Grenfell Tower: a political prop in a morality play

John McDonnell’s use of the M-word in relation to the Grenfell inferno marks a new low in the political milking of this catastrophe. I’m not normally squeamish, but I must say I have found the marshalling of the Grenfell horror to political ends, the transformation of this human calamity into effectively a meme saying ‘Austerity Bad’ or ‘Tory Scum’, deeply disturbing. And now McDonnell has dragged it down to its nadir, with his claim at Glastonbury that the residents of this tragic block were ‘murdered by political decisions’.

The entire setting of McDonnell’s comments feels nauseating. Here we had the shadow chancellor of the deceptively bourgeois Corbynista movement shoring up his party’s support among the leisured classes by using the poor almost as political props. One can imagine the sad-eyed look on the generally well-to-do Glasto attendees’ faces as they heard about these ‘murder’ victims in a faraway tower block on Planet Poverty.