A thought occurred to me when I saw the BBC headline this morning of the Queen and Prince William visiting the area of the Grenfell tower fire. A fire that has left 17 people confirmed dead with 76 missing.
Buckingham Palace: Receives £370m for refurbishment.
Grenfell Tower: Doesn’t receive £300,000 for a sprinkler system.
As pointed out by numerous voices, one example being Aamer Anwar, these people died because they were poor. They continually raised awareness that fire alarms didn’t work and lifts repeatedly stopped.
People jumped.
People who were on the lower floors hurled whatever they could at windows to try and wake people up. They are at outside the incident now wondering whether they should have bothered as they think it would have been better if their neighbours had died from smoke inhalation in their sleep rather than in a panic to escape.
Aamer Anwar, human rights lawyer and current rector of Glasgow University, has said that a government inquiry is not good enough as it allows the government to set the parameters. He pointed out examples like the Hillsborough disaster and Bloody Sunday and how the government continually white washes these to make no one, especially the government, look at fault.
He wants an independent inquiry and a criminal investigation. This happened as a result of Tory austerity and cuts to both social housing and to the emergency services. That blood is on their hands.
When Boris Johnson was mayor of London he oversaw the closures of dozens of fire stations. We had Labour leader to Tony Blair, John McTernan, saying that ‘Only 2% of a fireman’s time is spent fighting fires.’ You cannot afford to cut emergency services to save a quick buck. Austerity does not work.
According to Akala, rapper and poet, rich people living nearby complained that the tower block was an eyesore and urged a refurbishment. This refurbishment results in ‘pretty panels’ being placed on the outside, according to Aamer Anwar these panels assisted the fire.
This is an absolute tragedy and it exposes the utter corruption at the heart of government and in Tory austerity policy. Like Anwar, we fucking hope it ends in criminal charges.
BBC has confirmed the death toll has risen to 30. Fire chiefs expect it to be higher.
They’ve said they don’t expect to find any survivors and there’s still over 100 people missing. Some could be outside and unaccounted for but that still leaves a lot of people.
Note that this was social housing, so a lot of the people here were disabled.
Many of which were also housed on the upper floors.
Floors that the fire brigade simply couldn’t reach. They only had equipment to get to the 11th floor. Surely the government must have known this.
They knew.
I had to do safety training when I worked in a big office tower in Seattle. If there is a major fire in any tall building, there’s a limit to how high the fire department can get. They don’t want it to be broadly known, but if you’re above the 8th-11th floor (depending on the fire department) you’re utterly fucked. Maybe you have a small chance of helicopter rescue on the top floors of some buildings. But unless they are made exceptionally fireproof, tower blocks are deathtraps.
There is a reason that most tower blocks in the UK are allocated to public housing for the poor. They are deemed expendable.
In 2014, I received my Kensington and Chelsea council tax bill and a letter from the leader of the council, Nicholas Paget-Brown, explaining that all residents who pay council tax in full would “receive a one-off payment of £100”, to be deducted from the bill. This bonus, the letter continued, was due to the council’s careful management of its finances over the years, “consistently delivering greater efficiencies while improving services”. Austerity, K&C style: you give to the rich while taking from the poor (nobody with discounted bills or claiming council tax support was eligible to share in the bounty of the town hall blue-chips).
On a Conservative website, Paget-Brown further explained that “thanks to an overachieving efficiency drive”, the council was “well ahead of [its] savings targets for the year”. Triple AAA credit status, how nice. In deciding what to do with this surplus, he continued, “we have taken the view that it is simply wrong to discount from our calculations whose money this was in the first place. In short, we think the right place for it is back with our residents.”
In May 2014, the local election returned a huge majority of Conservative councillors. Business as usual. For years, the Royal Borough has got away with bribing the electorate with its own money. For years, the Royal Borough has been running huge underspends in its revenue budgets which it then transfers into capital reserves. The underspend in the 2016-17 adult services budget alone is £1.9m. Apparently, adult services in the area are doing so well they don’t need the money. And every other social service must be performing brilliantly, as the council’s projected reserves of £167m by the end of 2016-17 has climbed to a staggering £209m – that’s £42m surplus to requirements. How many sprinkler systems is that?
As the toxic ash of Grenfell Tower’s vanity cladding falls over the neighbouring streets, we are left with the acrid truth in our throats: regeneration in the Royal Borough is in fact a crime of greed and selfishness. I took the refund. At the time, I felt uncomfortable with this decision and the ways in which I justified it to myself. And then I forgot about it, until the smoke drifting into my flat in the early hours of Wednesday woke me up. Today, I gave it back. It wasn’t ever mine to keep. I handed it over in cash to a vicar running a refuge for the victims of the fire in a local church. I explained that it was not a donation, not a charitable act, that it was guilt money and he was doing me a kindness by taking it off my hands.
If you live in Kensington and Chelsea, please, give your rebate back. But not to the council, which seems to have trouble in identifying those – “our residents” – who might actually need it. - Name and address supplied
These councillors are the ones with blood on their hands and they should be held accountable for this tragedy.
But it should also be noted that we shouldn’t let John McTernan away with his comments two years ago about the fire service.
“Fire prevention a massive waste of precious public money”.
He’s been tweeting quite a bit since the tragedy and yet hasn’t quite managed to reiterate this claim.
No, John, fire prevention would lead to saving precious human lives.
NONE of this was from her perspective and all from the self-aggrandizing perspective of the fucking slavers. I have no fucking sympathy for anyone in this story except the life that was forcibly stolen.
☝☝☝☝☝☝☝☝
This was heartbreaking to read but I felt nothing for the author and utter contempt for his parents.
again i’m really conflicted. there’s no excuse for the author or his family to have treated another human so fucking horribly. it was really painful to read. but it also allowed my mom and i to discuss the shittier aspects of filipino culture. she explained to me a lot about social structures in the philippines and how rich ppl treat poor ppl.
i feel like most of the responses to this article have been (white) readers getting up on their high horse and shitting all over this family. but like. do they understand that this is not exactly a one time isolated incident? that so many poor filipino domestic workers are treated like shit by their employers?
i’m just 1000% over ppl acting so self righteous in reaction to this article. it’s all so superficial. like, yeah, i’m all aboard other poc and black ppl discussing how this slave narrative is so fucked bc it’s from the perspective of the owner’s son. there’s definitely so many real things to talk about! but then there’s also these weird comments like i saw some white person call the article “liberal guilt in vector art form” and honestly. i want to throw up all over them. like what kind of shitty fake concern is thattttttt. like what do you care about the phlippines or domestic workers or slaveryyy. I’m in such a bad mood.
That was hard to read, for sure.
I think a lot of people in THIS country don’t get that we’re still complicit in these kinds of horrifying exploitative relationships, even distantly, because of global capitalism.
Back when I was working a corporate job, I was sent to Manila to train a small office of women in a complicated technical issue. They worked from 10 at night until 8 in the morning, which is a pretty standard practice over there, because a lot of US and Europeans outsource to the Philippines to take advantage of the cheap labor there, and the workers in Manila need to keep those hours. I was thrown into an entire high-tech upscale world that ran on time delay, with bright-eyed people in polos and khakis hanging together outside their offices at 3 in the morning. It was easy for me to work in this environment, because I never experienced real jet lag during my short stay. But for the women I worked with, who all had kids, just like me, I figured it must be a harder life. So one night, on our midnight dinner break, I asked them about it.
They told me they missed their kids sometimes, but they still saw them every day when their shifts intersected. And with the excellent salaries they got, they all could afford many domestic servants. “I have a lady taking care of my kids very well,” one of them told me. “She lives with us. We let her go back to her home island for a few days once a year to visit her own kids.” She named the salary she paid this woman and it was so tiny my heart felt like it stopped.
I realized I was part of a horrible chain of exploitation of women’s emotional labor. In order for people richer than me to benefit, I was sent away from my kids for a week on a hard but fairly enjoyable business trip. The women I trained had more time stolen. The women they used for childcare had even more stolen. We were all exploiting each other down the chain. And it’s not just the Philippines where this happens.
I’m not going to praise the author, but I’m glad he put this narrative down in a fairly honest way.
Anonymous said:
could
you imagine that new pokemon getting a super doting trainer thinking it
has successfully disguised as a pikachu, only to have its wooden tail
fall off one day, poor thing would have a panic attack over if their
trainer will still want them i bet
okay arguably i got a little carried away BUT this idea was way too cute not to run with..! ;u;
i had considered making a comic with a child, but then i thought mimikkyu’s “““tail”““““““ would be a perfect height for a walking stick - and it makes them more huggable anyway!! or at least, sylvester thinks so ^q^
Awhile back, I was working my way through the exercises used in Middlebury College’s “Scholarship in Sound and Image” workshop, as described by Jason Mittell, and I did one called “Reader…” where I played a scene from Hannibal against Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. A friend who’s doing their PhD thesis on the gothic in contemporary popular culture and has a chapter that, in part, explores Hannibal through this lens, was all, we need to do a thing. So, they submitted a proposal for a paper/video presentation to Sheffield University’s Reimagining the Gothic 2016: Monsters and Monstrosities symposium, and this is the video portion of that - basically, an expansion of the original short video that incorporates both Jane Eyre and William Godwin’s earlier gothic novel, Things as They Are; Or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (which, seriously, if you love Hannibal read. the. thing. - the parallels are amazing), which was originally mentioned to me in a Tumblr message by @doctornerdington and was nothing less than a brilliant insight.
And, to pontificate just a little, THIS is what digital humanities means to me. It’s such a strange catchphrase these days, and it gets money without being very clearly defined. But this is a project (that will hopefully be an essay in a book one of these days) that happened because 1) I tweeted about my adventures in videographic criticism practice, and 2) I have not shut up about Hannibal on social media since IDK September 2015. We did the presentation jointly, and I’m on the other side of the ocean from Sheffield, but because the organizers were open to such a collaboration, it worked.
