The aerated “concrete” scandal
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I haven’t yet seen anyone in the media making the point that the use of this material instead of real concrete (obviously by definition “aerated” concrete is not “concrete”) can be attributed to the capitalist aim of short-term profit-making.
Presumably it was used in constructing buildings like schools, hospitals and prisons between 1950 and 1980 as it was cheaper than using real concrete. Structural engineers must have known that after 50 or so years it risked collapsing but 50 years is a long time when your aim is to make immediate profits. Of course the final decision as to what material to use wouldn’t have rested with the engineers but with the construction companies’ directors with their eye on the bottom line and getting a good “return”for the shareholders.
There must be some journalist out there looking for a story like this.
Incidentally, aerating things seems to have been the rage at the time. Isn’t Madame Thatcher, when she worked as a scientist, said to have worked out for her employer the optimum amount of air to inject into its ice cream?
In China they were using more sands than concrete for building and apartments complex constructions and several of them collapsed, and they were mixing hydraulic concrete with regular concrete for bridges columns
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/china-concrete-sand-quality-scandal
With this type of concrete a building can be built in a few weeks or months and the wall can be build in a factory and since they are very light they can be transported to any place around the earth, and the cinder blocks are very light, they are many pre fabricated building who were built using aerated concrete
Sky has a list of the schools affected Tellingly, they seem to cluster in a few areas, maybe reflecting the practices of a few architects or building firms? Particularly, Essex seems to be a serious locale.
I see a Labour government was involved in watering down standards:
“The film begins in 1963, with the Conservative Minster for Housing Keith Joseph setting an annual target of 400,000 new homes. It was this that kickstarted the ‘numbers game’, which prompted Labour to pledge, in their 1964 election-winning manifesto, that they would build 500,000 homes, and which continues to dominate political discourse about housebuilding today.
Labour’s Housing Minister Richard Crossman introduced subsidies for contractors to adopt offsite manufacturing methods that were intended to allow local authorities to deliver housing from a factory production line.
Contractors such as Wimpey, Laing’s, McAlpine’s, and Costain, began to court council leaders like T. Dan Smith for public contracts, offering ‘package deals’ that would encompass all aspects of the project, taking advantage of the perceived complexity of the new building systems. The new approach was summed up by one council leader as, “build it quickly, think later.”
The contractors began to build across the country with the mindset of building as cheaply and quickly as possible. The contractors’ workforce was often unskilled labour on wages that were determined by how quickly work was completed, thereby tacitly encouraging the corner-cutting and time-saving that became endemic.“(https://www.designingbuildings.co.uk/wiki/Adam_Curtis_-_The_Great_British_Housing_Disaster)
It would be surprising if the same mindset didn’t apply to the building of schools, hospitals, etc during the same period by the same capitalist enterprises.
And just like Keir Starmer, Dan “The Plan” Smith was an ex Trot.
It appears to be, unsurprisingly, that Trotskyism is a good grounding for those who wish to manipulate, control, intimidate and hoodwink their fellow party members and the general public.
If you have a son or daughter that has ambitions to join the higher ranks in politics and you can’t afford to send them off to Eton, you can always enrol them in the local “rent a spart” branch. Given a fair wind and sharp elbows they’ll end up at least a Junior Minister.
There was another material widely used in construction which was asbesto, many town and houses complex were built using asbestos and it produced cancer to workers, children, and owners of the properties, it was used because it was cheap, and contractors were able to build houses quickly, it was used to build schools, and homes in low income neighborhoods, water pies were manufactured using asbestos. The history of this lovely capitalist society is a history of horrors and killing
https://www.mesothelioma.com/asbestos-exposure/jobsites/homes/
Several neighborhood built for war veterans contains a large quantity of asbestos materials
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