No lessons yet from Art School fire

The Grenfell fire inquiry reached the first of its grisly conclusions during the week. The fire service was blamed for encouraging people to stay put in the burning building – and, to be fair, that advice was based on the belief that an individual fire in a flat could be hermetically sealed, when the safety measures were woefully inadequate – and the flammable insulation cladding was the cause of the lightning spread of the fire to the upper floors and the deaths of 72 people.

Over the sound of fire alarms is me blowing my own trumpet. Shortly after the fire I revealed in the Sunday Herald that the same combustible insulation panels were used in the renovation of the Mackintosh building of the Glasgow School of Art, which burned down (for the second time) in June last year. It was of unusual severity and spread rapidly.

We don’t know the cause yet but is it too much to think these plastic-filled panels had something to do with the speed of the spread? We don’t know because the fire service investigation hasn’t yet been published, for some reason, and there has not been, unlike Grenfell, a public inquiry.

This is inexplicable and inexcusable, but credit to SNP MSP Joan McAlpine and her Holyrood committee for keeping alive investigation into it, and to Tory Adam Tompkins for calling for a public inquiry.

But that’s as far as it goes. No-one has been held accountable, and the people who presided over two fires on their watch are still in place and planning to oversee yet another renovation.

The people in charge may not have known or understood the dangers of the panelling. But it doesn’t even appear that lessons have been learned by the Scottish Government. Two years after Grenfell new regulations, which came into force last month, still permit flammable materials of the kind on Grenfell and hundreds of other buildings still to be used in Scotland, while they are banned in England.

As long as they pass the “utterly inadequate” (Association of British Insurers, the ABI) British Standard test 8414, they are allowed.

Thanks Evans for the Tories

Doesn’t your heart just go out to the constituents of Ribble Valley who, because of the election timing, may be deprived of their vote?

Okay then, no. The case put on Tuesday in Parliament by their Tory MP Nigel Evans, who has the demeanour of a starved whippet and the dog’s ability to quickly pounce on opportunistic targets, was that they wouldn’t be able to register for a postal vote because they might be trekking in the Himalayas or cruising, on the Yangtse or Amazon presumably, or at least where the post is something you tie your beast of transport to.

Good to know these Tories have us ordinary folk at the forefront of our minds.

Snow fair ... history is repeating itself

Well so much for the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act and the two-thirds majority when it can simply be dispensed with by passing a one-line bill.

Hopefully, then, this doesn’t mean that from now on we’ll be fighting through the snow in mid-December to vote in each future General Election.

The last one so close to Christmas was in the wake of the First World War, on December 14, 1918 when the low turnout – 57.2% – was probably to do with a combination of soldiers still abroad and the Spanish flu epidemic.

It was almost the last fixed, gerrymandered election, voting had been extended to women over 30 – as long as they owned a property or were a graduate – and to men over 21, although, of course, the majority of those who had fought for their country were probably below the age bar.

It was also the last election in the then the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Three years later, almost to the day, British rule over the majority of Ireland ended and months after that the Irish Free State came into being. The Liberal Party also combusted and Labour moved into second place.

This time it looks as if Labour might follow the Liberals, at least in Scotland. I don’t know about history repeating itself as tragedy and farce, as Marx put it, but this may also be the last time that Scotland is involved in a UK election. I am searching for the betting odds.

Chocs away for the Mars

I wrote last week about the Mars, the boat that was moored for 60 years off Dundee, where children under 16 who were homeless, orphans or on the cusp of trouble were sent.

It’s lodged in the folk memories of Dundonians, even if they weren’t born when it was there.

My old chum Gordon Douglas wrote a book about it, lavishly illustrated, called We’ll Send Ye Tae The Mars, which can be bought on Amazon.

He took mild issue about the description that, although it educated and trained kids in a military fashion, it was effectively a “prison ship”.

Well, kids were sentenced to serve there, whether they wanted to go or not, so they were incarcerated.