Toxic regulations, not the fire brigade, are to blame for the Grenfell deaths

It has been bizarre to hear the London Fire Brigade taking the brunt of the blame for the deaths of 72 people at Grenfell Tower. Its commissioner Dany Cotton certainly deserves condemnation for persisting in telling residents to stay put when it ought to have been clear early on that fire was engulfing the building and it needed to be evacuated. Her suggestion that she ‘wouldn’t change anything we did on the night’ — in spite of the role her advice played in boosting the death toll — compounds her errors. Yet by the time the fire service arrived, tragedy was already assured. To pin the blame on Ms Cotton, or anyone in the fire service, risks missing the moral of Grenfell.

The chief failings lie with those who allowed a 23-storey tower block to be clad in flammable material. We haven’t heard much about that side of the story this week because Sir Martin Moore-Bick’s report is, oddly, divided into two parts. Only the events of the night of the disaster are covered in the report so far published. We will have to wait years for the next instalment, which asks how the building became a death trap. The delay is all the more puzzling given that a lot of evidence on this matter has already been put to the inquiry.

The flames at Grenfell had not even been extinguished before the tragedy was being enlisted as a political weapon — the conceit was that deregulation caused the deaths, along with austerity, capitalism and contempt for the poor. In one especially fatuous contribution, the then Labour MP Chris Williamson declared, ‘It’s time we put neo-liberalism on trial for Grenfell.’

Yet the flammable cladding used at Grenfell had been installed in Labour council-owned blocks and also in private blocks with half-million-pound apartments.