I didn’t know that. Thanks.
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They flash SATIRE on the screen in the fire bit.
Classic theater is of three types - comedy, tragedy, and satire.
This sketch just swapped categories to my mind. Thank you for sharing it!
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First as satire, then as tragedy.
(Though really, I think it jumps straight to documentary.)
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When i googled it there was a bit of text showing up in Google that i couldn’t see on the Youtube page. I’ve now managed to find the complete comment from elsewhere:
The “Satire” Caption is because the second half of the sketch, with the model that collapses and catches fire during the pitch, heavily references a disaster which had recently occurred in Britain, in which a set of tower blocks collapsed, causing numerous casualties.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
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The term “social housing” implies the existence of society, something the Tories have contested since the 1980s.
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Socialism for the rich, capitalism for the rest!
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How they got to a place were every single building tested has failed.
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The local authority will have insurance through a private insurer.
Although how many insurers will want to take on a property with this sort of cladding in the future is a question worth asking.
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Fixing the cladding on every one of the 600 blocks potentially affected by defective cladding would cost less than half of the money sent to the DUP.
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That is kind of the problem, these are council flats, aka government owned housing (it seems to be more common in the UK then the US…and a lot of it is much nicer). So they can’t afford to do it now, and if insurance goes up they will be able to afford it even less. That is if they are required to have any, they are the government, maybe they exempted themselves…
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Important to bear in mind - local government housing, not central government.
Central government sets the rules and provides the local authorities with some money from central taxation (but not enough), requires local authorities to raise any further funds they might need from direct taxation of their residents (who are generally considered to be so vehemently opposed to any realistic increase in council tax that it would be suicide to even consider it) and leave the local authorities to get on with it.
Local authorities generally genuinely try their best with hopelessly inadequate funds. The particularly galling thing about this fire is that it happened in one of the richest local authorities in the country - one which actually raises more in funds than it spends (you’re not allowed to call this a budget surplus apparently according to some Tory on the radio - it’s officially a ‘reserve’).
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The situation will be getting worse in (I think) 2020, when local government will lose access to money from central government and will be expected to fund itself from business rates.
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If anyone wants to get into this sort of stuff for work, ASTM has a Property Condition Assessment standard that is widely applied, and is the sort of report that they will pay someone to write, in order to check off the checkbox on their risk assessment forms. This kind of dangerous siding is something there is a responsible way to look for. There are many many companies doing this work, and it’s kinda boring, but at least it’s not part of the problem?
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The comment is referring to Ronan Point:
Amazingly it only killed four people, largely because it was the living rooms that collapsed and most of the tenants were asleep in bed that early in the morning. The woman who actually sparked the explosion was blown across the room and survived.
This may also be of interest:
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Gas explosions are no joke, it’s pretty tragic it even happened at all but 4 deaths is a silver lining for sure. Wouldnt’ve taken much for the explosion to be worse.
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This accident reminds me of the New London, TX gas explosion. This was pretty early on when the industry wasn’t as regulated as it is now. Working at a gas utility i’ve had to watch a documentary on this accident as part of one of our safety meetings. The scale of this particular explosion was pretty horrific.
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Jeez, that was even worse than Aberfan.
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The scale of the explosion and the amount of casualties is something really difficult to wrap your head around.
But to tie this back to what happened in the UK, i get why the central government wanted the industry to regulate themselves but that’s not how the real world works. The government has to set reasonable yet effective guidelines and it’s up to a given industry to their set their standards to match those guidelines or exceed them. In my industry we choose to exceed all safety guidelines if possible. The New London explosion and the fire at Grenfell happened because of poor standards, and a complete lack of incentive to exceed said standards.
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I posted this in the UK politics threat we have, but it’s also relevant to this discussion here.
Grenfell tower could have been prevented, because here’s an example of where it was prevented, over 10 years ago. Of course, it wasn’t listened to by multiple UK governments.
Here’s the most chillingly relevant quote:
But the report added: “Notwithstanding… we do not believe that it should take a serious fire in which many people are killed before all reasonable steps are taken towards minimising the risks.”
Additionally, here’s the reason why so many tower blocks are failing safety checks:
It’s an astounding read. Just a little bit of digging has shown how builders have been able to completely ignore the building regulations which state that only non-flammable material should be used in this construction.
In short, builders have been able to sign off their own safety reports.
Meanwhile, the media does its best to attack opposition politicians for being inappropriately upset about this:
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I’ve had to rewrite my reply like 3 times now. This kind of gambling with people’s lives by politicians and corporations really pisses me off. I’ll just leave it at that.
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