Wasn’t this caused by green regulation? Putting a flammable cladding on the building to save energy? Regulations are to blame. When will you look up at the fields of crosses blighting your landscape and realize your windfarms do nothing but kill birds? Does the cult of Gaia know no bounds?

On a side note…I couldn’t help but notice that despite the totally engulfed high rise, the structure did remain standing. Compare that to the Twin Towers and especially Building 7 that had a “furniture fire” burning on its upper floors collapsing rapidly into their own footprints after only a few hours of fire. Odd.

There seems to be a hypothesis forming that this fire morphed into an inferno because a 27-story tower was retro-fitted with flammable “green” cladding, and stuffed full of Third World tax-eaters with portable propane stoves.

Fingleton is very sharp on Far East economics and Advanced Manufacturing, but often weak on British domestic matters. This is not surprising, since he has spent nearly all of the last 50 years in Japan.
So is the case here. British tower block living is almost entirely a social housing phenomenon.
Nearly all were built between 1955 and 1976 with massive subsidies from Central to Local Government, who were the landlords. In 1976, Britain went cap in hand to the IMF and building stopped permanently.
Right from the start, the vast majority were poorly constructed and insulated and employed noxious materials like asbestos that have since been banned.
Not very surprisingly, few Local Authority tenants were keen to live in these buildings and they were used to dump “anti-social” tenants.
Problems of insulation and dampness quickly became insuperable in many areas. From the late 1980s, they have been demolished as a result. Most noticeably, Glasgow has been demolishing the highest domestic housing in Europe. The ( amusingly named ) Red Road scheme bit the dust a few years back.
The social housing to replace this stock has been built for Housing Associations, not Local Authorities and has been low- and medium-rise ( 4 to 6 storeys, rather like tenements )
Grenfell Road was therefore an Architectural Dinosaur. Most Local Authority housing of the period was expected to last 60 years. Grenfell Road lasted 43 years. Even then, it was being used to dump 3rd World immigrants and “Syrian refugees”. Even with expensive refurbishment, it and similar housing schemes were unlikely to survive to 2050.
I think any inquiry will recommend that High Rises of this provenance be demolished sooner ( 10 to 15 years ) rather than later. With the exception of a few High Quality blocks in a few select areas – central Aberdeen springs to mind – very few will exist shortly, and an aberrant and bizarre period of British Architectural History will be closed.
The High Rise was a result of massive Central Government subsidy, without which they would not be built. But also massive Deregulation: Local Authorities ignored or circumvented their own planning regulations. They awarded contracts to companies in contravention of building and environmental regulations.
Of course, Fingleton was in London at the time – except he wasn’t living in a Tower Block !

Stuffed full of people who would have the right to buy and resell after a few years and trouser several hundred grand or more. Third Worlders having being given a massive gift like that had every the long standing advice to stay inside flats during a conflagration in the building. Some were ordered back inside by the firemen, and they obeyed.

One person made sure he got out, but he may have quite a while to think it through. A white man in whose kitchen the fire started (allegedly because of a fridge which is possible) is said to have had his clothes packed and moved out of his flat into the hall, before he informed the neighbors. The neighbour saw the luggage in the hall and the fire in his kitchen. So the fire likely started (or was started) quite a while before the alarm was raised. The man also behaved oddly outside. Yeah he got out with his stuff in plenty of time. He should get serious time in gaol.

The dry rise pipework (enabling the fire brigade to use hoses on any, even the topmost, floor may have had the valves stolen for scrap value.

I agree about deregulation.

I had the misfortune to live in a British High Rise for a short period. The Council was strict but sensible. Only buildings of 5 storeys or less were permitted to have mains gas. I lived on the third floor, but as it was a 14 storey block, I could only have electricity.
Portable propane and similar were absolutely verboten. They could and did evict people for this practice.
I would be grateful if you could direct me to the source of this story.

An estimate of how much this fire will save in tax revenues would be a nice number to have. Just sayin’

“There seems to be a hypothesis forming that this fire morphed into an inferno because a 27-story tower was retro-fitted with flammable “green” cladding, and stuffed full of Third World tax-eaters with portable propane stoves.”

Sources or retract.

An estimate of how much this fire will save in tax revenues would be a nice number to have. Just sayin’

If not the British people, at least the British buildings are doing their best to resist the third world horde. Brings a tear to the eye, it does.

Some mood music for the occasion:

Video Link

The building was clad in aluminum and polyethylene composite, and residents reported blue flame in units. This has been widely reported and you can do your own homework. So you get two phenomena that, among other lapses, turn a unit fire into The Towering Inferno: the cladding chimneys hot gases up the side of the building before combusting itself, and small propane bombs go off in individual units.

Fundamentally of course, the local government which owned and managed this monument to Peak Social Democracy had no pricing signals and no profit-and-loss discipline and therefore no incentive to bring this relic up to current industry standards.

I do hope the Inquiry gets to the bottom of this question and doesn’t whitewash it out of existence.
Mark Steyn reckons that there may have been as many as 600 people living in Grenfell Tower ( 120 flats of 1 or 2 bedrooms ) If you think 200 bedrooms, that’s 3 persons per bedroom. See https://www.steynonline.com/7921/the-great-fire-of-a-new-london
The High Rise in which I briefly lived is in part of Britain where the number of 3rd World immigrants is low. The Local Authority, even with anti-social tenants, tries to maintain 1st World standards. It is committed to demolishing all its High Rises.

A white man in whose kitchen the fire started (allegedly because of a fridge which is possible) is said to have had his clothes packed and moved out of his flat into the hall, before he informed the neighbors.

The man who allegedly (since we have only the neighbour woman’s account for this) watched his fridge combust, and then diligently packed his gear and thoughtfully woke up said neighbour as he headed for the stairs was Mr Behailu Kebedi, an Ethiopian taxi driver of a most un-white countenance. And it’s been all over the papers since day one. So I don’t know where you got that little tidbit from.

There are all sorts of unlikely tales swirling around the tower, such as the unnamed man catching a mystery baby tossed from 10th floor (in the dark and smoke? What is the likely trajectory and terminal velocity, at sea-level, of a healthy infant? Do not attempt to write on both sides of the paper at once).
I also heard two women on the radio claim that they were starting a collection for the inhabitants because the entire building was occupied by people from a single town, their hometown, in Morocco. It may well have seemed like that to them, I dunno.

I lived on the top floor, coincidentally the 14th, of a block in a notoriously grim estate from ’86 to ’93.
Ancient, probably 1940s gas cooker, acquired from where I don’t remember. All the flats had North Sea gas, which was a blessing as the electric underfloor heating (just resistance wires cast into the floorslabs I think, or something equally primitive) was unusable due to the cost. Built in the days when nuclear was going to make the leccy “too cheap to meter”.
You could fill the oven with bricks and use the heavy iron monster of a stove to keep warm.
Less active people (single mums with a handful of children, oldsters, and alcoholics/druggies downstairs) used SuperSer type butane canister (I think 13kg?) heaters or tall Aladdin-type paraffin (kerosene) things (which worried even me at the time).
The building reeked like a trawler. The lifts (elevators) were off as often as not, and the stair was narrow, windowless and almost a spiral.
The Council seemed think this was all fine and dandy. Otherwise they’d have had to rehouse all the paupers in buildings where they had a chance of surviving the winter without their (painfully saved up for and purchased) gas and paraffin deathtraps. Quite a few had had the electric cut off for debt, and the card meters ripped through their allowance in no time, being on a premium rate.

Oh I see. The Daily Mail strikes again.

Grenfell Tower fire is believed to have started shortly before 1am when a fridge on the seventh floor exploded. Samira Lamrini said: ‘The man whose flat it was came out and said it was his flat. He was a slim, tall, white British man.
‘He was pointing at the fire on a lower floor and said, ‘That’s my flat, that’s it’. He said it was his fridge that had exploded.
‘He started filming it on his phone. He was upset but I don’t think he had a clue about the scale of what was happening.
‘After that the fire went up in minutes, it was so fast. The speed with which it took hold was terrifying. It was like a tissue being set alight. It just went whoosh, so quickly. I didn’t see him after that.’ (Daily Mail 15/06/2017).

‘People have lost their lives. I can’t bear it’: Ethiopian taxi driver whose faulty fridge started the inferno’ says he’ll ‘never get over’ how many were killed. Behailu Kebede raised the alarm as the Grenfell Tower inferno began to spread, his neighbours have said. Father of one, a taxi driver from Ethiopia,discovered the fire in his fourth floor kitchen ahead of blaze.Tower block resident Maryam Adam said he knocked on her door to warn her at 12.50am on Tuesday night. (Daily Mail 16/06/2017).

Ms Lamrani (who seems to be Moroccan, and therefore reasonably aware of the subtle differences between Ethiopians and Brits) is also, surprise surprise, the source of the flying baby story, among other tales.

Lamrini then said she saw a woman from a ninth or tenth story window with a baby.
The woman signaled she was going to drop the child to those below, crying out “I’m about to throw my baby. Please catch the baby!” according to Lamrani.
Moments later, she did.
A man ran from the crowd of witnesses to catch the falling child. He then took the child to safety.
Lamrani calls it was a “miraculous” rescue.

Frankly I don’t see where “deregulation” comes into this at all.

Like, at all.

Bad cladding practice, bad regulation regarding cladding practice, silly, possibly corrupt acquisition of inappropriate cladding, and non-enforcement of fire regulations, yes.

But deregulation?

Might as well be aliens.

Actually, mostly is (though I don’t debase myself in cheering the death tool as some commenteros are wont to do)

Now, how come this doesn’t happen in France where “HLMs” are the urban blight of the “banlieues”, as well as sources of cultural enrichment?

As I wrote elsewhere, there are still Councils which try to apply 1st World standards, and others which don’t. The nearer to London, the more the latter predominate.

I did Jury Service a couple of years ago and the defendant (Sexual Abuse case) was a Moroccan who was living here illegally. I seemed to be the only person who was surprised that he had been here twenty years.

The baby would have been going too fast to survive the deceleration, and I never believed it, Thanks for the clarifications inc about the baby story coming from the same person who identified as a tall white man as the fire starter.

Ms Adam is with child, and in certain cultures a pregnant woman is believed to have the power of the Evil Eye. Adam, (the neighbour) was quite clear that after she was informed she looked in his flat, seeing there was already a fire in the man’s kitchen, yet he had already taken time to pack clothes ect because she saw them in the hall outside his door

It would be a very unusual person to go out the kitchen, where a fire was (unpredictably) developing and filling the place with smoke , and into the bedroom to take the appreciable amount of time to pack luggage. Dubious.

“Frankly I don’t see where “deregulation” comes into this at all.”

Well, I do.– Deregulation of immigration that is.

Let’s face it, these neoliberals and neoconservatives have sold people a bill of goods:

– First they send manufacturing overseas. I’ll note that nati0ns like Germany, who were smarter about the economic policy still have manufacturing. Fingleton is an expert on Japan, so he can speak to that better than I can. They have a manufacturing sector, hint, hint.

Free trade is also responsible for other problems, such as the illegal immigration crisis. NAFTA bankrupted a lot of Mexican farmers and effectively halted wage growth in Mexico.

– Second they deregulate the banking sector. The 2008 Financial Crisis is their fault. Disgracefully nobody was sent to jail over them.

– Third, all these needless wars. They make the defense industry rich. They sure as hell have not made the world a safer place. Quite the opposite. ISIS is their fault. The Unz review has a pretty extensive set of articles describing this situation.

– Fourth, their other policies of privatizing everything and deregulating everything have led to this crisis. This fire is an example of the consequences.

There is an alarming similarity between this and the 19th century, where the rich ruthlessly exploited the poor. It looks like the elite have looted society in their greed.

Eamonn Fingleton points out some very important facts about how messed up this whole situation is.

America produced more manufactured goods last year than ever. But with far fewer people due to automation. That’s the main reason manufacturing jobs are in decline.

Odd, indeed.

So odd, that the original 2006 Presidential Commission Report on the 9/11 disaster had not one word about the collapse of Building 7.

(A half-assed 2007 addendum, subsequently rushed out to quell the resulting shitstorm of criticism, made a feeble attempt to explain 7’s collapse in innocuous terms.)

But, there you go. Noticing things.

“More recently another aspect of deregulation that has come in for widespread denunciation has been so-called zero-hours contracts. Under such contracts, employers are not required to guarantee workers any minimum number of working hours. Many critics consider the concept to have gutted workers’ bargaining power.”

Zero hours contracts have been around for decades, working perfectly well, as they still do for skilled workers where demand exceeds supply. For example, many IT contractors are effectively on zero hours, in that when the work is finished, the company have the right to release the contractors before the contract expires. “Bank nurses” can pick and choose the hours they work, without fear that the NHS won’t call again if they turn down some work.

The huge difference between the situation now and in, say, 1974, is that there’s now an almost infinite supply of low-skilled workers, thanks to the EU accession of Poland, Romania etc. In many factories or warehouses there’s a two-tier workforce – people who were employed before 2005, on full time contracts and generally paid above minimum wage – then the more recent “employeees”, provided by an agency and on minimum-wage zero hours contracts.

The gutting of worker bargaining power is a supply and demand issue – the numbers on zero hours are a symptom, not a cause. Those like the Guardian who weep crocodile tears over ZHCs are the same people who want effectively open borders.

If a 20 pound baby falls 100 feet, it’s going about 55 mph by the time it reaches ground level, and generates roughly 1900 foot-pounds of force.

Deregulation, if it means anything, presumably refers to a smaller number of regulations.

Being opposed to deregulation, therefore, seems to mean being in favor of a larger number of regulations.

But when it comes to safety the issue is simply not the number of regulations, it’s whether they are the right regulations.

I’ll go out on a limb here and state that this tragedy was the result of one or more factors. None of which have anything at all to do with the number of regulations existing.

1. Regulations were inadequate or just wrong. Possibly because the “greenness” of a material was inappropriately privileged over its fire safety.

2. Regulations were not followed, whether in using the wrong material or in not installing it properly.

3. Tying in with 2, regulations were not properly inspected nor enforced.

Increasing the number of regulations will simply not prevent another such disaster. The solution is to have the right (not necessarily more) regulations, and then enforce them properly.

Fewer, but well chosen and strictly enforced, regulations are infinitely preferable to more but less well enforced regulations.

Not directly. As there are non-flammable claddings with similar insulation characteristics that could have been used. And probably even the “flammable” material could have been used safely if properly installed.

However, you point out a real problem. When I used to teach classes about how to deal with water-damaged buildings, I would point out that some new materials and assemblies that were going up for “energy conservation” reasons would react less well to getting wet.

A common response was, “So you’re in favor of wasting energy and killing the planet!”

Facepalm.

Those Accession-country peons are as a consequence of their (locally) pitiful pay, thrust squarely into the Working Tax Credits zone. Bring the family, claim for the lot. Claim the rent. NHS treatment for grandma. Even better, let them stay home and just claim for the kids. If you don’t have any, just invent some.

16 hrs a week playing at some notional private enterprise “self-employed” set-up will pull in a good wedge, and more importantly, a whole raft of benefits provided you can demonstrate dependents. So we get car-washing by hand, hairdressing, tailoring and alterations, nailbars, and mini-cab driving.

Any savings one makes living temporarily and illegally crammed into a local authority semi or (dare I say it) towerblock flat, hot bedding, or two families to a room, go a long, long way to an early and wealthy retirement in Transylvania. Or Togo. With maybe a couple of extra girlfriends or even wives. Whose many, many uncontraceptived children will be motivated to make a similar fortune … guess where?

Meanwhile the same setup won’t even keep the local Brits in oven-chips and lager. They have to pay London prices for everything, all their lives, and eventually die in poverty (homeless, of course). Probably unable to “afford” a family at all.

Well done ‘British’ Business! Almost all the costs of your non-corporation-tax-paying rackets, including the wages have been palmed off on the working, PAYE, IR35-paying public. Enjoy your private islands and yachts. This can go on forever, obviously …

Thanks Logan. None of the current Lions crew, still less Gatland’s recent locally-based call-ups, could make that pass. Maybe an All-Black?

Many in the world will rethink WTC towers, especially tower 7.

IF that were the main reason, there would be no export deficits.

There would be:

1. Balanced trade
2. HIgh levels of capital investment (US corporations are not spending, but hoarding cash)
3. A positive correlation between productivity and unemployment (the data shows the opposite)

Somehow Germany and Japan, as Fingleton in his other articles have documented, maintain export surpluses. I would recommend reading Fingleton as he is an expert in this field.

I’m skeptical about automation taking out most jobs.

The MSM have decided that the local council is to blame, as is Theresa May. But the London mayor is not. Somewhat unusually the chain of command and responsibility has managed to leapfrog a whole tier of government.

This is nothing to do with the mayor being a swarthy Muslim. Nothing at all.

Further study shows that it was EU safety regs combined with the environmental regs. You have this entirely backwards.

These would be the same civil servants who have made the NHS such a raging success. Good luck with that!

Last time around, the Black Plague (if we may still call it that) solved the labour supply/demand problem, and that led to nearly 700 years of increasing liberty and self-determination in the English-speaking world. Let’s hope it doesn’t take a similar pest, brought in no doubt by our highly prized migrants, as so many of these once controlled or eradicated diseases have been lately, for the common folk to get back some of the power they have lost in the last few decades.

“As several British commentators have pointed out, all the evidence is that had the building been run and maintained in the way that was originally intended (with borough council officials maintaining a hands-on approach), the disaster would probably never have happened. ”

That is extremely hard to believe. For it to be true the councils who were grossly negligent would have had to suddenly become non-negligent just because they didn’t have an intermediary. Why would this be so? They ignored their own regulations over and over again, why would putting them in direct control improve things?

“I’m skeptical about automation taking out most jobs.”

Sure, it will only take out the manual labour currently being done with low-skilled, cheap labour, both home-grown and imported, freeing them up to be even more fecund than they are now. Sounds like a recipe for success to me.

Interesting to see the first-world flip over into the third-world in mere decades.

Ten years after In The Jaws Of The Dragon was published, this from The Economist

https://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21737517-it-bet-china-would-head-towards-democracy-and-market-economy-gamble-has-failed-how

“How the West got China wrong. It bet that China would head towards democracy and the market economy. The gamble has failed”

The article does not really make sense. It seems to say more government regulation is needed because the government cannot be trusted to regulate itself. What might have helped would have been aggressive insurance requirements.

The WTC was also a government project. Although at the time of the catastrophe its ownership was changing from the Port Authority to a private owner.

Automation has replaced a lot of jobs but has created others. On the other hand, much of the “manufacturing” that is going on in the US is assembling parts sourced from overseas. Real manufacturing is the making of the original component parts and the machine tools.

Now it’s a black plague of another type that’s destroying everything that has been achieved in the previous 700 years!

Don’t be a stupid conspiracist. It had nothing to do with the Israelis!

Buildings fall down all the time when furniture catches on fire.

Well, at least, in my dreams they do.

Corvinus, you spew out all sorts of dubious shit all the time.

Are you going to retract it all or provide sources?

In contrast to increased regulation from disinterested bureaucrats, the libertarian practices of ending welfare and full liability (for the immigrants and building owners) would have actually done something to avert this tragedy..

got rid of a lot of parasites, think of it as a cleansing fire

was the entire building on welfare?

With the assistance of all of the above-firing and educated “experts” in Western dual-earner households—with their daycare-raised kids, holding onto two of the few rent-covering jobs per household due to their superior expertise—you’d think that answers would be quicker, more detailed, more convincing and more comprehensive.

They never are, whether it’s the Grenfell Tower fire or the fire that took the life of the magnificent Notre Dame cathedral.

But instead of highlighting this inconvenient fact for the top 20% of mass-immigration supporters who need the welfare-assisted labor that keeps wages low for the bottom 80%, the Yellow Vests are out on the streets, protesting one of the few good things the rich are doing: funding the restoration of Notre Dame to the tune of a whopping $1 billion.

Who do the Yellow Vests think will pay for the restoration if the rich don’t do it?

Bottom 80%ers with extra money won’t give to anything unless it has a cutesy photo of a baby, a puppy or some other “working families” heart tugger. It is hard to attach a big photo of a suffering baby seal to the ransacked roof of the Notre Dame cathedral, humanizing it for the bottom 80%ers.

Attention bottom 80%ers of France: If properly renovated, one of the architectural wonders that makes your culture stand apart will outlast your children who share 50% of your DNA, your grandchildren who will share 25% of your DNA, right down to your great-great grandchildren who will share less than 10% of your DNA.

Stop critiquing them for saving the cathedral for the children.

It is funny that Yellow Vesters think they would get the money if elites had not given it to restore the cathedral. That’s not how the womb-productivity-based welfare system—funded by tax dollars from the affluent—works in the USA.

The money goes to single-breadwinner households with kids, like the many immigrants working cheaply for the rich. Womb producers in single-breadwinner households get multiple streams of welfare to boost up their wages as long as they work part time, staying below the earned-income limits for programs that guarantee them free food, reduced-cost rent, monthly cash assistance, ekectrcity assistance and up to $6,431 in refundable child tax credit cash.

In contrast, the people pay into the government retirement system, getting taxed at either 7.65 or 15.3% of every penny earned, unlike the womb-productivity-based welfare, which is free to the womb producers. France’s national retirement program sounds less generous than the one in the USA, where the average SS check is $1,300 per month, and rent for a crappy, one-room apartment is $900 per month.

Maybe, that’s why quite a few Yellow Vests look older, not like the typical, young, strapping radicals.

But it’s not like cathedral-repair money would be diverted to retirement accounts of the poor French citizens who paid into the system, not if the French system works like the one in the USA. If cathedral-repair money from the rich went to “the poor,” it would likely go to their womb-productive, groveling, cheap servants: the welfare-eligible migrants displacing the French from jobs.

A donation to cathedral repair is a donation to everyone alive and yet to be born.

You haven’t accounted for drag in your otherwise accurate calculations. The woman and her story are doubtful, but stranger things have been known to happen: https://www.mprnews.org/story/2014/05/13/infant-survives-11story-fall-in-minneapolis

Portable propane and similar were absolutely verboten. They could and did evict people for this practice.

Were they white? Would a British government authority evict a black Muslim for violating some regulation?

Sources or retract.

Does WikipediA count?

Fire safety experts have said that the building’s new external cladding was a possible cause of the rapid spread of the fire. Experts said the gap between the cladding and the insulation worked like a chimney to spread the fire.
…
One of the products used was Arconic’s Reynobond, which is available with different types of core material—polyethylene…or a more fire-resistant material…The Reynobond cladding reportedly cost £24 per square metre for the fire-retardant version, and £22 for the combustible version.

The external cladding although sandwiched with aluminum was highly inflammable at the uncovered edges of the cut panel
The layer of cladding affixed directly to the external walls was fire resistant

The reason that the Grenfell towers did not fall down is that their were no tactical Davy Crocket nukes stored at the bottom of the liftshaft .

Just EXACTLY what was manufactured here in the United States? Bombs? Missiles? Military aircraft?

Where the hell have you been living these past 40 years? Go into ANY “big box” store and 95% of the merchandise says MADE IN CHINA, or some Third-World country in which the multi-national corporations have set up their sweat shops.

The United States’ major exports are scrap metal and GARBAGE. Wake up and smell the coffee!

WTC7 had office waste paper bins burning ie garbage cans.

The diesel tanks were intact and unruptured and unburnt, it was merely burning paper wood that melted the steel lattice building structure.