Tories failed renters before the Grenfell Tower disaster – and nothing has changed since

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Theresa May meets emergency services staff at the site of Grenfell Tower (Getty)

You asked in today’s Daily Edition: who’s to blame? Check out the Landlords and Tenants Reform Bill.

This bill, to improve tenants’ rights, forcing rented homes to be made fit for human habitation, was voted out at first reading by 312 Tories. Seventy-two of the Tory voters have declared on their list of interests that they are private landlords.

Shouldn't this prevent them from voting?

C Pickering
​Mickleton

Theresa May has shown callousness and a complete lack of empathy by not mingling with the survivors and listening to their grievances in the aftermath of the Grenfell disaster.

This is yet another simple proof of this government's remoteness from people. Enough is enough. Enough austerity, grinding poverty, unfairness, bias, discrimination, injustice and long-standing inequalities between those who have and those who have not.

Munjed Farid Al Qutob
London NW2

Theresa May tried to frighten people saying that voting for Corbyn would take us back to the 1970s. Her Government's recent bonfire of public safety regulations has taken us back nine centuries to the 1200s, when the first laws were enacted to prevent spread of fire in the City of London.

In the year 1212 after the Great Fire of London that killed thousands a new law said: “Whosoever wishes to build, let him take care, as he loveth himself and his goods, that he roof not with reeds nor rush.” In other words, there must be no more thatch in London.

This Government has abjectly failed in its primary responsibility – to protect citizens. This ideologically driven obsession with cutting government is shameful, may even be criminal and surely must now stop.

Nicolas Hall
London W9

Politicians are fond of the meaningless cliché “lessons will be learned”. May needs to learn a lesson about helping people (the “ordinary” people) cope with tragedy. I'm no lover of monarchy as a concept but the Queen and her grandson have shown how it should be done.

Where are they all – why has Hunt not appeared to show some support for health care staff who are far more qualified than him to do their job? Rudd? Other relevant politicians? Barwell?

R Kimble
Leeds

While we wait for all the investigations, the outcome of the public inquiry, efforts to apportion blame, remedial action and so on, let’s do what we can to stop this from happening again. It seems clear that if the occupant of the flat where the fire started had been able to extinguish it, then it would not have spread. So please, Sajid Javid, take the following very simple steps to give some quick, and cheap, short-term protection against possible further fires.

1. Install a professional fire extinguisher, of a type recommended by the fire service, in every flat in every tower block. Ensure that the cost is covered by central government so that local authorities do not have to find the money.

2. With every extinguisher, provide simple instructions, with pictures, showing how to use it. Get the fire service to set up a website with a video showing exactly what you should do if a fire breaks out in your flat, and make sure that every extinguisher is accompanied by a link to that website.

Although, in the past, many people have not taken the risk of fire seriously enough, and might not have paid attention to fire extinguishers and how to use them, they surely will now.

John Knowland
Oxford

Paris Agreement

Trump seems completely incapable of understanding the concept of a non-zero-sum game: he seems to assume that any deal which is good for the world must be bad for America, and vice versa.

In reality, withdrawal from the Paris Accord is bad for the world, bad for America – and indeed bad for Trump himself, who is now despised more than ever.

Mike Wright
​Nuneaton

Russia

I normally think highly of the writing of Mary Dejevesky but in today's issue she missed the boat. To claim, as she did, that the one Trump policy that has infuriated the US elite is his attitude towards Russia is to give Russia a level of importance in the eyes of Americans that it just doesn't have.

The Trump policies that the “elite” and a large segment of the US population detest have to do with the attempted travel ban, the wall, elimination of healthcare for millions of Americans, tax cuts for corporations and top bracket individuals, insider business dealings, sabre-rattling at Iran and cosying up to Saudi Arabia – a list that grows with every new tweet. Clearly, the focus on Russia of the congressional inquiry is just a mechanism for ridding the country of the embarrassment in the White House.

Anita Feiger
Address supplied

Illiberal liberalism

The hounding and subsequent resignation of Tim Farron over his views on human sexuality indicate just how intolerant and illiberal our society really is, especially towards those who do not sign up to the “liberal orthodoxy”.

Andrew Brown
Derby