Extract from my journal, 30th June 2015
 
At our team meeting today, the two main discussion topics are Steve’s position as Technical Advisor and lines to take at FW/6. 
 
[Background: FW/6 was the technical committee at British Standards responsible for furniture flammability. John Lord deliberately informed Jo Swinson, the Minister, that I had brought a Civil Service Code case against my managers – for failing to implement the new match test in April 2015. This gave her no choice but to ignore my government response to the 2014 consultation and instead choose Lord’s. His was a put-up job which would have delighted industry in that it instigated at least another year’s delay in bringing in the match test. The main justification he gave for this was to say that we needed to get FW/6 to provide more input to the test (which we didn’t, of course). The meeting with them was looming and there were complications, not least of which was that Steve had just been elected as the new Chair of FW/6 . . . ]
 
Chris’s opening comment about the upcoming FW/6 meeting says it all, really: “We’re covered because the Minister didn’t promise anything.” She means, of course, that John’s published government response that he conned past the Minister didn’t promise anything. And even then, that’s not strictly true; the response’s Next Steps actually say:

“The aim of this would be to enable BIS to launch a new consultation early in the next Parliament, covering all the proposed changes to the Regulations which stem from the stakeholder discussions outlined above, complete with draft regulations, guidance and further technical explanations. 

“This would in principle enable the full review to be completed by April 2016.”
 
Maybe one day, Swinson will realise that when she instructed her officials to get the new match test in by April 2016, they actually made sure that was going to be an uphill task, i.e. by changing the aim, without her permission, to – as it says above – getting a review of allthe Regulations in by that time (no chance) and even then, it’s only ‘in principle’. If future historians ever want to work out why millions of UK citizens continued to be poisoned by the furniture in their own homes long after it was necessary, they should head for these ‘Next Steps’ by Mr Lord (not his real name) and see just how powerful a single mendatious sociopathic civil servant can be when he has a wealthy and rewarding industry to suck up to.
 
Barbara’s solution to the ‘Steve problem’ (i.e. he’s now Chair of FW/6) is one of two options:
 
1)         British Standards are asked to provide a stand-in Chair for this particular meeting. Steve of course can still speak.
 
2)         Steve is asked to step out of the room when the BIS material is discussed.
 
Here in all its glory is the senior civil servant’s extraordinary hubris. Because, it hasn’t occurred to Barbara for a moment that this is FW/6’s meeting, not BIS’s; not hers to control. She, like most of her kind, spends her entire time telling lower ranks what to do and think; therefore assumes an outside body will allow her to do the same. She also has already forgotten the farce she caused by trying to railroad a group of test experts not so long ago – particularly the part where she was literally stamping her feet and crying, “You’re not listening to me!”
 
On 2) even John can’t restrain himself from pointing out that allthe material at this meeting is BIS’s.
 
Barbara has also only just noticed that Steve is still our technical advisor, and has decided to let him go. She says that she, Chris and I will phone him on Thursday to give him the news. 
 
Then it’s time to discuss what lines we’ll take at FW/6 and things get a bit fruity. Sorry, when I say ‘we’, I do of course mean ‘Terry’. Because, while I have to listen to these higher ranks talking well-enunciated bollocks, it’s me who’s going to have to face a roomful of vested interests at FW/6. Sorry, when I say ‘fruity’ I reall mean ‘fruit and nutty’. 
 
John is now annoyed because British Standards have not actually done anything since he and Barbara coerced them into agreeing to look further at the regs, and they’ve now only got one month left to do so, if we’re to meet the new deadline of implementing in April 2016. Not that he wants to meet the deadline necessarily but he does want to be seen to be ‘doing something’. He thinks it’s down to bad adminstration at BS and doesn’t react when I point out that the Minister agreed with them having 12 months in which to do the ‘work’ – it’s John who changed it. I point out further that Sir Ken and the others had won 12 months off Swinson and were not going to now agree to just 6. He doesn’t like me saying this of course, since he made this change without Swinson’s permission. Incredibly he then suggests, and the rest agree, that I should tell them they’ve got a month to deliver. This is the same John, of course, who remained utterly silent a few months back when Sir Ken bullied us into the 12 months in the first place.
 
I remind them that weasked for this meeing with BS and that making such a demand will only cause bad feeling. And then the ultimate irony – John says I should tell them, tough, get on with it, and if they come and complain to the Minister, so be it. 
 
And true to form, he then decrees that Chris and I need to work out the actual lines to take for the meeting since he has other things to be ‘doing something’ about.
 
Had a long talk with Steve this evening. He was quite amused at his forthcoming ‘sacking’ as our technical advisor. He’d already told UKTLF that he was no longer in that role anyway. Oh, and UKTLF [association of test houses] have decided that the match test is ready to go and are considering challenging our commission to British Standards on the grounds that it’s unnecessary. If they do that, Steve as Chair of FW/6, will put me on the spot to defend BIS’s commission. Please do, I said. That should make an interesting ‘line’ to discuss with Chris tomorrow. He also said he’ll stick it to Barbara in her phone call to him by commenting on what a great job Terry has been doing on the match test. 
 
He also said that in persisting with this, it’s uncovered just how corrupt the industry is. But the problem with that is it will just increase the cover-up and it’s the UK consumer who’ll suffer. 
 
Which is the eternal dilemma of anyone who’s trying to do the right thing. While the bought just throw statements and commands that don’t stand up to any kind of honest scrutiny, the good guys have to spend much time explaining why the evidence suggests they can’t do things that way. They also face the problem in doing so of how much they reveal that they’re on to them. Because once the bad guys know you know they can of course shift their machinations to one side, thereby causing you a whole barrel more work.
 
In other words, while Barbara and John decree that they have other things to do so can’t face FW/6 and the many guests scheduled to come, including Sir Ken Knight, it’s me who’ll be standing in front of a whole gaggle of mixed and overlapping vested interests (since there’s no way Chris will do so [and in the event she did indeed cry off sick at the last minute]). It’s me who has had to spend the past few years getting up to speed so they can’t overwhelm me with techno-babble. It’s me who’s spent eleven years building solid relations with them so that I can at least resist them without it getting too acrimonious. It’s me who once again will have to look Sir Ken in the eye and face up to that well-connected, calmly overbearing, establishment-backed “You will do as I say” command. 
 
Why will I do this? Because it would be wrong not to.
 
 
 
 

We now know that while Grenfell Tower was still burning and for days following, officials of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea council were holed up in their offices planning their denials and busily shredding incriminating papers, doing nothing at all to help stricken citizens. The government was busy with its urgent priorities, too, one of which was shaping the Inquiry to minimise damage across a whole range of interests, including its own, in particular the bodge it had made of buildings and fire regulations over the past thirty years or so. That and the fact it was directly responsible for failing to put right the furniture flammability regulations when it had the chance to some four years previous to the fire. 
 
There were plenty of well-compensated officials in government and the fire sector who would have received their orders almost as soon as the building caught fire. Oh, and let's not forget the flame retardant industry. After all, they had markets to protect, and it didn't help that outside the UK, the western world had largely turned against its products in furniture. So much so that it had been expanding into building materials instead. But it clearly wouldn't do if the truth got out that its products in sofas and mattresses in the tower were obviously not doing the job of preventing fire; worse still, they added greatly to the toxicity of the blaze. And so Dr Malcolm Tunnicliff was rushed into the media, while the fire was still burning, to assure everyone that there was no hydrogen cyanide poisoning (actually there was, and lots of it) and only old furniture (pre-1988) was toxic; modern furniture was not. Now, a common theme amongst those with something to lose from tragedies like Grenfell is that when they are pushed into an ethical and logical corner regarding, in this case, their lies, they simply don't respond. And so Dr Tunnicliff did not respond when I wrote to him to point out that he'd got the issue with furniture exactly the wrong way round, i.e. modern furniture is far more toxic than older stuff when it burns.
 
Meanwhile, a shocked and devastated community had to look after itself. 
 
There was an interesting moment, following the end of a meeting in June this year at the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. We were being escorted from the meeting room to the reception via the lifts by, well, I'll call her Doris for now, since civil servants are very sensitive about being named in public. Even though they're public servants. 
 
Incredibly, considering what had gone on in the meeting, Doris was smiling and actually skipping a little with some kind of self-induced pleasure. She then made small talk by asking us what we were doing next. Instead of answering that particular question, however, I decided to try popping her joy bubble by saying, "You met the All Party Parliamentary Fire Safety and Rescue Group yesterday and they're hopping mad that you didn't answer any of their questions either."
 
I watched her carefully. The jolly sheen in her eyes dimmed for about half a second but then quickly returned. "We had a meeting with them, yes," she beamed.
 
As we left the building I said to my colleague, "She believes the meeting went well because she thinks she dealt with us. She'll tell her line manager everything's fine and probably get a positive mention in her annual report."
 
Move forward to last week. I'd put in some questions to the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (along with many other people) regarding their complete inability to acknowledge, let alone deal with, the fall-out of the fire in terms of sickness and environmental damage. One of my questions was what is the Council doing about the fact the government proved four years ago the furniture flammability regulations don't work and therefore they contributed greatly to the toxicity of the fire? Well, RBKC contacted BEIS for a statement. Doris would have provided it and what she put forward was the same stock response BEIS has been giving for over a year - that they're still working on the regulations but must not do anything that would reduce fire safety.
 
Compartmentalisation. In our meeting with Doris, I had asked a similar question about twenty times: do you agree that your own evidence proves that the current match test fails in up to 90% of cases and therefore UK sofas are unsafe? She would not reply. The closest she got was to say the government believes the regulations can be improved.
 
To state that BEIS must not do anything to reduce furniture fire safety when they themselves have already proved it doesn't exist is clearly a lie. Doris lied. How can a civil servant lie in a public statement, especially when the result of that lie means millions of people are being poisoned in their own homes, and the Grenfell Tower fire was worse than it should have been?
 
Compartmentalisation. At one point in our meeting, I asked Doris about the sofa in her own home and the fact that it is toxic both in normal use and especially if it catches fire. I watched her eyes cloud briefly, sensing a trap - a trap, for God's sake! Yes, a trap of the truth - finally, she said, "I don't feel that my sofa is unsafe." Bear in mind, this is the woman who is responsible for these failing regulations that right now are damaging the health of thousands, perhaps millions of children. "And what are your feelings based on?" I said, "against the hard evidence on your own department's website that proves your sofa isn't safe." She didn't respond, presumably because to do so might have weakened the compartmentalisation protecting her from having to actually do some work. 
 
Doris, by the way, has been full time on the furniture regulations for around two years. She's even received a promotion in post, her salary now around £50K a year. When I asked her where they'd got with interliners (a proposal for which is in the 2016 consultation document that they are still apparently 'working' on) she said, "What's an interliner?"
 
This, in a nutshell, is how the establishment - government, local authorities, fire services and police at management levels - works. It is not there to help/protect the public. It exists to protect and reward itself. Similarly, the leadership of RBKC does not exist to protect its citizens; it exists as a career platform for itself. Like BEIS, it compartmentalises in order to allow it to lie, essentially. And when it's presented with the truth in such a way that threatens that compartmentalisation, it will just go silent, like Dr T.
 
So it is that the Leader of the Council, Elizabeth Campbell, has gone silent on me. As detailed on the Grenfell Tower Fire page of this site, after she mentioned that I'd raised the issue of the furniture regs at a recent RBKC meeting (well, she didn't have much choice), I wrote back offering to bring her up to speed on one of the main contributors to the fire. She didn't reply. I wrote a reminder. Again, she didn't reply. 
 
And thus the Leader of RBKC joins the long list of others who do not reply either, such as Sir Ken Knight, Dame Judith Hackitt, the Inquiry, BEIS, MHCLG, the GMB, Matt Wrack of the FBU; and Dave Sibert also of the FBU but recently and mysteriously stripped of his job there.
 
Silence, of course, should be damning, a sure indication of cowardice and mendacity. But it often works in the UK, unfortunately, simply because the recourse of the ordinary person is much more limited than it should be. The press used to be a reliable recourse but they are mostly hamstrung these days, by rich owners who do not want their rich mates pursued, and/or by the fear of legal action. There is a TV journalist who has been following the Grenfell fire since the beginning. I had a long conversation with him once about the role the furniture regs played in the fire. He was very interested but he didn't report on it. Later, I found out that he'd suffered from thyroid cancer. Thyroid conditions are one of the more well-established effects of flame retardant chemicals the like of which will be in this journalist's furniture in large amounts. I wrote to him about this. He didn't reply, although he's still reporting on Grenfell. Just not on the bit about furniture and flame retardants.
 
Yes, in a way you know you're right when they don't reply. The trouble is, they're surrounded by many others of a like mind, who also don't reply.

Extract from my journal, 25thJune 2015
 
I remembered today that in fact I have the power, not my bosses. The longer I stay in the job and with the Civil Service Code case continuing, that power is strengthened. Barbara, for example, keeps trying to find different ways to move the project forward but only by pretending she didn’t cause any problems in the first place. But everywhere she goes, I have her blocked – with truth, integrity and knowledge. 
 
For example, yesterday I was discussing her dismissal letter to Steve [she’d forgotten that he’s still our technical adviser and for reasons as usual undisclosed decided she’d better formally let him go] with my union guy, Carl. He stopped me at one point and said, “Hold on – she’s dismissed him? That should be in your case.”
 
And he was right. I’d missed it because I’ve almost grown used to their casual, but essentially lying, way of dealing with stakeholders, including those who’ve contributed enormously to the public good and for no reward, financially or otherwise. 
 
What had happened was this . . . a couple of weeks ago, David King [at the time heading Flexible Foam Research, a two-man operation acting as a front group for the British Plastics Federation, big advocates of flame-retarded foam] sent John a ‘technical paper’. It purported to prove how the new match test isn’t going to work – but most of it the same old opinion-expressed-as-fact crap; and he ended it somewhat arrogantly/aggressively by listing ‘acknowledgements’ in the form of FIRA, FRETWORK, the Fire Protection Association, etc – the usual snouts in the FR trough suspects. Anyway, John and Barbara didn’t of course understand it and passed it to me, without actually admitting so of course. I told them to ignore him – let FW/6 deal with it [FW/6 was the British Standards Institute’s working group on furniture flammability – an upcoming meeting was scheduled very soon to discuss the progress, as such, of the new test] – that it’s just a shot across the bows. The only thing of significance is that he twice mentions ‘extra work/research’ that’s needed for the new test. He, along with the likes of Dave Sibert, Paul Fuller, Jon O’Neill, have been saying this for months, of course, but without ever saying what it entails. Sorry – they have actually told us: it’s to commission British Standards to come up with a test foam formula even though we’ve already had one for the past 30 years.
 
Barbara, however, insisted on doing an analysis. Which she did. Then told me to look at it. Which I did. It was, as usual, almost entirely wrong about everything. I went round to her desk and said that his arguments are blown out by BS7176. Her face was a picture: a carefully arranged frown that mightbe saying, “Of course,” or more likely, “HELP! What the fuck do you mean?” She should know of course, since she heard Steve give the argument at the FPA meeting in the House of Commons meeting room some months back. But there you go: she’s forgotten and so just wasted time writing an ‘analysis’ that misses the major point. [At that meeting, King was banging on about how we must get the test foam formula right, or face thousands of fires, court cases, etc. Steve pointed out that a) the formula we’d proposed for the new test has been used for loose covers for 30 years without any problems, and b) where testing for BS7176 – for non-domestic furniture – is concerned, flame-resistant foam fillings are required but all test houses just use any old bits of foam they have lying around, again with no problems.]
 
So Barbara, frown deepening in what I think was meant to indicate intellectual foreknowledge, said, “Yes, of course,” then went on about how “We’ll pin them down at FW/6, and answer all their arguments.” [Anyone following this story will probably be able to guess that when FW/6 met, Barbara and John were nowhere to be seen, and Chris who was supposed to support me in the likely battering to come from the Skipton Mafia and their mates managed to turn up right at the end, well after the storm had subsided.]
 
Then Chris tried to prove to me that we don’t need a technical adviser but the best she could offer as to a reason why is because, “It’s all like Game of Thrones.” So I emailed Barbara just before she was going to send the dismissal letter to Steve, copying in everyone, including Samantha, to say:
 
The timing is wrong and so are your reasons. One of which is that now Steve has been elected Chair of FW/6 there is a potential conflict of interest (the irony of which would be enough to scorch the FR-treated pants of Burson Marsteller) but the independence of the FW/6 Chair is not an issue; no one, not even the FR guys are questioning Steve’s independence. And most crucially, who are you going to replace him with? As soon as it’s known we don’t have a TA we’ll get loads more reports from the likes of David King, written in technobabble which will just cause more delays (as intended). Ditching our TA will also be seen as us losing faith in the new match test. Finally, you know there is no one else with Steve’s brilliance and integrity.
 
Barbara emails back to say she’s glad these issues have been raised before she sends out the email to Steve, along with a dig at me for not raising them earlier – yes, B, but it actually takes me some time to work through all your machinations. She goes on to say she’s discussed this further with Samantha who has some ideas about how we can achieve our objectives. Whatfecking objectives? The only one that matters is to stop putting the public at risk. But here’s the thing: some time back, when all these problems began, I said to Samantha: I know these proposals are a bit complicated; why don’t I ask Steve to come in for a couple of hours and we can explain it all to you. She looked me in the eye and said, “No.” [Which I now believe is a clear indication that she’d been got at.] Oh, and Samantha also said we need to make sure we aren’t rude to Steve. Which, really does show their utter lack of understanding of anyone outside their nicely-mannered circle of pension-preserving collusion, because I’ve never seen Steve be offended by anything other than people lying to him and thinking he’s too stupid to see it.
 
And with that, Barbara walked right into my rat trap. I emailed back to say that finding other experts could be a problem since over the past several months BIS does not have a very good reputation. For example, we’d invited a group of test experts to a meeting at one-day’s notice last December then totally ignored their advice when it didn’t suit our agenda (I don’t of course mean ‘we’ here; I mean ‘Barbara’); that we are currently vacillating on more work/no work with British Standards who are looking on bemused; that the furniture/testing industry is a small world (roughly Skipton-sized as it happens).
 
Barbara then went quiet, and no one else replied to my points. Which is odd at one level, given that I had in effect just accused her and John of giving the department a bad reputation amongst our stakeholders. 
 
Back to my meeting with Carl . . . we decided that the best move for now is that I write to the big BIS chief, Martin Donnelly, and tell him that the department is in danger of being highly embarrassed when it transpires it’s keeping the entire British public at risk via fence-sitting civil servants. We’ll see if he has any more of a conscience than his senior managers.
 
Finally and perhaps the most revealing thing that happened this week: I’d deliberately left Richard Black [not his real name: the CEO of a very large chemical treatment company, one that Trading Standards had often found guilty of undertreating furniture fabrics] off the guest list for our upcoming stakeholder meetings. This is because a Trading Standards colleague tipped me off that they’re about to bust his company once again. But he found out about the meeting and demanded to be invited. So I wrote to our lawyer for a legal view and she replied that we probably shouldn’t invite him, given that he may be on the way to another prosecution. But John emailed in with a spurious (and suspicious) comparison about how the government is still talking to supermarkets even when they’re in breach of various regulations, and that we should invite Black on the same basis. 
 
This chilled me. Because Black is in thick with the FR producers, and with Andrew Stephenson MP, and is part of the Skipton Mafia. When I told Carl about John's actions later he suggested that it would probably work like this: the big 3 FR producers and/or Burson Marsteller and/or a big treatment company offer our man a well-paid job somewhere down the line. It’s not even illegal, as such, and can easily be covered by holding an ‘open’ interview for the post. Which makes sense, although I wouldn’t rule out hard cash. After all, the FR industry gave that US burns doctor a straight $250,000 to lie in court and big-up flame retardants. Given that our new match test could cost them around £50m a year, I’m sure they would gladly stump up at least a quarter mill to stop it going through.