Looking back in anger on scandals

There's been a development in the Grenfell Tower outrage ... the police are considering charges against a broad range of people.

Grenfell fire charges sought for up to 57 people

A couple of points this raises for me:

• the public inquiry seems to have delayed prosecutions
• it was for a long period apparently the case that the only persons publicly acknowledged to be under criminal investigation were KCTMO and its staff, namely the actual people with direct responsibility for managing the Grenfell Tower building
• nevertheless, there were very widespread attempts to blame individuals and organisations that were much less closely connected; a theory which exonerated Civil Servants was consistently pushed by a broad range of activists, namely that "deregulation" was primarily to blame
• counsel to the inquiry decried a "merry-go-round of buck passing", and showed up a diagram of which organisations had blamed each other, which was a tangled mess

The thing which really drew my attention was that one of the survivors is quoted thus:

The decision makers need to be brought to justice, not middle management, not lower management, but the people that made the decisions need to take responsibility for what happened at Grenfell

No justification whatsoever is offered for this appalling sentiment, and the BBC doesn't appear to have pushed back on it. There is no level in a corporate hierarchy where the Nuremberg Defence should apply.

Gemlog index

Site index