report authors found fault with the Tenant Management Organization for not taking tenant concerns, including about fire safety, seriously enough; the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, where the tower is located; Studio E, the architect behind the refurbishment; contractor Rydon Maintenance Ltd and some of its subcontractors; and the London Fire Brigade, which was not prepared to respond to a high-rise fire.
“The inquiry report reveals that whenever there’s a clash between corporate interest and public safety, governments have done everything they can to avoid their responsibilities to keep people safe,” Grenfell United, a group of fire survivors and bereaved family members, said in a statement. “The system isn’t broken, it was built this way.”
The group added that the reports’ conclusions spoke to a “lack of competence, understanding, and a fundamental failure to perform the most basic duties of care.”
They continued: “When voids were created as the government outsourced their duties, Kingspan, Celotex, and Arconic filled the gaps with substandard and combustible materials. They were allowed to manipulate the testing regimes, fraudulently and knowingly marketing their products as safe.”
They added that their lawyers had told the inquiry that the three companies were “little better than crooks and killers,” a statement the report reveals to be “entirely true.”
“We were failed in most cases by incompetence and in many causes by calculated dishonesty and greed,” they wrote.
The Grenfell fire, when it first ignited seven years ago, called attention to rising inequality in London, as it was a public housing building in one of the city’s wealthiest boroughs.
In 2019, Member of Parliament Jeremy Corbyn said that “Grenfell Tower would not have happened to wealthy Londoners. It happened to poor and mainly migrant Londoners.”
Upon the report’s publication, he wrote on social media: “The Grenfell Report gives us official confirmation: 72 people needlessly died because of corporate deceit, deregulation, privatization, ignorance, and contempt for working-class communities. We will never, ever forget.”
The Grenfell Report gives us official confirmation: 72 people needlessly died because of corporate deceit, deregulation, privatisation, ignorance, and contempt for working-class communities.
The Peace & Justice Project, meanwhile, wrote that the report showed: “The legislative actions of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government on 2010-15 are largely to blame for the fire and resulting death toll. Their disgraceful and habitual deregulation has been found to have led to safety matters being ‘ignored, delayed, or disregarded’ by building materials manufacturers and council officials.”
To avoid another similar fire, the report authors made several recommendations, including:
Making one government department responsible for fire safety issues;
Creating a construction regulator;
Mandating fire safety strategies for high-risk buildings;
Developing a special license for contractors who work on higher-risk buildings; and
Establishing a system for accrediting fire-risk assessors.
Grenfell United called the recommendations “basic safety principles that should already exist.”
In addition to following the report’s advice, the survivors and family members also called for the government to ban Arconic, Kingspan, Celotex, and Rydon from working with both central and local governments.
They also urged the Metropolitan Police and the Crown Prosecution Service, who are now reviewing the report to decide on charges, to hold those responsible accountable. Any cases are not expected to go to trial until 2027.
“To prevent a future Grenfell, the government needs to create something that doesn’t exist,” the group wrote, “A government with the power and ability to separate itself from the construction industry and corporate lobbying, putting people before profit.”
The Peace & Justice Project also called for accountability, saying: “Today’s report paints a clear picture of how the Grenfell Tower disaster was allowed to happen. We are hopeful that this stage of the inquiry brings those responsible to justice in the form of prosecutions and criminal proceedings, as well as an immediate end to the callous privatization that has been allowed to shatter communities like Grenfell.”
It noted that there remain 4,630 residential buildings in the U.K. with unsafe cladding as of July 2024.
“With only 29% of the necessary remedial work undertaken under the Conservative governments of May, Johnson, Truss, and Sunak, we call on the new Prime Minister Keir Starmer to accelerate the removal of dangerous cladding from residential buildings to ensure the safety of all residents and the avoidance of another preventable tragedy like the Grenfell Tower fire,” the group wrote.
