past crimes and present misdemeanours

May 30, 2018 2:24 AM

'The Tower' - a long essay/article on the Grenfell Tower fire by Andrew O'Hagan in The London Review of Books
posted by fearfulsymmetry (24 comments total)

I subscribe to the LRB and Andrew O'Hagan is a source on whom I rely.

I can't cope. When I get the physical paper, I will take it piece by piece, with long gaps between each piece.

I cannot read it in one unbroken sequence.

Either I am a member of the human race, and I will be undone reading it all

Or I need to isolate a phrase, a sentence, a paragraph - something which allows me to engage and not feel my entire humanity dissolve

We were not meant for this
posted by Barbara Spitzer at 2:48 AM on May 30, 2018 [8 favorites]

Looking at Twitter, this seems to be quite a divisive piece - vis, this thread by Luke Barratt, who has also covered the issue in depth. (I'm not sure I'm qualified to express an opinion, myself, other than that I'll watch both sides with interest and, as is usual regarding this subject, despair.)
posted by Grangousier at 3:47 AM on May 30, 2018 [8 favorites]

Just a warning, the LRB article is supremely mobile-unfriendly, at least on not-bleeding-edge devices. It took me literally ten minutes to get my phone to respond enough to turn it off - there was no hope of just killing the tab or Chrome. Will try again on a desktop, I really want to read this.
posted by Dysk at 4:42 AM on May 30, 2018 [1 favorite]

It’s full of details and meanders a lot and there’s no tidy ending. I imagine most people with a chip will find it knocked at one point or another. The most valuable thing it offers is a case study of how not to handle PR after a disaster. For that it should be required reading for civil service staffs.

That said there should be jail time for those responsible for the fraudulent cladding, but I doubt it will ever happen.
posted by seanmpuckett at 4:58 AM on May 30, 2018

the LRB article is supremely mobile-unfriendly, at least on not-bleeding-edge devices.

Confirmed on this 2012 Acer Iconia A510 (Cyanogenmod 12.1/Android 5.1.1, Firefox 60.0.1, uBlock Origin 1.16.8). The article becomes readable once the loading progress bar reaches about 80%, at which point loading seems to hang. But unless you cancel the page load at that point, about a minute later it kills the browser. And don't touch the hamburger menu. Grrr.
posted by flabdablet at 5:53 AM on May 30, 2018

Took a really long time loading on my laptop, I thought it was going to hang. Must have lots of weird elements attached.
posted by glasseyes at 6:05 AM on May 30, 2018

Re the mobile reading experience, it does do that annoying shutter view thing between chapters, so it's messing about with Javascript etc. That said, I had no problems with hanging or speed on my iPhone 6S.

It sure would be nice if we could go back to just HTML, huh.
posted by seanmpuckett at 6:35 AM on May 30, 2018 [5 favorites]

This piece is really weighted towards how the poor Tory council felt. I'd hesitate to call it actively dishonest but the depiction of Paget-Brown is embarrassingly fawning.

He is of his age and background,’ a friend of his told me. ‘He probably appears to many to be some sort of patrician Tory. But he has given thirty years of his life as a councillor, and you don’t do that out of some sense of noblesse oblige. You do it because you are deeply interested in the circumstances where you live.’ As a writer you try not to be swayed by people’s niceness – and besides, nice people can do terrible things. But self-sustaining decency was a commodity in short supply, and I found I liked Paget-Brown.

Contrast that with the lack of trust or sympathy extended to the actual victims. There's a strong vibe of 'those nasty ungrateful residents' here and some very unpleasant sniffiness about residents not wanting to bare their souls in the right way to the media. First they're wrong and imagining things because they're just so emotional and then O'Hagan edges right up to portraying them as cynically manipulating the media:

But after a few minutes the women went round the front of the church where all the cameras were. It seemed they both didn’t and did want to be with people like us. I was talking to residents about the council – ‘They take your number just so’s they can say they have your number,’ a man called Ishmael said – and then the TV cameras came over and the interviews began, including with the women who had gone out by the back door.

The emphasis throughout is uncritically on how the 'decent' council was hung out to dry ("But this Grenfell group was political. They hated everything the council and the TMO did, no matter what") with the scorn cast on Paget-Brown and the council getting a lot more attentions and sympathy from O'Hagan than actual grief from Grenfell victims, who get picked apart under the guise of 'just asking questions'.

seanmpuckett is right about the PR handling side of things but the worst O'Hagan sees in the action of Kensington and Chelsea is that they were "the unluckily posh-seeming leaders of a rich-seeming council, who just happened to have the wrong names at the right time". Meandering, maybe, but there's a lot of hazy arguing that looks almost designed to obfuscate where the blame lies.

Seriously, Luke Barratt's twitter thread, as linked by Grangegousier is a vital and clear-sighted comparison but Claire Launchbury has also picked up on some of the victim-blaming O'Hagan's engaging in here.
posted by ocular shenanigans at 8:47 AM on May 30, 2018 [9 favorites]

Having now made it through the piece on my desktop, I came here to pretty much say what ocular shenanigans has already said better than I could. The whole piece after the first chapter or two is pure slant and spin masquerading (almost convincingly) as even-handed or objective.
posted by Dysk at 9:04 AM on May 30, 2018 [2 favorites]

One thing that really stood out for me on reflection was the constant drumbeat of of course everyone hates the council because they're Tories which seems like some kind of strange anti-pseudo-racism defence of a political position. And the use of it to kind of shrug off people's loathing of the council and government response as being little deeper than that "oh they're toffs with hyphens and caps so of course they suck." Which rather trivializes the specificity of the problems caused not only by the council but by government meddling.

There's some nuance I'm not capturing well, probably due to lack of coffee. I hope it's comprehensible.
posted by seanmpuckett at 9:23 AM on May 30, 2018 [3 favorites]

So, chapter one, not that far after mentioning (rightly) Aberfan and Hillsborough, we get this from O'Hagan:

 The fire hadn’t even reached its dreadful zenith before the TV announcers began shaking their heads and looking for austerity commentators and someone to blame.

Which.... I mean, I was awake when Grenfell was happening, I watched the social media roll in, and there were plenty of informed ordinary people that night who linked to Grenfell Action Group and concerns there had been. The above sentence is basically 'too soon' and the trouble with that, as we all know, is that all too soon, it becomes 'let it go'.
posted by threetwentytwo at 10:24 AM on May 30, 2018 [6 favorites]

I am a big, big fan of the LRB, but I am not looking forward to a whole issue on the subject of Grenfell. As much as I appreciate the left wing politics of the publication there is a point when it becomes a little too much, and I'd rather have an article about translations of Homer or something.

Also, yes, their web presence is not excellent. But this is a magazine that is perfect for long train journeys - it's even thoughtfully sized so that it provides a layer of insulation on a cold platform bench. Worth tracking down a physical copy.
posted by The River Ivel at 11:24 AM on May 30, 2018

‘It doesn’t fit the narrative,’ another one said, ‘but in actual fact there were too many helpers. And there were too many donations. And there were too many crazies. But you won’t hear that on Newsnight.’

That's a quote from a Head of Service at the Council, given in a generally approving context. Appallingly tonedeaf.

And then O'Hagan goes on to comment that there were Housing Officers on the ground. That the Head of Education sent emails to the schools the next morning. But nobody reported it. Yeah, because that is literally the bare fucking minimum that should have been expected. Reporting it is Dog Bites Man level.

This is atrocious.
posted by threetwentytwo at 11:52 AM on May 30, 2018 [8 favorites]

As much as I appreciate the left wing politics of the publication there is a point when it becomes a little too much...

That point sure isn't this article! It's basically Tory apologia.
posted by Dysk at 11:59 AM on May 30, 2018 [1 favorite]

I'm a subscriber to the London Review of Books and since they sent the subscribers' e-mail saying what would be in the next issue I've been dreading getting it in the mail. If LRB has an institutional weakness it's for anything that seems like it's debunking received wisdom, even if it leads them into brambles. I feared that would be the tack taken here, and from what I've seen here and on Twitter, they seem to have stumbled through brambles into a hole.
posted by Kattullus at 3:14 PM on May 30, 2018 [2 favorites]

Many people dislike the 'unbelievably insidious and patronising' tone used by O'Hagan when recounting Stormzy's public criticism of Theresa May's response to the fire.
posted by brushtailedphascogale at 2:57 AM on May 31, 2018 [1 favorite]

So, after my above two comments I went a bit further in reading, and, in between the Tory apologia, O'Hagan recounts:

- an anecdote from the Council about a £900 pram demanded by a survivor (no evidence for this)
-Survivors refusing temporary bed and breakfast accomodation (and if O'Hagan can't guess why that is, well....)
-Survivors demanding specific 2 and 3 million pound houses from the Council.

And in between this, an anecdote from his own childhood about how his parents were grateful for their council house, just so we can all grasp the implications, in case we were in any doubt.
posted by threetwentytwo at 3:12 AM on May 31, 2018 [2 favorites]

Re: the Stormzy excerpt:

It was just another rich pop star taking advantage of people’s pain to sound relevant. According to a clear breakdown provided by the Charity Commission, of the £24,993,386 raised in public donations – from newspaper appeals, the Red Cross, the Kensington and Chelsea Foundation, as well as dozens of smaller charities – £23,726,876 of it had been distributed directly to survivors of the fire and victims’ next of kin by 25 April this year.

a) That's what had happened by the end of April. The Brits were in February. Darling O'Hagan has provided no indication that the funds had been disbursed at the time of the criticism.

b) That's still a disbursement shortfall of over a million fucking pounds and he's acting like there's nothing at all untoward or worthy of criticism here.
posted by Dysk at 3:27 AM on May 31, 2018

This article is by far the most detailed account of the Grenfell disaster to have appeared so far, and probably the most detailed account we're going to get until the public inquiry publishes its report in 2020. O'Hagan has done his research, he's listened to people (he refers to 'hundreds of hours of interview for this story'), and he's got hold of some key pieces of evidence, like the council emails about the cladding.

Now, it's pretty clear why he's been given access to this material: the council leaders want to get their side of the story into the media before the public inquiry. There's a lot more evidence still to come out (the public inquiry already has more than 330,000 documents to slog through), and some of it, I suspect, will put the council's actions in a less attractive light. But anyone who wants to know why Grenfell happened should be grateful to O'Hagan for putting this material into the public domain. It's not the whole picture by any means, but it's a start.

It's basically Tory apologia

Really? It reads to me like a sustained indictment of Tory government policies. O'Hagan lays bare the disastrous legacy of Thatcherism: privatisation, deregulation, the depletion of the social housing stock, the corrosive effects of austerity. He accuses Theresa May and her government of being 'cynical and opportunistic' in their response to the fire. He shows how May and Sajid Javid (now Home Secretary) tried to avoid the political fallout from Grenfell by shifting the blame onto the local council. And he's also critical of the Labour Party for failing to challenge the government effectively over 'the deregulation of fire safety, the under-resourcing of the London Fire Service, the excesses of the construction lobby'. If you think all this is 'basically Tory apologia' then I don't know what to say to you.

And now the Daily Mail is putting its own spin on the article. According to the Mail, O'Hagan shows that 'the London fire brigade, cladding firms and Tony Blair are responsible for the Grenfell tragedy': no mention of Theresa May there, you notice, and no suggestion that Tory policies might have had anything to do with the disaster. If we want to challenge that narrative, I would suggest paying attention to what O'Hagan says about deregulation and austerity, instead of accusing him of siding with the evil Tories because he dares to express some sympathy for the local council.
posted by verstegan at 3:32 AM on May 31, 2018

O'Hagan exonerates the council from failing to engage their duties with respect to building inspection and fire safety almost entirely. He suggests that people were blaming austerity from within minutes of the fire, because people just like to blame austerity for things. He suggests that the blame lies as much with Labour as with the Tories (which leaves just enough meat for the Mail to spin into the headline they did) and the building trade. He casts poor hapless ministers and council members as having been thrown under the bus, how could they possibly be responsible when they were told that the cladding was safe (by the people selling it, yes, I'm sure you can absolutely treat advertising copy as gospel fact). He doesn't take the council to task for their failures to inspect the exterior of buildings (in fact, he makes sure to mention that doing so is utterly not routine because the building trade is trusted, despite the fact that it very much is the council's remit - at no point does he suggest that trusting the trade was perhaps a mistake, nope, he's sure to lay the blame for that firmly at the feet of the building trade exclusively). Over and over, he goes out of his way to suggest that really, everybody is to blame. Which is pretty close to saying nobody is to blame, in practice - it's spread so thin, how can you actually hold anyone responsible? He also goes out of his way to attack and ridicule anyone who had any critical commentary at the time, including council tenants more generally, who he casts as ungrateful louts trying to benefit from disaster. Insofar as he attributes any blame to the Tories, he is very careful to ensure that it is Sajid Javid and Theresa May personally (or the ghost of Thatcher), and not the party or their policies as a whole who are blamed.

To quote O'Hagan himself:

"Our instinct is to police the people we don’t like, as if that alone proves our moral valour, while turning a blind eye to the bad behaviour of those we designate their victims."

This is exactly what this piece is. He's designated the council as victims, and spends the entire article looking for anyone else to take the blame.
posted by Dysk at 4:10 AM on May 31, 2018 [3 favorites]

Like, there's a fundamental sympathy and benefit of the doubt that gets extended to the council especially, politicians more generally, and is absolutely withheld when it comes to discussing anyone trying to hold the former to account in any manner (where the latter overrides the former for politicians).
posted by Dysk at 4:14 AM on May 31, 2018

According to the Mail, O'Hagan shows that 'the London fire brigade, cladding firms and Tony Blair are responsible for the Grenfell tragedy': no mention of Theresa May there, you notice, and no suggestion that Tory policies might have had anything to do with the disaster.

There's a reason they come to that conclusion. There is more time spent rubbishing the idea that austerity is blame, to accuse the papers and public of just knee-jerking against austerity, than there is actually discussing the issue. Yes, he mentions that "George Osborne did more harm than any British politician for a generation when he cut rent revenues and imposed austerity measures." But he also takes the time to make statements like "The fire hadn’t even reached its dreadful zenith before the TV announcers began shaking their heads and looking for austerity commentators and someone to blame" much more often throughout. He spends a whole chunk of the article painting austerity as a meaningless bogeyman that people reflexively blame, then quietly makes makes quick mention that it might have been part of the problem toward the end. It's not hard to see how people got the message that austerity was the fall guy here, not the problem - that's a much bigger focus of the article, something O'Hagan spills much more ink on.
posted by Dysk at 4:19 AM on May 31, 2018 [1 favorite]

I'm convinced enough that this analogy's accurate that I certainly won't go out of my way to read the article:

Andrew O'Hagan compares Grenfell to Hillsborough in terms of scale/public impact in that awful piece, which is fair enough, but if the LRB had commissioned an article like this in 1989 it would have been a hagiography of David Duckenfield, Irvine Patnick MP and Kelvin Mackenzie.
posted by ambrosen at 1:22 PM on May 31, 2018 [4 favorites]

He suggests that people were blaming austerity from within minutes of the fire, because people just like to blame austerity for things.

To be fair, people also just like to blame gravity for preventing their houses from floating off into space.
posted by flabdablet at 1:38 AM on June 1, 2018 [2 favorites]