Sky’s The Limit When You Need To Blame The Deaths Of 72 People On Greens

A years-long coronial inquiry and investigation recently found that the Grenfell Tower Fire in the UK, which killed 72 people and injured many more in 2017, was preceded by numerous government failures. But thanks to the boffins over at Sky News, we now know who the real culprit is… ‘extreme Green ideology’. Rewriting history never looked so ugly or ridiculous, writes Dr Alex Vickery Howe.

There’s a song by English rock group Elbow that we should all be playing this month. It’s an anthem to rage, and to shame. A response to the horrific Grenfell Tower fire of 2017, the song ‘White Noise White Heat’, as described by Elbow frontman Guy Garvey, is a reaction to the hopelessness of being a bystander to unimaginable tragedy as well as the implicit culpability of being part of a corrupt society that allows people to die for being poor.

Garvey describes it better than I can:

“I kind of renounce all our previous records with this track, or what we are best known for. What is the point of uplifting songs in the face of this horror?”

A long time ago, my student apartment went up in flames. Well, to be accurate, the flat directly beside mine went up in flames. Mine filled with smoke and was toxic within seconds of the shouting outside waking me up. In my sleepy state, I didn’t really know what was going on – I thought the neighbours were fighting and, in a rare moment of urban heroism, decided to try and break it up. I think that split decision saved my life.

News cameras arrived first. Then firefighters. Then young police officers. And then espresso coffees care of my eccentric neighbour Roberto, looking fabulous in his Italian suit and sporting an incredible beard. The following morning, I was working daycare and weighed down by small children in a swimming pool. A friend rang….

“Alex, were you in your pyjamas on the news last night… with Pavarotti?”

It’s one of those quirky stories I tell. I put it into a screenplay a while back, but people said it was too farfetched to film. Their loss.

The part I don’t tell is the part about feeling trapped – coughing, blind, struggling to find the door – for what was a very short amount of time, but long enough to stick to me. That feeling popped into my psyche again recently when I managed to lock myself out of my new apartment, with Spacey (my dog), and a friend from the university, who came around the corner with lattés and banana bread just in time to be stuck with me in the upstairs corridor.

We realised that we could call a locksmith, but that getting that person up to us via the emergency stairwell is tricky in our building, and required a key I didn’t have. It took a bit of choreography: me holding the dog, my friend heading downstairs, me opening the stairwell at the top….

Since then, I’ve been petitioning Strata to leave the emergency stairwell unlocked and accessible from the ground floor. I know you’re supposed to go down in an emergency, but I keep thinking… what if someone is stuck up there? What if Spacey is trapped in a fire and I can’t get to her?

My partner says I’m fixating, which is true, and has become a feature of my personality exacerbated by my brush with Long Covid… and that’s fine. It’s a three-storey building. It’s new. It’s safe.

Grenfell Tower was a building in state of neglect, where petitions by residents were ignored by council representatives; where physically impaired people lived on higher floors without wheelchair access; where mattresses and other debris blocked the exits; and where the prevailing ‘wisdom’ was that each flat would be isolated and contained in the event of a fire, so residents were to stay put and wait for instructions.

The tragedy was predictable. Some of those who predicted it – such as Mariem Elgwahry and Nadia Choucair, two Grenfell Tower residents who were threatened with legal action for daring to discuss their concerns about fire safety – perished in the blaze.

I won’t go into too much detail in this article, as I’ve kept myself awake dwelling on it; the systemic failures; the contempt for the working class that underpins so much of our current discourse; the cost-cutting that led to substandard (i.e. flammable) materials being used to ‘update’ the tower.

I will just mention the people flashing their lights on and off from within their flats, desperate to be seen… my stomach drops at the thought of what they felt as time ran out. And I’ll mention the people who threw themselves from open windows when it became the better option. And the little girl, 12-years-old, who spoke to emergency services on the phone but died before they could find her.

I will just mention the emergency services personnel themselves, left physically and psychologically scarred by the impact of a catastrophe they couldn’t combat, because they had no idea the government’s neglect of that tower over successive decades had made it a deadly prison.

For those who were dwelling within the walls of Grenfell Tower when a refrigerator – itself poorly made due to lackadaisical government regulations and standards – ignited a blaze that fed from the fuel of shoddy cladding, there was little hope. Especially when they were told to wait.

This is the shame that Guy Garvey captures in his glorious anthem. The shame of a society that should’ve seen this horror coming. A society that didn’t care enough to do better.

As the inquiry into Grenfell Tower has recently released its findings to the public, the culpability is now clear. The cladding. The cost-cutting. The fact that 25 years worth of warnings was stubbornly, arrogantly, stupidly, and cruelly ignored.

David Cameron’s coalition government didn’t like ‘red tape’, so they disregarded the safety of human life.

The Tenant Management Organisation, the key council body responsible, didn’t show any genuine interest in things like appropriate fire doors or the combustibility of the cladding.

The companies that oversaw the building’s refit were cavalier and incompetent.

That’s what happened. That’s the result of the inquiry. Grenfell Tower fell because money talks and idiots listen. Tiers of greedy, stingy people made unconscionable decisions based on the economic bottom line. It’s an anticlimax, but the inquiry led to all the obvious places.

I could let it go. I will just mention one more thing…. Two things…

Miranda ‘poorly named’ Divine and Rowan ‘money doesn’t buy personality’ Dean. Writers, if we’re charitable. Or character actors. But, really, they’re part of the same thing….

The far-right bullshit machine that is Sky ‘News’.

I’ve wasted… no, spent… I’ve spent a lot of time looking at the ridiculous lies that Sky trades in. Ever since its conception, Sky has been looking up to its big American brother, Fox, and picking up all the older sibling’s terrible habits. Both are Rupert Murdoch’s ugly children. It’s sad to see how nasty the little brat is getting, and how fraudulent.

Sky essentially imposes conspiracy theories on viewers. Often viewers stuck half-drunk in Hungry Jack’s. I prefer dull, truthful news. Alas, truth isn’t always marketable… not even when it features espresso coffees in the twilight hours by the cosy glow of your smouldering bedroom.

As reported by Media Watch – I want that hosting gig – Miranda and Rowan decided to blame the Grenfell Tower disaster not on neglect, not on incompetence, and not on saving a buck and screwing the poor, but on…

Green policies.

That’s right. In the alternate reality where Miranda and Rowan are serious and sexy people, the Grenfell Tower burned because of those tree-hugging bastards that believe in equality and environment justice. How? Well, Miranda and Rowan can’t really articulate that bit. For them, it just feels instinctively good to spit venom and use dead people to score cheap points.

Some of you may distrust anything the ABC reports. Good. Dig deeper. If you think old Aunty is a commie-run agitprop network that is as biased towards the left as Sky is to the right, then please take a look at the primary sources.

Here’s what Miranda said.

“Fears were raised in the U.K. Telegraph last week that green energy concerns to satisfy carbon emission targets were prioritised ahead of safety.
In Australia, cheap flammable Chinese aluminium composite cladding has led to building fires.
Green ideology has given us sky high electricity prices, deadly pink batts and now flammable cladding.”

Here’s what Rowan said.

“The towering, deadly inferno in London is an extreme, but apt, metaphor for climate- change alarmism and progressive politics.
It’s not climate change that kills. It’s the zealotry of those who believe they are on a Gaia-given mission to save the planet that is capable of causing economic mayhem, poverty and even death.
Meanwhile, those who should be looking after the community and our security instead waste their time and our money on pointless superficialities that are designed, like cladding, to hide their deficiencies and to make them look good.”

Their words. You decide.

Personally, I think the idea that these people are ‘journalists’ is as ludicrous as claiming Prue MacSween is down to earth or Andrew Bolt could ever be a critical thinker. These people have nothing to do with news. They’re ‘commentators’ in the sense that a stoned roommate is a commentator, shooting the breeze from the confines of a compromised brain. I don’t know if this level of disinformation, opportunism and slander is criminal, but it’s certainly unpleasant and it’s beyond batshit crazy.

The far right likes to pretend their political opponents are blinded by ‘ideology’, but what could be more ideologically blinkered than bogusly claiming a tragedy was caused by environmentalism, and basing that claim on… a wish? An alien visit? Something written in their porridge? I think Rowan is a porridge guy. Froot Loops might give him Pride Month PTSD.

If anything, the collapse of Grenfell Tower is the result of unbound capitalism. Somehow, unaccountably, these people can’t see that.

All Miranda sees is the phantom menace of ‘green ticks’ and ‘energy efficiency’, as though she isn’t intelligent enough to recognise corporate spin when she encounters it. I doubt there’s anything wrong with Miranda’s intelligence… it’s her integrity that’s glitchy.

All Rowan sees is the climate change boogie man, who, in Rowan’s world, must be responsible for every bad and sad event. It couldn’t be the love of money… could it, Rowan? It couldn’t be disdain for those less fortunate.

Their world is the upside down. A dimension of mind where Sky is the voice of commonsense, Donnie Trump is both the legitimate president and the enduring symbol of male virility, scientific consensus is synonymous with cronyism, and attacking the Australian Race Discrimination Commissioner is just what you do when you’re a playful larrikin having a laugh.

They would say the rational world is the false one. They may even believe it. Their boss doesn’t. Like those ultimately found responsible for the deaths in Grenfell Tower, Murdoch worships profit before people.

That malfunction has stained the talent he once had and poisoned his legacy. He’s a newsman who has stopped caring about the news. I don’t know what it will take to bring his bullshit machine to a grinding halt. Some liability for the Grenfell Tower lies would, in my view, be a terrific first step.

I encourage everyone to read the inquiry in full and to denounce the Sky spin. It’s not enough to mourn the victims of the Grenfell flame. It’s not enough to sing for them. We have to learn from what happened to them, and that begins by facing the actual truth.