It was inevitable that austerity, now specifically the propaganda of austerity, would mean death on the streets. Left-wing media and charities have warned that poverty kills for many years, sometimes quietly and sometimes in a bonfire of reckoning.
The most important element of the Grenfell Tower fire is not the heroism of the firefighters or the sudden and – to some – amazing revelation that ordinary people can love. It is not the extraordinary gulf between the media class and those they report on, so obvious on television that it makes the recent failures of journalism – Brexit, Trump, the last two general elections – seem an inevitability, rather than a mistake.
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