Did The Daily Express Cause The Grenfel Tower Fire?

I did wonder whether anybody would try to link the current big news story with the ongoing big news story.  Does the fire at Grenfel Tower have anything to do with the EU?  Well obviously it doesn’t.  Whatever were the immediate causes, and whatever the underlying reasons behind the tragedy, this is very much a British built tragedy.


But obsessives tend to be obsessive so the EU haters at the Daily Express just couldn’t help themselves.  They titled an article with the question - did EU regulations lead to the Grenfel Tower fire?  To be scrupulously fair to the Express, which is something the Express rarely is to its victims, if you read the article with any degree of attention you’d have to conclude that the answer was no.   But of course facts don’t matter in this kind of thing.  Most people only read the headlines, and the effect is to pull the agenda in the direction of suspecting the EU as being behind everything that is bad.

The temptation is to think that this kind of thing doesn’t matter.  After all, who reads the Express?  And who amongst those that do believes a word it says?

The answer is that unfortunatly quite a lot of people not only do read it, but they believe it as well.  They might not believe an individual article like this one.  You’d have to be pretty short on critical faculties to give it any credence.  But you still pick up the worldview by a sort of osmosis.  If you are continually reading about the threats posed to your way of life by modernity, reformers and foreigners then you end up seeing things through that prism.

An interesting bit of research has just come out of Yougov.  They show that there is a big correlation between your preferred source of news and your political opinion.  Amongst people whose primary news source is print, there is a big majority who vote conservative.  Those who get most of their news online favour the Labour Party.   Correlation doesn’t imply causation, but it doesn’t preclude it either.  I don’t think that anyone would seriously argue that the print media are more reliable than online news.  So it appears quite likely that the newspapers are having a big impact on how people vote.  And they are voting on the basis of the kind of distorted and biased article that the Empress produced attempting to somehow blame the fire on the EU.

The biggest problem is that newspapers rely on emotion to sell themselves.  Any emotion will do, but anger is definitely a good one.  And it works.  This Express article has made me very angry.  So angry that I just want to tell the fucking fuckers who wrote the fucking thing to fucking fuck off and to fucking stay fucked off when they’ve fucking well got there.