the snap general election thread

CKhalvashi

Fella wrote: »

So much time? It's taken them a week to sort out permanent & what looks like high-quality accomodation for 68 families. Just how fast where you expecting them to do it? It would have taken at least some time (days) for them to even know the basic details such as how many families they needed to rehome. There would have been a lot of questions that had to be answered relating to whether the families would even want to live in an apartment block & whether they wanted to stay in the area etc etc. Actually doing stuff takes some time, Government can't just wave a magic wand & just know the details of what's required and then produce it from thin air. This could easily have taken months.

It's taken them a week to properly announce that everyone affected will be rehoused in the area. That should have been in immediate response.

I agree that physically finding the accommodation won't be done overnight, and agree that this part has been done quickly.

You might want to reflect that the Corbyn solution (sieze the homes of the rich) quite apart from being unecessary and draconian, would have been a messy nightmare to implement, would have seen the tenants scattered far & wide, and would NOT have given them permanent accomodation since those houses would have had to be returned to their legal owners sooner or later. By that point the Government would undoubtedly have been facing dozens of lawsuits from the house owners which they would certainly have lost. The relocated tenants would at that point have been forced to move AGAIN, possibly pending results of court cases etc etc. A hideous unworkable mess.

I didn't agree with that solution at all.

What the PM should have done is ensured everyone had accommodation for the following night, with access to food and clean clothes. Before you say 'oh, but...', I'm sure that the PM could have organised the coordination between multiple agencies to ensure community centres with temporary accommodation were available, whilst offering to foot the bill for anything those centres don't have. I'm also sure that she could have got someone to do it for her before you say she should have been dealing with other things.

That she sat on it for almost a week before making that very basic guarantee wasn't a good move, as instead of having the public support her in trying to do the right thing there was a lot of pressure to get her to do the right thing while the public rallied against the government to do it for her.

ThinkingOutLoud_2

It does seem to be a factor of living in a permanently connected world that everyone expects Instasolution where many are sitting there twiddling thumbs ready to assign empty homes in the exact location anything happens.

Isn't the real world where we have a shortage of housing and we hopefully do not see disaster like this week in week out the norm? And where every government employee is busy working hard already?

That does not justify the fact coordinating a decent overall response has been less than apparent (much though many action like review of other such cladding and the like have clearly been underway). I suspect much that is being done is not being shouted about simply because this kind of comment will be thrown up anyway. Better to get on and do the right thing than shout about it. I will bet the efforts to rehouse began before the above began screaming not because of it!.

The solution for the future that has been indicated is to create a better, national level ability to respond to such unforeseen events. No government past or present has made that happen or it would be in place. No manifesto on any side said that needed to be done - life much in life action speaks louder than words.

Conrad

mayonnaise wrote: »

Typical that such islamophobic guff comes from a #goodbyeeu twitter handle.
'But no siree....we're not racist, no...no...' :rotfl:

That's it wave the race card around. You do realise this renders the word 'racist' less potent right, so that one day when real racism comes along no one will take notice?


Will the thousands of girls abused over 15 years by gangs be getting £1m homes each, or was their trauma not too bad?

Fella

ThinkingOutLoud wrote: »

It does seem to be a factor of living in a permanently connected world that everyone expects Instasolution

Yes and they're the same people who would have been shouting loudest if the Government had acted hastily & made the mistakes that would have been inevitable if they did. If the families had been relocated the next day into whatever could be found, lots of it would have proved unsuitable & ill-thought-out & all we'd have been reading from the Corbynistas was how the Tories rushed into knee-jerk reactions & made a mess of it etc.

It's been said before but it's worth repeating: Corbyn's labour and their followers are simply a party of protest. They have no idea what it takes to Govern. They simply sit on the sidelines & criticize everything the Government does.

CKhalvashi

And we've just proven once again that what I've said (or written) hasn't been read properly.......

I didn't say it should be completely sorted within 24 hours as I agree that would cause more problems than it would solve. I said it should have been guaranteed to have been sorted within 24 hours, and sorted as quickly as practical afterwards.

Can I just point out (once again) that I didn't vote Labour in either election this year, as I don't think that seems to have sunk in either.

Cakeguts

CKhalvashi wrote: »

It's taken them a week to properly announce that everyone affected will be rehoused in the area. That should have been in immediate response.

I agree that physically finding the accommodation won't be done overnight, and agree that this part has been done quickly.



I didn't agree with that solution at all.

What the PM should have done is ensured everyone had accommodation for the following night, with access to food and clean clothes. Before you say 'oh, but...', I'm sure that the PM could have organised the coordination between multiple agencies to ensure community centres with temporary accommodation were available, whilst offering to foot the bill for anything those centres don't have. I'm also sure that she could have got someone to do it for her before you say she should have been dealing with other things.

That she sat on it for almost a week before making that very basic guarantee wasn't a good move, as instead of having the public support her in trying to do the right thing there was a lot of pressure to get her to do the right thing while the public rallied against the government to do it for her.

Are you saying that the government should rehouse anyone who doesn't have buildings insurance? Some of those flats were privately owned so who was insuring the block for them? It is normal in leasehold flats for the freeholder to have buildings insurance. So what happened to that insurance? In a normal situation it would pay for someone to go into a hotel otherwise everytime there was a house fire you would find someone sleeping in the local school hall or leisure centre?

buglawton

There's a whopping "West London tower block fire" thread elsewhere for that topic...

Meanwhile back to the Election topic. There was an excellent documentary this week called "Brexit Means Brexit: The Unofficial Version". It covers the history of the last year since the referendum and also covers the whys and wherefores of the recent snap election.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08w2chd

I was left realising just how little the conservative govt seems to have actually done in that one year, apart from wait for 1 year to serve the Article 50 notice.

Thrugelmir

CKhalvashi wrote: »

I wasn't anywhere near the internet yesterday (busy dealing with real life stuff), however I am happy the government has announced this, just less happy it's taken them so long and so much public pressure to do it.

I suspect that people were working around the clock behind the scenes to achieve this outcome. Was never in doubt. I understand the frustration. But there practicalities and complexities involved.

Fella

Thrugelmir wrote: »

I suspect that people were working around the clock behind the scenes to achieve this outcome. Was never in doubt. I understand the frustration. But there practicalities and complexities involved.

It's not as if they had anything else on their plate. Like running the country, negotiating the next Government, negotiating Brexit, the many Terror threats, trying to work out if other tower blocks need safety measures as of yesterday, that kind of stuff. All the while knowing that the slightest mistake will be seized upon & any hint of a u-turn seized on even more.

I don't particularly pity them, after all nobody forced them into politics. But to glibly say this could have been done better or quicker betrays a complete & utter lack of understanding of what it takes to actually do stuff in the real world.

Corbyn has enjoyed a honeymoon period lately, helped substantially by the fact that he himself has nothing whatsoever on his plate except to criticize the Government. Something he does in a remarkably one-dimensional ineffective way (he's not bright enough to have worked out that if he laced his non-stop whinges about literally every single thing the Govt did with the occasional bit of praise when they get things right then his criticisms would carry ten times the weight). Since he himself is devoid of answers on any topic his belated honeymoon period won't last.

May was always overrated IMO (not being clever after the event, feel free to check my posting history), she then came up with an awful manifesto, a terrible campaign strategy & a string of unimpressive personal appearances. Nonetheless the facts are she's had to face a series of hammer blows, ranging from terrorism, her own fall from grace, more terrorism, disastrous election results personally, to the Grenfell tragedy. All set across a backdrop of the Brexit negotiations. Say what you like about her (and I'm not a fan) but she has actually managed to remain on her feet in the face of an onslaught that would have obliterated most of her peers. Could she yet stage an unlikely comeback? In the current political climate anything is possible.

Chrysalis

ironically it seems the tories are backtracking on their best manifesto pledge, the energy price cap