Madam,

The Grenfell Tower disaster in London will go down in my memory not only for the needless and utterly tragic loss of life it caused, but also because the tower’s smoking carcass represents, I hope, the end of a certain establishment mentality.

This latest tragedy is another harvested from the poisonous weeds of neoliberalism. For over 35 years we have had corporations and big business writing their own legislation, laws and rules, backed up by a dominant mass media aligned with an ‘economy first’ agenda.

The combination of neoliberal policy at home and aggressive foreign doctrine abroad has reduced the UK to incidents you might be forgiven for thinking happen only in ‘developing’ countries’. In globalisation’s race to the bottom, here is a tragic reminder that the Tories have us well and truly down there in the leading pack.

The cruel irony for me is hearing Emma Dent Coad talking after her Kensington victory about the empty and very expensive blocks of private residential units all over the Kensington area. She was demonstrating that only a fraction of the luxury flats are being lived in. The rest, owned mainly by foreign wealthy investors, sit empty and have done for months and years. So, to those trapped in the Tory mindset of private profiteering over people’s basic needs, it will not seem inappropriate that the majority of people from Grenfell Tower, hurt, confused and intensely worried about their loved ones, have been sleeping on the floor of the local sports hall.

Almost 12 million people voted in the General Election for a new kind of politics, one where pleas from resident housing groups are not ignored, where health and safety legislation is not re-branded as a problematic hurdle that profit must smash out of its path, and for a government that treats victims of such horrific events with kindness and all the generosity they can muster.

I am writing this on Sunday morning, four days after the fire, and so far what Theresa May and her government have managed to offer is woefully inadequate. What they can muster, is simply nowhere near enough.

I am indeed heartened by the massive overall increase in votes the Labour Party managed to achieve, including here in Ceredigion, where the hard work of everyone who contributed to Dinah Mulholland’s campaign was rewarded by a massive 10.4 per cent swing, racking up 8,017 votes. This constituency is no longer a ‘two horse race’.

Whilst the government scrambles from one crisis to the next, trying desperately to cover up its tracks and its accountability as it goes, the innocents caught up in the life-and-death reality of the austerity ideology, a vicious offshoot of neoliberalism, continue to wait for the very basics needed to begin their long, hard road to recovery.

Yours etc,

Johnny Gaunt, Labour Party member and branch, Organiser of Stop the War Ceredigion, Pontrhydfendigaid.

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