Grenfell Tower and Others

As soon as it was reported which cladding product had been used on Grenfell Tower I read up on the stuff. For those who don't do that sort of thing and are currently mystified by the various reports following ongoing surveys of other clad blocks I clarify as follows.

Aluminium Composite Material (ACM) is just two sheets of aluminium bonded to a core of another material. What makes a panel suitable or not for a given application is what the core is made of.

Harley Facades, subcontracted to Rydon, are reported to have fitted products from Reynobond, who clearly state in their literature that their ACM panels come with either polyethylene (PE) or fire retardant (FR) cores and the provided illustrations show panels used primarily as fascias on shopping malls or low-rise office buildings.

If the reports are correct and Reynobond PE has been fitted to a block of dwellings with a roof in excess of 18 metres in height, the point at which the regulations relating to the control of the spread of fire across external walls changes, quite a number of people are directly responsible for a fire in a single flat having spread such that it had the disastrous consequences we are all aware of.

Without sight of all the contract documents and communications relating to the project neither I nor anyone else can say how far up the chain of command the awareness went of the panels being fitted not satisfying regulations.

I can say, however, that a legal precedent exists for everybody down to the team that fitted them to be accountable when failing to achieve fitness for purpose has health and safety implications, of which this fire was an extreme example.

Any competent cladding installer should know the building regulations pertaining to their trade and know that Reynobond PE panels are not appropriate for tower blocks like Grenfell and should refuse to install them.

Of course, before it gets to that stage, any competent specialist subcontractor should refuse to provide a price for works that contravene regulations and, anyway, no competent main contractor should ever request or accept one.

All those who can reasonably be expected to have known the material to be used was inappropriate have been negligent in failing to stop the works and prevent the installation of a life-threatening fire hazard. Any person not directly connected to the works but who had suitable knowledge or experience to notice the danger and did so in passing without subsequently insisting the works be stopped is included in this group.

Note it is enormously unlikely that a complete block of flats would be clad so quickly that the identifying marks on the reverse of every panel and on their packaging would have been hidden from view before any competent person engaged to inspect or oversee the ongoing works had had a chance to see them, recognise the unsuitability of the panels and stop those works.

Contrary to the impression given by many voicing their protest on social networks and in the streets, the members of the councils and associations who engage contractors to refurbish blocks of flats for which they are responsible are the least likely people to have the specialist knowledge to recognise a material as not fit for purpose on their projects, the least likely to have knowingly placed their tenants at risk.

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It is reported that emergency checks of the cladding on similar buildings throughout the country following the Grenfell Tower fire have found the same PE cored panels have been inappropriately fitted to other blocks by the same specialists under subcontract to the same main contractor engaged by different clients.

I expect there will be found at the end of an enormously long and expensive investigation a large number of people employed by both the specialist subcontractor and the main contractor were complicit in the willful and repeated carrying out of substandard works to blocks of high-rise social housing.

A lot of those people will claim that they were only following orders and they feared losing their jobs had they been obstructive. I don't care. If you want to yell and scream at someone, yell and scream at the people who actually installed the cladding. Nothing can justify participating in the turning of a tower block into a flaming torch. 

The Digital Despot

It has long been the case that any common-goal movement comprising humans will fractionate over time. In the olden days this would happen after the common goal had been achieved, when petty squabbles took the place of the new-found boredom. The principal effect of social media in particular is to accelerate the process such that the fractionation happens way before anything useful gets done.

Some of the problem arises from the plethora of available movements to digitally support. In the olden days you had to get off your arse and write letters, attend meetings, rallies and events to be part of something. Now people seem to think clicking "Like" on a Facebook page adds weight to anything. It plainly doesn't.

Imagine you are despot who feels the need for a Personal Guard of hand-picked and handsomely paid elite soldiers at your side to make you look 'ard. Imagine you oppress a million people and they start getting umpty. If every single one of them slagged you off on Facebook and Twitter you wouldn't be upset. But if just one in a hundred of them got off their arses, got together and turned up on your doorstep looking for you you would brick yourself.

So the digital despot simply diverts a few currency units from the Personal Guard budget across to the Social Network Unit. It is much more efficient and a lot safer to disrupt or distract discussions online than it is to stand up in an assembly hall full of militants waving a cat picture or suggesting that another cause is of greater worth than the one everyone just gave up their evening to support.

The few who can remain focussed on the big picture and who see but are not distracted by its intricate detail will still achieve change.

[2nd June 2014]

The Manifestos

An unexpected postal vote form arrived so I figured I had better mug up a bit sharpish on who is offering what and how much it is going to cost. To this end, I visited official websites and cheerily downloaded documents to read from the two main contenders for government. 

I was intrigued as to why the Labour Party chose to publish their balancing of the books separately from their Manifesto so, because it was unusual, very much shorter than the manifesto and bound to be full of numbers, Funding Britain's Future was the first of the three documents I read. I was impressed. It looked like a summary profit and loss account, showing itemized policy costs being totaled and balanced against the total of itemized policy savings or additional revenue, with a little extra put aside to cover for fluctuations.

I then looked for a similar table within the Conservative Manifesto to compare it with but there wasn't one. All of the Conservative cost and saving / revenue balances were included within the body text as each policy item was outlined so I ended up reading the whole thing.

In it the Conservatives set out their policy stall across a relatively concise 88 unillustrated pages and mention costs, savings and revenues and how things balance as items arise throughout the Manifesto document. I note the policies themselves are written with a confidence one might elsewhere associate with the statement of common sense, the kind that requires no argument for because anything else would clearly be silliness. End of.

My next read was the Labour Manifesto.

WTF is it with some political parties these days feeling they have to badmouth the competition to make themselves look good? Are not their policies supposed to stand confidently up on their own as being obviously the sensible thing? The Labour Party felt the need to make derisory and at times misleading mention of the Conservatives 68 times in its 123 page manifesto, which averages out as just over a jibe on every other page!

Anyway, aside from this peculiar "we are all victims together" tone in which they were presented alongside many brightly coloured photographs, Labour's policies included no surprises, unlike the policies in the Conservative Manifesto which were a lot closer to the political Centre than I had expected them to be.

The big surprise from reading the Labour Manifesto came from their apparent hoping that no one would ever think of comparing it with their separate Funding Britain's Future publication, you know, the one where the sums balance. Well...

It seems Labour's ruse for getting the books to balance is to include only the costs arising from just enough Manifesto proposals to absorb the few savings anticipated. There are many other proposals in the Manifesto that would incur significant additional costs that are not included in the calculation in the document "Funding Britain's Future" but there are no other proposals from which savings or revenue arise.

Policies aside, the Manifesto documents tell me:

Conservative - Vote for us. We propose to do this stuff and pay for it this way because it makes sense to us.

Labour - Vote for us. Our stuff must be much better because we are not horrid Conservatives.

Labour having published Funding Britain's Future alongside but separate from their Manifesto tells me they knew they couldn't get the books to balance if they took account of all the costs that would arise from their proposals so they avoided including any of them in the Manifesto itself.

Taking into account the proposals and the presented costings for them:

If these two Manifesto packages were tenders to design and build you a house I would have to advise you to go with the Conservative bid and end up reliably warm and dry, even if it isn't in the home of your dreams.

Labour's bid promises a very comfortable and well equipped residence but their price won't cover all of it. So, unless you were able to stump up a whole bunch of extra cash, the build would run out of money before the roof went on, leaving you cold, wet and broke after a relatively short period.

As to Labour's proposed £250bn investment fund:

The idea of a government funding vast infrastructure projects to boost an economy is an outdated one. The consultation and planning period is lengthy and has to be carried out by experienced people, only a handful of contractors have the experience to undertake the work when the planning is complete and the bulk of it is undertaken using huge machines, many of which are sourced from abroad.

Infrastructure projects are a great way for a government to spend lots of money in a hurry, thus bumping up GDP, but the money doesn't filter down in to as many pockets from where it can be spent to support the rest of the economy as it used to when there were a thousand men with shovels and families to support doing the work now undertaken by one or two drivers of large and complex machines.

The rail construction industry is not one that needs such a massive injection of funds. Were these funds to be injected into the sector in the hope the activity in it would increase significantly in a short period of time that hope would be promptly dashed. There simply wouldn't be enough appropriately trained, qualified and experienced people to make it happen. By the end of the first parliament, even if the rail projects were launched on day one, there would be a huge bill for design, consultation and legal fees but no material progress whatsoever.

I don't advocate making any commitment to borrowing billions of extra pounds to spend on anything until Brexit is settled, until trade rules are agreed and the country can work out what it will be able to afford to repay.  If, however, a government were hell-bent on borrowing hugely against an unknown future, I would strongly advise them to build houses not railways.

Spending any given sum on building houses would generate more, and more varied, employment than spending the same sum on building railways and the benefit of all these new builders having money to spend in the wider economy would be felt within months and the housing market would almost immediately begin the process of rebalancing, as it adjusts to the prospect of adequate supply.

If the same pressures were applied to buying up land for housing as would have to be applied to buying up land to run railway lines across, and if the same overall budget were to be made available, it is not beyond imagine that by the end of the first parliament there would be a thriving construction industry, reduced unemployment, no housing shortage and house prices would have fallen noticeably.

I still wouldn't recommend Britain borrowing against an unpredictable economic future, that of trading under as yet undefined post-Brexit rules, because it is daft not to defer any significant borrowing until enough is known to work out what Britain will be able to afford to repay. 

At least if a government invests in housebuilding and the sums are awry and the project has to be shelved half way through there would be still be more houses for people to live in than before, just not as many as they had promised. A half- built railway is no use to anyone.

Trump Meets Obama

From watching the brief photo shoot held after Trump met Obama I am given to think Trump has no real idea of what to do now he has won the election, that he had little or no understanding of what the President's job he fought so hard for actually involves and is now daunted by the prospect of taking it on.

As CEO of all the States of America Trump will no longer have the option of bankruptcy law to fall back on if his grand plans fail, he will not have the personal safety net he relied upon so famously in business.

As round-the-clock front man for the whole USA Trump will no longer have the option to re-shoot or to edit out mistakes, as he could when his personal brand of Reality had TV appended to it and came in short episodes.

For the first time in his life Trump will be just as responsible for the wellbeing of the fired as of the hired and that responsibility will be absolute, as will be his ultimate responsibility for everything else happening in America, too.

So, Citizens of America, be grateful there exist Congress and the Senate to temper any madnesses that might arise from Trump's total lack of experience in the hugely frustrating game of politics he is now elected to play. Even if he avoids meltdown, he will become visibly stressed, he will lose weight and even his hair will suffer.

Meanwhile, don't waste the next four years of your time and energy on fighting amongst yourselves or on just praying for a better world. Instead, get together to use those same hours and that same effort to make genuine improvements to it.

Po's Letter To The Americans

Dear "Christians",

Read your fucking book.
Open the gospels, take a look.

The man on your cross, him with the beard and hair,
Was nailed up for saying life's much better if we share.

In a message word-approved by the 1st English King James
He said, ignore petty differences and concentrate on sames.

He said, Don't give cash to gods, instead pay taxes to your Caesar.

I say, next time, vote to share them out so everyone's lives get easier.

© Pastor Po 2016

Pastor Po's Rock Show 13 - Back after a six month break spent settling in to his new home in France, The Pastor brings you another eclectic hour of rockin' tunes with minimum waffle in between.

US Election / Healthcare / Trans Loos / Hate preachers

Having endured a summer of UK Labour Party supporters ranting at each other on FB with previously unseen levels of vitriolic abuse about who should or should not be their leader, I shall be enormously grateful when next week arrives and the equally emotive US Presidential Election is more or less settled, too.

The two contests, the Labour one and the US Presidential one, are more similar than one might imagine in that they are both intense arguments between people as to which faction on what is broadly the same side should be in charge. The only real difference being that in the Labour party the two sides are on the political left and in the US the two sides are on the political right.

My own political view is more central than any in either of these contests and I have held or hold no voting right in them. I remain an uninvolved observer and it is from this standpoint that I make the following comments on the United States at election time, educated and / or inspired by the variety of threads and discussions I have e:overheard between US citizens in recent weeks.

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From a British and French perspective, it is obvious there is something seriously amiss with the healthcare system in the US that anyone has to look at their pocket book to decide whether or not they can get the medical treatment they need or that anyone could become destitute through illness or accident and there is clearly a huge amount of confusion and misinformation as to what the rules and therefore the costs actually are.

That said, what is frankly astonishing is the sheer selfishness of so many people who are unwilling to help share the cost of providing treatment to those less fortunate than themselves. Medical problems can befall anybody without their being at fault so, surely, it should be a given that in any civilised country, especially one that purports to hold to Christian values, such burden-sharing should be welcomed not vehemently railed against.

There appears to be enormous distrust of any system being introduced by any government that would level the healthcare playing field. Particularly among Republicans this distrust manifests itself as acute paranoia, tending people to batten down their own personal hatches and to view anyone not closely blood-related as a dangerous enemy in their perceived war against .... Well, it is unclear what the war is against but it is clearly waged daily and with a fierceness I have never e:seen outside of the US.

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I read from someone proposing to "make America great again", itself a peculiar slogan in that it clearly indicates a view that America is currently less than impressive, a claim that the US had been at some time "the envy of the world" and it should fight to regain this position. I saw little point in advising this person directly that I knew of nowhere that in my 54 year lifetime had envied a country in which, amongst other things, so many people feel sufficiently threatened on a daily basis that they require to carry guns or to keep them in their homes to protect themselves and their families.

One only has to watch a selection of television crime dramas from around the world to note the significant cultural difference between European countries in which routinely armed police officers carry weapons they rarely draw and the US where, it seems, firepower is represented as indicative of authority more than the law itself and the firing of guns is enthusiastically celebrated.

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What the hell is it with the United States and transgender "bathrooms"?

Here in France it is common for public loos to be unisex, equipped for those who wish to stand *and* for those who wish to sit down, often without there being any divide other than the doors of the cubicles in which those who wish to sit do so.

Urinal troughs or bowls are fixed to a wall and the men who make use of them are facing that wall and their "private" parts remain so by dint of being obscured by their bodies. Men and women wishing to use the cubicles simply walk behind them and society does not crumble.

Slightly less commonplace but far from unusual is the public loo that has the urinal visible from outside. Again, those who wish to use it are facing it and their "private" parts remain so by dint of being obscured by their bodies. Passers-by do just that, they pass by and society does not crumble.

Where nominally gender-specific separate facilities are provided and one facility is oversubscribed so prospective users of it avail themselves of any overcapacity that may exist in the adjacent facility society still doesn't crumble.

I can only assume that American males, for it seems to be they who are most outraged by gender indistinction, despite their overt machismo are in fact sufficiently insecure in themselves that they fear contagion will somehow ensue from the nearness of anyone displaying, or having hidden, any difference from them.

It is as if those intent on appearing the most cocksure are not sure of anything, least of all the orientation of their own cock, and that it is their deeply felt fear that this might be discovered that leads them to make such public insistence that their masculinity is heterosexually aligned that they become perpetual caricatures of this tradition.

I am not suggesting homophobia, transphobia or any other similar phobias do not exist at all in France, just that a very much higher percentage of the population here really couldn't give a monkey's what someone else is because they don't believe what other people are makes any difference to who they themselves are and they accept that everyone needs to go to the toilet now and again and that it is nothing to do with sex.

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I was also inspired to watch a BBC documentary largely focused upon Steven Anderson, a proudly homophobic "fire and brimstone" preacher and Pastor of the Faithful Word worship club in the Tempe suburb of Phoenix Arizona. A more hateful and unchristian individual would be hard to find and I don't advocate anyone wasting their precious time by viewing his many posted rants and rages, not least because he gauges his success by the number of hits he gets, irrespective of whether the viewer or listener is astonished and offended by his raving or whether they echo his spiteful sentiment.

Were Mr Anderson to pay more attention to the real world than the virtual one he might notice his clubhouse is not enormous and many seats remain empty during his performances, but he is unlikely to acknowledge such an obvious clue as to the level of support he genuinely enjoys and is unlikely to consider for a moment that the majority of his online viewers are likely to have clicked on his uploads out of curiosity alone and do not share his beliefs.

It is no surprise that Anderson holds that only one version of the bible is worthy of belief, the one the English King James commissioned the writing of back in 1604 and that took seven years to evolve to his satisfaction such that it received his seal of approval for publication in 1611, no surprise he discounts all of the versions that existed and differed from it during the 1611 years prior to its issue and no surprise he pays no heed to the fact that none of them were around when the key character in whom club members are supposed to believe was alive.

Even if one were to accept Anderson's view that King James' was the only Version worth the paper it is printed on, one might note how selectively he preaches from it. A key example being, to anyone who, like Anderson, hold's Paul's input as equal to the Jesus character's, that one of Anderson's most famous and newsworthy sermons was one small legal step back from inciting the murder of President Obama despite Romans 13 clearly stating "the powers that be are ordained of God. Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation." Which, to be honest, is pretty straightforward.

Obviously this passage was retained in the KJV to give King James divine authority to govern on earth but, to any literalist, it applies equally to any who hold positions of power anywhere and thus would bestow a similar divine authority to govern locally upon any President of the United States, too. You don't have to be theologian to spot that all of Romans is instruction from Paul to early Christians living in Rome on how to blend in, to not make waves and generally to be neatly oppressed and good servants of the Roman Empire, much if not most of this instruction being in clear contrast to that given by the Jesus bloke who was all about equality.

It should also be noted that Anderson gratefully received a gift of an AR-15 assault rifle, presumably in recognition of his services to homophobia, during a seminar of similar worship club "leaders".

Otherwise notable from the documentary was the interpretation of free speech that enables individuals and groups in the US to very publicly insult passers-by at random according to their perceived religion or sexual orientation, often using electronic equipment to amplify their voices to make themselves heard over the general hubbub of a busy thoroughfare. All of these hate-preachers in the documentary considered themselves to be doing their bit to "make America great again" while serving no practical purpose.

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I am sure the majority of American citizens who will cast their vote for a Democrat or a Republican to be their next President are quite reasonable people who just want to be able to get on with a job of work, look after themselves and their families and not have to worry about whether or not they are tooled-up when they go out or whether they can afford to get proper medical attention should they require it, just as they want to enjoy having somewhere comfortable to live into old age, to have enough healthy food to eat and for their children to receive a proper education, and I doubt very much that anyone wants to feel threatened by the police who they employ to protect them.

Sadly, most of what I have seen in the run up to this election is a ridiculous amount of internal argument, a large number of people reverting to immediate insult on a largely homophobic basis in the event of disagreement and a remarkable degree of ignorance. If even a quarter of the effort that is currently expended on insult were to be directed toward constructive discussion and even half the money wasted on worship clubs were diverted toward the common good I could imagine America could achieve a good few positive steps toward achieving a feeling of shared greatness that would be of genuine benefit to future generations.

As it is, the apparent entrenchment of the two principal and increasingly polarised parties that are the Democrats and the Republicans is not serving to improve the lot of the average citizen in the slightest. I do feel genuinely disheartened that any citizenry should waste the opportunity it has every day to collaborate with itself in pursuing shared goals and instead let itself so easily be diverted into mudslinging and unproductive separation into factions, each blaming another for its own failure to disengage from the imagining of spurious enemies, fictional external forces at work to destroy the fabric of their society that they have themselves allowed to become threadbare by their distraction from its maintenance.

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If I had to pick a side in this upcoming election I would support the Democrats because they are closer to the centre ground than the Republicans. They are still a way to the right of me but nowhere near as far as the Republicans. On average, too, I have read a great deal more in the way of reasoned argument coming from the Democrat side and a great deal more in the way of paranoid hatred and insult coming from the Republicans. Neither presidential candidate has the magic power to suddenly make everybody in the United States wealthy but only one would be well received worldwide and thus be able to negotiate anything that might be of benefit.

There may well be millions of American misogynists who can laugh off Trump's attitude to women but they should remember that the President of the United States of America also has to work outside of the country if they are to improve its international standing, to engage with the wider world where there are many heads of state and holders of other key negotiating positions who are women. Anyone who thinks they, or the majority of males in positions of power, will be impressed and positively disposed toward a man who has boasted of sexual assault is really not thinking clearly.

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I don't believe in gods, I am not that kind of pastor, but I have read the book most wield as their authority to teach and I know well enough what it says to understand what it was made the Jesus guy popular. It was his talking down religious hierarchy and bigging up individual conscience, the general idea being to respect everyone equally and to support those less able to support themselves, thus benefitting society as a whole as opposed to just adding to the wealth of the already rich. It's not socialism, it is humanity. Socialism is what the UK Labour Leadership battle was about and is a very long way to the left of the US Democrats.