how to 'value engineer' the deaths of 72 people (insulate britain)

 on channel 4: sunday 12th june, 10.30pm there's a dramatisation based on the transcripts from the grenfell tower fire inquiry 

aka. how to 'value engineer' the deaths of 72 people.

a disaster that had been coming since the lakanal house fire (2009), since the first time insulating cladding was placed on a building in the UK. 

it has to be said that the purpose of a lot of cladding was less to make the building warm and cosy but rather to improve the appearance of the buildings. the peculiarly british habit of having the rich and poor live cheek by jowl necessitated hiding the poor populations and the camouflaging of social housing. the disinclination of the rich to pay enough tax to ensure adequate maintenance of social housing, the tendency to view the poor as scroungers and social failures who didn't deserve the housing by the people employed to provide them with services, the rapid appreciation of the inner cities, all led to this outcome. 

here we see not a deliberate plan to incinerate 72 people but the abject failure of the state to frame adequate building regulations - a failure based in free market ideology that regulation held back capitalism from achieving better value. and so the deaths of 72 people were value engineered. 

but further, prior to grenfell the state's entire strategy was to elbow the poor out of the city and to gradually destroy social housing by creating a 'hostile environment' (to borrow a term from the immigration debate) to housing the poor. unfortunately the incineration of 72 people in grenfell was a bit too far ahead of the curve and all the people directly involved have suddenly found themselves in the wrong having previously been told they were in the right.

here we have gavin barwell, eric pickles, grant shapps, james brokenshire, seven housing ministers in eight years, eight housing ministers in ten. it is almost like they don't care. the blame becomes widely distributed and thinly spread. whether they will ever be charged and what with is still an open question. 

and what is this but boris's latest plan to require the selling off housing association property (that the state does not own) and thus more destruction of social housing. a policy that the pilot programme has demonstrated does not work and has been proposed two times before anyway. 

and really the blame goes beyond them to the people who voted for this shit time after time. 

of course this value engineering is not the great beautiful appliance of science that we might all hope for but a parsimonious skimming of social reproduction costs, an attempt to shave them to the minimum and indeed beyond that, to force such systems into collapse to permit the looting of the collapsed entity by a capitalism grown ambulance chasing and vampiric. 

at every stage of the process the value the working class need to survive is extracted and rises up into the skies where the rich live on olympus, while those who make the world with their labour struggle to find enough to live. 

interestingly what the social housing of britain probably needs next is a vast campaign of insulation (to enable people to adequately heat their homes over winter). indeed there is a campaign of civil disobedience by people demanding more insulation, judges and juries are disinclined to jail them for demanding the obvious o the government are engaged in changing the law to permit putting people in jail for demanding the obvious more easy. 

the grenfell tower inquiry podcast is probably a good place to start (it is reliably blood boiling). there should be a new one out today. the guardian will offer you a guide to how to fix the housing crisis but like the government they are fixated on making home ownership easier, increasing the supply of social housing (the single most effective measure that could be undertaken) is relegated to the sixth (and final) recommendation, a recommendation made by everyone we asked (as if it were going to be controversial, as if the guardian needed to apologise for making it). 

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today horsemouth should probably go and re-arrange his finances. (it's a beautiful day outside).