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Lewis Hamilton says he had ‘nothing to do’ with Mercedes deal with Grenfell firm

A little bit of background. A company called Kingspan sold some of the cladding that was largely responsible for the ferocity of the Grenfell Tower fire that killed 70 or so people. That same company now sponsors the Mercedes Formula 1 racing team. Kingspan themselves claim that their product was used illegally and without their knowledge.

There’s more. The government, unusefully, is poking its oar in:

Meanwhile, Communities Secretary Michael Gove said the government could amend advertising rules on racing cars if Mercedes does not pull the partnership with Kingspan.

The apparent rule being invoked here is that you should not receive money from a company that has supplied a product where the misuse of that product has led to someone’s death.

Oddly enough there is another company whose name appears on Mercedes’s cars that falls into the same category. That company is Mercedes. Mercedes makes cars. Rather a lot of people have misused Mercedes cars (and lorries) over the years and – guess what – lots of people have died.

It’s actually a bit worse than that. Mercedes is the result of a merger between Daimler and Benz. It is not entirely clear to me who invented the car but the choice comes down to one of those two. So – you could argue – not only are Mercedes responsible for Mercedes car deaths but every other car death as well. That’s millions of people (I think). So, if Mercedes should stop receiving sponsorship from Kingspan it should certainly stop receiving sponsorship from Mercedes. And probably from all its other sponsors. I am sure you could make an argument.

That is, of course, if the world wished to be consistent. But of course it doesn’t. Why not? We all know why. Well, if we don’t here’s a clue: a large proportion of the people killed in Grenfell Tower were black.

While I was imagining writing this – it sounded a lot better in my imagination than it looks on the screen – I had an uneasy thought: the late Brian Micklethwait would not pen a post like this. I wondered why. I told myself that Brian would continue to ask “Why?” “Why do we get this very apparent hypocrisy?” To which I suppose the answer is that in anything involving black people a different standard is applied. “Why is that?” I imagined Brian asking. At which point I started to come to some rather dark conclusions. Which is something Brian liked to avoid. “Optimism is a tactic.” as he once said.

On reflection, I don’t think he would tackle this subject at all. He didn’t particularly like discussing identity politics even if he did once use the phrase, “woke nonsense.” He also didn’t tend to accuse people of hypocrisy. Well, at least not strangers. So, I don’t think he would have written about this even if there hadn’t been an identitarian dimension. If he had I think the title would have been something along the lines of “Why black people (and everybody else) should want freedom for themselves (and everybody else).”