A fire in London

Around 1:00 AM on Wednesday, a fire broke out in the Grenfell Tower, a 24-story apartment building (some might say "tenement") in London housing about 500 people.  Partly due to flammable cladding on the outside of the building, the fire spread rapidly.  The building had only a single stairwell and fire alarms did not work.  The BBC has pictures of the results here.  45 fire trucks and hundreds of firefighters struggled for hours to defeat the fire.  The battle was marked by dramatic events such as a woman trapped on the ninth floor throwing her baby to a man on the ground (he caught it successfully).  So far 30 people are confirmed dead, and the final number will certainly be much higher.

Though near an affluent area, Grenfell Tower was public housing and a high proportion of the residents were immigrants and minorities.  Residents and even the fire department had long complained that the building was dangerous, with its flammable cladding and nonexistent or ill-maintained safety systems, but nothing was done.  Similar accusations have been made about other low-income housing in the area.

Last week's shock national election result in the UK, in which the Conservative party barely clung to power while the opposition Labour party made dramatic gains, was largely a verdict on the Conservative agenda of austerity and deregulation (some American blogs took it as a rejection of Brexit, but the only significant national party that repudiated Brexit, the Liberal Democrats, lost big).  In the popular vote, the Conservatives beat Labour by only 42% to 40%.

And now, the Grenfell Tower fire is rapidly becoming a symbol of the fruits of the Conservatives' agenda.  Regulations had been loosened, money to local authorities for enforcement and maintenance had been cut, and politicians had vented punitive and contemptuous attitudes toward the poor (sounds depressingly familiar).  Guardian writer Polly Toynbee sums up the harsh indictment, and this collection of stories shows how anger over the disaster is developing.  If the fire had happened a week before the election rather than a week after, the Conservatives might well have lost.

It could yet happen, too.  The Conservatives, eight seats short of a majority in Parliament, have had to form a coalition with a reactionary Northern Ireland splinter party which looks steadily nastier the more closely it's scrutinized.  If the coalition doesn't hold, one possible result would be a new national election.  If so, I won't be surprised if the Conservatives are kicked out of office.  Austerity and small government sound harmless enough in the abstract, but a 230-foot smouldering tomb full of charred corpses makes the reality inescapable.