Yesterday’s Observer newspaper revealed that manufacturers of the insulation installed on Grenfell Tower – cladding that led to the inferno that killed 72 people in June 2017 – have failed to pay into the multi-billion pound fund to fix dangerous cladding in residential blocks.
On top of this, two building supply firms involved, Saint-Gobain and Kingspan, have reported over £7.5 billion profits since the Grenfell Tower fire.
The French-based Saint-Gobain corporation which owns the Celotex insulation brand used on Grenfell has reported record profits of £5.8 billion.
As the Observer reports, the public inquiry into the fire heard allegations in November 2020 that Celotex employees carried out a ‘fraud on the market’, rigging a fire test and making ‘misleading’ claims about their insulation material and behaving in a ‘completely unethical way’ according to one former Celotex product manager who worked on fire tests of foam panels used.
Despite this the firm is insisting their insulation was not to blame for speed of the fire which it claims was driven by the cladding not the insulation.
Kingspan which has reported over £2 billion in profits since the Grenfell fire admitted to the inquiry that there were ‘shortcomings’ when it came to testing and certification but insisted to the inquiry that they were not responsible for the fire as their cladding was installed incorrectly and without their knowledge.
The multi-billion dollar US company Arconic, who made and sold the cladding, held primarily responsible by the inquiry for the speed and ferocity of the fire, joined in the blame game when its lawyers accused other companies of blaming Arconic as ‘a very convenient way of avoiding their own responsibilities’ and denying the claim the company had ‘misled the market’.
In fact, Arconic’s lawyers went further and blamed the contents of victims’ flats saying that more heat was generated by them catching fire.
The Tories were also spreading the blame as far away from the current government as possible.
Michael Gove, Tory minister for housing and communities, admitted last month that lax housing regulations were at least ‘partly responsible’ for the Grenfell Tower inferno.
In a press interview, Gove said: ‘I believe that (the guidance) was so faulty and ambiguous that it allowed unscrupulous people to exploit a broken system in a way that led to tragedy.’
That doesn’t do justice to the ‘bonfire of regulations’ brought in by the Tory government of David Cameron, a government that had Gove as a minister, which stipulated that all regulations, including health and safety and building regulations be torn up. A Tory government that, just months before Grenfell, boasted about how fire regulations in housing had been slashed in their drive to abolish a ‘health and safety culture’ that harmed ‘money-making business’.
Gove is clearly attempting to deflect all the excuses from the companies responsible for cladding and insulating Grenfell in lethal materials and is pushing responsibility well into the past, in anticipation of the damning conclusions of the inquiry when it publishes its finding later this year.
What Gove and the multinational companies up to their necks in complicity in turning Grenfell Tower into a ‘death trap’ can’t avoid, is the fact that since a fire that claimed the lives of 72 men, women and children, these same companies have been making billions in super-profits.
The revelations about the £7.5 billion made by these companies and their failure to spend even a fraction on funding schemes to fix unsafe residential blocks in Britain has led to calls for sanctions to be applied to them, with calls for all those involved to be held to account.
The Tories will never hold these companies to account, instead they worked hand in glove with these companies to make a profit out of building death traps for workers and their families.
The working class must bring the lot of them to account by demanding the TUC call a general strike to kick out the Tories and bring in a workers government that will nationalise the building industry, the banks and major industries and put those responsible for the 72 deaths on trial.
Only the overthrow of profit-driven capitalism can provide a safe future for all workers.
