Blinded By Your Grace
February 23, 2018 11:28 AM   Subscribe

Stormzy delivers a blistering performance at the Brit Awards, calling out Theresa May's response to Grenfell and suggesting the Daily Mail suck his *bleep* (previously on Twitter).

Number 10 has responded.
posted by threetwentytwo (13 comments total) 16 users marked this as a favorite
 
Number 10 has responded

If the Tories gave a fuck about the safety of ordinary people in ordinary homes, they wouldn't have systematically blocked Karen Buck's private member's bill, and voted against including its substance in other legislation until it was too late for it to do anything to protect the social housing tenants in Grenfell. If they gave a damn about those made homeless by substandard housing and greedy landlords, they also wouldn't have committed a paltry £72 million in funding to the implementation of the Homelessness Reduction Act 2017 for the entirety of the UK.

The Tories will always do as little as possible as late as possible to protect the vulnerable. They can rot in hell and, if there is such a place, they surely will.
posted by howfar at 11:47 AM on February 23, 2018 [28 favorites]


- great flow
- loves his mom
- tells the Mail to suck his dick

What's not to like about Stormzy?
posted by tobascodagama at 12:21 PM on February 23, 2018 [15 favorites]


Have the Grenfell survivors even been all relocated into suitable housing yet? I went googling for an answer, but all I found in recent news was an article about leaseholders in a tower with the same type of cladding all being blackmailed by the freeholder to foot the £30+k bills per home (at £200-300k home values) to replace the cladding, and refusing to start works until the funding is in place, and I got too angry to continue googling.

And listening to Stormzy now. It was a fantastic performance.
posted by sldownard at 12:25 PM on February 23, 2018 [3 favorites]


Have the Grenfell survivors even been all relocated into suitable housing yet?

My understanding, from colleagues in London who have worked with Grenfell survivors extensively, is that the are still a significant number of people who haven't be rehoused properly. Sadly this is par for the course with the homeless, particularly in London. I've got stories about 5 and 6 person homeless families from London being shipped out to share a single bedroom B&B on the outskirts of Birmingham, and councils ignoring our efforts to get them somewhere better, lying to us, deceiving our clients, doing everything they can to ignore the law until you're on the verge of dragging them into court, then backing down at the last minute (or at least pretending to until you've backed off a bit, then starting the same old bullshit up again). It's a fucking travesty. I seethe with rage whenever I think about it.
posted by howfar at 12:36 PM on February 23, 2018 [17 favorites]


What kind of mic was that where it could be rained upon without issue?
posted by grumpybear69 at 12:42 PM on February 23, 2018


What kind of mic was that where it could be rained upon without issue?

You can see the Sennheiser logo, but I don't think that's a water resistant mic so theres a good chance it was damaged by the end of the show.
posted by Lanark at 1:02 PM on February 23, 2018


howfar, that's shocking and not at all shocking at the same time. I don't even have words to describe how I feel about the amount of sheer meanspirited bastardry people are willing to commit, anymore.
posted by sldownard at 1:13 PM on February 23, 2018 [1 favorite]


This Guardian article from last December suggests some of the reasons why it's taking a long time to rehouse the survivors. Blame Theresa May, if you will, for making a totally unachievable promise to rehouse everyone within three weeks, but don't blame the hard-pressed council staff who are working to deliver the policy. Or at least read the article before you rush to judgement. Maxine Holdsworth, who was brought in from Islington to lead the rehousing effort (and who will doubtless get the blame if anything goes wrong), comes across as a decent and conscientious person landed with an almost impossible job ('a crisis on a scale that no living UK housing professional has ever had to deal with'). The Guardian article says she looks 'tired and very sad', and no wonder.
posted by verstegan at 3:32 PM on February 23, 2018 [1 favorite]


don't blame the hard-pressed council staff who are working to deliver the policy

I'm a long term housing professional who has seen desperate and helpless people repeatedly fucked about by hard pressed council staff fighting to deny them their legal rights. Yeah, working for a local authority is really fucking tough, but you know what, so is dealing with the mountains of unlawful bullshit they pile on my clients, that I have to desperately try to pick off. Do you want to hear about my clients living in a two bed house with 9 children, who are repeatedly pushed away by the local authority when they try to get help? Or maybe the parent who was told they were intentionally homeless for moving away from a house opposite their child's abuser's workplace? Or maybe the couple who both lost their jobs after being moved to another city when they became homeless. These aren't unusual examples, this is the norm.

Some things are just immoral, as well as illegal, and hard pressed council staff do a lot of those things. I'll have more sympathy for how difficult their jobs are when they stop punishing my clients in illegal ways. We don't accept failures to comply with basic moral and legal duties in other professions, and working for a local authority is no different. If they aren't prepared to do the job the law says they have to do, they aren't worthy of it.
posted by howfar at 4:10 PM on February 23, 2018 [27 favorites]


I should probably add that I do have generally have more sympathy than I sometimes express. We are in the middle of a housing crisis created and perpetuated by central government. The environment has never been more difficult. But, at the same time, the people who work for a local authority have a duty to hold it to account when it fails to do what it is obliged to do. And I just don't see that. I see institutional cultures that treat the homeless (including those who are homeless because of terrible housing standards) as an inconvenience to be deflected and diverted at all costs. I see the appalling waste of money and effort that goes into avoiding legal duties, rather than performing them. And I don't know how to respond to that except with either anger or despair. I know anger isn't great, but I guess it's less paralysing than despair.

I have friends and former colleagues who work in housing for local authorities, and I know they're not monsters, but they are part of systems that frequently act in monstrous ways.
posted by howfar at 4:59 PM on February 23, 2018 [9 favorites]


Number 10 has responded
This is not the cabinet rap battle Lin-Manuel Miranda promised us all.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 3:49 PM on February 24, 2018 [1 favorite]


And one of [the] last people pulled from Grenfell Tower dies seven months later. Her husband couldn't carry her down the stairs to escape the fire, and although they were rescued by firefighters, she died Jan. 29 after going into hospital due to her burns and never going home.
posted by sldownard at 11:44 PM on February 27, 2018 [1 favorite]


.
posted by tobascodagama at 6:57 AM on February 28, 2018


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