The weight of a political promise

Subject: The weight of a political promise.

I suppose none of us can imagine what it is like to have escaped from a burning building by the skin of our teeth, losing everything we possessed, including many of our friends and perhaps relatives. The experience of trying to get out, the panic, the smoke, the terror which is transported between frightened people.
Then to be faced by the incompetence of the council and slowly have revealed the true story of why the fire took over so quickly and reflect on the inadequacy of the Fire systems in the building, the inadequacy of escape routes, the lack of maintenance which led to a failure of emergency lighting in the stairwells.
The failure to treat the people as a composite group, people who collectively suffered the same problems and needed to be consoled as a group.
The people who survived have been given many hours of prime time TV to express themselves, the interviewers have been openly shocked at the grief of families who have not only lost their families but are faced with the harrowing image that their remains are so badly burnt and consumed by the fire identification will be impossible.
The apparent distancing from the fire and its consequences by the senior members of the Council was another sickening experience for the residents and all of us, as we witnessed the divide in society which allows people to judge segments within society differently.
Having said all this and having judged the incompetence of response from not only the councillors of Kensington and Chelsea but also the government of the day especially the cack-handed way the prime minister responded when she eventually visited the site to thank the emergency services but failed to see the need to make herself available to the residents. One could go on and on cataloguing the missed opportunities, not only in the lead up to the fire but the events afterwards and its afterwards that we now see the schisms  emerging.
The residents, human beings were mainly from countries of the war torn Middle East. Some no doubt illegal and a symbol of clusters of people living in crowded conditions in many of our cities. They are terrified of authority since they are the very people who live in that grey area between acceptance and being rejects, who are used to getting by, who bring up large families where having large families is a function of being who they are, or at least who they have been taught who they are by their husbands. These cultural assumptions house children, many children brought up, possibly better than in our western culture where having children can be assumed as a drag. The institution of the family and its emotional collective, its sibling responsibility, its gender hierarchy clustered under one roof, gathered into limited space, brings its own message.
But what we are now seeing is the resistance born of living in a country which for all its faults is a far cry from the homeland of the survivors. Countries where the sight of a burnt out shell of a building is common place, hundreds of burnt out building litter the landscape and no help is on offer for the people living there.  And so when the demands are made, when social services are not enough, when accommodation offered is not to their liking we begin to hold up our hands and question.
Of course they are seared with the experience, many suffering post dramatic stress, temporally unhinged and readily open to suggestion. The agent provocateur works amongst them stirring dissent where rightfully dissent should exist but also along side the rationale that it will take time to resolve this horrible situation and making demands on a nation which is failing to address its own indigenous people's needs, then the sympathy will begin to ebb away.
The problem is lack of trust. With memories of how their concerns regarding safety in the block were ignored by the very type of people,(the authorities) who  are now promising to sort things out.  Their instinct tells them, these are just words, just political promises and we all know the weight of a political promise.