Like most of the country, the Herald woke up this morning to the news of a catastrophic tower block fire in West London. This has been accompanied by multiple fatalities. It does not look like the sort of thing that should happen in 2017. You expect flame retardant fittings in buildings like this and the footage has left us feeling quite ill.
Unlike a terrorist incident, where our instincts are to find some way to defiantly laugh in the face of it, there is no humour in this. So without joking, we will simply point out three things that we would satirise if we were in the mood.
1. There are people claiming that it is too much of a coincidence not to have been “the Muslims”.
Right. So you think that ISIS now runs a building contractors and has managed to win what we suspect was a lowest tender offer, so it could fit flammable panels on a tower block as an elaborate set up to then burn it down. We are not experts, but we would suggest the chances of this being decent and traditional British corner cutting and botched jobbing are rather higher than some ISIS mastermind, don’t you? Even if those wangs claim responsibility. Top tip, just because 9/11 involved a tower block does not mean every single event involving a tower block is also terror. You jeb end.
2. Competitive grief
You know the sort of thing. It’s one thing putting something on your facebook expressing horror. That’s fine, not going to criticise that. Did you need to put a picture with it though? No. Then we have a look at twitter. People at the incident, you say what you like, we don’t criticise you at all, and we hope you get away from it to recover, even if the scars are only mental.
But, if you weren’t there, do you really need to put something on the hashtag that relates to the incident, to express your grief, maybe with a horrible pic of people burning to death – because let’s face it, that’s what it is a picture of? Is this helpful? Or are you fishing for likes and retweets. And if you are? What are you. Are you a good human? Look in the mirror.
A wise person once said in the first hour of an incident you see the best of Twitter, offers of help, refuge, etc. Then in the hours that follow you see the worst.
3. The media coverage
Satirising the media coverage of a horrific event like this is going to take more skill than we have at this game, and even if you are as good as the mighty Chris Morris, you would end up with Brass Eye paedogedden style blow back. So we aren’t going to do that. But we ask you to do this. Consider the mawkish mentality that is drawing people to rubberneck at this horrendous event. To seek out awful videos on twitter. To watch rolling news coverage speculating about how many people died and how. To watch traumatised eye witnesses explaining their reaction to it live on air. And frankly to get in the way of the first responders actually doing some thing useful.
So to the media we say this – confine yourselves to sharing details of how people can help. If you are sitting there in production thinking I hope that tower block collapses live on air, please, book a holiday. Take some time out from your job, it is twisting your sense of decency.
And to the public we say this – turn it off. Don’t ignore what has happened, and we do need answers about why it happened, but don’t let the need to fill airtime on a rolling news show draw you to gawp at it. What matters is what we do after this event has been forgotten by the media. What we do to pressure landlords into ensuring fire safety. It is unacceptable in 2017 for something like this to happen. And it is terrifying that it appears residents had repeatedly raised their concerns. That is where your energy should go, rather than staring at the fire footage thinking fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck that.
