This story has been circulated for so long that it has become accepted truth. However, it was actually the 2008 crash which mainly triggered the need for austerity - if the economic forecasts before that crash had been borne out, there wouldn't be nearly such an issue today. Arguably they were spending beyond their means (and so are the Conservatives by the way), but the impact of the 2008 crash was much much bigger. Saying that the current austerity is only caused by Labour spending too much money is not true.
That said, I think Labour are guilty of playing politics by failing to do anything about it in the 2 years running up to the 2010 election, because they didn't want to destroy their election chances by starting austerity before that. If Labour had won the 2010 election, we would've also had austerity nearly the same as what the Conservatives have done. In addition, I have little doubt (sadly) that the Conservatives would've done the same thing between 2008 and 2010 if the situation was reversed.
As regards the bailing out of the banks, I know there is still a body of opinion that this should not have been done and the banks should have been left to fail and suchlike. The counter argument is that this would've caused the entire world economy to collapse and things would be even worse today than they already are. I don't consider myself expert enough technically to judge on that, but I certainly can empathise with the feeling that giving billions of pounds to banks to prop them up after their poor decision making doesn't look good to those who don't have much money.
I'd also like to make a factual correction. There is no section D notice in force on the Grenfell tower story. A section D notice was issued for the Manchester bombing, because there was a criminal investigation affecting national security in process, and printing certain information would have compromised that investigation. This is why the UK was so angry when some of that information was made public in the US.
Section D notices are for matters of national security involving criminal activity and suchlike - a section D notice would never be issued in a situation like this tower fire, and if it was I have every confidence that it would be quickly struck down by the judiciary.
More likely, it's a combination of incompetence and the process that we have in this country. The convention is that a person cannot be considered as dead until a coroner has declared them as dead. In this case, we don't know how many people were in the tower, we don't know how many escaped, and in some cases it's likely that the fire was so severe that only ash remains, or you cannot tell for sure how many bodies are in the room.
The process in the UK (rightly or wrongly) is based on two assumptions:
- It's better to reveal no information than to release information that might turn out wrong later.
- It's better to reveal no information if revealing it could cause additional distress to families of victims, or on the other hand give them false hope.
As I remember, it took a very long time for the death toll from 9/11 to be confirmed, and even now today, they are not sure that the death toll is correct.
One other comment regarding the use of cheaper cladding materials - we don't actually have the technical specifications for these materials. Although it seems bad that they chose a cheaper material with only a marginally lower cost, we need to wait for the conclusion of the accident investigation. The statements I've read was that the more expensive material was "less flammable" rather than completely fire proof. As such, the investigators may end up concluding that the fire would still have spread in the same way even if the more expensive material had been fitted - we don't know that until the experts have investigated fully.
