Re: Original Post on Grenfell Tower

That post had been amended and appended and become quite long, and it unwittingly included a widely-published bit of misinformation, that the plastic filling in the panels was polyethylene, which could not possibly have evolved the cyanide gas that survivors were treated for, as is mentioned in some of the updates. It now turns out that the plastic filling was some variation on polyurethane or polyisocyanurate foam, which definitely would create cyanide. But it isn't yet totally clear that this is really what the plastic filling was, and lots of early reports said polyethylene (which would have to be have been in the form of fibre rather than foam.) The structural panels mentioned in the post ARE recycled polyethylene, but the tooling that makes them could be adjusted, via an appropriate mould-heating "profile" to use polypropylene or other plastics that might available in bulk as waste from some other process.

It is also worth noting that if the (different) plastic used in the Aluminium Composite Material skins of the offending cladding panels was any relative of PVC, then the toxic smoke will have included dioxin as well as cyanide. This is very important, as dioxin is a long-term poison, sometimes producing skin problems in the short to medium term, and, eventually, various cancers. From very small doses: it may be slow-acting but it is many times as toxic as cyanide. Survivors (and bystanders/neighbours) of the Grenfell Tower fire, need to see their doctors if they suffer skin problems or other unexplained illness, so that the possibility of dioxin poisoning gets entered onto their notes so that in the future, the right actions are taken if any of the possible cancers crop up. These can be difficult to diagnose early enough for effective treatment if doctors don't have some sort of a clue as to what is going on, so survivors need a prominent comment in their medical notes.

An edit is needed, which will be done when the truth about the filling becomes clearer. The post has been reverted to draft, but not deleted, pending this. In the meantime, there will shortly appear a new post on an earlier disaster in the British Isles (though, "outside London"). See above.

Grenfell Tower: Fire Appliances

In his tireless search for the killer revelation that will set an angry mob on a path to storm Downing Street, lynch Theresa May and sweep Labour to power, The Mayor of London,  Mr Sadiq Khan, has seized on the fact that the 67metre "Aerial" platform needed at the scene of the Grenfell Tower fire arrived late, "because it belongs to Surrey Fire Brigade and had to come from 'outside London.'" (A place which none of the metropolitan elite can actually visualise.) He has demanded an immediate investigation into this arrangement, obviously thinking that it must be due to recent "austerity" measures that can be blamed on the government in power.

Medawar thinks that if this matter is investigated, fully and truthfully, rather than simply stopping with the procurement of the existing appliance, it will be found that this arrangement goes back decades, perhaps even to the nineteen seventies when high rise buildings such as Grenfell Tower were being built. Far more commercial high rises have been built in London in the last ten years than were built back then, so the need for such appliances is probably greater than it once was, but to return to the reason why London Fire Brigade does not own the appliance which seems key to fighting fires in tall buildings, many of which are in London:

Medawar saw a predecessor of the same appliance, being demonstrated on a children's TV programme, and it, too, was owned by Surrey Fire Brigade. Medawar stopped watching children's TV in the nineteen seventies...

At the time, the Fire Brigade, like the government, was still adjusting to the existence of what seemed like lots of high rise buildings (still nothing compared to what there is today!) and the Home Office advice to fire brigades struggling to purchase very expensive pieces of capital equipment, which they might not use very often, was to share them between adjacent brigades, basing them in a position where they could get to the largest possible number of different target buildings (in this case, high rises) as quickly as possible. I think that the children's TV programme actually said that the appliance could get to large parts of London faster from Surrey than it would have done had it been based in the middle of London.

Bedfordshire Fire and Rescue Service have a number of specialist vehicles, including an aerial platform (not as high reaching as the Surrey one, but suitable for the tower blocks found in Bedfordshire and neighbouring counties) and these are based at Kempston, sited for a quick scramble onto the A6, M1, A421, A428 etc. In parts of Hertfordshire, Northamptonshire and Buckinghamshire, it will be this equipment that arrives at a fire, if the controller actually calls for it. In other parts of Hertfordshire, it may be equipment from Cambridgeshire or Surrey that arrives, but only if the controller asks for it! The main factor behind the Aerial Platform being late at Grenfell Tower was that the controller's checklist didn't include asking for it on initial reports of a fire in a high-rise building. This has already been changed, as an obvious management error.

Formal and informal arrangements to pool key resources and provide mutual support are part and parcel of how the fire service in the UK actually works on a daily basis, and it is becoming painfully obvious that the people who want to run the country have no clue that this is so. The "culprits" they need to look for are Roy Jenkins and Merlyn Rees, Home Secretaries in the relevant period, both Labour, and just possibly Reginald Maudlin, Conservative. During the seventies, Home Secretaries were struggling with a fire service nationally that hadn't really been properly organised since the second world war, and there were still tiny private fire brigades belonging to local factories, dotted all over the country. 

Most of the pooling and sharing arrangements still in force, actually go back to those reforms, although they may have been "renewed" more recently, allowing spin doctors to claim they are actually recent. 

It is also worth noting that a 67 metre Aerial Platform is a very large vehicle indeed and access roads around Grenfell Tower, and quite a lot of other high rise buildings, are restricted and awkward. If Mr Khan wants vehicles like this to be based in Central London, he's going to have to find a few billion pounds to reconfigure the road network.

Coercive Diplomacy: The Blair Way

See link to BBC article.
Sir John Chilcot is not the first person to mistake a vicious pathological liar for someone with very strong self-belief.

Russian Readers and LPS buildings.

In this past week, this blog has had more readers from Russia than from the United States or the United Kingdom. This is the first time this has happened in the history of the blog. It may be because the post on Grenfell Tower mentions the Large Panel System for large buildings. The former Soviet Union built a lot of these, many under twelve stories high so that they are not officially "high rise" but are still capable of the same kind of cascade failure as Ronan Point, at least in columns if not all the way across.

In some of the new provincial cities built in the USSR to house strategic industries or research facilities, great tenement blocks were built: not as high as Grenfell Tower or Ronan Point, but often hundreds of metres long. Cascade failures in these will lead to a collapse going from ground to roof, but probably not proceeding along the building like falling dominoes. This will still suffice to kill dozens of people, though, and it may have been what Chechen terrorists were seeking a few years ago, when there was a spate of rucksack bombs being placed in the entrance foyers of tenement buildings. 

In the smaller LPS tenements, three to six stories high and like a Czarist era Mansion in size, of which there are many in Moscow if not elsewhere, a rucksack bomb in the foyer would probably destroy the whole building. In a concrete cell or steel-framed structure the same size, such a bomb would basically just destroy the foyer and cause blast casualties in adjoining rooms.

 Chechen terrorists probably had an expert knowledge of the weaknesses of various standard Soviet era buildings, from the fighting that went on in Grozny, and they chose to exploit the weakest point in the weakest type of building.

Taking Stalking Seriously: With Important Update.

"Taking stalking seriously is murder prevention." See link.

Back when David Blunket was Home Secretary, he made vigorous attempts to get police to take stalking and harassment seriously and actually produce an appropriate reaction. There were a few self-righteous responses from senior officers, but basically the police in general ignored the Home Secretary, who is responsible to Parliament for their actions. The reason for this is simple: the police have a deeply-ingrained culture of believing that stalking victims willfully provoke their stalkers and don't deserve any help. In truth, many individual stalkers are stalkers because they develop deep grudges about happenings which a normal person would regard as totally insignificant and probably not even offensive in any way.

Mr Blunket was also concerned about gang stalking, after one mother and her handicapped daughter committed suicide after being endlessly stalked by gangs of youths and adults, with the police constantly refusing help. It is apparent that the police in the United Kingdom have taken a collective decision to ignore senior politicians and Parliament on this issue.


Update 5/6/2017: The Inspectorate Of Constabulary and the Crown Prosecution Service Inspectorate have had a go at improving the situation. One of the key findings of their report, is that police frequently obscure stalking campaigns by treating each and every incident in isolation, as in the case highlighted above. This has to stop. Not only do the inspectorates want the law tightened, they want police and prosecutors to be much more aware of what the law actually says!

The full report "Living In Fear: The Police and CPS Response to Harrasment and Stalking" and an associated research publication may be downloaded from the page on this link. This link has been updated as of 3rd of June 2026; the name of the publishing agency had changed.

 

 

Petition For Sun Qian

Sun Qian is a Canadian citizen who has been detained for months without any proper legal charge by the Chinese Communist authorities, solely because she practices the meditation and exercise discipline "Falun Gong". Whilst chained up and helpless, guards have sprayed pepper spray directly into her face, and then covered her face to maximize absorption of the irritant by the skin, mouth and particularly eyes. She was then not allowed to change her clothing for ten days, which meant that she was exposed to the irritant for all that time. The response of Canadian government officials has been to suggest that they should proceed "very quietly" which appears to be a euphemism for doing absolutely nothing.

Please sign the petition to shame the Canadian government into looking after one of its citizens.

Overwhelming Fire In Portugal

While headlines in Britain have been dominated by the Grenfell Tower fire, the situation in Portugal is at least as bad. In this instance, the fire is believed to have been started by lightning, but in many other similar fires in Southern Europe, Australia and California, forest fires have been started by property developers to illegally clear land, and have gone far, far out of control. Where this happens, it needs to be punished with exceptional severity, and it must be recognized that this type of arson is done for profit, and the culprits and their associates must be subject to asset seizure, exactly as if they were drugs dealers.

In terms of death toll, this is the worst forest fire in Southern Europe for some time, and the impact will be particularly bad in Portugal, where the national population is fairly small.

We are still at the beginning of summer: there will be more fires before autumn. There already are quite a lot of firefighting aircraft available in the region, particularly if the French are in a position to lend theirs, and these are useful, especially for moderating a fast-moving fire. But the death toll in such emergencies seems to come from villages and towns being surrounded and overwhelmed, and, especially, the fire catching up with fleeing residents on the highways. There needs to be a form of fire-fighting with "combat persistence" to defend pockets of habitation and avenues of escape.

There might well be room for even more amphibious water bomber aircraft, and for all-terrain vehicles able to get fire-fighting equipment to even inaccessible hotspots, but what is also needed is some sort of monster fire-fighting equipment that can make use of recently improved highways into villages and towns, to deliver water and fire-retardants for long enough to keep people alive until the fire passes.

After many years of infrastructure spending by the European Union, it is reasonable to expect highways and bridges leading to any significant settlement, to be able to take lorries of the normal maximum weight of forty-four tons. Tanker fire-engines should be built, right up to this weight, and equipped with high pressure jets, remote-controllable from within the cab, which should also have high quality air filters and standby oxygen to protect the crew. These vehicles should normally be filled with a solution of ammonium phosphate fire-retardant in water (plain water in a pinch), and their mission should be to damp down corridors along the highways, to keep the fire back so that residents can escape and fresh fire-fighting resources can be deployed. It would be straight-forward enough to also equip these machines to produce local mists of water or phosphate solution in "self-defence" if the fire gets close. Where suitable perimeter roads exist (and they could always be built especially for this purpose) the heavy fire-fighting equipment would be able to lay down a fire barrier around vulnerable towns and villages. There simply has to be a means of protecting refuges and the avenues of escape.

Update: 19/6/2017 The most recent news images from the scene (much too upsetting to embed on the blog), show burnt-out cars and body bags on what should be a decent single-carriageway trunk road, capable of taking standard 44 ton lorries. But the burnt-out trees come right up to the edge of the road. This is not acceptable for an evacuation route in a high fire-risk area. There has to be some sort of treeless verge. This would still require a last-minute spray with ammonium phosphate to make it into a firebreak, but at least it would be possible to spray such a break quickly from a vehicle trundling along the road, without encroaching trees creating dry and fire-retardant-free areas through which the fire could reach the road.

English Losing Its Importance? Really?

This is a link to an article about Jean-Claude Juncker, the President of the European Commission, which describes how he told Italian reporters that English was losing its importance, and then proceeded to make a speech in French. The Italian journalists present, all people with jobs, laughed politely, but for an awful lot of young people in Italy and, even more especially, Spain, there is no hope of employment in their home country for the foreseeable future. Nothing that their governments or the European Commission are willing to do, is going to help the situation.

Things aren't really that much better in France, and the favourite to win Sunday's Presidential Elections, Mr Macron, has made it clear that he favours "reform" of the European Union, solely in the direction of intensifying the very factors leading to high youth unemployment in most Eurozone countries except Germany and Holland.

For victims of Spain's 50% youth unemployment, the only two viable options are: learning German and going to work in Germany as a migrant (competing for minimum wage jobs with the millions of migrants that Mrs Merkel is importing from outside the EU) or learning English and seeking work in the United Kingdom, something which may become very difficult to do if Mr Juncker persists in his attempts to extract ransom payments from the British taxpayer and the Spanish government similarly persists in trying to blackmail the United Kingdom over Gibraltar. Learning French and seeking work in France would be an act of desperation, similar in nature to throwing oneself in front of an approaching train.

The situation for Italy's unemployed youth is a little bit better, in that their government is not engaged in deliberate, systematic attempts to offend not only the British government, but the British people. Italian jobseekers in the UK are more likely to get a sympathetic hearing than Spanish ones. There also exist several opposition parties determined to get Italy out of the Eurozone, which, frankly, is the only way to free the Italian (or Spanish) economies up, so that they may once more create sufficient jobs for the young. In Spain, there appears to be a political consensus for staying in the Eurozone, even if that means that half the country's youth must become exiles or accept that they will never hold paid employment in their lifetimes. 

Those zealots who fondly believe that the United Kingdom will (or should) rush back into the European Union at any price (and that price would include joining the Eurozone at a minimum, something that many of them actually want), are ignoring the fact that Eurozone membership for the United Kingdom would ensure that British youth would also have no hope of jobs in their lifetimes. The Eurozone acts as a system of sacrificial economies around the core German economy, which are then loaded down with all the economic problems that the Eurozone allows Germany to discard. It has no other intended purpose: those commonly advanced by advocates are just cosmetics. 

As long as learning English opens up the prospect of a new life in the United States, Canada or Australia as well as the United Kingdom, it will remain the most attractive option for those who are being so foully betrayed by Europe's political consensus.

French Presidential Election: First Round

It appears, from the exit polls at least, as if Emmanuel Macron has won the first round of the French Presidential Election. This will be hailed by the European political elite as a victory for "moderate" politics, because his main rival is the "Rightist" (with a decidedly left wing economic policy) Marine Le Pen. Before anyone goes dancing in the streets to celebrate a victory for moderate commonsense politics, it is necessary to point out that Mr Macron is sufficiently anglophobic to win a presidential election in Argentina, never mind France. If Mr Macron is a moderate, then North Korea is a cradle of democracy.

Supreme Irony: Tony Blair and the Blank Cheque

This is a link to an article informing a very weary British public that Mr Tony Blair sees it as his opportunity aka "duty" to return to frontline politics in order to deny Theresa May a "blank cheque" in the Brexit negotiations. This from a man who, ever since he left public office, has been consistently behaving as if he had a blank cheque as far as public money and the trappings of power are concerned.

The Parliamentary Petition to deny Mr Blair all access to public funds, created by Steve Goodwin, has had its deadline brought forward, from the 28th of August to the 3rd of May. Any UK readers who feel they've had as much of Mr Blair as they can reasonably be expected to take, should sign the petition as soon as possible. If enough publicity for the petition can be generated, the threshold of one hundred thousand signatures can still be achieved despite the unfairly narrowed deadline.

PS: If anyone wonders why Medawar is concerned to prevent Tony Blair regaining, and immediately abusing, power, then they should read the second article ever published on this blog, and especially what it says about pathological liars.

Update: 25/4/2017  This is a link to a Daily Telegraph article suggesting that the "Open Britain" campaign is really all about getting Blairites back into Parliament.

Update: 8/5/2017  The Parliamentary Petition has ended as of the 3rd of May. There is now, belatedly, a note admitting that the petition was ended early "because of the general election" but there's no reason why it couldn't have been run on for the new parliament to deal with after June the 8th (it was due to end on the 28th of August). There has been no official response to the petition, either, despite the site promising that all petitions that reach ten thousand signatures will get a formal response from government. Once again, Blair gets away with it. This sort of thing is what gave rise to the country saying "the Devil looks after his own."

The Pressing Need to Deny Tony Blair Access to Public Funds

This is a link to Steve Goodwin's petition to deny Tony Blair access to public funds. In the next few days, the petition will pass the ten thousand signature threshold, which warrants a formal response from government, and that is an achievement. However, many more signatures are required, before the 28th of August 2017, to reach the one hundred thousand signature threshold needed to trigger a debate in Parliament. We need to reach this second, more difficult, target, because the initial, reflex government response is quite likely to be dismissive and unsatisfactory. In order to do so, it is necessary to offer a wider justification for denying Mr Blair access to public money than was possible for Mr Goodwin to expound within the format limits of the UK Government and Parliament website. Mr Goodwin chose to concentrate on two main issues: Mr Blair's "blurring of the line" (in fact, a gaping chasm) between the public interest and his own personal business interests, and Mr Blair's recent attempts to divide the nation and sow the seeds of lasting enmity over Brexit. These are valid and pressing reasons, of course, but they are not the only ones. Here are some of the others:

False legitimacy: like every other conman, Tony Blair cultivates every scrap of apparent legitimacy and prestige he can scrape up. He makes money from foreign leaders and businessmen, especially the unsavoury ones, by convincing them that he still has authority and power in the United Kingdom and can influence opinion, policy and even legislation in their favour. Every pound he is paid from the public purse seems to yield ten pounds for him in terms of his ability to get money from Central Asian dictators. This in turn fuels his ambitions to make a comeback as a "world leader" by fulfilling some kind of supranational role invented especially for him. Tony Blair is not a benefit claimant, dependent on the state for his daily bread. In Central Asia, people only get money from the state if they are in the dictator's circle of friends, so everything Blair is given makes it look, to his clients, as if he is still on the inside as far as UK policy making is concerned. The simple solution is to give him nothing.

Trappings of Power: See above. Also, Tony Blair has recently specifically demanded that he be granted certain status symbols by the UK Government, which would make it look as if he were still in power in the UK. Especially his demand that not only should the car he uses whilst abroad have UK diplomatic number plates, so should all the cars in his entourage. This would enable him and his "Homies" to roar through foreign capitals in convoy, bearing plates that would indicate to any reasonable citizen of that country that he was acting with the full authority of Her Majesty's Government. Assuming that at the same time he would likely be on his way to meet the leaders of a discredited regime, ruling by force and terror, then the sight of Blair playing "world leader" would raise up many new enemies of Britain. The Prime Minister, Mrs May, has refused this particular demand, but Blair is likely to keep on repeating the demand until he gets his way.  It is not in the national interest to let Mr Blair bestride the world as a PR man turned Emperor.

Police Protection: Tony Blair's arrogance and his addiction to armed protection appears to corrupt the officers assigned to his detail. Neighbours of the Blairs in Connaught Square angrily reported being denied access to their own homes by gun-toting police when the Blairs moved into their home there (one of seven that they now own), which seems to have been chosen specifically for its resemblance to 10 Downing Street. Although the precise number of officers assigned to protect the Blairs and their extensive property assets is an official secret, it is clear from what's in the public domain that there are several times as many officers looking after Blair as are needed to look after another former Prime Minister, Sir John Major. Medawar has relatives living near John Major's house and nobody around there has been bullied or offended by his very discreet protection detail. Nobody has yet complained about hordes of gun toting police around David Cameron, either. Yet again, the armed police protection is used by Blair to impress foreign leaders with his supposed ongoing political relevance. It helps him to convince the gullible that he is still "speaking for Britain." Blair's protection should be reduced to the levels which suffice for others who have served in the same office, and greater discipline should be imposed on those who protect Blair, to remind them that their primary duty remains to protect the public. If the Blairs want to own a property empire as a speculative investment, they should pay for private security firms to guard the investment properties. Publicly-funded policemen should not do the job!

Fairness: Other former ministers are not granted public money and the labour of senior civil servants to help and advise them with pet personal projects, however "worthy" they purport to be: why should Blair be granted special privileges?

Update: 13/4/2017: The petition has now passed the ten thousand vote threshold. Will post link to the government response when it's published.

Update 23/4/2017: The petition has now been waiting for an official government response for 11 days. Even allowing for the Easter holiday, this is a bit too long. The deadline for the petition to reach 100,000 votes has also been moved, from the 28th of August, to the 3rd of May. It seems that someone in Downing Street, probably the unelected Cabinet Secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood, is using the announcement of an early General Election to protect Mr Blair from any awkwardness. Precisely the sort of abuse of power that Mr Blair practiced for so long whilst in office.

Worrying Case of Cyber Stalking

This is a link to a BBC article about an instance of cyberstalking, where the perp sent a writer with epilepsy an animated tweet with flashing lights in it, causing the writer to have a seizure.