I haven't written a blog entry for some time. Unlike government departments, however, I am not going to blame the coronavirus for the delay. That's all government departments, by the way, not just the ones that are actually dealing with the virus. The government recently announced that there may be "understandable" delays in replying to Freedom of Information requests during the coronavirus lockdown. Well, one of my understandings is that most civil servants actually have more time on their hands during lockdown, simply because in working at home they are not spending most of their day in meetings.
My reason for not writing a blog entry for some time is that I've being doing a lot of work with some very good people that may bear fruit in terms of getting the government to finally do the right things where flame retardants in furniture is concerned, but it would be counter-productive to say too much at this stage.
To recap, however: this website focuses on the continuing scandal - one that actually gets worse as it goes on - of collusion between industry and corrupt and/or spineless civil servants with the result that everyone in the country is being posioned in their own homes by huge amounts of flame retardants that do not even work in preventing or slowing fires.
In fact, the more time you spend in your home - which the government currently insists upon - the more you will aborb flame retardants than normal, via your sofas, mattresses, cushions, etc. The damage this is doing to the nation's health dwarfs anything the virus can do. In my opinion.
Where flame retardants and fire safety is concerned, the entire operation is being controlled by big business and the puppet scientists and officials they bribe to sit on supposedly independent panels and committees that advise the government on policies. These experts are often based in universities that are also funded by business.
For example, the Fire Science unit at Imperial College receives funding from several big flame retardant producers. Surprise, surprise - the guys there are big fans of the UK's furniture fire safety regulations which lead to all those massive profits for the flame retardant industry. At the key time when the Department for Business had just proved the current regulations don't work and wanted to bring in new ones that would, while simultaneously hugely reducing toxic flame retardants in our furniture, Imperial got their guys on to the relevant panels and workshops. And they're still telling anyone who'll listen that the rest of the world should adopt furniture fire safety requirements just like the UK's. Even though they don't work.
If you care to do some internet research, you'll discover the many links between Imperial College and the massive PR company Burson Marsteller. BM represents the three big flame retardant producers and spends a fortune on promoting their products as wonderful life-savers in times of fire, while covering up any evidence that in fact they are incredibly toxic.
You might be interested to learn that BM also represents huge health care companies, including the kind that make vaccines and ventilators. Imperial, of course, are providing the computer modelled figures on coronavirus cases, deaths, etc, that our government is basing its virus policies on. But I'm sure the fact that a lot of money is going to made by these companies off the back of a pandemic is entirely coincidental.
Now lets go back a few days to the Second Reading of the new Fire Safety Bill, and the opening comments of James Brokenshire, Minister of State, Home Department.
"Almost three years have passed since the tragic events on the night of 14 June 2017. It was the greatest loss of life following a residential fire since the second world war. None of us will ever forget the events of that terrible night, and the Government are resolute in their commitment to ensure that they are never repeated. Those 72 people should never have lost their lives. Our thoughts today are very much with the victims’ families, survivors and fellow residents, who have had to rebuild their lives over the past three years.
"I know from my time as Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government the profound effect the events have had on the Grenfell community, but also that community’s sense of purpose and its clear demands for justice and change. I have had the privilege to meet survivors and their families, as well as those in the local community who joined together to support them. Those discussions have been humbling and harrowing. They have underlined the responsibility—indeed, the duty—on us to act. The Government will continue to provide support to the affected families and support the creation of a memorial on the site of the tower, a process that is rightly being led by the bereaved and the local community."
Lovely words, surely? Heatfelt, genuine, emotional and, what did he say, "humbling". Well, let's be clear: this man is a hypocrite of the highest order and his words here are bordering on sociopathic. Why? Because he has played a major role in blocking the truth of how most of the Grenfell victims died while at the same time protecting a highly-placed beneficiary of the chemical industry who'd infiltrated a Grenfell experts committee - chairing it in fact - with the primary purpose of ensuring that the real cause of deaths would never come out.
Don't think that sort of thing can go on in Britain? Well, check the rest of this website to learn how the Department for Business has decided to continue poisoning the entire country in order to protect industry profits and its own back. And how the same department lied about the report they commissioned to look into the fridge-freezer that started the Grenfell fire, stating to the world that the fridge-freezer was not a risk. While at the same time concealing the actual report which, when you study it in depth, shows that in fact the fridge-freezer was dangerous under the very conditions at play in the tower (especially the regular power surges) in order, one suspects, to protect profits of the company Whirlpool while also covering their backs for not having done anything about Whirlpool wash-dryers that keep catching fire. Oh, and of course to deflect attention from the fact that the very same department is also up to its neck in corruption over the furniture regulations.
Back to Mr Brokenshire. In 2018 I wrote to him to request that he ask Sir Ken Knight to stand down as Chair of the independent experts panel to the Grenfell Inquiry. I included eight pages of evidence that were cleared legally by a lawyer working for Grenfell survivors. In essence, this showed that Sir Ken is mired in conflicts of interest. Specifically, he played a major role in blocking safety changes to the UK's furniture flammability regulations, thereby ensuring the continuing massive profits to industry, including flame retardant producers who are, let's say, adept at finding their man. Sir Ken has refused to even look at the role played in the Grenfell fire by the failing furniture regulations, despite the fact that toxic fumes from burning sofas and mattresses played a large part in the deaths.
Sajid Javid was in charge at MHCLG when Grenfell happened and he appointed Sir Ken. I wrote to his successor, James Brokenshire, but neither he nor his department replied. After two fruitless reminders, I put in an FOI request. MHCLG's reply was this: "We will neither confirm nor deny we have the information you request." Not much information to be free with there then. Next, my MP wrote to MHCLG requesting a proper answer. Eventually (around six months after I'd written) she got a paper reply from the new Minister, Kit Malthouse. Malthouse claimed that the department had in fact replied to me by email several months ago. However, this was a lie on two grounds: first, I never received an email and second, he claimed that it had been sent before my FOI request, i.e. why didn't they just repeat it to me then? He also included a copy of the attachment he claimed had accompanied the email. Needless to say, there was no copy of the email itself since, well, that's not an easy thing to fake.
The attachment was from a civil servant and, true to form, spent most if its two pages repeating what I'd asked for and the way it goes about answering requests. There was only one line relevant to my request and all it said was that the Department had no reason to doubt Sir Ken's independence. I thought I'd have a word with this civil servant so phoned MHCLG and asked to be put through. After a pause, the switchboard official told me that no one by that name was listed as working at MHCLG.
Finally, a brief word about Matthew Hancock, sorry, Matt Hancock - Secretary of State for Health and Social Care. He's the guy who's currently always on TV telling us what we must do about the coronavirus. Well, here's a couple of things you might not know about Mr Hancock.
While a Minister at BEIS in 2014, he and Oliver Letwin ganged up on the junior Minister Jo Swinson and pressured her into delaying changes to the Furniture Regulations. This, as said, ensured continuing massive profits to industry at the expense of public health. Then in 2017, on the day Grenfell Tower was burning, he and Letwin and Michael Gove met to discuss ways of further weakening building safety regulations in order to increas massive profits to industry at the expense of public health. This meeting had to be curtailed, no doubt, when someone informed them that dozens of people were burning right now in a block of flats that had caught fire due to weak regulations.
If you believe that the same Matt Hancock now has public health and safety as a priority over business interests, all I can say is why?
My reason for not writing a blog entry for some time is that I've being doing a lot of work with some very good people that may bear fruit in terms of getting the government to finally do the right things where flame retardants in furniture is concerned, but it would be counter-productive to say too much at this stage.
To recap, however: this website focuses on the continuing scandal - one that actually gets worse as it goes on - of collusion between industry and corrupt and/or spineless civil servants with the result that everyone in the country is being posioned in their own homes by huge amounts of flame retardants that do not even work in preventing or slowing fires.
In fact, the more time you spend in your home - which the government currently insists upon - the more you will aborb flame retardants than normal, via your sofas, mattresses, cushions, etc. The damage this is doing to the nation's health dwarfs anything the virus can do. In my opinion.
Where flame retardants and fire safety is concerned, the entire operation is being controlled by big business and the puppet scientists and officials they bribe to sit on supposedly independent panels and committees that advise the government on policies. These experts are often based in universities that are also funded by business.
For example, the Fire Science unit at Imperial College receives funding from several big flame retardant producers. Surprise, surprise - the guys there are big fans of the UK's furniture fire safety regulations which lead to all those massive profits for the flame retardant industry. At the key time when the Department for Business had just proved the current regulations don't work and wanted to bring in new ones that would, while simultaneously hugely reducing toxic flame retardants in our furniture, Imperial got their guys on to the relevant panels and workshops. And they're still telling anyone who'll listen that the rest of the world should adopt furniture fire safety requirements just like the UK's. Even though they don't work.
If you care to do some internet research, you'll discover the many links between Imperial College and the massive PR company Burson Marsteller. BM represents the three big flame retardant producers and spends a fortune on promoting their products as wonderful life-savers in times of fire, while covering up any evidence that in fact they are incredibly toxic.
You might be interested to learn that BM also represents huge health care companies, including the kind that make vaccines and ventilators. Imperial, of course, are providing the computer modelled figures on coronavirus cases, deaths, etc, that our government is basing its virus policies on. But I'm sure the fact that a lot of money is going to made by these companies off the back of a pandemic is entirely coincidental.
Now lets go back a few days to the Second Reading of the new Fire Safety Bill, and the opening comments of James Brokenshire, Minister of State, Home Department.
"Almost three years have passed since the tragic events on the night of 14 June 2017. It was the greatest loss of life following a residential fire since the second world war. None of us will ever forget the events of that terrible night, and the Government are resolute in their commitment to ensure that they are never repeated. Those 72 people should never have lost their lives. Our thoughts today are very much with the victims’ families, survivors and fellow residents, who have had to rebuild their lives over the past three years.
"I know from my time as Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government the profound effect the events have had on the Grenfell community, but also that community’s sense of purpose and its clear demands for justice and change. I have had the privilege to meet survivors and their families, as well as those in the local community who joined together to support them. Those discussions have been humbling and harrowing. They have underlined the responsibility—indeed, the duty—on us to act. The Government will continue to provide support to the affected families and support the creation of a memorial on the site of the tower, a process that is rightly being led by the bereaved and the local community."
Lovely words, surely? Heatfelt, genuine, emotional and, what did he say, "humbling". Well, let's be clear: this man is a hypocrite of the highest order and his words here are bordering on sociopathic. Why? Because he has played a major role in blocking the truth of how most of the Grenfell victims died while at the same time protecting a highly-placed beneficiary of the chemical industry who'd infiltrated a Grenfell experts committee - chairing it in fact - with the primary purpose of ensuring that the real cause of deaths would never come out.
Don't think that sort of thing can go on in Britain? Well, check the rest of this website to learn how the Department for Business has decided to continue poisoning the entire country in order to protect industry profits and its own back. And how the same department lied about the report they commissioned to look into the fridge-freezer that started the Grenfell fire, stating to the world that the fridge-freezer was not a risk. While at the same time concealing the actual report which, when you study it in depth, shows that in fact the fridge-freezer was dangerous under the very conditions at play in the tower (especially the regular power surges) in order, one suspects, to protect profits of the company Whirlpool while also covering their backs for not having done anything about Whirlpool wash-dryers that keep catching fire. Oh, and of course to deflect attention from the fact that the very same department is also up to its neck in corruption over the furniture regulations.
Back to Mr Brokenshire. In 2018 I wrote to him to request that he ask Sir Ken Knight to stand down as Chair of the independent experts panel to the Grenfell Inquiry. I included eight pages of evidence that were cleared legally by a lawyer working for Grenfell survivors. In essence, this showed that Sir Ken is mired in conflicts of interest. Specifically, he played a major role in blocking safety changes to the UK's furniture flammability regulations, thereby ensuring the continuing massive profits to industry, including flame retardant producers who are, let's say, adept at finding their man. Sir Ken has refused to even look at the role played in the Grenfell fire by the failing furniture regulations, despite the fact that toxic fumes from burning sofas and mattresses played a large part in the deaths.
Sajid Javid was in charge at MHCLG when Grenfell happened and he appointed Sir Ken. I wrote to his successor, James Brokenshire, but neither he nor his department replied. After two fruitless reminders, I put in an FOI request. MHCLG's reply was this: "We will neither confirm nor deny we have the information you request." Not much information to be free with there then. Next, my MP wrote to MHCLG requesting a proper answer. Eventually (around six months after I'd written) she got a paper reply from the new Minister, Kit Malthouse. Malthouse claimed that the department had in fact replied to me by email several months ago. However, this was a lie on two grounds: first, I never received an email and second, he claimed that it had been sent before my FOI request, i.e. why didn't they just repeat it to me then? He also included a copy of the attachment he claimed had accompanied the email. Needless to say, there was no copy of the email itself since, well, that's not an easy thing to fake.
The attachment was from a civil servant and, true to form, spent most if its two pages repeating what I'd asked for and the way it goes about answering requests. There was only one line relevant to my request and all it said was that the Department had no reason to doubt Sir Ken's independence. I thought I'd have a word with this civil servant so phoned MHCLG and asked to be put through. After a pause, the switchboard official told me that no one by that name was listed as working at MHCLG.
Finally, a brief word about Matthew Hancock, sorry, Matt Hancock - Secretary of State for Health and Social Care. He's the guy who's currently always on TV telling us what we must do about the coronavirus. Well, here's a couple of things you might not know about Mr Hancock.
While a Minister at BEIS in 2014, he and Oliver Letwin ganged up on the junior Minister Jo Swinson and pressured her into delaying changes to the Furniture Regulations. This, as said, ensured continuing massive profits to industry at the expense of public health. Then in 2017, on the day Grenfell Tower was burning, he and Letwin and Michael Gove met to discuss ways of further weakening building safety regulations in order to increas massive profits to industry at the expense of public health. This meeting had to be curtailed, no doubt, when someone informed them that dozens of people were burning right now in a block of flats that had caught fire due to weak regulations.
If you believe that the same Matt Hancock now has public health and safety as a priority over business interests, all I can say is why?
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