Compassion is THE answer

Yesterday, four key Barclays employees were charged with fraud. Bribing the very rich of Qatar to lend them billions so Barclays did not need to be bailed out of the government, thus inevitably curtailing their bonuses. ￡40m a year, for one of them, needed protecting.

OMG. This does not play well.

Turn back to Grenfell Tower. As thrown as senior Tories were by the election result, the panic in their voices is now of a different order.

I went to visit the scene last night, and stood and wondered among the dying flowers, the burnt out candles, the poetry written by friends and the desperate missing persons posters. So, so sad.

There is a gulf between, on the one hand, political miscalculation and a failed campaign and, on the other, a national tragedy that captures, with ghastly clarity, a much broader sense of grief, social division and unheeded anger.

Wiser Tories understand that the Grenfell tragedy represents a much more serious challenge than the advance of Jeremy Corbyn.

First, the incompetence with which the disaster has been handled beggars belief. One would have expected the Conservative local authority and central government to have been on the scene around the clock: vocal, visible and accountable.

As Rudy Giuliani has written of his conduct as Mayor of New York City after 9/11: “I had to communicate with the public to do whatever I could to calm people down and contribute to an orderly and safe evacuation. It is not enough to hold meetings behind closed doors, or issue a press release. While Mayor, I made it my policy to see, with my own eyes, the scene of every crisis, so that I could evaluate it at first-hand.”

Fredrich Engels, back in Victorian Manchester, struggled to name the crime visited on children whose limbs were mangled by factory machinery, or whose parents were killed in unsafe homes. Murder and manslaughter were committed by individuals, but these atrocities were something else: what he called social murder. Engels wrote in 1845 “When society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual.”

And that hasn’t changed.

Over 170 years later, Britain remains a country that murders its poor. When four separate government ministers are warned that Grenfell and other high rises are a serious fire risk, then an inferno isn’t unfortunate, it’s inevitable. Those dozens of Grenfell residents didn’t die: they were killed. What happened last week wasn’t a “terrible tragedy”: it was social murder.

By all means, let’s wait for a judge to confirm the reports that the tower was covered in banned cladding, and that the 79 men, women and children confirmed to have died in the fire (at the time of writing) possibly did so for a grand saving of about ￡2 a square metre.

And, as I write this, there are dozens of other towers out there which are accidents in waiting.

And we can draw our own conclusions about whether well-heeled renters in a luxury tower would have received the contempt, dished out to Grenfell’s council tenants, AFTER they had published detailed reports on their homes being firetraps.

The social violence documented by Engels wasn’t aimed at a particular person and it wasn’t usually intentional. These were acts licensed by those in public authority, who decided the lives of poor people mattered less than the profits of the rich.

The logic still applies today.

It’s why the politicians and officials, who will not countenance the use of empty private property to house victims of a major catastrophe, are the same set who make it their business to kick council tenants out of their homes to turn them into private assets … to be left empty.

The conservative elite need to take a long hard look at their consciences, to practise what they preach. To leave their ivory towers. To get out into the streets. To meet people and to talk to them. To learn to nurture empathy, to release their emotions. To express sympathy.

It is the key lesson for them.

My anger with Mrs May stems from her promise to move away from Cameron’s elitism and espouse, instead, the “just ab0ut managing”. It was a chimera that we all believed in, but which amounted to nothing.

This elite must learn the vital lesson of compassion, or the Tory party will be reduced to nothing as an ageist, out of date, austerity obsessed, uncaring party of the past.

And there is a very great urgency for this vital sea change.