Why are some on the Left claiming a ‘bonfire on red tape’ led to Grenfell Tower?

Now that Labour councils have been shown to be as much up to their eyeballs in the tower block cladding scandal as Conservatives ones the Left has subtly shifted onto a different target: the ‘neoliberalist’ war on red tape. Writing in the Guardian today, George Monbiot accuses the Government’s Red Tape Initiative – set up to consider which regulations might be reformed once Britain is freed from having to abide by EU directives – of plotting to downgrade building regulations, so as to put the poor at risk while big business increases profits. ‘Red tape,’ he asserts for good measure, is a ‘disparaging term for public protections’.    

Let’s leave aside the Left’s own dislike of regulations which it finds inconvenient – that relating to the funding of trade unions, for example. Monbiot’s usual parable about callous neoliberalism trampling on the rights of the poor is in danger of becoming, in the case of Grenfell Tower, the standard version of events.