Last month’s extraordinary testimony from Dominic Cummings was nothing short of a pantomime. Making caricatures of politicians and references to memes, the former prime ministerial chief advisor—and puppetmaster in the liberal imagination—admitted that tens of thousands of lives were needlessly lost as a result of government incompetence.

Cummings conceded that his decision to delay the first lockdown was a huge failure, and that an urgent inquiry into the handling of the pandemic was necessary to get the facts out there and allow bereaved members of the public to receive the justice they desperately need.

However, recent experience has taught us that in the face of looming inquiries, the government’s response is to drag and dawdle. Four years on from the fire at Grenfell Tower, nothing has happened. The lengthy inquiry has still been unable to identify with who is to blame for the deaths of 72 people and the displacement of hundreds more.

What happened at Grenfell and what happened during the pandemic are far apart, but they’re fundamentally comparable. They both reek of political negligence: Cummings told a select committee that he heard Boris Johnson say he’d rather ‘let bodies pile high in their thousands’ than order another lockdown – a comment that was ghastly not because he said it, but because it’s what he actually did.

For many, successive lockdowns have brought unemployment, numbing loneliness, and the adverse effects of repetitive isolation. But the sentiment that bodies can pile high in the thousands, on top of over 120,000 deaths, is sickening. While Johnson’s aides claim he made the remark—he himself swears he didn’t—the accusation was wholly believable for all sorts of reasons.

A year ago, Johnson ‘joked’ that the effort to build life-saving ventilators might be called ‘Operation Last-Gasp’, a crude statement that set the tone for his handling of the pandemic. Boomeranging from failure to failure, Johnson’s measures have been ill-advised and negligent. Allowing a five-day free-for-all Christmas before promptly dashing false hopes all over the nation—and after the public brushed shoulders in supermarkets and shops to finish their Christmas shopping—was symptomatic of his inability to consider how his recklessness comes at the cost of peoples’ lives.

Yet since the prime minister has an ability to retain popularity despite every catastrophic decision made, it seems as if ordinary lives are expendable in the eyes of those who set the political agenda. This reality is nowhere starker than in the deaths of Grenfell tenants. This was no freak accident; the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation (KCTMO) and the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC) indulged in cost-cutting measures at the expense of human life, despite repeated pleas by residents around fire safety.

Following the fire, then-Labour MP and local housing activist Emma Dent Coad said the fire was ‘entirely preventable’. Complaints about the KCTMO went as far back as 2004, when the Grenfell Action Group—a community group voicing concerns of the residents of the Lancaster West Estate in North Kensington—noted that Grenfell Tower’s emergency lighting system was basically non-functional.

The complaints stack up to reveal a culture of dangerous negligence. In 2016, the Grenfell Action Group said that ‘only an incident that results in serious loss of life’ would make the KCTMO wake up and act; a 2009 fire at Lakanal House, another London tower block, killed six people, yet this event alone did not prompt the necessary change required in health and safety legislation. Diane Abbott has highlighted key ways in which Grenfell residents were failed by the powers that be, including financial cuts to refurbishments to the tower block and the delay in rehousing residents affected by the fire.

Eventually, Theresa May said that the support following the fire was inadequate, and ‘was a failure of the state, local and national, to help people when they needed it most’. The government has supposedly made massive efforts to rectify these mistakes. However, following the Grenfell inquiry, combustible materials continue to be used on buildings, and Parliament has voted for measures that could see flat residents paying to remove dangerous cladding from their own homes.

Grenfell Tower was situated in one of the wealthiest boroughs in England, yet the community surrounding it was among the ten percent most deprived areas in the country. Countless links have been drawn to the destruction of Grenfell and social inequality. Data from the Health Foundation shows that people living in the most affluent areas are fifty percent less likely to die of Covid than those in the poorest areas. Ethnic minorities and disabled people are also more likely to die from the virus.

A pattern is not a coincidence. Those with political power continue to make sweeping, reckless decisions knowing that their chums in government and the prosperous are more likely to make it out alive.

As the public, we need to stop politicians with poor track records. We can all recall Johnson’s comments about African people (‘piccaninnies’), Muslim women (‘letterboxes’), and gay people (‘tank-topped bumboys’), but the fact is that he is already at the top, and far from being touched by his past, means he is setting an agenda to shape Britain’s future in the interests for himself and his millionaire friends.

Though his approval ratings have somewhat slumped, this is hardly justice to those of us who have loved ones among the dead. The contempt and disdain shown from politicians who are meant to serve us is a slap across the face, and if the Grenfell Tower inquiry is reflective of our collective inability to hold to account those who fail the public, the future of any Covid inquiry—and any healthy democratic culture in Britain—looks bleak.