Painting the establishment class as the true victims of Grenfell tower is depraved Tory propaganda

On June 14th 2017 at least 80 people were killed in the horrifying Grenfell tower fire.

The disaster generated a huge emotional response because it was such a visual demonstration of the huge inequality in austerity Britain. Of course we all knew how bad it was before the fire.

You'd have to be criminally ignorant to not know that tens of thousands of sick and disabled people have died within weeks of being declared "fit for work" in corporate disability denial factories.

You'd have to have been living in a bubble to not know that tens of thousands of vulnerable people have died as a consequence of savage Tory cuts to the social care system.

You'd have to be profoundly ignorant of the way the world works to imagine that the increased emergency service response times, and increased NHS waiting times due to Tory austerity cuts haven't been paid for in human lives.

But people being burned alive in a tower with inadequate safety features and covered with highly flammable cladding is obviously more immediate and more visual, and as a consequence the anger is more visceral, especially given the aloof response of the Tory government, the shocking ineptitude of the local Tory council, and the absolute barrage of lies and excuses from the Tories and their attack dogs in the right-wing media.

In the immediate aftermath of the tragedy the extreme-right Breitbart London editor and former UKIP adviser Raheem Kassam tried to paint the Tory party as the true victims of the Grenfell fire by spreading a load of absolute lies that the Labour Party were responsible, including the easily disprovable assertion that the Local council was Labour controlled (unsurprisingly in actual reality the local council in the richest area of London has been permanently ruled by the Tory party).

Kassam's lies were so sickeningly obvious that only the most freakishly fact-averse extreme-right fanatics could possibly have fallen for them, but his central narrative that the establishment are the true victims of the fire was obviously considered useful by the right-wing media, and hence, within a month of dozens of neglected and ignored poor people burning alive in the richest borough of one of the richest cities in the world, we have Clare Foges of the Times using the same disgusting argument that the true Grenfell victims are the poor establishment class.

In her abomination of an article Foges tries to portray anyone who considers the political ramifications of the fire for themselves as engaging a circus of "blame-mongering" and "mob-rousing".

Thus anyone who draws their own political conclusions about the fire and the hopelessly inadequate local government response is an unreasonable "blame-monger", and anyone who actively engages in protest isn't an angry citizen utilising their right to peaceful protest, but a member of a scary and detestable "mob".

Foges also gets the excuses in early by predicting that the Grenfell investigation (cover up?) may find that nobody was to blame with a claim that "we should be wary of attributing to conspiracy that which is adequately explained by cock-up; that there were simple failures of foresight, questions unasked that should have been asked".

So the essential themes of what Foges is arguing are:

Don't think for yourself. Don't question the establishment line. It was probably all just an unfortunate mistake for which the establishment elitists are absolutely not to blame. Anger is unreasonable. You should hate anyone who is angry about Grenfell. They're a dangerous mob. They're the true villains. 

The conclusion of Foges article plays a very cynical trick by conflating criticism of the establishment class with criticism of Britain.

Foges criticises the concept that Britain is "a country rigged by an unfeeling elite that cares nothing for people because they are poor" with the absolute non sequitur that Britain is "a nation that is compassionate, generous and decent".

It's profoundly dishonest to argue that it's shameful to accuse the elitist establishment class of callous and uncaring elitism because British society as a whole still retains elements of compassion, generosity and decency. But that's exactly the cynical and manipulative trick that Foges plays on the reader.

The obvious bad faith conflation of the establishment class with Britain as a whole in order to use faux patriotism to attack "the left" is such a sickening display of contempt for the reader it's extraordinary that people buy into this kind of insulting propaganda crap.

But unfortunately we know that millions of people do willingly buy into this kind of intellectually dishonest rubbish because we spent six infuriating years listening to David Cameron spout this kind of logically incoherent, bad faith, fallacy-riddled propaganda gibberish, which brings us neatly to the fundamental thing that Foges "forgot" to mention in her impassioned defence of the establishment class ...

What Foges "forgot" to mention that she was employed as a special adviser and speechwriter for David Cameron for seven years, and that Cameron including one of her jokes in a speech is what she considers the absolute highlight of her career so far!

Is it any wonder that a woman who helped David Cameron by scripting his intellectually dishonest pro-austerity speeches would come out swinging wildly against anyone making the argument that mindless adherence to ruinous austerity dogma could have played a crucial role in the Grenfell tower tragedy?

Is it any wonder that a journalist with such an intimate relationship with the Tory party would seek to manipulate the minds of middle England by deliberately recasting the all the players in the Grenfell tower tragedy into different roles?

Is it any wonder that an establishment insider would seek to portray the callous and uncaring political elitists who allowed it to happen, and responded so inadequately, as the poor innocent victims, write the poor women who tragically burned to death after having had their fire safety complaints repeatedly ignored out of the script entirely, and merge the angry local residents and "the left" together into a single character to play the role of the detestable villain for middle England to hate and pour scorn upon?

This attempt to rewrite the establishment class as the poor innocent victims of the Grenfell fire would be sick enough in its own right, but that it's coming from a very recent member of the most powerful Tory inner circle of all reveals another revolting aspect.

The fact that someone with such close links to the Tory party can pose as some kind of objective journalist in order to spread such intellectually dishonest Tory propaganda reveals the ongoing collusion between the Tory party and the mainstream media.

Is it any wonder that huge numbers of people have completely lost faith with the mainstream media when the architect of ruinous austerity dogma George Osborne can walk straight out of parliament and into the offices of the Evening Standard as their editor; when employees of the supposedly impartial BBC politics department can walk straight into 10 Downing Street to write biased political propaganda for the Tory Prime Minister; and former Tory propagandists like Clare Foges can continue writing the exact same intellectually dishonest Tory propaganda in the pages of Rupert Murdoch's Times?

Is it any wonder that ever more people are turning to independent media for their news because they can see that the establishment insiders club that the mainstream media are supposed to hold to account, and the mainstream media themselves are pretty much the same damned thing.

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